Chapter 3
8 June 1991, Saturday
Today was brilliant. I have a new vocabulary word, doggerel, and a new favorite author, Ogden Nash. The man is hilarious.
I don't mind eels
Except as meals
And the way they feels.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
Indeed, until the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
Once I have space of my own, I have got to buy his books.
Yeah, today was great. First AP let me out to use the loo and then dropped me off at Mrs. Figg's. I had a late breakfast with her and the cats (who are much fonder of kippers than I am) and helped with chores all morning. We scrubbed all the litter boxes except the one behind the chair AP sits in, and brushed the cats, and she showed me the newest litter of kittens. They'll be cute in a few weeks, but now they're little meepy things. Five of them. One tuxedo, three tabby, and one an odd sort of tabby where part of the stripy bits are orange instead of brown. I think she's going to be really pretty, and Mrs. Figg figgures that she'll be able to find a really nice home for her ("at a nice price" going unmentioned). I told her my poem while we were hanging out laundry and she burst out laughing and told me to look up "doggerel" when we got to the library. Then we had baked potatoes stuffed with tuna fish and cheese for lunch and changed our clothes and headed for the library.
Mrs. Figg is funny. I change into nicer clothes to go to the library, she changes into Crazy Cat Lady clothes. "Can't let my fans down," she says, and winks at me. Her other mantra is "The truth is a wonderful and precious thing, and should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story." She tells great ones, too, all about growing up in a village in Wales that is half normal people and half magic people.
What I actually know about Mrs. Figg is that she was born in 1920 in the States, that her parents were some sort of researchers who came to Britain between the wars to do more research, that her maiden name was Arabella Marie Ambrose, and that her marriage was a bad idea (once when I was little I asked where Mr. Figg was (I'm smarter than that now, I swear!)). Oh, and that she raises and sells registered Maine Coon Cats, who are huge and fluffy and smart and some of them have thumbs.
Anyway, back to my day. We went to the library and I looked up doggerel like she said, then I spent the afternoon reading funny poems and laughing. The librarians were really nice about it. I think being a research librarian must be one of the best jobs anywhere. You get to help people find answers to stuff, which means you never have to worry about running out of things to be curious about.
I never did get around to doing Dudley's natal chart, but that just leaves me something to do for later.
Dinner was sole in some sort of cheese casserole, brown rice, carrot salad for veg and spice cake for pud, and I am spending the night because AP called and said they were running late. Tonight's story was Paddington Bear. I'm much too old to be read to, but Mrs. Figg doesn't have any children of her own, so if she wants to read to me, that's OK.