-- Friday, July 30, 1999 --

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6:21 a.m. I'm usually not up this early. The alarm didn't go off this morning and the shuttle guy out front was kind enough to call us and wake us up. There was an extreme flurry of activity, culminating in untied shoes and peetus interruptus, and I can't tell you how angry the neatly preened early birds looked in the back of the airport van, but now Igor's off to the friendly skies and I am drinking microwaved coffee from yesterday in the hopes that I can write this and maybe go back to sleep for awhile. I mean, right now, the moon is still up, looking a little gray-faced and bedraggled in the white predawn, but still.

On the other hand, there are millions of folks who do this every single day. I know that. I used to. You do what you have to do. I, in fact, really love the morning -- I just usually see it from the other side, the paperboy side. He hurls the paper all the way from tomorrow into our front yard and then I go to bed.

I've already unwrapped and looked at the front page today, and on it is another one of those stories that remind you that it's the end of the world as we know it. No, I don't mean the creepy looking Richard Gere-Julia Roberts "vehicle" and I don't mean the people fleeing from yet another bucolic setting where "it" can't happen but which is, actually, zinging and pinging off the ambulance as they round the corner. No, I'm referring to the article about people eating food wherever and whenever they please.

I really don't know which is worse -- the report of people drinking Coke at Mass or eating corn-on-the-cob at the theater. The mind boggles. And sometimes you really can see our world for what it must look like to a person who's just stepped from the pages of a Time after Time-travel story. Who are these new barbarians?

About a year ago I found myself wandering through the aisles of an inside antiques mall -- in one of those huge hanger-like buildings in which people have individual booths of all their neatly tagged insanely overpriced Stuff 'n Junke. I was looking for a manual typewriter that I'd seen advertised on a web page, because I always do things far in advance. Y2K, you know. You may be barricaded and fighting, but I plan to be barbecuing and writing.

And I was swept away by a huge display of incredibly beautiful vintage clothing, so fancy it made you wonder whether it was real or was it merely costume? On closer inspection of the seams and the linings, you had to accept that it was real, however uncomfortable that felt. How small, how intricate, how delicate the people must have been. The rich people, at least. Cording swirling through stiff lapels, frogs in wine and forest velvet clasps. Thin froths of spider lace peeking out of bodices of spun-silk light; coy pure-white cotton undergarments fine enough to wear to the Academy Awards. As one's frock. If one can afford it. And they can and they do.

What bone-rigid rules must have bound the tiny men with the embroidered waistcoats and the women with sixty little black shoe buttons and even teenier pearl-secured gloves. And how cheap and papery and utterly disposable must modern clothes seem ... and what did the simple folk wear? How many layers to warm a lesser citizen? How were they secured? We never see actual poor-people's clothes from a century ago, when you think about it. Has all the poor clothing perished along with the people inside? Burned in bonfires, used as rags, woven into weird ragg rugs, of which I saw plenty in the shops?

As I was waiting outside in the rain under the diamond-dripping awning for the valet to bring our car around, I looked at the people who were wandering into the antiques mall. This is the millennium, folks. This is what it looks like. Guys in loose T-shirts and baggy oversized shorts, nylon-webbed sandals caging huge hairy toes. Kids with yellow plastic plugs in their ears nibbling corn-dogs on a stick or tilting back their head and squeezing yogurt up a tube and into an open mouth as they walk.

Our clothing is very soft and loose here in the future. It's basically underwear worn in lieu of. Whatever happened to all those shiny silver skintight jump suits we were supposed to be wearing by now? The ones with no pockets? No visible means of support? No entry or exit points?

Hey! The sun is all the way up. How pretty. I could take a picture, I know, but the coffee is just kicking in and I think I should be able to go back to bed now, snap on the electric blanket, and get some turn-the-pillow-over-to-the-cool-side, school-is-out, end-of-the-century quality sleep.