Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,69

followed were gone forever. “Two months of my life, erased!” I said to Hugh.

He reminded me that I had actually lived those two months. “The time wasn’t stolen,” he said, “just your record of it.” This was a distinction that, after thirty-four years of diary keeping, I was no longer able to recognize. Fortunately I still had my notebooks, and as soon as the police left, I bought a new laptop and sat down to recover my missing eight weeks.

The first challenge was reading my handwriting, and the second was determining what the notes referred to. After making out “shaved stranger,” I thought for a while and recalled a woman in the Dallas airport. We were waiting to board a flight to San Antonio, and I overheard her talking about her cat. It was long-haired, a male, I think, and she had returned home one day the previous summer to find that he had been shaved.

“Well, in that heat it was probably for the best,” the man she was talking to said.

“But it wasn’t me who shaved it,” the woman said. “It was somebody else!”

“A stranger shaved your cat?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” the woman said.

I eventually re-created the missing two months, printed them out, and placed the finished diary in my locked cabinet beside the 136 others that are shelved there.

“What should I do with these things when you die?” Hugh asks.

The way I see it, my options are burial or cremation. “But save the covers,” I tell him. “The covers are nice.”

As for seven-year-old Tyler, who knows if he’ll stick with it? A child’s diary, like a child’s drawing of a house, is a fairly simple affair. “We went to a castle. It was fun. Then we went to a little zoo. That was fun too.”

I thought my account of August 11 would begin with an accident I’d had at the castle. We were in the formal gardens when I took a wrong step and fell down before a great number of people, one of whom shouted—making me feel not just stupid but stupid and old—“Don’t move him!”

My face burned as I picked myself up off the ground.

“That happened to me not long ago,” Pam said, trying to make me feel better.

“It’s what you get for horsing around,” Hugh scolded.

Tyler said simply and honestly, “That was really funny.”

I pulled out my notebook and wrote—as if I would possibly forget about it by the following morning when I’d limp to my desk—“Fell down in garden.” I was mentally writing the diary entry, the embarrassment I felt, the stabbing pain in my knee, the sound of my body skidding on the gravel path, when we entered the castle’s petting zoo and I saw something that moved my fall from the front page to the category of “other news.” The place wasn’t much: some chickens, a family of meerkats, a pony or two. In one large cage lived a pair of ferrets and, next door, some long-haired guinea pigs. A woman and her two sons, aged maybe five and seven, spotted them at the same time I did and raced over to get a better look. The younger boy seemed pleased enough, but his brother went bananas. “Jesus!” he said, turning to look at his mother. “Jesus, will you look at those?”

I pulled out my notebook.

“What are you writing down?” Tyler asked.

“Have you ever seen guinea pigs so big?” the boy asked. “I mean, Jesus!”

The woman offered Tyler and me an embarrassed look. “You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name like that, Jerry. Some people might find it offensive.”

“Christ Almighty,” the kid continued. “Someone should take a picture.”

Writing about it the following morning, I’d recall how incredulous the boy had sounded. Yes, the guinea pigs were big—like furry slippers, sizes nine and ten and a half. They were hardly gargantuan, though. Had he possibly confused them with hamsters? The look on his face and his unexpected reaction—evoking Jesus as a weather-beaten adult would—were remarkable to me, and standing there in that dinky zoo, my knee throbbing, my little notebook firmly in hand, I knew I needed to keep the moment forever.

Mind the Gap

I said to my father yesterday afternoon, “Do you fancy my new jumper?”

When he answered, “Huh?” I was like, “‘Jumper?’ It means ‘sweater’ in England.”

“Right,” he said, adding that it was ninety-two degrees out and that if I didn’t take it off I was guaranteed to get heatstroke or at least a rash, and wasn’t that the