The Little Feat Edition
Give Me Just One Clear Moment, I'll Turn Your Head Around.
Today is Wednesday, I think. Let me check my cellphone. Living as I do, with only one major obligation, taking care of my mother, the days tend to blur and I get to be as bad as my mother is keeping track of the days.
The virus persists and Mom and I continue to live in isolation. After telling Walmart what we need, I drive a couple of miles down the hill, pull in, a teenager loads my trunk, and I pull away. So simple.
I go to the library. I return five or six books my mother has read and pick up five or six more. I have a page in my planner where I keep track of what she's already read. All the Amish Romance novels are shelved together, of course, and this makes it easy to make my selection. Occasionally, an interlibrary loan will come in for me and I'll pick that up or drop it off. Interlibrary loans makes the Alma Library enormous. Libraries are something that go deep for me.
A million years ago, two or three times a week, Mom would take my brother and me to Fort Smith's Public Library while she got her hair done or ran errands. My brother and I spent hours and hours there. And this was a formative experience for me. The Fort Smith Public Library started out as a Carnegie Library in a Victorian home in Fort Smith's historic district. I got my first library card there when I was five-years-old and used it, a lot. The librarians thoughtfully shelved all the Dr. Seuss books together on the lowest shelf in the children's library. As I grew up, I wandered through every shelf and picked out books that seemed interesting. I learned how sex works thanks to the library and a copy of Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape. I found a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog on one of the atlas tables at the library and discovered it was a book that explained how to do everything. The library helped me discover Wanda Landowski the harpsichordist. The library had a complete collection of her recordings of Bach on 78rpm records that were as heavy as could be. I listened to them over and over again over headphones in the music room. Until I discovered Glenn Gould on piano or E. Power Biggs on the organ, Wanda Landowski was without parallel. I discovered that Time Magazine published an annual called Time Capsule that completely summed up what happened in the world each year. Fascinating. Anyway, I could go on and on and on about the history of Carnegie Libraries and what I learned as I wandered through the stacks and then wandered some more. But I'm saving those memories for another day.
I went to my optometrist this week and picked up my new glasses. Yay! It was an interesting experience. I'm used to being across a table from an optician who makes adjustments to the frame ensure a perfect fit. Nowadays, this is done in my car, as if I was at Sonic. I wasn't pleased, but there are a lot of things about the pandemic that displease me, so there. This is what I look like in my new glasses.
(I’m a little bit scruffy.)
Mom and I went to her beauty shop this week and that was a rather sketchy experience. The beauticians, without exception, wore there masks below their noses and the other customers that came in and out of the shop made half-hearted efforts to mask up. Mom wasn't especially keen on me going into the beauty shop with her but I did anyway and behaved myself. So did Mom. Mom told me later that all the beauticians had had the virus. But Mom had been complaining, daily, about needing a haircut so we laid that issue to rest. She's scheduled for some coloring and a perm early in January.
I have a couple of writing projects underway. The hard one is an article for my synagogue's February newsletter. The rabbi asked me to write something about my service on the board of the Jewish Burial Association of Madison (JBAM). Eventhough we only meet over Zoom and another member of the board is remaining on the board after moving to Silicon Valley, I feel my time to resign has arrived. The burial association manages the Jewish cemetery in Madison and has done a terrific job creating a space for Jewish burials the will serve the community for decades to come. The 300 word article I'm suppose to write will be part of the recruitment effort at the synagogue to fill my spot on the board. Three hundred words is a hard hole to fill as it's a bit small for my discursive style but I will accomplish it.
The other writing project that's coming along rather nicely, thank you, is my Kabbalah Romance that's been stuck in my head for a couple of years. I've written a very detailed outline that gets down to the paragraphs and I've started filling those in with real words and dialogue. I feel very good about how it's going and where it's going. The project was originally inspired by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. He was part of the faculty at a retreat I attended in Santa Cruz. He read from his novel in progress, Kabbalah, A Love Story. (Highly recommended.)
I'll give another plug to the writing program I use, Scrivener, as it is perfect for creating a detailed outline and then convert it to prose. Word is for typing. Scrivener is for writing.
Mom has been doing ok. Physically, she's well. Mentally she's disadvantaged. Some of our conversations are repeated over and over again and that's ok with me. All I have to do is repeat my part of the conversation and I can do that while emmeshed in other chores. Emotionally, she's going through a rough phase, at least I hope it's a phase she'll pull out of. In the afternoons, she'll reminisce about something and become very sad. She'll cry and sob. She descends into a dark place. When this happens I'll give her a Xanax which numbs her up. Her psychiatrist told me not to give her a Xanax at night because it might make her confused or lose her balance if she starts to wander around. So I don't.
