Two brief paragraphs as momentary tableaux -

[leondacter]

Friday I stopped in Topeka to have dinner with my mother and father; I wanted to assuage the manifold anxieties I knew they would harbor about my move to Los Angeles if I didn’t explain myself. My sister stayed home, absorbed in her teendom. Over dinner both of my parents seemed giddily excited about the move and gushed about what a blessing Jen is; I don’t mean to mock with these descriptives, because I feel the same way. My father told us an anecdote about a mouse he had used in treating his therapy group. The group consists of traumatized children, and the mice (there are many) are meant to foster a sense of compassion and empathy which helps the children learn in a very basic way to identify with other beings. This particular mouse fell prey to some unknown malady: It was losing its hair in clumps, lying deathly still for long intervals, and after a few days of this its hind legs ceased working: So he decided he needed to humanely kill the mouse. He wanted to spare the mouse the misery of a slow-coming terminus and the child the blunt horror of discovering one morning that his little friend had further devolved from a balding rodent to a lifeless, hairless clump of dissipating tissue. Plans were made, and at the limits of his situation my father gassed the mouse in a plastic bag by introducing fumes from his car’s exhaust pipe and sealing it off. As he was holding the bag up to the pipe, one of the officers on premises walked by and said something like, “Most people use a hose.” My father explained that he was, in fact, killing a mouse, and more odd humor was exchanged about perhaps writing up a report on the homicide. Worst of all, my father said, was the mouse’s expression: Utter dismay seemed to have leapt into his mousey face in the final moments. His eyes, said my father, were huge and protruding. It was at this point that I asked if he had ever considered writing a book about his experiences as a therapist. He said he had. He explained to me the mandatory waiting period and obscuring of facts involved to ensure anonymity. Most therapists, he explained, take endless notes and publish them after countless years have passed.

Sunday morning we ran our valet operation with two golf carts due to a collegiate bicycle race that ran on streets in front of both our garage and our loading zone. Brandon reveled in it, telling the bellman we could have every tip he garnered if we would let him drive the carts around. It made for an interesting morning between the buzzing whir of spandexed cyclists that zoomed past every few minutes and the various elderly who seemed to get a kick out of being trollied around to their car by a young man in a swift but small batteried vehicle. Just outside the gated lot, a fledgling stood with a puffed chest on the cement, watching us move. The young bird simply observed us with a small amount of self-assuredness from the ground, and everyone made comment to him, laughed, or made some other noise of significant amusement as they passed within feet or inches.