The end of the rainbow

I should go to bed now.  I'll be tired tomorrow.  But I don't feel like going to bed. There aren't many things that I miss about being young and single. Staying up late, in fact, might be the only thing. Well, staying up late, and eating whatever I wanted with near-impunity. Those two things.

I used to stay up until all hours. If I was reading a book that I didn't want to put down (and I was almost always reading a book that I didn't want to put down), then I'd stay up until 3 or so.  I worked later hours then, and I seldom had to get up before 8, so I'd still get five hours of sleep, give or take. It was enough.

*****
I still don't get much more than five or so hours a night, and it's not really enough anymore.  But it's OK. I will catch up, when I'm (really) old, or dead.  By the way, that first part was a rare Thursday night entry.  I'm unpredictable.  But it's Friday night now, my normal start-to-cobble-together-a-post time, and so I'm starting to cobble together a post.  I'm also waiting for eggs to boil.  Lent can't end soon enough.

I'm approaching the halfway mark with the Cazalets. There are actually five books in the series: The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change. I'm just starting Confusion now, and I'm finding it hard to avoid the temptation to read ahead (or to look up plot summaries on Wikipedia, just to see what happens.)

I still can't imagine how I never heard of Elizabeth Jane Howard or these books until this year. No other novels I've read have conveyed the heroism and romance of England during World War 2, without sparing the truth about the fear, privation, grief, and (often) terrible boredom of war. Right about now, the Cazalets and all of their friends and their remaining servants (most of whom have joined the armed forces) are obsessed with food, which makes me feel a little guilty for complaining about eating eggs again.

*****

Social media and hip-hop artists share a preoccupation with fake people. They must be everywhere.  The fake people, that is.

*****

We just returned from an overnight road trip to Philadelphia. I drove, because my husband was on call and couldn't leave town.  I like to drive; the only problem is that I can't read in the car when I'm driving it (as far as you know), so I didn't make much more progress with Confusion.  It was a very good drive--both ways--except that I panicked a bit midway through the Fort McHenry Tunnel.  The tunnel hasn't bothered me in years. Perhaps my 12-year-old's questions had something to do with the panic this time. "Wait--does this really go underwater?  Like we're driving a car, under the Harbor? So there's water on top of us, right now?"  And the answer was yes. We're driving underwater through a dimly lit dark tunnel that feels five miles long. But we did emerge from the tunnel, and the rest of the drive was quite easy and pleasant.

*****

The 12-year-old is the one who notices things, and remembers things.  We were driving last night from my brother's house (where my nephew's birthday party had just ended) to my sister's house (where we were staying) and he said "you know the bench, Mom?  The one with the sign next to it, that says The End of the Rainbow? Ever since I was little, that's how I knew we were getting close to Aunt Carole's."  I always like to hear my kids' reminiscences, though it reminds me that they're getting older. A 12-year-old has long memories; he remembers his childhood in segments, and thinks of himself as quite old, relative to when he was little.

And again, he notices things.  I actually have no idea what bench he's talking about.  I must have driven past it no fewer than 100 times, and I couldn't pick it out of a lineup.

*****
I have things in common with both of my children. Although I don't notice things like my 12-year-old does, I have the same long, encyclopedic, and detailed memory.  Although my 15-year-old is fortunately free of my tendency to borrow trouble at high rates of interest (in fact, he probably worries far less than he should), he shares my scatterbrained distractibility.  (Blogger is flagging that word as either misspelled or not a word. I assure you, Blogger, that it is a word, and a correctly spelled one.)  They're both really good company, and great traveling companions, and I'm glad we got to ride together this weekend, tunnels of terror and nonexistent rainbow benches notwithstanding.

*****
We're watching hockey now. The Capitals are winning a very important game against the Columbus Blue Jackets.  In the perfect world, the Penguins will also lose to Carolina (because in a perfect world, the Penguins will always lose), but the win over Columbus will leave us nicely positioned to let Columbus and Pittsburgh face one another in the first round of the playoffs. I'm not going to jinx anything. The less said, the better.

*****

Normally, I try to make sure that these long and winding roads actually lead somewhere.  But not tonight. I'm flat out of words for now.  The Penguins won, but the Capitals are beating Columbus 3-0. Let's go Caps.