We don't watch as much CNN as we used to. When we feel like turning it on, we ask each other, "Do you want to see if Trump is still president?" Every morning, around 6a, I open up the NYTimes on my phone and check it's column about what was said during the monologues of the late night shows. The paper embeds video clips in the column and I watch them. It feels good to be able to laugh at what's going on. I especially like the clips of Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Trevor Noah. At the insistence of Mom's best friend. we've watched a few of the Christmas movies on Hallmark. I feel good about seeing new actors on the screen and feel good about them earning a living. What I don't feel good about is the writers who have to follow such obvious formulas and plot lines. How very tedious that must be. While we're watching, I can't help myself and I mock the show. It makes Mom laugh, so I don't feel too bad about doing it.
I'm still reading La Vendee by Trollop. All the French names are hard for me to keep track of, but it's a good story and I love it. I'm about half-way through it.
I picked up an inter-library loan this week. The Workshop: Seven Decades Of The Iowa Writers' Workshop. It's an anthology of what graduates of the workshop have written about their experience. It's extremely self-congratulatory, but I guess The Workshop has earned the right to be that way.
I received a copy of Toward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson by Simon Jacobson. I ordered it directly from Chabad. Chabad has an outfit called The Meaningful Life Center that reaches out to Jews, and people in general, to engage them in what's a cross between self-help psychology and faith. Dont' get me wrong, the center does some great work and I've bought several of its publications and even a poster that describes the seiferot.
Of course I have several other books I keep beside me and delve into sometimes and I've cataloged those in a previous message so I won't do it again.
I've been watching The Crown and am enjoying the season eventhough I have a pretty good idea of how the season ends. I just watched the penultimate episode and am anticipating the season finale. After I finish The Crown, I think I'll take on The Queen's Gambit. The stills I've seen look very good and remind me of the art direction from Mrs. Maisel. I've had an interest in chess for a long time. When I lived in the Bay Area, I was a member of The Mechanic's Library and Chess Club. It was a nice refuge when I was wandering the streets of San Francisco, like an old fashioned club.
This week, we received our new washing machine. Replacing a washing machine that's 62-years-old is a big event for us. The tub of the new washing machine is enormous. You could fit a five-year-old in there, but I probably won't. The installers did a miraculous job getting up and into the house and then up a couple flights of narrow stairs. I had imagined they would use a handtruck but the science of moving heavy, awkward objects has evolved. Basically, they ran a wide fabric strap underneath the machine and then attach it to a harness on their shoulders, one man in the front and another in the back.
That same day, I attended an online event hosted by The Lincoln Center Theater. It was marking the anniversary of the theater staging Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia. In attendance was the director, several of the actors and Sir Tom himself. Towards the end of the event, they accepted questions from the audience and I was ready. My question was to Sir Tom, of course. I asked him where in the creative process he realized he was writing three separate, interlocking plays. Sir Tom answered that, about half way through what turned out to be the first play, he arrived at the notion of expanding the topic into three plays. I was delighted. This was the second time I've asked Sir Tom a question. The first time was in San Francisco at the ACT. He did an afternoon event onstage with the director Cary Perloff who always staged his plays. The event was to promote his play, Rock 'n Roll, which of course I saw. That time, my question was about his relationship to music, especially Pink Floyd which appears in several of his plays including The Real Thing. Of course his answer was self-deprecatory, as is his style. He said back then that his interest in music was rather trivial. He said he just listens to music he likes and if it fits, he puts the music in his play. So much for the artistic process.
Speaking of music, I received a couple of nice CDs this week: Yo-Yo Ma playing the complete Bach cello suites and an interesting CD by the violinist Johnny Gandelsman who transcribed the cello suites for violin. That transcription, and Gandelsman performance, creates a very interesting effect. Of course Yo-Yo Ma's performance is up at the top of the mountain of recordings of Bach's cello suites. (Once upon a time, I saw Ma perform one of the suites at Lincoln Center. I was in the third row and the experience was transcendent.) One thing that I found rather odd about the Ma CD was that the booklet goes on, at great length and in minute detail, about the suites but never mentions Ma at all. The only thing that I can think of that explains this is that it's one of Ma's early recordings, before he became so revered.
I need to wrap this up. I miss you and hope you’re healthy and well.
All my love,
Brian.