Nov. 12th, 2006

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Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] ron_drummond, I was invited to a house-warming potluck yesterday evening. I know the hosts, Jon and Penny, although I hadn't seen either of them for years, and when I first got to the house I didn't see a single person I knew amongst the hordes of clean, respectable folk and their scampering children. Had I come to the wrong house? Anxiety welled up ("Little fears cause anxiety, and great fears cause panic"), and I considered leaving. But I had something that Ron had asked me to deliver to Jon, so finally I asked a couple of women where Jon was, and they seemed to know who I was talking about, although with a name like Jon, like John, who knows? In fact, he was upstairs in a room with John & Ron, talking about the Little, Big anniversary project.

Anyway, it's a beautiful old house that Jon and Penny have bought on Queen Anne. Built in the teens of the last century, it's full of wonderful wood molding and panelling, beveled glass doors on inset bookshelves, lots of little nooks and crannies and small closets, and a useless steel bonnet above the stove that apparently once directed smoke from the old wood stove into the chimney. One of the strangest moments came when Ron and I stepped out into the backyard hillside to look around in the chilly dark and discovered one of the huge radio towers of Queen Anne right there, practically in the yard, or so it seemed -- a titanic metal structure thrusting up into the misty air, towering over us pygmies below. As a little girl observed later, "I don't like that thing. What if it falls over?" Ron and I could relate. It was unnerving to realize that the thing had been looming over us the whole time without our knowing.

A lot of the people at the party seemed to be family of Jon and Penny, although slowly I began to distinguish who was and who wasn't and eventually found a few hipsterish weirdos wandering the fringes like me. We eventually ended up in the kitchen chatting, and we were joined by the nine-year-old daughter of Penny's son from her previous marriage (the ex-husband was there as well, and was an interesting guy in his own right whom Ron talked to for quite a while). The girl informed us that she was said to talk a lot, and she proceeded to wade right in with us, clearly delighted to be hanging out with the cool grown ups and trying to trick Jon (who may have been slightly tipsy by then) into pouring some port into her water glass. She was a total kick in the pants, telling us about a frozen person who had been discovered in Alaska and asking why the one hipsterish weirdo woman was dressed all in black. "Ever heard of Johnny Cash?" the woman's boyfriend asked. The girl hadn't, but we started singing "Ring of Fire," and she'd heard of that.

Eventually we all drained back into the night and to home, wherever it was. A nice evening on another neighborhood street in Seattle I'd never seen before. And last night, I slept like a dream.
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The Earth and the Moon were more than a hundred Million miles behind in the depths of Space, and the Astronef had crossed this immense gap in eleven days and a few hours; but this apparently inconceivable speed was not altogether due to the powers of the Navigator of the Stars, for Lord Redgrave had taken advantage of the passage of the planet along its orbit towards that of the earth; therefore, while the Astronef was approaching Mars with ever-increasing speed, Mars was travelling towards the Astronef at the rate of sixteen miles a second.

The great silver disc of the earth had diminished until it looked only a little larger than Venus appears from the earth. In fact the planet Terra is to the inhabitants of Mars what Venus is to us, the star of the morning and evening.


-- George Griffith, A Honeymoon in Space (1901)

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