-- Monday, July 5, 1999 --

------------

10:08 a.m. This entry will be a two-parter because I will be taking a big break in the middle of the day to go to Sam's funeral. But first, a discussion of journal honesty, and what it means to this particular Roman Catholic.

How honest do you have to be when nobody's looking?

I could say it's "today" and write a spiffy piece, pack it away, and slam it upline just in time to look like the real thing. Or, since nobody's taking attendance, I could wait until late at night, any night, and just write something that seemed to be about today, as best I could remember. But that would be lying, cheating, stealing. And you, the journal reader, would not be getting the real thing.

Part of the tight high-wire act of this thing, to me, is to do it every day. On the tippy-toe-moment. And yes, with piled-up commitments and packages and pestering gnats and a blindfold, if that's what the day is like. Or I'll live with a sorry, flattened pratfall of lame jokes and excuses if the spotlight winks out at midnight and the show's over too soon. This is show bizness; life lived live. Truth on a dare.

Whoa. It's 10:30 already and I have to get cleaned up and shiny, fluffed and stuffed. I need an extra 20 minutes to goop on the icy icky hair-color so I appear to be blonde. Truth only gets you so far.

8:06 p.m. I'm back. Sam is tucked safely away now, and in the house where we filmed him just a few weeks ago, the mirrors are covered with sheets.

Odd rituals and customs. My mother always gets upset if she sees a bird suddenly right at the window, poking around the sill, looking in. In an Italian family it means that someone you know has just died. It could be someone down the street, or a lost, distant relative, or someone closer.

My ex-father-in-law would laugh out loud at my mother's superstition and just go on hammering away at another spinning bird feeder that he would then jam into the seed-spattered ground outside his picture window and fill to the brim with succulent goodies for his beloved wrens and chickadees and the occasional rare crested beauts that swarmed and fluttered and pecked and posed for his zoom-lens. He must have built a thousand squirrel-confounding bird feeders and intricate little peaked bird houses in his lifetime.

I don't know. I don't know what to believe, sometimes.

The little birdy (opposite) flew bam! into my office window last summer, knocked herself out, and stayed dazed and confused just long enough to let us think we suddenly had a new pet. I was bringing a saucer of water out to the yard when she recovered her senses and flew away. She left a visible ouch-spot of yellow fluff on the window where she hit, but no relatives or neighbors left the earthly plane that afternoon, as far as I know. Especially not the guy with the anger-management issues and the drum set.

So you wash the windows and cover the mirrors and you hope and you pray.

And now my ex-father-in-law is gone, too. He died quietly in the pre-morning of June 15, before anyone else was awake. And, listen to this: in his bedroom, on the inside of the closed window looking out -- somehow -- there was a tiny little bird.

And that's the truth.

I'm sure they'll be loads of people tomorrow ...