Imaginary friends

Harvard was a big weekend for magic and mystery. Oh yeah, and shopping. I bought an Edith Wharton book illustrated by Maxwell Parrish for the spouse, a lifetime supply of red ink for my Dr. Grips, Fluxx, a Martin Greenberg anthology, chocolate pudding ice cream, and untold numbers of Brazilian CDs (Caetano forever!). I'll also admit to a Rosie (a Concord album I've never even seen before). In terms of torturing people with canned entertainment, in the car we listened to Jean Shepherd, Bertie Wooster, Elmore Leonard, Warren Zevon and The Rocky Horror Show. We'll sleep when we're dead!

The biggest mystery was the imaginary friend. Now, Lord knows, I go back with this woman for years now. I've known her longer than I've owned many of my socks. I've never known her to get "creative" in all that time (give or take the odd adolescent overenthusiasm). But I have fully come to believe that the new b.f. simply does not exist. How come he could only meet with us Sunday night? Did he know that the weather would be bad and we'd missing breaking by the breath of a speaker point and hence hit the road? Not to mention all those other times I've never seen him. At this point, I've come to accept that Clayton doesn't exist. Maybe it's Claeton, spelled to rhyme with the Rolls Royce. Or Claethon, as in Phaethon, and he's the son Helios never liked to talk about. Whichever. Clayton: if you're reading this, I know you don't exist, so you can stop right now.

As for magic, I did get to hang with the Nostrumite Saturday night during the 4th round while everyone else was debating or judging. We sat in some burger joint and waxed nosty on old times and alternately watched the BC/Syracuse game on ESPN and the crawl on CNN. The lad was sent into a state of permanent depression when we read that doctors had removed some baby's extra second head. Fortunately, the crawl said, this condition was "rare." We hadn't known this. We thought that two-headed babies were as common as Frenchpeople at a Dump Bush convention. Of course, this is the sort of thing that starts the Mite yapping for hours on end, decrying the poor usage of the English language and spewing forth on the over-reliance on synecdoche in critical animal rights theory and ultimately telling me in deepest confidence that he's heard that the PETA people are trying to ban the playing of "Fur Elise" on the local classical radio station. Don't even ask about his reaction to the women who refused to go wild for Koko the gorilla. There are nights like this one when I wish Jules weren't still in Dahomey or wherever he went. (Now I know it wasn't Dahomey, which really does sound like someone from Dahood, but that's just too easy.) Maldives? Whatever. The Mite says Julie should be back toward the end of spring or the beginning of summer. Good. The Nostrumite always needs someone to keep the lid on. Maybe he should get married again. He's about due. Come to think of it, there is no Claethon, so maybe there's a possibility there...