Pre-holiday

It's Wednesday morning and I'm at the help desk waiting for my computer. It's not working so good. Yes, Google Docs, I know that that should read “not working so well,” but I’m taking poetic license. Work with me.

I'm the only customer here. There are four IT specialists - three enlisted people and one civilian - and they're all looking at my computer. Apparently it's an interesting case. I'm just glad it didn't start behaving normally when I arrived, just to make me look bad. They do that, you know. 

Another customer just rolled up to the help desk counter so now my computer is being attended to by three IT people. I think they're trying to decide if I need a new battery, or a new computer, or something else. A new computer is kind of more trouble than it's worth, especially since it won't really be new, it'll be just a refurbished standard issue Dell laptop much like the one I already have. I don’t need the latest and greatest, bro. I’m not out here writing code. 

And look at that - a new battery it is. I'm waiting for the very nice Army E-3 to finish testing my new battery and then I'll be back in business. 

*****

I don’t even know what else to write about so I’m just going to type. It looks like my favorite part of November has come to an early end. It was gloomy and damp all day today, with no sign of the sun, and tomorrow will be more of the same. By the time this rainy period passes, I’m afraid that we’ll have made the transition to winter. The holidays are bearing down on me, and I am not ready. I’m not even close to ready. I haven’t done my shopping, I don’t have rock-solid plans in place, and I’d just as soon not do anything at all for Christmas but that is unfortunately not an option. I think I have to take care of my mom for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and that’s fine. Someone has to do it, and it might as well be me. 

And it just occurred to me that the dumb computer is probably not the only thing that needs a new battery. I should go back to the help desk. 

*****

Or maybe I should just take a day off. That's what I'm doing now. It's Friday morning and I'm in the car on my way to George Mason University for day 3 of the Patriot Invitational, a mid season meet with maybe 10 teams swimming. It's a D1 meet, so Marymount will probably finish last but they're doing really well. My son's medley relay finished 9th of 16 on Wednesday night, and they broke their own program record. This morning is the 100 breast prelims. 100 breast is my son's best event. It's his bread and butter. It's the moneymaker. 

*****

Thanks to unusually horrendous traffic our 45 minute drive to George Mason took an hour and 20 minutes. We arrived just in time to see the heat immediately after my son's heat, with their times still on the scoreboard. Five minutes would have made the difference. But at least we got to see him, and we'll see him again tonight because he qualified for finals. Meanwhile a Friday off is turning out to be just the thing. 

*****

We made it back to George Mason in plenty of time for finals. My son had a great race. He swam his second best time and then beat his record time in his 400 medley relay split. The 400 relay, with a first year swimmer leading off in the backstroke, finished .07 off the program record. They'll get it next time. 

Meanwhile this month gets more and more bonkers by the minute. MTG is a riddle wrapped in an enigma and the Trump Mamdani meeting absolutely did my head in. I still can't figure out what to make of it. Did Trump's doctors change his meds? Is he trolling JD Vance and Stephen Miller? One thing that seems certain is that Zohran Mamdani is a generational political talent with absolutely extraordinary people skills. I saw the last few minutes of the meeting on TV and the first few minutes of the post-event coverage just before we left for finals, and Nicolle Wallace and her guests were losing their minds. I’m still flummoxed by the whole thing but one thing that's certain is that the Internet always wins. The memes arising from this absolutely unhinged meeting are top notch. 

Niche swim parent humor. I cracked myself up with this. 

*****

Saturday was the last day of the Patriot, and Marymount got second to last place - a very good outcome for the only D3 team at this meet. Marymount finished the 400 free relay, the last event of the weekend, in 9th place (they were seeded 14th) with a program record time. After a late dinner at an Irish pub in Fairfax, we came home and fell into bed, exhausted. It’s Sunday now, and I now have a kitchen full of Thanksgiving groceries. One holiday at a time. That’s how I’ll get through this season. Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then New Year’s, and then the second half of the swim season starts. That’s the real fun. 

Powerwash

I cleaned a lot last weekend. My house was pretty clean already but there were a few grotty little corners that needed some muscle, elbow grease, and Dawn Powerwash. I hadn’t planned to deep clean but once I cleaned out a bathroom cabinet and hung clean shower curtains, more enhanced cleaning ideas occurred to me, and I ran with them. There’s no way to deep clean one little spot and then just stop. Once that bag of potato chips is open, I’m going to keep eating. The result of all this extra effort is a house that looks almost exactly the same as it did before, but a little cleaner and neater. The kitchen cabinets are less cluttered and better organized. The inside of the oven and the top of the refrigerator are clean. Everything in the freezer is identifiable. And everything just feels better. It was a lot of work, but the return was worth the effort. 

