| November 8, 2000 The Closing of the Year
Can you believe the vote is still out?
Yowza. I have the feeling my candidate’s going to lose, but still, what an exciting
election. I’m glad I got to see how it all works. Not looking forward to the next 4
years of Republican domination of the presidency, house, and senate, though. Ouch. (I guess you can't really call it domination
when the margin is so slim, but it's still quite an advantage.)
I wonder if Rebekah voted before she went off to
Mozambique with the Peace Corps. Hmm. Actually, I wonder how she’s doing. I have
written to her, but no word from her yet.
Let me muse a little about eBay. Did you
know people will buy most anything that you put up for auction? Today I sold
these lampshades for $6.50:
Now, you can probably tell by looking at
them that they were not exactly my style. My mother-in-law brought them to me last xmas
with 2 little lamps that I use in the guest bedrooms. The lamps had shades already, these
blue floral ones were an extra set. Do they remind you of the Brady Bunch?
 Marty was particularly
vehement about these lamp shades. It’s interesting, because he doesn’t exactly
consider himself a style maven, but he certainly knows what he likes and doesn’t
like. I thought they sort of matched our wallpaper in the hallway, which was here when we
moved in.
Anyway the lamp shades are headed out to
a new home. They are in great shape, by the way. They may have been made in the '60s but I
don’t think they’ve ever been used. I can’t imagine why, can you?
It is well and truly feeling like fall in
Connecticut now. Not the nice touristy kind of fall where the leaves are beautiful and the
sky is blue, but the damp, cold, gray, frost-on-the-window, dark-when-you-leave-work kind
of fall. It gets dark here now around 5:00 PM, but of course that will keep getting
earlier and earlier until the middle of December.
 It reminds
me of England when it gets like this. I remember from when I lived there when I was
younger, we spent the whole winter walking around dazed in the dark. It was dark when you
went to school. Dark when you left school. It was so dark, so much of the time, that I
learned to distinguish the headlights of my mother’s car from all the other cars on
the road when she came to pick me up from school in the dark. We’d all stand out
beside the road in the dark and wait for our parents to pick us up, Andrew and Phillip and
I. I could see my mom coming from far away.
I had a huge crush on Andrew. He seemed
to have some kind of preference for me, too. We were 12 or 13, I guess. We went to school
together for 2 years, what would be 7th and 8th grades in the US. When I moved to America
at the end of that second year, he and I wrote each other letters regularly for years.
 I saw him again in 1988,
just for an evening, when I was studying in Cambridge for the summer. We met up for dinner
and had a good time walking all around Cambridge that night. He seemed so grown up. He
said I sounded so . . . American. I had to laugh. My life had changed so much. We’ve
continued to keep in touch through the years. I last heard from him earlier this year.
He’s been living in France for several years working for fancy hotels. He’s a
smart guy.
Of course the flip side of the whole
winter darkness thing is the summer sunlight. Yes, it rains in England, but don’t let
them fool you – there’s some glorious summer weather too. Sometimes. And it gets
light before 5 AM and stays that way until 9:30 or 10 PM. 
When I was younger, about 6 or 7, I loved
playing outside in that extended dusk, riding my bike and feeling the air getting cool
against my skin as the sun went down. Of course, by that hour, I was usually riding alone.
All the little English children my age were in bed hours before that. Some of them went to
bed so early, it was still light out. Their parents must have thought mine were completely
insane to let me run around outdoors for hours after any decent child’s bedtime.
 They were probably right. Look where it got me. I'm just so . . .
American.
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