AUSTIN, Texas, August 11, 2005 — I'm going to the club, for sure. I'm going to take back my movies to AFF and, if there are any left to review, get some more. Not that I really must do either of these things. I'm completely free today.

I use that as an excuse to go back to bed after the dog wakes me up. (She acted like she wanted to go out and I took her. Himself shouted from the kitchen that he'd just let her out. Be that as it may, she produced at least the 'pose' for doing her business.) Yep, we both went back to bed. I'd been dreaming something but all I remember was someone who had this iridescent skin, like

mother-of-pearl. Must have been interesting. I lost it.

About seven-thirty, I actually got up and made coffee. FFP went off to the club, but I found things to do until nine: I read a bit of the newspaper, I read some online journals, I published my own journal for yesterday and set up today's. I called Dad and told him I'd had an e-mail from the people who borrowed the van saying they were having a wonderful vacation. They won't be back until the 25th. He's glad to hear from me that I've heard from her. (Wonder how much 'secondhand' e-mail is communicated like this, forwarded verbally or over the phone.) He says he's booked up: dentist today and a dinner invite tonight, games at church tomorrow, over here Saturday for a little celebration, part of La Semaine d'Anniversaire or Geburtstag Woche. Yes, it's the week I celebrate my birthday. It isn't an even decade or I'd do a month. I'm serious. I believe everything in life should be celebrated. A lot if possible.

A little after nine, the club is starting to seem like a good idea when FFP returns from his own trip to the club, having stopped at Upper Crust. He has a Texas Croissant for me. All part of the celebration week, you know. I eat it along with a plum while he eats a Mediterrean Croissant with some eggs. I get some more coffee. No way I can go right away to the gym. Allow a little time for digestion! Boy, I'm a lazy bum this week! I read a few things in the Austin American-Statesman while we eat and talk. I usually don't read the papers completely on the day they come because I never remove them from the kitchen, giving FFP a clean shot at them on the 'day of.' By evening I'll remove them to my reading chair in the bedroom, perhaps. But never during the day. Well, almost. Sometimes, FFP marks something and takes it to my office. Sometimes I wander off with something exceptionally intriguing. Not ususally. But if I sit down in the kitchen I will read papers in there or if I'm eating standing up I might have a section open on the portable dishwasher. FFP always seems to rise earlier than me. He gets a small coffee, retrieves the papers, feeds the dog, gives her a pill for her liver and lets her out (usually on this last one). He will sit at the breakfast table with cereal and usually consume the Statesman before he does anything else.

I decide that, since I'm not going to go to the club right away I should do something useful. But I really don't. I look up some stuff on the WEB about South Africa and write my friend in Cape Town a note. I idly poke through stuff in the office closet, wondering what to do with pictures in frames of FFP's high school class at a reunion (and not the latest one), of UT Women's basketball teams (presented when one of us was a 'guest coach'). I throw away some old clippings about the JFK assassination. I think my parents must have clipped them from the Dallas newspapers years ago for Forrest. (The paper bag I keep in my office for recycling is full of things this week like Christmas cards and old newpaper clippings and instructions for long gone gadgets as well as the usual current junk mail and papers. I've been poking through stuff all week trying to find stuff to get rid of or rearrange. )

I get stuck back at the computer somehow. I update a friend's WEB site and get stuck looking at a journal site that FFP has discovered because, I think, he likes her reading list. There is so much out there, so many perspectives on the world. And so little time. I can't believe anyone else reads this. There is so much else to do. Lately, I've had the urge to look back at my journals. But not at what's online. Further back. Paper or computer jottings lost in files or old notebooks. But I haven't found the time to actually go look for this stuff and sort through it. It's around here somewhere, though. Some of it. I think. Old photos and paper souvenirs, too.

Finally after 11:30, I decide to go to the gym. Must get in shape. I take along The Poisonwood Bible. I'm reading a little of the parts I heard on the CDs to kind of mesh and finish to the end. I get very involved in the book on the bike and find I've been on it for 55 minutes. I do a set of dead lifts and three sets of scapula squeezes but that's all the ummph I have. Would I do better if I intentionally took off a day now and then? I don't know. It's scary not to exercise a little each day except when I'm on vacation when it doesn't bother me at all to just walk a little and not worry. Anyway, today I did something.