Thanksgiving is in just about two weeks. I started my grocery shopping, so I have all the non-perishable things that I’ll need. The perishable items will need to wait until closer to the date. I have at least two more Thanksgiving grocery shopping trips to go. At least. 

And I have to figure out Christmas, which shouldn’t be a thing that I have to figure out because it happens on the very same day every year, but here we are. I might be hosting my mother for the week between Christmas and New Year’s or I might not. I might work on the day after Thanksgiving or I might not. Thanks to a stupid Commanders game, we might be moving the whole Christmas celebration to Christmas Eve. We might travel here or there if my mother doesn’t come, but I don’t know either way yet. Things are uncertain, which is my least favorite way for things to be. 

*****

But at least the shutdown is over. I’m not going to wade into the politics of which Democrats voted with the Republicans. The whole thing was the Republicans’ fault, and they were never going to act in good faith about Obamacare subsidies or anything else. Of course, we were just a few days away from air travel breaking down altogether just ahead of the holidays, which would have forced the Republicans to the table. But that’s just more misery on top of the misery that they have already caused. We all know that rich people unable to board an airplane is a national emergency like no other, but it’s not just rich people who want to fly home for Thanksgiving. I don’t care if Ivanka and Jared can’t fly to Palm Beach, but I do care about my friends and neighbors and colleagues hoping to visit their families for the holidays. As much as I wanted the Democrats to hold the line, I’m glad that there’s a chance that air travel will be back to normal before Thanksgiving week. 

*****

“Back to normal” lol. I’m hilarious. It’s Friday now and the President is crashing out all over the internet, which is rife with rumors and speculation that he’s going to resign (he’s not) or that the Republicans are going to use his well-documented poor health as the perfect excuse to use the 25th Amendment to yank him out of what remains of the White House and install JD Vance in his place (that one is plausible). 

Meanwhile, I have to go to a gala tonight, which is the very last thing I want to do on this lovely November-y Friday. I’m not a gala person. I don’t like to dress up. I do it when I have to, but I don’t like it. 

The gala is a charity event. An old friend of my husband is one of the organizers, and we’re going as a favor to him. He’s not one of my favorite people, and he wouldn’t be even if he wasn’t a big MAGA but he is a big MAGA and this party is going to be MAGA central, a thing that should not even exist in the DMV. Oh, and would you like to know what the charity is? It’s an organization that supports victims of human trafficking. You cannot - CANNOT - make this stuff up. Maybe I’ll report back on this event later. Or maybe I’ll forget all about it when I deep clean my brain to rid it of everything I saw on the news this week. That is a cleaning job for you right there. There’s not enough Dawn Powerwash in the world. 

Letters from an American in Petrograd

I’m sick today. It’s Wednesday at noon and I’m not at work. I’m on my couch bundled up in a baggy sweater and soft pants, shivering a bit and hoping to regain my energy. I hate being sick but I have to admit that a sick day is a very nice thing to have, and I’m grateful that I can rest when I’m sick and not worry about my paycheck. It’s a privilege, although it certainly shouldn’t be. Everyone should be allowed to take a day when they need it. Everyone should be allowed to rest when they’re sick. 

*****

A day later, and I’m much better. No fever, no disgusting GI symptoms about which the less said the better, and I’m back to about 80 percent of my normal energy level. I did very little yesterday other than binge-watching “Shetland,” reading, sleeping, and watching and reading news coverage of the off-year election, which was so much better than last year’s catastrophe. Here in the DMV, we’re finally free of the “I’m speaking” lady - IYKYK. 

“Shetland” is my favorite down and out TV show. Most of the time, I don’t even care who committed the crime - I just like looking at the beautiful Shetland landscape and listening to the Scottish accents. And unlike many fans of the show, I like the Ruth Calder seasons just as much as the Jimmy Perez seasons. The newer seasons still have Tosh and Billy and Sandy and Cora, and they still have Shetland itself. “Shetland” is medicinal. I’m pretty sure that three episodes cured whatever it was that was ailing me. 

*****

Lest it seem that I spent a whole day watching BritBox, let me also tell you about what I was reading, or rather re-reading. I watched the movie “Reds” for the first time right after Diane Keaton died, and immediately put Ten Days that Shook the World on my TBR list. I read 10 Days in college, but I barely remembered it. And at the time, I also didn’t know anything about the Bolshevik Revolution or the early days of the Soviet Union. It’s not that I’m an expert now, of course, but I’ve read enough to know about Kamenev and Zinoviev and the other Old Bolsheviks, and to know what happened in the wake of the 10 days. 

