January 24

I have a friend who is a sister to me. There's a pretty good difference in our ages, and we're quite dissimilar on some surface levels, but on other deeper ones we are wonderfully in synch. There's nobody truer, and tonight, there was nobody bluer either. I mean, she came over to my house with the weepy no-good-very-bad blues. We talked a while and got things cried out, and then I gave her two books, her belated Christmas. The first was a lovely blank book from India that I'd been saving, and I told her it was for recording her busy dream-life. The second was an all-time favorite of mine, A Girl Named Zippy, a copy I'd picked up for her second-hand. She asked me to inscribe her dream journal, so I went into the kitchen to have a bit of quiet. I left her reading Zippy in the living room and pretty soon she was laughing herself just about sick. Luckily, I had my camera with me in the kitchen, so I could steal an action shot. They say a good gift makes the receiver cry? Then mine was a success, because tears of hilarity were squeezing themselves out of my pal. I told her Zippy was good for her abs.