Good week. Better weather.

Waiting at a plant nursery for a friend to finish socialising so we can start our own desperate catching up, I step into a moment where you can smell the moisture in the breeze and a peacock has it's wings fanned out. It's the animal kingdom version of movie or street scene where a girl is losing out to an umbrella hell bent on sucking up to the sky and turning upwards to show it's intent. The peaccock is the girl and the plume is the umbrella. Sky is the constant. 

I see it go round and round, twirl and twirl, front and ass, and I photograph both. I mail ass pic from phone to another friend who used to be grated by his phone's ridiculous 2-bit appendage, Sent on my Blackberry. He nonethelss replies from his BB, asking if I thought the peacock mistook my laughter for rain. And I, tee hee, vain peacock myself, forgive the birds for being such vile snake-like things. 

You'll agree it was a good line. I wanted to have come up with it.

~

Tuesday. Gorgeous weather. So much rain. Salmon sky. All that. We have a plan. We're going out. To celebrate the weather, if you please. We're four people - two of whom are up there in the first para, third I'm talking to on the phone. Fourth is a perpetrator of the walk and talk malaise.

In two minutes of having gotten out of office -- 6.45 p.m? -- my nice blue seersucker trousers, my season substitute for jeans, get caught between two adjacent parked cars, one of which is what I drive and rip hard. They get caught in a teeny inexplicable protrusion from the parallel car just as I am slithering sideways to sit inside, and they rip unmistakeably, at the butt, right side, below the 'back pocket'. No point hoping I didn't hear and feel what happened. I am a mess of red laughs and huge relief. I thank my stars that I am not, for one, getting OUT of the car and/or late for a meeting. None of that, at least. This sucks. This rips. But I am spared the necessity to take asylum in the infra red besotted furnace on wheels. Second bright side: the weather, the weather! I am still talking to my friend. It's drizzling. I think we laugh for 12 minutes straight. She stops at South Extension, picks me up my change, my spanking new lowers. I reach our rendezvous and (mostly) stay in the car till she arrives - you can still drive a car with a bare butt. I change in the dark. She and the car door act like the shield. I flash her. The laughs don't die.

~

We're at a shoot. Photographer friend-colleague from office and I. It's maybe one of those off track things about the journo life that I don't mind -- hanging with photographer colleagues, doing some work for some story. (Nobody in the profession calls it an article. That's only to outsiders, to people who you ring for the story - hi, I'm so and so from such and such place, is this a bad time?, I'm doing a... hell, even here, I say 'story' -- I'm doing a story on blah blah and I was wondering if you were free to talk. meet). We write articles but we do stories. And when you hit it off with say, photographer colleagues, it's amazing how much peripheral stuff you can fit in and learn about each other on these 'assignments'. Or stories.

We're done with the shoot. We're walking in an alley and his eye catches sight of an oil painting of the golden temple from outside a hole in the wall art gallery. We go in to examine the strokes, the green-grey colours of the sky, share a little working knowledge of flat brushes, learn a little about the painter, see his other work, be interested, not just act it, like the bright, bright colours in he uses for Varanasi ghats, say thank you to the woman trying to discern if we're interested or just playing the fool, then go out and debate if we want to waste more time before going back to office or what. And what a silly doubt that is.

~

I asked one of my favourite people, an editor who's seen me since I was 20 and had milk teeth, if he'd read any Jonathan Franzen. I was still carrying Freedom buried with me in my bag then. And I wanted to know if any half-sharp person I respected thought it as addictive. Talk about desperately seeking validation.

"Well, if you did have [a daughter], you might let yourself recognize the actually-not-terribly-hard-to-recognize fact that very young women can get their desire and their admiration and their love for a person all mixed up, and not understand –"

"Not understand what?" 

"That to the guy they're just an object. That the guy might only be wanting to get his, you know, his, you know –"

And he slightly furrowed his brow and said, yea.. you know, I've read Corrections and I enjoyed it very much... but the thing with these contemporary American authors is... they don't stay with you...

And I thought about this. And I remember thinking, he sounds so unlike what so, so many others would sound like when they say the same thing, speak the same phrase, and believe similarly that the thing with these contemporary american authors is...

I have a habit of jotting down phrases/passages/ words/lines/triggers in a book that I like. And in a book as thick as Gone With the Wind, I found I did it just once. I loved the book, enough, sure. I read it very fast. I told everyone I'd usually tell about it. I even took the metro so I would not waste precious reading time driving. (If I'd done that last Tuesday, it may not have happened and you might not know about my ripped thread bare ass car episode. So good I drove). I wanted all the time to be making progress and finding out which Berglund family member did what next. And now it's with my friend who I was raving about it to. It'll be nice to see if we agree on the same good, addictive, gossipy parts.

My one line, on page 169, my edition, was "She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song." I must like it enough and evidently, for in my annotations in my diary, I have that line followed by a smiley face, three exclamations and another smiley face.

They may not stay with you, these contemporary American authors. But sometimes they, too, quite hit the spot.