Someone once said that journalism is the first draft of history. I don’t know if that’s true of all journalism, especially not now when we have “respected journalists” writing books about one President’s supposed senility and saying not a word about the obvious decline of the current President. But it’s certainly true of 10 Days that Shook the World. Reed was observing and reporting and even participating as the events of 1917 unfolded, and if you read it and think “I still don’t get what happened in this part,” then it’s probably because Reed himself didn’t always get what was happening; or rather, he knew exactly what was happening in front of him but he hadn’t yet pieced it together with what was happening throughout Petrograd and Moscow; and he hadn’t yet seen the aftermath that would make the importance of those ten days so much clearer. 

*****

John Reed’s writing is beautiful in some places and choppy and abrupt in others. I thought that Reed had written most of the book during or immediately following his time in Russia, but I learned that he was just taking notes in preparation for writing the book after he returned home to New York. The American authorities, who had long been watching Reed, confiscated his notes and materials as soon as he got off the boat and held them for seven months. When his papers were finally returned to him. Reed holed up in a friend’s house and wrote day and night for two weeks until the book was ready for the publisher. 

Ten Days that Shook the World was banned in the USSR under Stalin, even though it depicts most of the Bolshevik leaders as brave and principled, and even though John Reed’s pro-Communist sympathies are evident throughout the book. Lenin even wrote an introduction to the first edition. But Stalin was barely mentioned, and so Reed’s version of history conflicted with the Stalinist version in which Joseph Stalin was the most important figure of the Revolution, with only Lenin himself as an equal. 

*****

A week or so ago, Bari Weiss’s very silly internet publication, hilariously named The Free Press, ran an opinion piece on the historian Heather Cox Richardson. Full disclosure: I read HCR’s Letters from an American almost every day, and I admire her immensely. You will not read balanced and unbiased commentary on HCR on this blog. This is, as they say on social media, a Heather Cox Richardson stan account. 

Anyway, The Free Press writers, unsurprisingly, are not HCR fans. Writing about Letters from an American, which people will be reading decades from now, they whine “the history in her telling is never neutral. It is a morality tale in which Republicans play the villains; Democrats, the weary defenders of reason.” 

A second full disclosure: I didn’t read past that line, which was in the first paragraph. Life is too short for me to waste time reading a hit piece on my beloved HCR, not to mention reading the opinions of people who are too stupid to understand that history is never neutral, and there are not always two equal sides to every story. Knowing the difference between right and wrong and allowing that knowledge to inform her writing doesn’t make Heather Cox Richardson an opinion writer. Historians are supposed to interpret events, not just record them. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now, almost a week later, and I’m not working again because it’s Veterans’ Day and even though I’m not a veteran, I still get the day off. I do love a mid-week, no-reason-at-all holiday. I’m still reading Ten Days that Shook the World, a little bit at a time. It’s going to take me more than ten days to finish that book, if I actually do finish it. The debating and fighting and name-calling are wearing me out. I can’t imagine what the 2025 version of Ten Days will look like. Readers will need valium just to get through a chapter. 

Still, that’s what makes the book still interesting and compelling 108 years later. Red vs. White. Kerensky vs. Trotsky vs. Lenin. Mensheviks vs. Bolsheviks. Bolsheviks vs. everyone. It’s like a time capsule from 1917. It's like reading John Reed's blog - like "Letters from an American in Petrograd."" 

I heard it on the radio

Radio was a huge part of my Philadelphia childhood. The radio was always playing - in the house, in the car, on the front stoop - someone was always listening to music or news or Phillies baseball on the radio. We woke up to clock radio alarms, and turned on the kitchen radio first thing in the morning. Kids got little transistor radios as birthday or Christmas presents. We bought radio/cassette players and Walkman portable devices with our babysitting or part-time job money. I listened to the radio everywhere. 

My childhood and teenage radio favorites included pop music on WMGK or WIOQ, R&B and rap on the great WDAS, and my beloved New Wave on WXPN. I didn’t listen to classic rock radio that much, until around the mid-eighties. By that time, I was out of college (I hadn’t graduated - that would come much later - but I was out) and working as a proofreader and typefitter and layout artist for a small print production company that specialized in display ads for Yellow Pages directories. Yes, that’s right, I helped to make the Yellow Pages. 

