Insomnia, thy name is PMS...

Today I gave up my Aunt Margaret's table. I lent it to a new friend who has just started renting a house and needed more furniture to fill it up. It was that or let my landlord use it to stack his golf clubs. (Well, we would have found a family member to house it, but new friend, let's see, we'll call her Margaret, for Margaret's table is now hers.)

My Aunt Margaret got married, eloped, when she was fifty. She married a judge from the office where she was a secretary. Their "meet cute" had something to do with baseball tickets. To the Mets, I thought, but someone said the Mets weren't around then. Aunt Margaret was a career girl in the twenties and thirties. I guess she got married in the late forties, as she was born in 1898. (You do the math, I'm too tired.) It is a family mystery as to why she married him. Maybe he made her laugh, muses my mother. All my mother remembers is that he was old. But he bought Aunt Margaret a pig, (she wanted one) and when she was widowed, Margaret made it possible for my mom to go to camp two weeks in a row one summer. She bought everyone magazine subscriptions, and took us to see "Hello Dolly" one summer, on Broadway. My grandmother, (not Margaret's sister in law, but my dad's mom, who was friends with Margaret through some club, not because my mom married my dad) bought me soundtracks to every play I'd seen. I still have all of them, even though I haven't played vinyl for years.

I love sitting here and discovering what will come out. It's like no other kind of writing. When I journal, it's generally because I have to work something out. When I write a letter, it's to a specific "Dear you." When I write a cover letter (let's not talk about it) I freeze until I get to the second draft that has been doctored by Kiki (dear dear Kiki). But when I come here, and I'm in the right place, the writing just comes.

Of course, as soon as I write a sentence like that, the flow stops. In the background, I'm listening to the commentary with version of the season finale of Season Five. So I stop every now and then to turn back to the TV behind me. What I love about the commentary for this particular episode is that Michael Patrick King doesn't talk over the dialogue, as he often does in other commentary episodes, especially one with Berger in Season Six. (But we won't get into that here.) I had lunch with a dear one this week, Kay. And she and I are the type of friends that will never run out of things to talk about. On Tuesday, at Mad Mex, we could not stop talking about SATC. We know all the episodes by heart and love them all--and agree that a good show is one that can be better by talking about it with friends.

Well, my neck is getting tired enough that maybe my body can be tired enough and I can sleep. Tomorrow--Sandcastle. It is my favorite day of every summer. My friend K. and I have been going for the past three years. I've gone for the past five. But I'm too tired to write more...maybe sleep will come...