Things to do in Hingham while staying with the Aged P’s.

(Mom, I know you sometimes read this so please note that Aged P's is form of endearment, Dickensian in origin.)

• Take Dad to his personal trainer, who tells me Dad is a very unusual client in that he prefers to discuss solar panels and globalization rather than Brittany Spears. Dad, who has no clue who BS is, wants to know if she is pretty.

• Swim laps, slowly, like a frog. Use time to think about my story called “Gone to the Amazon” – water is the unifying theme - and also to think about formerly swimming laps in the pool of my former in-laws and the tortured relationship of former in-laws as well as ex-husband with said pool. (Scene of debauches, dunkings, & debunkings.) It’s only a pool, you say. Correctimundo. I actually like swimming pools, outdoors not in, and though one should prefer swimming in water in its natural element (oceanic, riverine, lagunal) I really do like the pool and the light on the pool.
Note: Parental pool looks nothing like this. No palm trees for starters.

• Look at family photographs that are displayed in tasteful groups all over the parental house and count how many pictures there are of me relative to how many there are of my siblings. For instance, I sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms (“my” old room has long since ceased to be “Christine’s” room and is now my father’s upstairs office. I will not point out that the rooms my siblings occupied are still identified as B’s room, or P’s room or M’s or…. you get the idea. But I don’t mind that.) And on the mantelpiece is an array of framed family snapshots, in which Michael appears 5 x, Carl thrice, Brigitte thrice, and Peter and I once. This is only one room out of several and so it would be a mistake to generalize. But I will, and I do. I would make graphs if graph making were one of my skills.

• Eat ripe melon.

• Endlessly ride the recumbent bicycle while reading (looking at) The Best Cartoons of 1957 full of painfully sweet, and yes, innocent, cartoons, featuring men in hats and woman in aprons and other woman with flamboyant, buoyant bosoms and cupidesque lips.

• Gossip with my mother, mostly about other family members.