Caitlin called from camp today, all teary-voiced wanting to come home. After seven weeks of tolerating third-world quality housing conditions (including many varieties of mold), vast quantities of rain, the accompanying smells of damp and decay, little privacy and 8 girls living in very close quarters, I couldn't blame her. She'll be home on Saturday anyway, so a few days early didn't seem like a big difference. I told her she needed to have a counselor or camp director call us to let us know it was ok to come pick her up early. She called back a little while later, having talked to her bunk counselor who convinced her to stay the rest of the week.
Rebecca invited me to watch The Lizzie McGuire Movie with her this afternoon, the first time she's actively wanted to do anything with me for months. I sat through a few scenes of the movie (it's probably no worse than Here Come the Brides or the Partridge Family shows were from my adolescence, but it was cloyingly irritating, nonetheless) and then had to make dinner, but the mere fact that she tolerated me sitting next to her asking dumb questions about the movie was refreshing.

The mimosa trees are in full bloom here. We had one in our front yard when I was a kid and I thought it was the most exotic, tropical looking plant I had ever seen. The pink flowers, like small fragile fireworks frozen in the moment, were so amazingly different from the brash geraniums or heavy-headed tulips that were more common. My father groused about the seed pods the trees dropped, and the roots always seemed to be trying to escape the ground. The tree died years ago, surrounded by the oak tree by father valued more than all the others in the front yard, the birches that have since been winnowed to a single trunk, having failed to withstand many years of ice storms, and the firethorn bushes that my sister eventually ripped out by the roots. Years later and I would go to Hawaii a number of times, and was overwhelmed by the beauty and scents of the ever-blooming flowers. I would always think, though, that the mimosas were misplaced in this harsh climate and that they were forever trying to return to their tropical home.

Books: Finished Small Town last night. The main thread of the story - the quiet-guy-who-is-transformed-into-a-homicidal-nutcase-by-a-traumatic-event - was the least interesting part of the story. The supporting characters - the writer accused of a heinous crime, the former police commissioner trying to determine how not to let his life become "former", the art gallery owner who explores parts of herself that she did not know existed - these are the ones whose stories engrossed me.

I read the book Mrs. Kimble by Jennifer Haigh today. I don't know how I found this book, but it may have been in the monthly book newsletter my library supplies. The Mr. Kimble character links together three women who marry him at different points in his life. He is a completely unlikable, unsympathetic character, lightly drawn as if a charcoal sketch, the details of his life not as important as those of the women who married him. That any of them found something remarkable in him, some shred of attraction, is difficult to believe, but a book worth reading despite this exceptionally flawed character.

Movies: Lost in La Mancha, the documentary about Terry Gilliam's decade-long attempt to film the story of Don Quixote, derailed by the flagging health of his primary actor, the vagaries of the weather in Spain (the rain in Spain falls mainly on the rugged hillsides where he is filming), and the annoyances of fighter jets roaring through the skies above his location. The movie falls apart in dazzling slow-motion, the amazing sketches and storyboards and human-sized puppets and stunning costumes all for naught. A couple of observations kept occurring to me as I watched the carnage - actors play a tiny, but vital role in the making of a movie, rather like a small, critical part in a machine - the part must be present for the machine to function, but there are untold other gears and cogs and sprockets that must precisely aligned as well. And - the director must be both visionary and operational leader of the film. He must be able to articulate the vision so that others can act on it, but also must be the leader of the troops as well. Although there are assistant directors to whom some of the operational details are delegated, the director must hold it all together. In the case of this movie, the actor-cog failed, along with many other parts, and the center could not hold.

Cats: We bought Tabitha a variety of foods to tempt her into eating more. Tonight - canned salmon. No dice. All she wanted was an ounce or so of Lactaid. The other greedy cats gobbled the salmon after she delicately turned up her nose at it. Tomorrow - one of those small tins of really expensive cat foods that that pure white cat advertises. She's sure to love that, right?