I ask the guy when I checked in at the front desk in the gym if my commuter cup was in lost and found. He poked through a drawer with clothing and tennis shoes spilling out and couldn't find it. I looked in the Ladies locker room in a cabinet where abandoned shoes and visors sat. Not there. Later I thought about asking about another lost and found at the pool. Or getting the key to the locker I used yesterday (one of the upper ones no one likes) and seeing if I left it there. I can buy a new one for ten or fifteen bucks and in fact I have another that I took to the club today. I held up the cup and ask the guy if he'd seen one like it. I don't care so much if I find it as I find it interesting when little stuff goes astray. Reading The Poisonwood Bible makes you appreciate the ridiculousness of us and all our possessions, a room full of fancy machines with four TVs and three atomic clocks and a coffee bar to get exercise. Reading about Africa makes you wonder at the abundance of food we have turning a simple obsession to get fed into a gourmet and diet industry.

When I get home, FFP is leaving with a yellow legal pad and the digital camera in hand. He is going to do an interview. He is retired, but he spends most of his day working on something for his column or the ballet or scheduling social events. I decide that I will shower up and go downtown-ward to return my movies. After my shower, though, eat a little snack and read the rest of today's Statesman and work the crossword puzzle. By the time I finish, FFP returns. I ask if he would like to go to the AFF office with me and he says sure. We go down there and exchange the movies. After we finish we talk about getting a coffee. I'd suggested it before we left. I feel like celebrating because, you know, my birthday is sometime this week. It is hard to celebrate when you are retired, have enough money, no real worries and do whatever you please most of the time. (A friend of mine said that was a plot line involving Kramer in some Seinfeld episode but I only watched that show in reruns and not that many of those.)

I suggest we go to Pacha's which is a Bolivian coffee shop in our neighborhood. I don't know what it means to be a Bolivian coffee shop. But we go there. It is a nifty place really. They don't have many parking spots and we get the last non-handicapped one available. Which leads me to say: "It's not four o'clock on a weekday. Why aren't these people working?" The place peddles Bolivian geegaws; there are dozens of decorated napkins along the top of the walls; several people do appear to be working (on the phone, on the laptop, having a tête à tête). I have an iced coffee (great) and a bowl of chilled avocado and something soup (also nice). FFP has an iced tea and a vegetarian quesadilla. It's a pleasant place and we sit and read a bit.

We go home and FFP goes to the convenience store to get gas and a package of tortillas. We've been eating a lot of fish tacos of late. We get stuck into patterns like that. FFP is kind of a repetitive shopper/cooker and I'm too lazy to shop and cook. He fixes the fish and I chop some tomato, onion and cilantro. We eat the tacos and I clean up. We have a little Chardonnay with it. And so it goes. Fed, we retreat to our corners to puzzle briefly over calendars, e-mail, social stuff, calling each other on the phone a couple of times. Then we take the garbage and recycling to the street. So domestic are we.

After a brief retreat we reunite in the bedroom for screening of films for AFF with intermittent reading and wine drinking. I finish The Poisonwood Bible. It is an intense piece that quietly makes you realize much of the sad history of equatorial Africa, especially in its encounters with the colonial powers. And yet Kingsolver manages to invent all these characters (six main ones and many others) that are fascinating. One she gives a gift of palindromes and another what can only be called a gift of malapropism. A gift because it's one thing to misuse a term and another to do so with such, well, precision and comedic timing. Fiction firmly rooted in history, literature, language, culture, medicine and much more. Yeah, I know, I'm seven years late raving about this book. I feel like reading it from the beginning since I heard most of it read to me from CD and it's different to see it on the page. But there is so much else to read. Not just books, but piles of newspapers and magazines.

We manage to get through two documentaries and start a feature film before sleep overtakes. It's after midnight when I doze off.