IKEA

I know that I am late to the cult, but I made my first trip to IKEA over the weekend. It was fabulous. I did get lost a couple of times in the store and had to ask directions. My new desk is almost perfect, which is the most I can hope for at $89. Although assembly was a bit tricky. I thought it was a joke, that thing about mistakes in the directions for self assembly stuff.

Book report: just finished The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich. Excellent. I don't always like her books, but this one I loved, stayed up late to finish it.

Passage from a book

She was pulling a rope out of the water and knew that it was coming to the end when the barnacles started to appear and they became more thick and clustered. Then it was strangely peaceful and the sound was turned off. She stood at the bow of a ship. If only she could have stood this way above the water and really breathed and let the waves go by like pages being turned and watched everything more closely and chosen things more carefully then she might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it.

For a moment she felt an astonishing brilliances and heat and light and all of herself flared up and the vibration after sixty-five years was not weakened by time but more dense then suddenly it was as if the flame had caught the flimsiest piece of paper for it flickered up and flew into the air then quickly sank down withered into a thin cinder of ash which blew off, inconsequential. Her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide.

Evening, Susan Minot, page 137