I worked in a small room with 3 other people. We were all in our 20s, but I was the youngest, and the only one who hadn’t graduated yet. The job usually required a college degree for who knows what reason, but I crushed the proofreading and editing tests, and they hired me. John, the oldest of the four of us, was our supervisor. He was just around 27 or so but seemed much older - he wore a shirt and tie every day, and carried a briefcase, and was very gentlemanly and kind. The company, such as it was, was a bit of a sweatshop, and we complained about our higher-up bosses quite frequently, but we loved John and would have ridden at dawn to defend him. 

Steve and Ann were John’s other direct reports. We all got along very well, except for Steve’s music. He’d been there longer than Ann or I, and he had brought in his own radio, and John allowed him to listen to it while we worked, and so we listened to WMMR - Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith and Kansas and Boston and the Rolling Stones and The Who and lots of other classic rock bands that had peaked in the 70s - all the livelong day. I wanted to fling myself against that radio every time WMMR played Jethro Tull or Lynyrd Skynyrd, which was pretty much every single day. 

Ann and I would complain good naturedly. “Can we find a station that plays music recorded in this decade?" we'd ask. "Like what?” he would fire back. "Devo? Madonna? Whitney Houston?” And yes, any of them would have been better than hearing “Aqualung" for the 500th time. But it was a losing battle, mostly because Ann and I were both born people pleasers and we just didn't bother to push back. 

Plus, some of the music was good, I had to admit. I'd loved Bruce Springsteen since I was 12 or so, and WMMR played him pretty often. But the best part of listening to WMMR during workday afternoons was Pierre Robert, the greatest DJ in the history of radio. That is not an opinion, it's a simple statement of fact. 

Pierre was very much not what you would have expected a Philadelphia DJ to be. He was a hippie Deadhead with long hair and a peaceful and joyful demeanor. He didn't care about sports. He didn't yell and swagger and brag. Even his catch phrases were different - “Great day in the morning" and “Greetings, good citizens." But people loved him. He stayed true to himself and became a Philadelphia legend. 

*****

When a Philadelphia local celebrity dies, as Pierre Robert did last week, the city goes into full mourning. I especially remember when Jim O'Brien, Pelle Lindbergh, and Roy Halladay died - coverage of their untimely deaths dominated all TV and radio broadcasts for days. I don't live in Philadelphia anymore and haven't for years, so I missed the media blitz, but I was still so sad about Pierre Robert. I texted back and forth with my siblings and cousins, and I listened to WMMR’s streaming broadcast at my desk just to feel connected to the Philadelphia diaspora mourning the voice of our youth. The WMMR broadcast team took calls from all over, and tributes poured in. In addition to being a great DJ, Pierre was a legendarily nice guy, and it was lovely hearing stories of his many kindnesses to fans and local musicians and colleagues. 

As it happened, I had already planned a short visit home for this weekend. My son had a swim meet near Philadelphia so we spent the night with my sister, and had dinner with my family. My brother said that he and his friends once set up a sound system on the street on bike race day (IYKYK) and an hour or so later, Pierre Robert himself walked by and said “Hey, nice set up! Mind if I take over for a bit?" “I wouldn't have recognized him," my brother said, “but I recognized his voice." Of course, they allowed him to take over, and he played music and chatted with the crowd for an hour. Stories like these are legion. The big joke on Philadelphia social media last Thursday went something like “I seem to have been the only person in the Delaware Valley who never met Pierre Robert.” Although my brother didn’t recognize him right away that day at the bike race, everyone in Philadelphia came to know Pierre’s face as well as his voice because he never said no to a selfie, and the internet contains hundreds of photos of his smiling, bearded face. 

*****

As much as I miss summer and as much as I hate a 5 PM sunset, I have to admit that the first few weeks of November are an evocative and beautiful time of year. At this point in my life, when I feel nostalgic, it’s usually something to do with my children - Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas, middle and high school band concerts, winter swim meets, holiday family outings to museums and Capitals games. But this year, golden early November is calling me back to my teenage and early adult years in Philadelphia. We had Wawa hazelnut coffee on our way to the swim meet on Saturday, and it tasted like walking from the City Hall subway station to my job at 16th and Chestnut on a beautiful late October morning in 1988, just another good citizen on a workday. It was a completely messed up, imperfect, chaotic, and beautiful time when my friends and I never had quite enough money but we always had enough money to go out on Friday night and we roamed around the streets of Philadelphia scuffing through leaves or stomping through snow and ice, like we owned the place because we did, and if it was afternoon, Pierre Robert’s voice was always in the background somewhere. RIP, Pierre Robert.