Tell Laura I Love Her
Writing by treason on Saturday, 24 of September , 2005 at 10:41 pm
I’m hurricaned out. I was halfway through a blurb about the busload of nursing home evacuees that burst into flames when the computer took a dump. The last time this happened, I’d written something I was really happy with, and in a moment it was gone. I’d tried to reconstruct every line from memory and maybe captured 70%, but the rest just wasn’t quite the same. Perhaps the Cybergods are trying to tell me something, I thought. So I decided to put the old folks on the back burner - oops, sorry - and, like all the politicians are saying, move forward.
T set up a second computer while the other will wait for him to repair it. Until that one’s resurrected, I’ll work on this one. It’s the one that he was determined to donate to the non-profit that I left back in June. I’m glad now that I refused to put it in my car. I’m generous, but T takes generosity to a whole new level. To illustrate, I took a break from cable news the other day to watch the Travel Channel. Maybe in some way I wanted to escape my country for an hour or two, who knows?
They were on the Amalfi coast, sipping limoncello. My blood pressure started dropping immediately. “Someday…before I die,” I said to myself. Then an interesting tour of Jordan with King Abdullah II. Where am I going with this, you ask? The generosity thing. The King was explaining Bedouin hospitality. A Bedouin on a magnificent white horse had come across travelers in the desert and immediately invited them to lunch. They accepted and were presented with fifteen sheep. The guests later discovered that the Bedouin had sold his most valued possession - the white horse - in order to purchase the sheep lunch. That’s T to a T.
King Abdullah goes on to explain that the guest - I’m trying to remember if he said it was his father or some other relative - bought the horse back, as well as fifteen sheep, and gave them to the Bedouin. Fascinating story, but let me get back to where I started.
Okay. The plan was to stock up on adult beverages and watch Rita coverage around the clock. By Friday afternoon, I was catatonic. It was clear that even if Rita dwindled to a tropical storm and just blew the sign off one K-Mart, this was going to be covered like Katrina. I decided I just couldn’t go through it again. I surfed the channels one more time and watched the wet reporters clutching their microphones, unable to see any real difference between CNN, MSNBC, and FNC, so I surfed it away.
I’ve found that if there’s nothing interesting on QVC or the Food Network, my only refuge is C-SPAN. On Friday night I got lucky. I landed on the National Book Festival Gala. There’s Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales - oh, and Laura Bush is sitting next to Condi. What authors will show up tonight?
Linda Sue Park, Sue Monk Kidd, David McCullough, and Tom Wolfe all appeared at the podium to thank the Library of Congress and former teacher/librarian Laura Bush for putting this little book thing together. The writers read excerpts from their latest works and spoke of the importance of literature in society. Tom Wolfe was delightful. Those in the audience held their breath when he wandered off and started talking endlessly about sex. Somehow he ended up talking about cats whose brains had been surgically altered and were continually humping each other in the laboratory. Again, as odd as his tangents can be, he always makes a point at the end - you just have to stick with it and pay close attention.
Just when I thought he was about to cross the line with the cat excerpt from the new book or the baseball/sex analogy, he’d snap right back to some sense of decorum with a remark that was not only funny, but almost demure. One of the biggest guffaws of the evening came when Wolfe, in his signature white suit, paused to reach into his pocket for his reading glasses. The frames were, of course, stark white.
Whenever I think about the people I’d invite to a dinner party, Tom Wolfe is always somewhere on the list. He seems to be to be a low maintenance guest. “Tom, I need to check on the canapes. Can you amuse the others while I’m in the kitchen?”
If it’s true that Tom Wolfe is George Bush’s favorite author, it’s a shame George missed this because of a hurricane. But if Rita had hit while George was in a tuxedo at a gala, we’d never hear the end of it. Such is the life of a president.
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