A few of my friends actually seek conversations on airplanes. They like meeting new folks. They sometimes choose books to “read” that they think might invite questions.

While I am enjoying the blogosphere, people in real life are a little more scary to me. I am bookish, not gregarious, and when I bring a book somewhere, it’s not a prop. So I am a little ambivalent about a recent discovery: whenever I read books in public about the dark side of the supernatural, strangers want to talk about it.

I took a book on the history of witchcraft to my favorite diner once. I had barely opened it before a woman asked me if I thought witchcraft was real. I told her I was skeptical. She seemed disappointed. The same book inspired lots of nervous glances and silent false starts from a man sitting next to me on an airplane. I think he really wanted to talk to me, but was even shyer than I am.

Most recently I finished In Search of Dracula by Raymond McNally and Rado Florescu, a history of Vlad III of Wallachia and how he became the mythic figure Dracula. On one of my glorious nights out by myself, I went to a comfy coffeehouse to read it. A young man (men at coffeehouses all seem very young to me. I must be old.) wanted to know all about it. How do you politely talk to an unknown man about medieval torture and murder? That is an etiquette dilemma.

In Search of Dracula is an enjoyable read, though I skipped the most gruesome chapter. Its biggest flaw is the absence of sufficient documentation for the reader to evaluate evidences for herself. The usual tendency of popular history to dumb things down for those readers who have a pathological fear of footnotes. Its effect as conversational catalyst was unforeseen, and I’m still not sure how to feel about it.

So the next time you feel a little lonely and wish you could meet someone new to chat with, you have a number of options. Start a blog, join a club, go to church, try a blind date, or sit in a public place reading about ghouls, goblins and witches. Tell me how it goes.

Since we bought this house, I have been learning to garden. I call my gardening style “Clumsy but Enthusiastic.” I am also cheap. No, I aspire to be cheap. Really I’m just poor.

The husband (a saint) watches the kids so I can go to a free gardening class. His saintliness lies in the fact that our baby always begins screaming five minutes after I leave the room, and continues screaming until I return. The husband is a solid, patient man who deals with this far better than most people would, including me.

The class was packed, and I was surprised to find that I was the only woman there under 50, and even in my current post-baby figure, I was one of the slenderer ladies. The chairs were set very close together, and every now and then a rustle would pass through the audience as each person shifted away from the stranger’s hip on her left, and then shifted back to avoid the neighbor on her right. Ripples of more than one kind passed through the crowd. Sort of a large soft meadow of wildflowers, moving in the breeze. So apparently gardening as exercise is not working for us.

Spring is springing and I am itching to get my hands in the dirt (where they will be safe from those Mint Milanos).

This is a bookless post! So I will add a poem from one of my favorites, Carl Sandburg:

Poppies
She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
In a loose white gown she walks
and a new child tugs at cords in her body.
Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping,
A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber:
She loves the blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.

(Now when’s the last time you heard a poet use “torsal fiber?”)

I just watched Three Days of the Condor, a 1970s spy movie. If you liked Bourne Identity, you’ll love it. Anyway, Robert Redford plays a bookish researcher for the CIA (uh-huh, Robert Redford nerdy. That’s why they call it acting). His colleagues are murdered and he must flee the assassins and uncover the conspiracy (as in every other spy movie). But my favorite part is when his superiors, who don’t know whether to trust him or not, have a meeting to discuss him.

Spy supervisor #1: Where did he learn evasive moves?
Spy supervisor #2: He reads.
Spy supervisor #1: What the hell does that mean?
Spy supervisor #2: It means, sir, that he reads everything.

Little did I know that I was qualifying myself for a second career. Stay-at-home-mom-book-junkie-spy. That’s me — double-o-size-16, licensed to put bad guys in time-out and correct their grammar. Watch out! I think that’s a pocket Shakespeare strapped to her thigh.

Four jobs you have had in your life:
1. Ice cream scooper (lasted two weeks)
2. Audio-visual nerd, um, librarian
3. General office flunkie
4. Archivist

Four movies you would watch over and over (in no specific order):
1. His Girl Friday
2. Strictly Ballroom
3. The Color Purple
4. North by Northwest

Four TV shows I miss most:
1. Angel
2. Titus
3. Star Trek TNG
4. The Vicar of Dibley

Four websites I visit daily:
1. Wikipedia
2. Our local public library
3. TomCruiseIsNuts.com (before they stopped publishing)
4. Google Entertainment News

Four of my favorite foods:
1. Saag paneer
2. Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos
3. Cheese crowns
4. Pad Thai

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. The British Museum
2. The library (any library)
3. Dairy Queen
4. Mongolia

Four things I always carry with me:
1. A book
2. A blue tourniquet my mother once used as a ribbon on a birthday present
3. A scrunchy
4. About a dozen discount cards

Four places I have been on vacation:
1. The Hermitage
2. The Catacombs of Rome
3. Nurnberg
4. Natural Bridge State Park

When I was five-years-old, I found in our basement a plastic holly wreath that my mother used at Christmas time. It was made to fit around a thick candle and, as it happened, fit quite nicely on the top of a five-year-old’s head. I was walking around with this wreath on my head, imagining that I was Julius Caesar wearing his crown of laurel leaves (yes, I was a nerd even then), when I had a thought, and acted on it before I even finished forming it completely. The thought was, “I wonder if I can get my head completely through this?”

I could. It is a curious property of plastic holly wreaths, however, that they do not come off nearly as easily as they go on. When I tried to pull the wreath up again, the plastic holly leaves pricked me. I pulled harder. They gouged me. Then I wondered if I would get in trouble for putting one of Mom’s decorations where it obviously did not belong. My panic mounted, and I no longer cared if I would get in trouble or not. I wanted this painful thing off.

My mother and father and my older brother were in the dining room when I walked in. They suddenly saw a little girl, sobbing, with a truly ridiculous ornament around her neck, tugging vainly at it crying, “I can’t get it off! I can’t get it off!”

They laughed. They laughed really hard. Of course. I would too, in their place. But it was the first conscious memory I have of being embarrassed. I knew that I had made myself ridiculous.

I recently read Richard Russo’s Straight Man, a humorous novel about Hank, the head of a literature department in a small state university. Each member of his department scrabbles for their own little bit of political power. At a high point in the tension, Hank, suddenly and uncontrollably relieved of an inability to pee, is hiding in the ceiling in urine-soaked pants, wondering whether he should eavesdrop on his colleagues as they debate removing him from the chairmanship. That’s where he drops my favorite quote from the book:

“Once dignity is surrendered, there are plenty of options.”

Yep. Just give up on that dignity and you can get the wreath pulled over your head (they worked towels between the prickly leaves and my skin and pulled it off). Thank you, Richard Russo. Now maybe I can give up enough to ask my mom-in-law how to hemstitch.