655 days, 12 hours, 27 minutes, 29.2 seconds

An editorial by a British woman speaks of Barbara Boxer's comment that Condoleeza Rice doesn't have to worry about her sons being killed in Iraq. A comment picked up by blogs everywhere. She follows the leads, ending up at an Amazon.com list of books and music by famous childless women, twenty-four in all: Emily Dickenson, Jane Austen, Dolly Parton, Marilyn Monroe, Virginia Woolf, Angela Davis, Bessie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Liza Minnelli, Mary Cassatt, Zora Neale Hurston... She wonders if her name will ever be among them.

655 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes, 50 seconds

Some Hospitals Call 911 To Save Their Patients, the New York Times headline reads. Hospitals specializing in only one or two procedures. Hospitals without a doctor always in attendance. Doctor-owned hospitals. A 44-year-old man just died, and an 88-year-old woman. The man lived in Texas. She can't help thinking of the president. And the little red phone beside his desk, for use in emergency. This headline lay on her virtual desk three days before she even looked at it.

655 days, 13 hours, 8 minutes, 2.6 seconds

She sits at the kitchen table with a low-carb breakfast bar. She teaches tomorrow, then plans to drive upstate. Good Friday, and the traffic should be hell. Then she'll drive back on Easter. What she really wants is a few days just by herself in the city. But she has to get up there. She wets a finger and picks a crumb of chocolate off the table, puts it in her mouth. It's nice to reach for a little black spot like that, not in the least bit worried it might be mouse turd.

655 days, 13 hours, 14 minutes, 26 seconds

She wakes to snow flurries. He's leaving for Florida in forty minutes. She supposes she should get up and see him off. She wants to tell him now that's the wrong shirt to wear, too bright for those slacks, but she doesn't. On the plane he'll look like some Queens or Brooklyn version of a Floridian. She goes downstairs for breakfast early, to spend a bit more time with him. He gets a call from work. He packs up his computer. The car service calls from downstairs. He's off.

656 days, 13 hours, 19 minutes, 56 seconds

Last night her husband yelled at her. Or this morning, really. It was 2:00 a.m. When he got in bed she just wanted to finish sending off some poems, pasting them into an e-mail, recording the submission. Then she went to back up the computer. But back up a step: she checked her email. Then she backed up the computer (just files from her document directory, just the changed files). It doesn't take long. Her husband put the radio on. She was halfway into the bathroom, ready to wash up and go to bed, when she had another idea. So she came back into the room and sat down with it. The radio shut itself off. He wasn't asleep yet. That's when he yelled that her typing was keeping him awake. She should go into the living room. And she was half tempted. But by the time she shut down, unplugged the port replicator, then turned the computer on again, she'd lose her train of thought. As if she hadn't already.

656 days, 22 hours, 8 minutes, 37 seconds or 656 days, 23 hours, 8 minutes, 37 seconds

Depending which clock you believe. The first is on the Backwards Bush site (from which she set her keychain). The second is on this very blog (using code from the Backwards Bush site) as well as the National Nightmare site. It has to do with the change in Daylight Savings Time. It has to do with the webmaster paying someone else to create the clock for him. It took her two weeks to notice this. More than likely the president never will.

657 days, 13 hours, 59 minutes, 38 seconds

The distinct sound of the woodpecker hitting his beak against a tree by her pond upstate. How she used to love to sit and watch and listen. Then she grew afraid about Lyme disease. Then his father got Babesiosis, spread by a tick native to Rhode Island, and almost died, and almost destroyed his recent second marriage. Then he, her husband, understood her fears.

657 days, 21 hours, 32 minutes, 15 seconds

Opening Day all over again. But if Congress won't give him money to send more troops to Iraq, and if they insist upon questioning his staff under oath, and if they keep calling for Gonzalez's Hispanic testicles on a platter, then he'll be damned if he'll play ball. He sits behind that great big desk, hand hovering above the red button, sulking. And her? She's left batting his head around, wracking up more countries than she can name. Except she's not very focused today.

