*silence*

Ph. is 13 today.  Drop the pre-teen rhetoric, old man. 

I remember reading to him from Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends
at my folks’ house in Raytown.  First time we met.  A poem called
"Invisible Boy." 

No, not tonight.  But tomorrow I’ll scrap together an entry telling what
I can recall from last night’s trip to the movie house.  D. and I veered to
the left (theater four – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind); Ph. and
his pal went to the right (theater sixteen – 50 First Dates).  Spotless
Mind follows a premise of memory erasure, the collapse of detail, and so
on.  It’s more complicated than that (a review tomorrow, he said!), but the
promise of fade and crumble has me taking pictures of birthday dinner–so as to
preserve it in this computer’s pixelated coffer (and depending on your browser
configuration, in yours) if not in the nerve endings and chemical stir
upstairs.  We may, like a cluster-spread of good, well-connected blog-writers and blog-readers, convene social memories, aggregating endlessly through a tired stretch of collective re-membering, of tonight’s dinner and Ph.’s exodus from pure childhood.