With a "remote kiss, heat-seeking" Alex just blew out the door to catch the bus. His morning routine is to pick out his most garish, most ill-fitting T-shirt and to argue with me about it for 15 minutes (I'm meanwhile holding up more acceptable school shirts, hopelessly.) I tried to ferret out all the really gruesome ones and stash them in the spidery attic in my annual seasonal "clothes switch," but he apparently had some stashed. Then, since we are shopping for a date palm instead of a Christmas tree now that Wisconsin is officially considered a sub-tropical region, the weather undermined all my good arguments about long versus short sleeves.

The pants are another issue. Now, he has settled on jeans, which are fine with me, but jeans for every occasion? The perfectly good cordoroys (also known as "the fabric of dorks" in his circle apparently) were promptly consigned to the ashpits of history because they were deemed "too feelsome," which was also the rating he loudly gave the red velour wallpaper in a friend's home. I know I'll have a pitched battle (pitched in his direction) to get him into the tuxedo (all suits or even sports jackets are tuxedoes to him) for his cousin Jenny's wedding later this month. He is to be "ring bear" and I think the only reason he consented to participate at all is that he imagines himself lumbering down the aisle in a fur suit. .Ah for the days when I dressed him up in sailor suits and followed him around with a camera. If he ever comes home in a sailor suit again it will be a real one and Mama will keel over.

Speaking of protesting things, ( you know, sailors, the military, war, etc.--try to keep up, won't you?) I dragged him and a friend along to protest the building of a gargantuan coal-fired, pollution-spewing power plant in the middle of a pristine little community near here recently. As the rest of us marched on the governor's office, I noticed that he and Ben were lagging behind. I later found out they were mumbling "where's the treat wagon?" and "my (his) mama made me come here."You all remember Erica Snowflake my lovely canary who suffered the indignity of complete ingestion (all right, there were three tail feathers left) at the paws of our bad cats? This year things have been a little less violent, but the year did include a little bout with a runaway hermit crab, which Alex had begged us to buy last year on vacation in Cape Hattaras. "Kermit" is the most resilient creature I've ever seen. He lived for months on air alone, fortunately for him, since, as it usually goes, his quiet charm began to pale for Alex almost as soon as we hit Madison. Finally, to save his little life and fearful of karma, I placed his little cage right next to Mr. Coffee, so that somebody would have to SEE him periodically amid the rubble of the kitchen counters.

After that he got a sporadic sponge-wetting and a few sprinkles of something that came in a can labeled "Crab Snax" and looks like larvae in corn meal--I don't ask questions; it smells and looks better than the bait I keep finding in the back of my vegetable crisper drawers--until the day we were to leave for this year's summer vacation. I had been whizzing down my "to do" list in a smugly efficient manner. Then, I asked Alex to clean Hermie's cage (a little plastic Barbie-pink clear-plastic case with a "log" in it). All was well until Alex decided that Hermie deserved a little exercise once in awhile and released him to my bedroom floor to do a few laps across the carpet. We-e-ell, three hours later, launch pad ready, countdown begun, I was forced to leave a really crazy note for the neighbors who were watching our place while we were gone, offer Crab Snax and water on the spot where the hapless crustacean was last sighted, lock the doors to keep the marauding cats, Tony and Cleo, at bay, and entertain myself with visions of the crab resting in the toe of my shoes, stuck underneath my pillow, or being batted like a puck around the house by the delighted felines (if he had gotten out of the bedroom already.)

Three weeks later, running bath water for Alex, I peripherally noticed movement along the base of the bathtub where I was kneeling. Yes! Holding a little sign reading "Put me back! Please!" in his one uplifted claw, Kermie came home. One can only shudder imagining his travels in the meantime. The Amazing Journey pales in comparison. And remember Friskie, the giant old denizen of the deep whom we inherited when we bought the Piney Wood Mews out to Viroqua there? He lasted two winters, the only fish in a small pond, dozing under water and waiting patiently for us to come throw him pebbles of Friskies cat food in the Spring when we opened the place. But alas, Friskie, il est mort!! He apparently mysteriously beached himself--three feet from the pond. I miss him.The cats, Dumb and Dumber, have a new trick-- every night they hunt down and shlepp upstairs some item of dirty apparal from the basement laundry room. Their specialty is socks, though they occasionally present other undergarments. That hunter instinct dies hard in these city cats. Other pets have come and gone�from fish who didn't last long enough to earn names (Note to self: Pine needles and yellow fish don't mix) to the turtle "Yoda," whose voracious appetite for earthworms quickly outstripped our combined abilities or will to hunt nightcrawlers. He never looked one bit grateful either, and watching him dismember them after craning that serpentine neck about to get a good look chilled me to the bone. He was a dead ringer for a guy I used to date. He had to go.

