Ian Hamilton in Florida
By Randall Mann

                               Gainesville, 1991

            Think again, Charles James,
some vile queen hissed at me, at the bar.
            So what if my gown
was not so much? The nineties
            were still the eighties then,

            and by that I mean
shoulder-padded, moussed, and bedazzled.
            I wished that Derek,
my blond fucker, my stalker,
            would please stop, or stop by.

            I lived in a clutch
of pink or blue apartments, gender
            meets architecture—
I lived, it’s true, in the pink.
            A big primeval bug

            was painted over
in the far corner of my bedroom.
            (I hid it with lube
left over from the Gainesville
            Murder Slumber Party.)

            Once, the handyman
walked right in like a sexy golfer,
            polyester slacks
and a white-capped, crooked grin.
            I put on my En Vogue

            cassette; I wanted
that kind of facial in the worst way.
            He fixed everything
but, then left me for wood chips?
            Fine. But here’s the point:

            Though there’s little point
in poems, that year, I fell hard for yours,
            Ian Hamilton:
'It’s been a long time,’ you said,
            ‘I’ll race you to the sea.'
                                                       in memory

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My first day of December was much better than my last day of November. I didn't have a vehicle, but gblvr came over and took me to the mall for Subway and shopping, and played Pink for me and brought me an early birthday present, a necklace with Klimt's Tree of Life (I must remember to post a photo tomorrow), so that was all wonderful. And I managed to get my now-sans-McAfee desktop working long enough to print my holiday card address labels, plus Adam's homework from yesterday which had to be reprinted because he failed to double-space it (and then I had to print it yet again because his paper said "populous" when he meant "populace" -- spell-check fail). And it also let me burn TV episodes to DVD so I can soon watch more Merlin, plus the awesome-looking The Real Merlin and Arthur special. And the van ended up having nothing serious they could find wrong with it, so it didn't cost a fortune like we feared. So Tuesday was really free of petty annoyances, for which I am extremely grateful.


A view from the upper level of City Place Mall in Silver Spring...


...which always has model trains around its Santa Claus.


We discovered this by accident one year visiting the Burlington Coat Factory in the mall, and now when we're in the area, we go take a look.


Because Silver Spring is a fabulous multicultural area with ten ethnic restaurants connected to the mall, they also have displays for Hannukah...


...and Kwanzaa, whose colors dominate in several of the store displays.


The trains go around a model amusement park...


...with a ferris wheel, skating rink, and this delightful swing ride.


This is a gratuitous blurry phone photo of downtown Silver Spring with the fountain turned off but the penguin display not yet erected.</center>

Evening TV here, after the beginning of the fabulous Terps game in which Maryland beat Indiana, was the new Celtic Woman special on PBS, Songs from the Heart -- not my kids' first choice but Daniel has sung several songs they've recorded in chorus, so he was tolerant, and Adam was working on making hikaru dorodango, whose existence he discovered in school. I know that someone is going to insist that Celtic Woman's music is not authentically Celtic, so let me quickly point out that I don't care -- my two favorite recordings of theirs are their versions of "Nella Fantasia" and "You Raise Me Up" (the former based on The Mission soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, the latter a rearrangement of "Danny Boy" composed by Secret Garden). In the new concert, they did Phil Collins' "You'll Be In My Heart" from Disney's Tarzan, Stephen Schwartz's "When You Believe" from The Prince of Egypt, Jimmy Webb's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Pie Jesu," and Lisa Kelly bravely welcomed comparisons to Eva Cassidy by singing her arrangement of Sting's Fields of Gold. I loved every minute of it.