THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING

So I am sitting in the Champagne French bakery which picks up the signal from Starbuck's, where I am too old to look appropriate.  Women walk in with enormous lips, none of which can be come by honestly, and it makes me sad, though all else in the neighborhood makes me happy.  I lack nothing but a couple of throw rugs for the bathroom(s); that's right, I have two.  The only thing I am lacking is my own pool and a literary agent, as it is my understanding I am too old to be interesting to them, which still comes as a surprise, except when I do yoga.   As I have probably oft pointed out, I have always been the youngest one.  You get used to that and it stuns to realize that is completely changed, and you have grandchildren, a blessing, sure, but still a shock as you remember how it was to be being carried out to sea as a five year old, waving for help to shore and having people wave back as they thought you were just being friendly. What adventures those were, and how amazing that you survived all of them, and you better start writing them down while you still can remember/write/make it to the Champagne French Bakery.

     My apartment is perfect for the twentyish writer I no longer am, with a little terrace I share with the twenty-something couple who will get married a year from Christmas, almost conservative in comparison to how it was in Amsterdam, where the people mostly have two teenage children and will marry never.  The world is changed/changed/changing, and I suppose we are simply lucky that it is still here with the mistake we made with Barack, who every day gets us stepping deeper in dreck, to put it almost politely.  I am sad for the people who believed in him.  

     But enough about politics and the probable end of the world.  We have only the present to live in if we're smart, and the day here in Beverly Hills is hot and sunny and improbable.  I spent yesterday at Bed Bath and Beyond like the bride I was a hundred years ago, buying linens for my new apartment, black sheets for the set that go with the comforter that has Paris on it, as if I had had a really great time there, singing in the Mars Club, waiting to be discovered at twenty, just out of Bryn Mawr and fearless, apparently.  The music on the soft/loudpeaker is "Under Paris Skies" so it is as if my whole life is in tune, and orchestrated, and all I have to feel bad about is reality, and then only if I pay attention to it, as almost no one does in Beverly Hills.

     Santa Claus is in the sky driving his sleigh above Wilshire Boulevard as if there were actually winter, the whole of America on super-hype, the season of sale.  Outside, on Beverly Drive little children sit curbside sipping ice water, not knowing how lucky they are to be here, or probably even alive.  My TV installation man was a Hawaiian recently back from the military, imagining he was old, at 30.  He told me not to believe the man from A T & T that the extra charges for connecting me would "probably" be cancelled, and I chose to believe him, the reason why I am now headquartered by the signal from Starbuck's.  There is little you can take to heart and make a part of your life when your own president is a liar.  It was such a great time to be a little girl when there was a Roosevelt.