Intimate utterances

At my sister's house I unthinkingly called Liam a pet name we use at home. My sister laughed and took up the name, and then her husband did as well, and while it made me feel that they were entering with affection into our intimacy, it made Liam feel that I'd betrayed it. The matter of public and private language--the ways in which those languages connect us to the experience of intimacy--interests me; a word that marks us as special at home diminishes our specialness in other contexts. Have you read Hunger of Memory?

On the way home we stopped at a rest stop and I saw a tough-guy teen dressed in fatigues: loose-fitting pants stuffed at the legs into big boots; an oversized top, cut off at the elbows. Distinct swagger; chin in the air. Pure fashion, not uniform. It's never happened to me before, but I felt a flash of anger; soldiering is an alien life choice to me, but if there's ever a suitable time for civilian adults to dress up as soldiers in a line at Burger King, this isn't it.

No museums in Washington; too hot for tromping. But Liam got to go out on the Chesapeake Bay in a pirate ship--Arr!--and shoot a water cannon at Pirate Pete who came zipping by in a dingy and obligingly back-flipped into the water, nailed. Everybody: Arr, laddies! The kid can cut the air with a plastic cutlass like nobody's business.

I learned this week that old American homes--and maybe those elsewhere, but I don't know--have one door to the outside that's wider than the rest: the coffin door. My folks' house was built in 1780, and the front door is the wide one. The strange thing is that whenever I think of the front entryway, I've imagine it with a coffin passing through--a very specific coffin, brown and simple--and people filing through a certain room at the end of a hall. That's never happened in real life; dead people and sick people have passed through that door on stretchers in my time, but no coffins. No wakes. There's a whole host of fantastical things I keep at the edge of what I know to be true, and among them is the sense that physical places have memories embedded in them. My little piece of woo-woo.