Back in the Good Old Days When Wild Animals Ate Our Babies

Oh, lord, people. This Mrs. Ernesberger you may remember from our discussion of the mysterious William Phillips, since he was living with her in 1880. So, when she says that her mom used to sing this all the time, that’s Patience Phillips, my third-great-grandma. I can’t even tell you how much it tickles me to think of her singing a song about the food they ate and the animals that could have eaten them back in the good old days.

I wish I knew the tune, because I would totally sing this to the Phillipses I’m going to see tomorrow.

Doot-doot-doo Finding all My Dead People Doot-doot-doo

In my very productive last twenty minutes I discovered that Oscar Phillips is in the Gresham Cemetery up outside of Charlotte, Michigan (pronounce shar-LOT, not SHAR-lett) with a bunch of our relatives and not in Marshall, where he died. And the woman I called in Pontiac found me right where Luke and Patience are in the Oak Hill Cemetery over in Pontiac and even faxed me a map.

I will have no time for research, but I will have time for visiting. The question is whether I should buy flowers for everyone.

One Foot in Front of the Other

I have been in the office since 7:30. I will probably not leave here before 5 unless I can figure out some way to sneak home between my two phone calls this afternoon and do the last one from my couch. But it is not yesterday. And that makes all of the difference.

Tomorrow is vacation!

And I am going to be running around like a madwoman getting prepared this evening. I want to print out nine thousand different maps. I’m afraid I will probably just sleep.

Salon @ 615

S. and I went last night to the library for their Salon @ 615 series with Adam Ross. First, I could not say enough good things about the Salon itself. The library is beautiful. The staff is friendly and helpful and seems genuinely excited to have people there for the event. Plus there was food. Which was uniformly delicious except for this one thing I had, which was somehow both the most delicious and most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten. It was turkey on a biscuit with some kind of spread and… I just don’t know how to explain it. Every bite filled me equally with yuck/yum feelings. It was somehow both too sweet and too savory, which was gross, but the balance made it delicious.

Explain that, food experts.

Anyway, Adam Ross was the dude last night and he was charming and funny and the story he read sounded great. There were some teenage boys in front of us who were there with their mom behind us and they kept turning around to look at her as if to say “I told you he was cool.” On the other hand, their little sister was snoring so loud behind us it was kind of making me giggle.

Jim Ridley from The Scene (and my editor at Pith) asked the questions and he was great. He has this way of laughing at things like he just means to chuckle, but then the laugh gets away from him and escapes out into the audience.

But my opinion of Ross stayed pretty much the same. He’s obviously brilliant. But I just don’t quite know. I still don’t like Mr. Peanut, for all of the reasons I didn’t like it before, because I don’t know if Ross is smart enough to be saying “Hey, obviously he killed her. Look at how he’s portraying her–so clearly bullshit.” or if it’s really supposed to be ambiguous because Ross doesn’t really think through all of the implications of the various conditions she has.

So, there’s that. I should have asked, but I was doing good to make it that far after dinner. If I’m going to do shit like this, I’m going to have to just try to eat late somehow and take my pills then.