Whenever Mary says she’s not very tall, I beg to differ, thinking of her as formidable, not shrimpy, but she says I don’t view her as short because I tend to hunch. Staying erect, though, is difficult these days.
I missed her when she was in the Bower of Bliss in Orlando last week, our daughter, Georgie, serving as her guide — like Virgil, I suppose, in Purgatorio — and said, when asked midweek by Mary’s sister in Glen Head how I was doing, that O’en and I were hanging in there, but that of course I missed Mary, for, aside from O’en, she was “the one I talk to.”
She was worried that thunderstorms would attend their return to LaGuardia, but in the next day’s Times Book Review I learned from James Fallows that in the past 13 years, a span during which there were more than 10 billion passenger journeys, two people died in United States airline accidents, the message being that she needn’t have worried. But she does worry, sometimes to the point of having a panic attack. Perhaps some of that has rubbed off on me, for today, in the throes of last-minute changes on deadline to a story I’d blithely handed in days before, and thought I was done with, all I could do was dither and hold a hand to my head and utter nonsensical things. Yes, Virginia, even 82-year-olds can freak out.
But back to Disney World, which I had vowed never to revisit when years ago we spent anxious hours in the dark trying to find our eldest daughter, who had, we later learned, fled into the 40,000-car parking lot to get away from the fireworks. Mary said where she and Georgie were in Disney World was quite beautiful, though the giraffes and gorillas were too far away for her to make any lasting friends. “And there were these animals with very long curved horns too,” she said, showing me a photo on her phone.
“Gnus. . . ? Maybe they’re gnus,” I said. “They’re in the crossword every now and then. . . . ”
“I don’t think they’re gnus. . . ”
“Speaking of which, she said she’d not seen a newspaper the whole week.
“A personal record for you, I’ll bet. As you know, no gnus is good news.”