20th century

No matter what’s happening in the world, it’s nice to have a proper Saturday. This past Saturday, we went to a hockey game in the afternoon, and left a bit early to meet our sons at the Elephant and Castle for an early dinner. Then we went for a quick drink just before our 7:30 showtime at the National Theater, where we saw “The Simon and Garfunkel Story” for the third time. It’s a wonderful show. 

*****

It’s been months, but I still can’t get used to seeing the National Guard in the Metro stations and out on the streets. We didn’t walk past the Justice or Agriculture or Labor buildings, so we were spared the sight of giant North Korean Trump banners. The area around the White House, though, is an absolute mess, cordoned off for a several block radius. We could barely see Pennsylvania Avenue past 14th Street, and the National Theater is at 13th Street. I know that some crazy person tried to breach the gate last week, but I think they’re also just scared to let people anywhere near the place. 

*****

Well, I didn’t want to see the gaping hole where the East Wing used to be anyway, so it was just as well. There was plenty else to do and see. The weather was beautiful, sunny and mild, and lots of people were out and about. In the little blocks of time before the game, and between the game and dinner, and between dinner and the show, we walked around enjoying the day, like free people without a care in the world. 

It felt like we knew everyone. People smiled and we smiled back. Women, especially older women, nodded and smiled at me in a friendly, conspiratorial way. We all saw each other. We all knew each other. 

*****

“The Simon and Garfunkel Story” is a hybrid concert/play, with singer/actors playing Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, along with a small backing band. They tell stories and play Simon and Garfunkel songs against a huge photo/video backdrop featuring American scenes of the 20th century. 

The stories and songs and images work very well together, establishing Simon and Garfunkel’s place in American life in the 60s and 70s. The cast changes costumes and looks throughout, beginning with the band’s “Tom and Jerry” buttoned-down look of the late 50s to their folk beatnik era in the 60s to their mod 70s style. 

We first saw the show in 2018, and we saw it again five years later, in 2023. The performers were different, but the show was exactly the same both times. The performance we saw last week, which was by far the best of the three (though the other two were quite good) featured a few new-to-the-show songs, and a few story changes, with most of the same 20th century Americana images and film clips. In 2018, those images evoked nostalgia. Now they evoke grief. 

*****

The first two performances we attended were very good, well-produced and very polished. The band remained in the background until the actors introduced them just before the final number. The performers all worked well together and probably went their separate ways after the curtain went down. Which is perfectly fine. 

This last performance was different. The performers seemed less rehearsed, but they were still perfect, hitting every note and every mark with the excitement and joy of musicians who love the music they're playing. Everyone on the stage was young, and the stars shouted out the band members frequently and sincerely. And the energy between Simon and Garfunkel was easy and genuine, like the two were friends in real life. 

And they are. At the end of the show, Jonah Bobo (Paul) introduced himself and Brendan Jacob Smith (Art) and told the audience that the two were theater kids and close friends at the same high school and had remained friends and musical collaborators ever since. They write and perform their own music, as well as performing covers at small venues around the East Coast. Their love for the music and for their band mates and their excitement at playing a prominent venue came across very clearly. They were a joy to watch. Just before they left the stage, they announced that they’d be in the theater lobby after the show to meet fans and take photos and sell their self-produced CDs. “No obligation on the CDs,” Smith said - “we just like to meet the audience.” 

These two young men were so sweet and patient with the line of older people who wanted to chat and take selfies. I didn’t need a selfie, or even to meet the performers, but I make it a point to buy people’s self-produced CDs, so I got in the line. Their manager, a young woman who is obviously also their friend, was working the crowd, and when she got to me, I told her that I just wanted to purchase a CD, and that the performance that evening was the best of the three times I’d seen the show. 

“Jonah,” she yelled. Jonah Bobo turned toward us, and she told me “Tell him!” When I told him that we’d seen the show three times, and that this was the best of the three performances, he broke into a huge smile. “Really?”

“By far,” I said. “Well, it’s not a competition,” he laughed, “but I’m glad we won.” 

*****

That was almost a week ago. It’s Friday now, and my mom has been here all week, so I’ve been too busy to document every detail of my days. She arrived on Sunday morning, and we’re taking her home tomorrow. 

My mom is a Simon and Garfunkel fan. She was young, barely 20, when she had me, and she always listened to pop music at home - sometimes the radio, but more often an album from her collection. She had several Simon and Garfunkel albums, including “Wednesday Morning 3 AM,” which I’m pretty sure I listened to in utero. They’re all octogenarians now - Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and my mom. They were born at the height of America’s importance in the world. But everything is different now, and nothing is what any of them could have expected. Paul Simon is nearly deaf in one ear now, and Art Garfunkel walks with a cane, and my poor mom is literally falling apart. They were children of the American century, and the American century is over now.

“It’s all right, it’s all right / You can’t be forever blessed.” We can’t be forever blessed. 

