Sometimes a series of things about us goes through my head and I just start giggling. This morning very early, lying awake and looking at the bookshelf of books signed by their authors, it was:

My father wrote a novel about an opera singer in the 1900s who could switch genders. Gender reversal or sudden gender-related surprises occur in two other novels of his.

When I was a kid, my brother made improbably huge kites out of PVC pipe and trash bags. They flew.

Because of my dad’s weird job my associations for literary figures are things like: I had to jump-start that guy’s car twice! Oh yeah, his wife called us at 3 am sobbing in Arabic about the water heater! That dude fed us lobster and played too much Eubie Blake at us! It’s not like name-dropping exactly because with a few exceptions the general public hasn’t heard of these people. But it makes me feel weird looking at book spines.

Our front door knocker is a bronze woman’s hand.

My father wrote a novel in which the love interest is a blowup doll.

My great aunt Zelda didn’t marry until retirement and was a doctor instead. She may well have been the first person to administer penicillin in Los Angeles.

My father wrote a novel in which someone is trying to complete the unfinished tenth symphony of the character in someone else’s novel.

Okay that’s enough for now. We’re weird.