Well, so much for quiet mind, dear friends. You would think that a week away from regular prose generation, a week filled with new adventures in yarn-based meditation (interested readers may click on the "continue reading" link below, while those who feel a creeping sense of dread at any signs of incipient craft-based prose may ignore it), would send me back here tanned, fit, rested and ready to play. Alas, Nature hates a vacuum, and within 20 minutes of my arrival at LuthorCorp last Monday morning, quiet mind was officially over. The LuthorCorp (Funky Little Company packaging division) sales force spent the week at a sales meeting in Virginia, which, of course, was the signal for which the Furies were waiting to unleash chaos on me and my fellow cubicle-based workerbees. I won't elaborate here, simply because the various indignities of the week will only make you indignant if you work at a packaging company; since I figure that only covers about 12 of you, I'll spare the rest of you, and just reiterate that it was a crunchy, crunchy week.
Terrible as I felt at the time, though, I tried not let it sadden me overmuch, and to remember that all that box factory toil makes it possible for me to write silly longwinded essays about eggs without worrying about how I'm going to pay my rent. The best thing I could do was to get myself back to the library and get to work. Back to the library I went, only to be refused admission by a pair of grumpy coat check clerks. I had come to the library straight from the farmer's market; apparently, bringing a bag of apples anywhere within a 500-mile radius of the library is a big no-no, which I certainly would have respected if only the nice fellows at the two security checkpoints I had to pass had informed me. I also appeared to be giving off the vibe of a person who would check her coat and bags at the library and then just leave the building, because the senior of the two clerks informed me, without any inquiry on my part, and in the tone of voice saved for addressing people who pee on the floor, that such behavior was verboten.
In the end, those grumpy women did me a favor: once I returned home and had a good rant and a nice hot aromatherapeutic shower, I realized that I had a topic in mind for the Oxford Symposium paper, one that would require research in other venues, and that while I am not done with the Rare Book Room yet, not by a long shot, I would not be requiring their assistance with this particular topic. By the time I had taken a nice retail therapy crawl around the Upper West Side with my favorite retail therapist, my sense of humor had returned, and I was finally in that state of tanned fit rested readiness for which I'd been waiting.
Lest you think I spent the week doing nothing but grumping around and hassling overworked, underpaid coat checkers at the library, I assure you that I've never had a week so crunchy that it didn't yield at least one pearl, and last week I had at least three. My favorite retail therapist's mother, a/k/a Mere Lapin, had three theatre tickets she couldn't use, so she passed them along to Bunni, and Bunni kindly shared them with Lloyd and me. Those tickets were for The Odd Couple, and thus did I get to bounce back from the day by watching Nathan and Matty do their thing, which is a very funny thing indeed. As we rode home on the subway after the show, Lloyd mentioned that it was a shame that comic plays were not the fixture they used to be on Broadway. I thought about the near-instant clout that the phrase "a new comedy by Neil Simon" conveyed in the 1960's and 1970's, and how I wished that we had that kind of comic playwright today. Then I realized that we do have that kind of comic playwright in Joe Keenan, who was a playwright, lyricist and the author of two hysterical, madcap novels (Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz) before heading out to California to become a producer and head writer for several seasons of Frasier. His third novel, My Lucky Star, has just been published. I bought it last Saturday. I finished it last Sunday night. I have spent the intervening week trying to find the right adjectives: brilliant, silly, fast-paced, crackerjack and just plain funny -- they all come close, but don't quite hit the mark. In short, if you ever, ever happen upon a marquee, or an ad in your local paper, reading "a new comedy by Joe Keenan," run, don't walk, to the theatre.
There is more than this, of course. There is a small army of small pleasures that have come to me in my moment of need, including but not limited to some truly kind and thoughtful correspondence from both an old friend and a new one, both of whom will be hearing from me before I head back to LuthorCorp tomorrow. There is more happy-making comedy in the form of the NewsRadio dvd I gave Lloyd for Christmas. (I get the same feeling watching NewsRadio the way I do reading Joe Keenan, namely a sense of wonder that anyone could a) be so funny and b) be organized enough to actually write it all down.) There are the usual pleasures of the kitchen, this week's being in the form of apple butter, a couple of loaves of rice bread, pie if I feel so inclined, baked apples if I'm feeling more low-key, which is usually the case after a few hours of mucking around with boiling-hot preserves. There is the prospect of our weekend trip to Boston in two weeks, with more travel to come after that. There is the general pleasure of working side by side with Lloyd, while he writes and I go through all of my notes and spreadsheets, shaking my head at the machinations of competing egg cooperatives. Last, but certainly not least, there is my trip down the downward side of what had been a steep learning curve...but I'll let my tutor tell you about that. 
All of these things are mood elevators, and they'll be good to keep near me the next time I feel Nature start to fill the vacuum.