Friday the 13th

Some stupid jerk on the stupid internet pointed out that the last time we had a Friday the 13th in March, the whole world went to shit for more than a year. I did not need to verify that March 13, 2020 was a Friday. I remember. And as it turns out, we have another Friday the 13th this week. I did not need to know this. I need to just stay off the stupid internet. Stupid jerks. 

*****

I wish I could just stay off the stupid internet altogether, but that’s not really practical or even possible. Instead, I’m doing little things like leaving my phone in a different room when I’m home, and setting time limits on social media. I also block trolls and chaos goblins on social media like it’s my job. If it was my job, I’d be good at it. I’d be highly paid. 

*****

Let’s talk about what’s good. My son is home for spring break, and even though I can’t really take any time off to hang around with him, it’s really nice to have him here. My husband went to a hockey game last night, and so I took both of my sons out to eat at a neighborhood restaurant and bar. It’s a low-key, easygoing place, part pub and part sports bar. My sons each ordered a beer with their dinner, and were subject to careful driver’s license vs. face scrutiny, which I found entertaining since I’m obviously their mother, and I’m not the kind of mother who’s going to aid and abet her underage child in an attempt to order beer in a restaurant. After the ID check, the waiter looked at me as if for confirmation, so I told him that I’m their mother and they are truly 24 and 21 years old, and he was satisfied, and the boys got their beers. It was a really nice evening. 

*****

In the movie “Hanging Up,” directed by Nora Ephron and based on her life, Meg Ryan plays Eve, a woman who is hanging on by the thinnest of threads - running a business, raising a child with very little help from her husband, managing a Martha Stewart-esque household, and caring for her cantankerous, early-Alzheimer’s father, played by Walter Matthau (his last role, I think). Diane Keaton plays Georgia, her famous and successful older sister (the Nora Ephron character) and Lisa Kudrow plays Maddie, the bohemian actress younger sister. It’s a good movie, despite a pretty tepid critical response when it was released. Critics can be stupid. I should know, because I write my own inept criticism and commentary all the time, and I can be stupid. 

Anyway, there is a scene in which Eve is rushing to work from the hospital where her father is a patient, and she backs into a Mercedes. The Mercedes driver, a doctor, admonishes Eve for her carelessness, but he’s not a jerk about it; and as a doctor, he can also see that she’s struggling. He hands Eve over to his mother, who is so kind that Eve breaks down crying about her father and everything else in her chaotic life. The mother tells her son that Eve has been through enough and that she shouldn’t have to pay for the damage. 

“He’s an uproar person.” That is the doctor’s mother, describing Eve’s father. A person who is never happy unless everyone around him is miserable, a whirling dervish of crazy who is always in the midst of an uproar, who creates uproar when none exists, and who thrives on the confusion and fury and misery that results from uproar. Does that sound familiar? 

Yes, this entire country - in fact, this entire world - is run by uproar people. Once again, Nora Ephron explains it all. 

*****

I wonder if God is in His heaven, looking down at us all and thinking “What the hell do I have to do to make you morons believe that climate change is real?” After work yesterday, I took off my sweater and put on my sunglasses to walk to my car, and drove home with music blasting and the moonroof open and summer in the air. The high temperature on Wednesday reached 82, and then an intense, high-wind August thunderstorm blew through, threatening trees and roof tiles and patio furniture. Today, Thursday, the windows were closed and the heat was turned back up and I sat at my desk working and watching the snow fall. We’ve cycled through all four seasons twice in the last two weeks. If I were to personify Maryland weather, I would call it an uproar person. 

*****

I started grocery shopping for an old lady in our neighborhood right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I’m still doing her weekly shopping, six years later. My younger son, who was 15 in March 2020, used to help me. The first time I went shopping for the old lady, she wrote the check for $20 more than the total I gave her. I told her not to do that, but she insisted. So I asked my son to come along and help, and I gave him the extra $20. 

School was closed during the first few months of the pandemic, and then summer came, and activities were drastically curtailed, so he always had time to help with the shopping. But even when school and activities resumed, my son made time to go shopping with me. We would laugh about the old lady’s crazy ass grocery requests, and talk about everything and anything. Those grocery trips are among my fondest memories. 

My son is home this week for spring break. He’s working and studying and training and seeing his friends, but he set aside the early part of Thursday evening to accompany me to Safeway. We talked in the car, about everything and anything, and we dunked on our poor old lady’s weird grocery requests. Literally the highlight of my week. And of course, I gave him $20, even though $20 isn’t what it was even as recently as 2020. 

*****

I’d never heard of Kharg Island until yesterday, which was finally Friday the 13th. I suppose I’m relieved that we didn’t drop a nuke on Tehran yesterday, but I think that the Kharg Island bombing is going to turn out to be a very big deal. I think that decades from now, people will talk about Kharg Island like we now talk about the Tonkin Gulf or Mosul or Kandahar, all places that most Americans had never thought of before we barged in with soldiers and tanks and bombs. 