660 days, 9 hours, 27 minutes, 19 seconds

660. All morning that number's been haunting her. Area code? Zip code? At last she looks it up, sees it's the area code for central Missouri. Central Missouri State University. Where a friend taught was until this year. An associate professor with tenure and his two children were born at home with a midwife because the school didn't pay enough toward medical insurance. Not to mention the paltry salary. He gave up tenure to get the hell out of their. Look at his wife's family – the number of amputated limbs that could be chalked up to poor medical care. They'd had custody of her daughter but had to leave her with the father when they moved. Missouri makes it all but impossible to take a child out of state. The personal. The political.

660 days, 10 hours, 29 minutes, 10.7 seconds

In line at the coffee shop. The two youngest children wander farther into the dining room. Then the youngest pulls away. His sister tries to lure him back, calls to someone, then leaves him alone to drag an older sister over. The mother smiles. In all, there are four children. They get a table. The mother carries the youngest now.

661 days, 11 hours, 39 minutes, 36 seconds

She knew she didn't want a marriage like her parents had. They didn't fight, didn't cheat on each other. They would have called this a good marriage. But she wanted more. And it took being away from home for fifteen years before she started looking beyond that, looking at three friends in particular who had long term relationships that she could envision for herself. Then, twenty years ago, her mother had a stroke, and she and her lover flew to California. All her father wanted to do was sit by her mother's bedside. On the plane home, she asked her then-lover-later-husband if he envisioned himself ever caring about her that much.

661 days, 20 hours, 45 minutes, 17 seconds

So she gets in bed and finds him lying on his back, snoring, and leaving her barely room to scrunch against the wall. She's obviously not able to sleep this way. She gets up, showers, tests her blood again: 133. With love, all things are possible.

661 days, 21 hours, 22 minutes, 41 seconds

Twelve years ago a friend and his wife sat on her sofa and talked of their daughter's upcoming wedding. She forgets the exact context now, probably she was questioning if this was the match made in heaven. And she answered that she'd prefer her daughter marry and divorce than not to marry, how much easier it was for a divorced woman to get jobs, and to attract other men. Something like that.

And, probably that same day, these parents talked of how they thought they had a solid marriage, but they'd never really had to put it to the test.

The daughter married that May. The father died in July. After that she lost touch.

661 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes, 1 seconds

Can you think of any better time than your anniversary to get your head shot up with poison? Insurance will pay for the doctor, not the poison. Which is more than they did a year ago. She likes to tell people she married him for his apartment and his medical insurance.

661 days, 21 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds

169. Her blood should be under 140. She knew she was pushing the envelope tonight. Anyway, while she's waiting up she decides to write to S. Happy anniversary.

661 days, 22 hours, 26 minutes, 31.7 seconds

She can't go to bed yet. She had chocolate mousse for dinner (actually they called it chocolate mini-mousse) and the longer she stays up the lower her blood count will be. It's that simple.

661 days, 23 hours, 0 minutes, 18.6 seconds

Don't ever get married, it will spoil your relationship, she told her closest friend thirty years ago. And S. repeated this comment at the wedding party she and her husband threw for them. Then two years ago, March 30th, midnight, the stroke of their anniversary, she was on the phone with S., the first time they'd spoken in years. S. was in the middle of a divorce. She'd lost all track of time.

661 days, 23 hours, 14 minutes, 3 seconds

He announces he's dying an Ambien death, and crawls into bed. He didn't get the watch at midnight, he tells her, it was closer to two in the morning. Did they really stay up that late? They were idiots and they stayed up that late.

She recalls, years ago, staying with friends, watching in silence as his wife would go to bed hours before he did. She vowed that could never happen to her. Yet here she is, still typing madly. Three feet behind her, in bed, he turns on the radio. It will cover the noise of her typing. It will help him sleep.

661 days, 23 hours, 34 minutes, 15 seconds

Midnight. The witching hour. She gives him i-pod speakers to replace the ones which broke last year. Which she also gave him. For another anniversary. Tonight he's taking Ambien, wanting the full night's sleep he was robbed of a few nights ago. What he calls her animal noises kept him awake. Any minute now and she'll turn into a pumpkin.

662 days, 0 hours, 5 minutes, 52 seconds

They weren't together more than three or four months. They went out to dinner at a little restaurant in the Village. There was a woman reading cards there, and they decided what the hell. She predicted they'd enjoy their time together, but the relationship wouldn't last more than three years. That was when they decided to make the most of their time together.