My students remain entertaining. So far this year I have read thefollowing deathless prose: "After that, I was put into an exhilarated math class." (But the fun stopped when I got to English class.) "The biggest injustification," according to one freshman is having to register last. He felt "driven to disparity." One woman, an ex-waitress, told me she was taught to "serve women first, oldest to youngest, then children, then the second course." Jonathan Swift would understand. Another has his hopes pinned on someday performing in that famous music house "Carnage Hall." A colleague reports that one of his students described the fateful night when he and his parents had a flat tire. "I stayed inside," the guy wrote, "while Dad went out and jacked it up with Mom." Myriad interpretations possible, eh?

Ken has had a fine fishing season. He and his buds have discovered that at night the lights from the brand new Frank Lloyd Wrong Convention Center make excellent strobes by which to fish the killer muskie. The other entertainment, apparently, is watching drunken boaters try to dock their boats. I'm not a big fan of the part when the guys drag these behemoth carcasses into my hallway on chains, leaving a fine swath of blood and entrails behind, but it's nearly worth the hassle to watch the testosterone rise. Not to mention that fresh fish is nice. The hunter instinct dies hard in men as well as cats, I guess. Let's see, kid, pets, students, fishing--that just about makes a life, I guess. We are both still underemployed, overworked, underpaid -- just like everybody else in these United States. We put our pants on over our heads just like everybody else does. We do daily battle with squirrels, the winged monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, just like you do. ( I KNOW they gotta eat too, but do they have to eat the Christmas lights?)

We feel blessed to live in a country where a guy like Ken Starr can keep a straight Sunday School Superintendent face saying things like "thong bikini pants." He who fathered the edict that there was never any reason to post obscene language on the Internet (Ken Starr 1995 or so). But I'm standing by my president-- just not very close by in case he tries something. I thought this letter had ended, but I have to paint you a little picture of last night's "installing of the Christmas tree." Ken left for Orlando on business yesterday at 6:00 am, and since Ken believes every holiday is part of a giant Hallmark conspiracy to make him look bad and doesn't really so much enjoy the tradition of getting, dressing, and having a needle-dropping dead bush in his living room, I thought I would seize the opportunity to get the tree.

So Alex and a woman friend (mine, not his, silly!) went and picked out the biggest one I could find--more branch for the buck, I say. She got a tasteful, shapely little Frazier Fir--but I have never been accused of throwing tasteful Christmases, so I got one that dwarfed the car. And I set it on the deck in water for a few hours while I took a Bushhog to the house to make space for it. Then, I realized that the friend would probably rather be home with her family putting up her tree, so I decided that I would find a way of getting this giant evergreen vertical. Well, two little boys (Alex and friend Josh) and I were just not up to the task, so I called my favorite ex-student Sami (also Alex's camp counselor last year) and he said he'd bring a friend. Half an hour later, I was balancing on our really decrepit porch banister--1/8 inch from the socket I needed to plug in the lights that light Rudolph's nose ,when a small foreign car roared up, lights flashing and radio blaring and out jumped.....16 clowns....no, out jumped three handsome Iranians and an equally handsome Jewish boy. (not that I can identify nationalities and creeds on sight, but they soon identified themselves as "three Muslims and a Jew" ready to do something they had never dreamed of doing--put up a Christmas tree for the nice dotty old schoolmarm. You haven't lived until you've seen this sight--one forgets how much one learns about this art from year to year--such as starting with the trunk end while passing it through the patio doors.... We ended up tieing it off to the wall�listing badly to starboard, but in water and sort of vertical. I paid them off in used books and gingerbread and sent them on their way, laughing all the way.

Later on, while Alex and Josh were trying to set up their train at the base, the tree got to really pitching about and I had to call my woman friend's husband Donny anyhow. But not until A and J had given their best little manly shot--hauling box saws ("clear the way, lemme at it with this bad boy!") hack saws, and wanting to just try to NAIL it in with a hammer. (I rejected that one.) This one's captured on video if you ever want a good laugh. But this morning I was very happy to come down and see old tannenbaum (not in spell checker) still upright. Gotta go make sleepover waffles, a specialte de maison Zielske.

By the way, I'm returning to my birth name for publishing --you may now call me Norma Gay Prewett, or simply (since apparently our newfound heritage includes some French royalty as well as the Irish brigands we knew about) Your Majesty.

We love you and hold you in our thoughts always.....

Gay,Ken and Alex Zielske

Tony and Cleo


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