Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking"

On Saturday I met about 20 widows and widowers in New York City to see "The Year of Magical Thinking," a spectacular one-woman show performed by Vanessa Redgrave and written by Joan Didion.
There were two things in particular I especially liked about the play. One was the way Redgrave/Didion talked about how she requested reports and found out exactly how long the ambulance took and how long paramedics worked on her husband. I have not done that, but I've wanted to and hearing that JOAN DIDION did it made me feel better. I also thought the whole thing with the magical thinking was great. It STILL bothers me that my husband's body was buried in a coffin inside a vault. What if he comes back to life? He'll be stuck there. And finally, I think (I don't have Vanessa Redgrave's awesome memory skills) Didion pointed out that she didn't really grieve her loss until she stopped engaging in the magical thinking. I think there's truth to that and it helps explain why the second year of widowhood can be harder than the first in some ways.

More Good Books
This morning before school Mario and I finished reading Book 2 in the new series "Warriors: The New Prophecy." This child, who used to have to be talked into listening to a book, ran upstairs and brought down Book 3, looked at the clock and said, "At least we can read the prologue." These are fantastic books in which cats (yes, cats!) struggle for the survival of their highly-organized, faithful and complex society during a siege by people and machines on their forest. Author Erin Hunter does a brilliant job creating an imaginary -- and yet somehow very realistic -- world in which cats organize, talk and solve problems. They also succumb to pointless ancient hatreds and xenophobia -- just like people. We are on the edge of ours seats wondering how the leading characters in the book will survive the trying times in which they live.