Whispering Phone, Sean Penn and Sabatier Knife

Last Saturday I saw Children of Men, a grim and probably all-too-accurate vision of the future, set in Britain in 2027, with bombs going off here and there and foreigners being rounded up and put in cages.

In the late afternoon, Tom’s brother Dan arrived from Sacramento and we had dinner at Ananda Fuara and then went to “What It Will Take to End the War: An Evening with Congressman Dennis Kucinich,” which attracted a standing-room-only crowd of 600 or 700.

It was held at the First Unitarian Universalist Society, whose minister jovially noted that plenty of Unitarians don’t believe in God, a startling but refreshing piece of news.

There were several speakers, most of whom were mercifully very brief. Congresswoman Barbara Lee spoke and was wonderful. She is actually a better speaker than Dennis Kucinich is. She, of course, was the only member of Congress to vote against the war in Iraq.

While Kucinich was speaking, someone walked into the room and up to the front on the far side of the room from me. My Inborn Celebrity Sensor told me it was Sean Penn. Hoping to get credit for an accurate prediction (and risking ridicule in the event it wasn’t him), I whispered to Tom that I thought Sean Penn had just come in.

Kucinich had finished his speech and was announcing a question-and-answer period when someone came up and whispered to him, and then instead of starting the questions and answers, Sean Penn was introduced and ascended to the podium for a moment. That was thrilling. He’s one of my favorite actors. He hadn’t planned to speak and didn’t do more than say hello.

Speaking of questions and answers, one time when I was on a meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, the teachers invited us to write down any questions currently on our minds and place them in the big bell at the front of the room, which looks like a giant metal pot. Jack Kornfield said they would address as many questions as they had time for, but that the answer might not be definitive: “We said we would do questions and answers.”

After our evening with Dennis Kucinich, as we were walking to the bus stop, Tom said, “You saw Sean Penn by the doors as we were leaving, right?”

“No! Where was he?”

“He was right by the door as we were coming out of the auditorium.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

“I figured if you could spot him clear across the room, you shouldn’t have any problem seeing him three feet away.”

Alas.

I sat down lately to explore the pleasingly limited features of my cheap new phone. I started by calling it from my work-issued cell phone and found that its ring was barely audible, even turned up "hi."

You'd have to have your ear 18 inches from the phone to know you were being summoned, though that's kind of moot, anyway, since I usually have the ringer turned off altogether and grasp that I have received a call when I see the light blinking on the answering machine, or when I hear someone opining into it.

Still, one would like a brand-new phone, albeit one that cost $14, to possess an audible ring.

I realized its reticence was probably due to the fact that I had, in a sad attempt to cling to the past, attached the previous phone's handset to the new phone. The sound of the ring actually comes out of the handset, which I had never realized, and the Sony handset was declining to amplify the signal sent by the AT&T phone, out of sheer petulance, no doubt.

I gave up and attached the AT&T handset and then it worked just fine.

In the Thelonious era, I liked to have all the windows wide open, and the door to the trash area open, as well, but Hammett is clearly desperate to fling himself out or through any such orifice, so now the place is pretty well sealed up.

Accordingly, when I shower, I must close the bathroom door so I can open the window, and leave it closed until the bathroom is steam-free enough that I can close the window. When I open the door, Hammett is often sitting right outside it, and when he sees me, he remains coolly seated but flings his head wildly up and down and from side to side.

Now that I have a couple of nice kitchen knives that I love and that no one is allowed to touch, this childhood act has come to be the one that causes me the most remorse: when I broke the tip off my mother’s Sabatier paring knife by using it as a pry tool.

Of course, if my parents could see the complete list of my childhood acts, they might feel several others were more remorse-worthy.

I would be furious if someone broke the tip off my Wüsthof slicing knife, but, surprisingly, she didn’t seem angry at all. She reshaped the little knife so that it came to a point again, and that was that.