Everything present is made out of the past

It's November, and you know what that means! I attempt to write a blog post every day and don't...quite. Maybe I'll get it this year: hooray for low-stakes challenges!

Thought: Public art in the roundabout like something out of the George Saunders story The Semplica-Girl Diaries. Pay $18/hr for humans to stand there? 

Thought: Mark Zuckerberg's plastic Lego hair. Also his plastic Lego soul.

Habit: Everyday, watching the middle schoolers walk in groups, or alone, I smile at the ones who walk alone.

Internetty: Hello, it's me, age 54, googling "can you take a dog on a cruise?" 

Vicarious excitement: An Amazing Race to the airport (Zoë on the bus, bound for Israel, Mark in the car with...her vaccine card).

Remembering: Just a couple of weeks ago, on our mini-Anniversary-getaway-weekend, Mark and I ate dinner outside at a fish shack, and a man who worked there pointed at Clover and said, "Wait! Wasn't that dog here for lunch?" (I guess she has a doppelgänger in the Lincolnville area!)

Animals:

• An enormous brown hawk, swooping down low, so close to my head it made me say "Whoa!"
• A busy animal hurrying into a shrub, disguising itself as a cute, tiny squirrel: in retrospect, obviously a rat.
• So many dogs, always.
• Mice, a-pooping in my kitchen cabinet.

Reading: Proust could declutter his apartment all he liked, but he couldn’t stop people from serving him madeleines.