Day 16

"Don't sit there," Mamie tells me, "that's where the chicken took a crap."

Which prompts us into a discussion about the kids of one of the employees here. Said chicken (Tweety the Wonder Bird) is owned by the youngest of the three - she has painted his claws blue, and apparently allows him to shit all over the furniture at will. Miranda pointed out to us over dinner that all this is symptomatic of the fact that their parents exert almost no control over them - letting them watch HBO programs without supervision, leaving them without superintendence at a bowling alley, etc.

"What's a slut?" the little girl asked Miranda yesterday in the lounge, and really, how do you answer that question for a 9-year old kid?

"A woman who does very bad things with men," was the reply.

Insouciant: "Oh, you mean like sexual intercourse?"


Anyway, the reason I was trying to sit down on the sofa with the crap on it in the first place was that the Duke-Maryland game was on last night, and we had high hopes that the newly installed cable (illegal unscrambling) would have the right ESPN channel. It didn't. Cursing at the television, scrabbling to find a radio so that we could try and listen to it.

Installed upstairs with a tiny receiver desperately trying to pick up the broadcast, I commented on how 1967 this all was: huddled around the wireless, feet being warmed by a space heater, wooden floorboards, scratchy blankets. We tried to order a pizza to make it seem more like being in college, but at $18 for a 10", we decided that there were better ways to spend our money. Insufferable sadness, but at least Duke won.