tavie.com

I just learned something surprising on this web page: the name Tavie, more than just being short for Octavia, "the eighth child", can also be a name in its own right, of Celtic origin, meaning, get this: twin.

How appropriate-- and bizarre-- is that? My name means twin. I am a twin.

Last night I had a strange episode wherein I was reading Angela's Ashes and then became sleepy. I turned out my light, and for absolutely no reason, I imagined myself adult and with a child, and my mother a grandmother, and my father a grandfather. And then I thought my father probably won't be around long enough to be a grandfather, even if Kirsten or I do have children one day, because he's 63 now (and diabetic and doesn't take terribly good care of himself). This made me extremely depressed and I imagined my parents dead. Then I thought about how hard they work, every single day, to feed and clothe and house and buy rubbish for this lazy, spoiled daughter of theirs who at almost 22 has worked a total of three days in her life. They get up at the crack of dawn and slave in government offices all day to make her fat. And then I thought, what silly things to think, and I tried to fall asleep, but I had that helpless, unexplainable sadness of the very sort that I used to have when I was 10 and in the hospital. And I chided myself for ever forgetting what that feeling was like, and I cried and cried. I wanted to wake Gina up, but I did not want to wake her. I wanted to call my mom, but I didn't want to wake her up at 4 in the morning. So I reverted to the old tricks I used back in those bad days to comfort myself, and I told myself a story to fall asleep. The story got fuzzier and more disjointed in my brain until I drifted off:

Once upon a time there was a giant Viking named Orr, who lived in a deep and dark cave surrounded by pine trees near the top of an enormous mountain. Every day, Orr would cut down the largest pine tree, and tie a piece of licorice string to it, the longest piece of licorce string in the world, and he would use this as a fishing pole. He would sit on the rocky ledge in front of his cave, and from way up there he would cast his line into a great silvery lake. He was trying to catch the Fish of Fortune. He didn't need bait because the licorice string was the most delicious string in the world, but sometimes just for fun he would put on big rubber boots and stomp around the swamps looking for worms the size of tree-trunks to put at the end of his line, but they would usually eat the string before he even got a chance to cast off, so mainly he went worm-hunting just for a change of scenery. The Fish of Fortune liked the string so much that they would fight each other to bite it. "Why are they called the Fish of Fortune?" the giant asked one day, and his pal Yahn said, "Because the Fish are very rich and all live in condos on Palm Beach", and Orr said, "Really?" and Yahn said, "No, you silly, they're called that because some people one day thought that maybe the fish might be lucky and that anyhow the Fish of Fortune was as good as any a name for them. People are silly that way in that they need to make up stories and legends about everything." So one day Orr was sitting there with his tree-trunk licorice-string fishing pole and he felt a tugging and he pulled up the most enormous fish he had ever seen...

At this point the story was dissolving into images of the Peter Pan ride at Disney World and Mark playing poker and then I was asleep.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:29 AM | shower me with attention