Little girl: Hallo.
Parrot: …
Little girl: Hallo.
Parrot: Hallo.
Little girl: Arschloch.
Parrot: …
Little girl: Arschloch.
Parrot: …

They sit at a long table where the altar usually stands and the priest speaks and they all sing. It is a sunny day. They each go up to the microphone and say something one by one, except for the fat kid who shakes his head when the teacher talks to him, and still refuses to speak when she drags him up front. A big painting of Mary in front of my face. All the men wear suits, like Alpha said. All the kids wear white robes and the girls have wreaths of baby’s breath. One boy stares at the paintings on the ceiling, mouth wide open. So I’m not the only one.
They get bread. It tastes like bread, Gamma says afterwards. They drink wine. Alpha tells me they get real wine. They’re eight years old.
Then frankfurters in the room next to the church. And coffee. At home we eat schnitzels a caterer brought and cake and ice cream. The cake has a white and pink marzipan frosting Gamma and I peel off because neither of us likes marzipan. Underneath is chocolate frosting.
We lounge around. Some of us take naps. Alpha leaves on a business trip. Clouds start to roll in, there might be thundershowers later. The air has that feel to it.
We return to the church in the afternoon. More ceremony and singing. We give back the robe and pay some money, for laundering the robes maybe. Gamma desires a walk so we walk and not where I usually walk, she leads the way.
We hear a siren. That’s an ambulance says Gamma, whose world is drawing into sharper and sharper focus.
We see lots of people she knows. Kids from school. We walk around the village. Past farms and flower gardens and vegetable gardens. Lots of lupins blooming, while mine haven’t even grown spikes yet. Same with peonies, mine are barely buds and look at those lush blossoms.
Gamma tells me you feel just like a princess on your first communion day. She shows me the old building where the showers and locker rooms for the old soccer field used to be. Shows me the broken windows, tells me about sneaking in there with a girlfriend once, exploring. People are cleaning up a wreck out on the highway, far off. Blue lights still flashing. A truck from the fire department carries off a silver van. More are still in the ditch.
A couple is out walking their big white dog. They are the parents of the open-mouthed boy in church. They tell us they took him for a walk after everything was over and he started crying and said he just wanted to go home and watch TV, he was overwhelmed.
Gamma and I hold hands and walk along the field. We bump into a little friend of hers out in the field with her little brother, taking turns looking at the wreck with their dad’s binoculars. We talk to them and Gamma looks through the binoculars but doesn’t see anything special, just a red car.
Further away, we look back. Here in the fields the sky is huge, broad and high. The clouds are black in places and brightly lit in others by the setting sun. The fields just beginning to turn green, bordered in the distance by green hills with mountains beyond that. A few houses, the edge of the village, with a row of tall poplars between them and the fields. At the base of the poplars, two little kids in summer clothes looking at a big wreck with binoculars.
Next to a field of wheat we stop and watch swallows diving after bugs. We watch a bug hurry through the air over the field until we lose sight of it. The green wheat looks especially soft, the green hairy bits standing up from the grains of wheat make it look almost misty. A tractor drives past on the track and we get out of its way.
Take a good look, I tell Gamma. Remember all these gardens and vacant lots and fields and farm houses. They’ll all be gone when you’re my age.
Why? she asks me. I try to explain. It makes her sad and I wish I hadn’t gotten started. I don’t want to make my kid sad, I just want her to remember the lupins and peonies and kids out on bikes and standing in the dusk and swallows.

Nothing like finding yourself naked and twisted at the bottom of a teeny plexiglass shower stall (sort of an inverted Ardha Matsyendrdsana), looking sort of up at the ceiling and sort of over at the grout an inch in front of your face, with a twisted knee, wondering how you are going to get out, and a little girl asking if you are okay, to make you question whether the reduced mildew problem is worth the effort of squeegeeing the inside of the stall after every shower.

My youngest daughter, her name is Gamma, can bilocate. She did it last night after dinner. We had cleared the dining table and were sitting there talking and getting ready to do what we do after dinner, practice cello, play a game, brush our teeth and go to bed, whatever, depending on the person. My father-in-law often takes a walk around the village at that time. My mother-in-law lies on the sofa with her leg-bending machine and her crutches and suffers from her knee-replacement surgery that prevents her from doing anything beyond dispensing criticism and instructions on matters great and small.

She, my MIL, got up from the table with great effort and limped, sigh-propelled, back to her sofa. We all talked about whatever we were talking about when suddenly Gamma pointed and shouted in a voice simultaneously awed and narky:

OMA CAN WALK WITHOUT CRUTCHES!!!!

