DRIVING WITH W. Had a chat with the President last night. He offered me a ride home, and I pitched FDR and TR as role models. Looking over from the wheel of the Lincoln, he said, "They were brothers, right?"...
"I have an evacuative mind," he confided. "I can take it all in one moment and then just dump it the next. Learned it at Yale."
Both Bush and I suffer from acute paranoia schizophrenia. He's mortified by a cripple with a terminal liver disease hiding in a hole near Pakistan. I'm terrified by our budget and trade deficits.
"Doesn't the $660-billion trade deficit worry you?" I asked him.
"Don't exaggerate," he snapped, "I'll have that down to 330 billion Euros in no time."
I worry about funding for daycare centers; he worries about funding anti-missile missiles. He worries about foreigners; I worry about Americans - especially him.
BUT REALLY, I can't complain, compared to my lawyer Dirtbag.
Last week Bag went over to beautiful Six Foot Sue's, who looks like Sandra Bullock. She prepared a feast, washed his back and granted all his birthday wishes. After breakfast he headed out to a meeting with bankers to figure out what to do with his inheritance.
And on the way to his BMW, he raised his hands and wailed: "WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MY LIFE?"
If he wasn't miserable, he'd be unemployed.
MY SIGNIFICANT OTHER, Miss Picky, can also see the half-full glass. She's been stressed about having to go to Hawaii. The other night I was studying her face, recalling what the photographer Bob Capa said about Ingrid Bergman: that he could look at her for hours. I'd gone only five minutes when she rushed for the bathroom. Must have gotten into some bad tofu.
My oldest friend says I don't deserve her. Others have wondered how she ended up with me. Well, she doesn't shop. And I've got some old tricks.
I began with the usual three months of fresh flowers and champagne - but anybody can do that.
Then I sat all the way through Oprah, muttering, "She's a genius." Next, I bought her the world's greatest vacuum. And, to seal the deal, I gave her dogs the royal treatment.
The path to the mature woman's heart is through her critters.
Now I just have to keep them alive.
That's not easy with a papillon and a gay poodle.
She got the papillon - a French butterfly dog, who looks like a black fox - at PAWS. He was sitting in the back of a cage with a sign saying biter. She tried to take him for a walk, but he wouldn't budge. She fell hard. I know Budhists who want to be Picky's dog in their next life.
Miss Picky just called from Hawaii and tested me on Pappy's menu: tofu dogs, pasta with butter, chicken breast - all sprinkled with the digestive enzymes. "And don't forget his coat!"
The Day-Glo coat is to make birds of prey hesitate. I once dismissed her bird phobia. Then I Googled "Great Horned Owl." Can instantly kill prey three times their size. Eats over 253 different species, including skunks, raccoons, cats and dogs....
I always thought owls in trees were being wise. Turns out they're studying the menu.
Where's Pappy?
MY NEW PROPANE HEATER and Jotul fireplace insert are finally working in time for spring.
Some people go tulip'ing on the Skagit to prove it's spring; I visit the homestead of an old Queen Anne Grizzly lineman.
I found my friend balancing on a ladder. He weighs about three Bob Dylans. He was sawing a limb off the cherry tree that frames his kitchen window.
Chickens, turkeys and Beatle-toffed highland cattle mill around the coups and pasture. And everywhere you look, from the sunlit cupola to the trained roses on the deck to the rows of the garden ... from the ceiling in the kitchen, ribbed like a fine cedar dory, to the driveway that slaloms through the alders and ends at a yellow-and-black 1953 MG-TF with Walt Whitman on the tapedeck ... everywhere you look is something beautiful that fits into a stunning landscape painting, Whidbey Island School, which lifts your spirits like a warm wind.
My friend and his wife have new neighbors. Their son, his wife and two boys, two years and two months old, have moved in next door. Tonight they'll be over for bath and books.
My friend is the most successful man I know.
BEST BETS ... Reading: Roger Angell remembers E.B. White in The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214
A fact: When E.B. White developed Alzheimer's, he thought he was in Seattle on a houseboat - where he lived in the '20s before being terminated by The Seattle Times.
...Watching: The "Fanny" Trilogy, France's most beloved movie.
LAST WORDS: "Congratulations to University of Washington President William Gerberding for daring to select Barbara Hedges as the school's next athletic director.... A few years from now Hedges - and to some extent Gerberding - will be judged, not by the novelty of breaking a gender barrier, but by the quality of the UW's athletic program during the '90s." -The Seattle Times,
May 22, 1991
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