HIGH AS A KITE...

And then some, even without the herbal supplement or wall-banging sex this time. We were staying at my mother's, and our room was right under the bedroom of the upstairs apartment--and there's not a whole lot that goes on in either room that the people in the other don't experience with almost the same immediacy...

The Goat drove in from his house and met us halfway between my work-haunts and my mother's for lunch; there we were, my mother, my daughter, my lover, and me, and we had a lovely time.

A lovely enough time that my mother forgot her purse in the restaurant, and as we swung away to head out of town, my cell phone rang. It was the hostess calling, and she had something for me. It was the best phone message I think I've ever received:

"The gentleman in the red hot-rod has the lady's purse."

And so he did. I swung around and got back to the parking lot before he took off--in fact, I nearly clipped one of his lovingly restored headlights in my eagerness to relieve him of the extra burden... and then we all drove up to my mother's house by our own routes: I wanted to get there, my mother wanted to get there, and the Goat wanted to have the maximum amount of scenery for the distance.

It was a beautiful day...

Later that afternoon, we added Big Brother's rather odd daughter, to the mix and drove into Town to see UP in 3D, in spite of all the critical noise about how the 3D got in the way of the movie [and it did apparently give my niece a headache, but then, we all do, to some degree]. I loved it.

And as I drove in to the "cinema," I thought: here I am in my car with my mother, my daughter, my lover, and my weirdest niece, and we're all off to have a good time together. My niece even consented to stay after the movie and play cards! She comes from a household that disdains games of any sort, and here she was, throwing her lot in with the B-Team. We talked of almost nothing but the movie all evening. And the following morning we were still quoting our favorite bits, among them: "I do not like the cone of shame!"

My question is, what's in the water in Emeryville, CA? Because whatever it is, the rest of the world needs some of it. I realize that part of the appeal of Pixar is that there's only one of it, but don't you wish there were more? At the very least, I wish there were more than one movie a year...

I can't wait to get my paws on a DVD of UP and run it until it's worn away and my eyeballs are dribbling down my front... And the best part? My mother is already talking about going to see Ice Age III with me. I know the movie is going to be a let-down, but it's in 3D, and it has Scratt in it. How not worth ten bucks could it be? Then there's the new Harry Potter movie, and then... well, we all have the first Pixar live-action hybrid movie John Carter of Mars and Monsters, Inc. II to look forward to.

Some days I'm so glad to be alive I can't see straight. That actually has more to do with the Goat than it does with the spate of 3D movies, but you'd never know it from the way I've been running on recently...

I had a long talk with my Favorite Daughter on the drive back to her mother's house [and it seems quite incredible to me that I can call it that without any reserve, these days]. It was all about what marriage was and wasn't. The FD is only 21, and has all the idealism of youth bearing her up; the thing that worried me was that she seemed so invested in how things should be rather than how they tend to turn out, given the flawed nature of human beings. I admire her spirit, but I did have to say that I hoped she found a way to forgive people more and advocate cutting the offenders out of her life a little less.

I wasn't exactly arguing my own case, and she wasn't exactly, either, but it did come up a couple of times. I have to say: if I've learned anything in life, it's that life isn't as neat as you think it should be, and it's better to be prepared to cut people some slack.

As I have often said, some of the scariest words in Western civilization are: "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." Anyway, we listened to each other, and tried to avoid each other's sensitive points, and still have an actual reality-based discussion. I loved it. I love her.

I love them all, really. How can you not love people who play cards and go to movies and are willing to go on and on about them for hours at dinner afterward?

Damned if I know.