For that instant, Gamma was two other places: in a large tent crowded with the halt and the lame and an evangelical faith healer (I SAY THROW YOURAH CRUTCHES DOWN AND WALK! THANK YOU JESUS!) and in a police station, on the good side of a two-way mirror, pointing out a suspect in the line-up (THAT’S HER! THE ONE WITH THE “CRUTCHES”!).

Okay, so trilocation, seeing as how she was also still at the dining table. And her grandmother metamorphosed temporarily into a crab, a crab caught in the headlights, a crab hypnotized by the snake, and both quickly scurried back to the table to fetch her forgotten crutches and yet not quickly seeing as how she was unable to walk without them and moving quickly would undermine her status as one unable to walk without crutches.

We floated, suspended in a timeless bubble of impromptu delight. Then the clock resumed ticking and Gamma went and brushed her teeth.

Sometimes you find yourself inside a joke. A blonde does something silly right in front of you. Maybe you’re even the blonde. You’re sitting in a pub, and a duck walks in, or a horse. You’re golfing, and Bill Gates, God and Tiger Woods play through.

But then space/time rights itself and, you know. Was that really a duck? You say.

I’m stuck in a joke at the moment. One of my favorites. You know the one about the traveling salesman and the farmer’s nasty, pulchritudinous daughters? That’s not the joke I mean. You know the one about the rabbi… the guy, who goes to the rabbi because his house is just too small for his wife and his kid and his cats and the turtle tortoise? And the rabbi says, but I thought your kid was in France? And the guy says, yeah, that’s the other kid. And the rabbi says, well, let someone stay over and he does, he lets his daughter’s friends stay over on the weekends and he throws birthday parties with a dozen eight-year-old kids but that doesn’t help so he goes back and the rabbi says, so let your father-in-law move in while your mother-in-law is in the hospital and he does but that doesn’t help so he goes back and the rabbi says, now that your MIL is out of the hospital, let her move in as well, she can occupy the sofa and dispense good advice and you can install one of those raised toilet-seat things in the downstairs bathroom and the rest of youse can use the upstairs bath and toilet because the raised toilet-seat thing is so scary-looking.
And the guy shrugs and tries that. Doesn’t help. Then the plumbing breaks and the downstairs bathroom floods and they have to turn off all the water in the whole house and go to work unshaven and unbathed until the plumber comes and fixes it. And his FIL can’t find the tortoise out in front of the house one evening when it’s time to put it back to bed so he goes out and helps him look for half an hour until his wife asks them what they’re doing, running their hands through the mulch and cursing, and they say looking for the tortoise and she says, Why? I put it to bed half an hour ago. And she laughs, and laughs.
And the guy, thinking how good it’s going to feel when the inlaws move back out, goes back to the rabbi and knocks on the door and Rod Serling answers and he asks for the rabbi and Rod Serling says, What rabbi? Perhaps you have the wrong door. And the guy goes back out into the street and it’s infinitely long and all the doors look exactly the same.

That joke.

For Novala (because she gave such nice answers herself, and is so delightful. Also, I reserve the right to change my answers).

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
The female sex android in a pulp paperback my father found on the bus once when I was a kid.
Margarita.

The last book you bought is:
Kafka on the Shore, Murakami

The last book you read:
Kafka on the Shore

What are you currently reading?
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

Five books you would take to a desert island.
A Moleskine
The Master and Margarita
Underworld, DeLillo
Finnegan’s Wake (I could finally read it, or use it to start fires).
One more book.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
My daughter Beta, because I’d be really interested to hear.
Two commenters to this post, chosen at random, because I can’t decide. Cookie, because Novala can vouch for him.

Has anyone else not done this yet? And Anne, who was actually the first person who occurred to me, which made me think she must have already done this a long time ago, and whose bookshelves I have seen with these eyes, and which contain books like you wouldn’t believe. So take it away, Anne.

We go to the river and walk into the woods until we don’t know where we are anymore, and then we keep going until we find ourselves again. That’s more interesting than retracing our steps and starting over.

It doesn’t always work. Driving in Brno last weekend, we kept going and found ourselves in a network of streets, the names of which all began with “Z” and were generally easy on the vowels, lined with apartment buildings with fewer windowpanes than windows and construction sites where no construction was going on, and not just because it was a Saturday.

So I guess the trick is picking where to get lost. Here, in the woods by the river, in the worst case, we could just follow the river to a town or a road.

We wander like this and talk to each other. We’ve been together nearly 25 years, and we just recently started doing this, getting lost and talking.