Looking Up

You know how, right now, a couple of hours after sunset, the earthlit crescent moon, Venus, and Jupiter make a triangle low in the sky? Well, it looks pretty spectacular in San Marcos. Austin has too much light pollution. And if you are cool enough to know my sister Margie, you can view it from the playground of the Presbyterian day care center across the street from where she lives, with a glass of wine in your hand.

Margie lives with Grady, who's a really cool guy, and his nine-year-old daughter Cora, so I brought Anna down with me. The girls played "Life." I used to love that game - used to play it with my cousins; that, and Clue. We had special voices for each of the characters, which was a lot more fun than the actual game itself.

They also have a great big black dog named Chicken.

It was a nice end to a long weekend, just visiting; though the dinner conversation was a little odd. Grady reminisced about how when he was growing up, there was a mirror above the toilet, placed at just the exact height where a male person, standing up to go pee, can keep a close eye on the proceedings. He doesn't think the placement was deliberate, and the person who put the mirror there, not being of the male persuasion, probably didn't realize that it worked out quite that way. "Actually it was pretty cool," he said. "I guess for the female equivalent you'd have to have the inside of the toilet lined with mirrors..."

It reminded me of some words of wisdom I'd gotten from Margie just a couple of hours earlier. They have a neighbor, she said, who's kind of creepy and is always asking her if she has a sister who looks just like her for him to date. (She doesn't, in fact; we look nothing alike.) Once he invited her in to look at some of his artwork, which was hanging - surprise! - in his bedroom. There were mirrors on the ceiling.

Guys with mirrored bedroom ceilings are always bad news, girls, always. No exceptions.

Now go outside and look at the stars!