Yesterday being Friday makes today Saturday, and we have plans. We’re going to an afternoon hockey game followed by a show at the National Theater. I kind of can’t believe that I’m doing two things in one day. My energy is limited right now, what with all worst-case-scenario forecasting and resulting panic. And it doesn’t feel right, flitting around to sporting events and theatricals. But it will be good to be out, and necessary since I’ll be on lockdown for the next week. My mom arrives tomorrow and that’s a whole thing in itself. I’m going from macro problems to micro ones. It’ll be chaos around here, but it’s the kind of chaos that I’m used to and can manage. My mom likes having me take care of her, and I kind of like taking care of her. It’s the least I can do. 

White Teeth

I just finished reading White Teeth, and my gosh. Zadie Smith has done it again, and by that, I just mean she’s done it because this was her first book. I always meant to read it, and I finally did. 

White Teeth was published in 2000, which was essentially still the 90s. Zadie Smith and the book got tons of attention at the time - she was quite young (still in her 20s) and a critically acclaimed first novel by a young author is always a big deal. Not long after it was published, I remember reading a blurb that described the book as a novel about a multicultural group of young people coming of age in London. That is not an untruthful description, but it’s a very incomplete one. White Teeth is about almost everything - family, sex, love, friendship, war, politics, history…it’s about the end of the British Empire and the history of 20th century England from World War II to Margaret Thatcher. 

*****

Every generation has some conflict with the generations before and after. Well, except Generation X because we are not out here looking for drama. Let the Millennials fight it out with the Boomers and Gen Z, and leave us out of it. Don’t start none, won’t be none - that’s our motto. 

Multilayered generational conflict is interwoven throughout White Teeth. Longtime friends Samad and Archie, who fought in World War II, both marry women a generation behind them. And so Millat and Magid (Samad) and Irie (Archie) are really young enough to be their fathers’ grandchildren, and are far removed from the England of the war years. Meanwhile, Archie’s wife Clara and Samad’s wife Alsana are the middle of three generations and torn between their native lands (Jamaica and Bangladesh, respectively) and their homeland, England. Samad doesn’t really consider himself English and in fact, he remembers Bangladesh when it was still India. It’s a lot. 

But it’s not all. Add in the scars of World War II and the beginnings of global radical Islam and the supreme arrogance of scientists who don’t distinguish between what can be done and what should be done, and you have a veritable ticking time bomb. 

Every character in this book has a distinct and complex personality - furious Samad, fierce and long-suffering Alsana, awkward Irie and her white father Archie and Black Jamaican mother Clara, Samad and Alsana’s twin sons Millat and Magid, the ridiculous but monstrous Chalfen family. And they all have a reason for being. The book needs every one of them. 

*****

I read novels for the characters more than the story, but White Teeth does not neglect one at the expense of the other. Something happens on almost every page, and reading it feels like reading Dickens, when there’s sheer joy in turning the page to find out what happens next. Fittingly, the book ends on New Year’s Eve 1999. Technically, 2001 was the first year of the 21st century, but the transition from 1999 to 2000 was really the end of the 20th century, and the 20th century is practically a character in White Teeth. It might be the main character. 

*****

I have at least three more Zadie Smith novels to catch up on, and then I’ll have read everything she’s published; in book form, at least. I’m hoping to read all of them this year. Stay tuned. 

In like an absolute jerk

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning with the promise of sunshine and spring temperatures all day. February is almost over. It would be a pretty much perfect day except that we are now at war with Iran. Apparently, the Board of Peace got bored with peace. 

I have no idea how my Trump-supporting friends and family members (who are fortunately very few in number) feel about last night’s bombing raids and the wider war that will almost certainly follow. I’m not going to argue with them anymore. There’s more than enough proof that he’s the worst President in US history. There’s plenty of proof that he’s the worst American ever, full stop. What can I say that they don’t already know? 

War with Iran was inevitable, I guess, and it’s not at all surprising that it’s happening the day after the Clintons sat for depositions before the House Oversight Committee. I’m beyond furious that Hillary Clinton had to sit through this clown show answering questions from people who aren’t worthy to sit in the same room with her. I’m so sick of seeing her made a scapegoat for the worst people. I’m sick of the He-Man Woman Haters Club that runs this country.  

*****

It’s Sunday now. Three Americans died yesterday, along with many Iranians, including about 100 students of a girls’ school in Tehran. And I am once again sick. Sick in both senses of the word, that is - I’m horrified and sickened by the death and destruction, but I’m also just sick. Chills, fever, and some other symptoms that you don’t need to know about. Gross. 

I absolutely hate being sick. Sometimes when I feel overwhelmed, I think that a well-timed positive COVID test or a quick stomach virus would be just the thing. But then I get that little quick stomach virus and I’m just miserable. 

But that’s enough about me. 

*****

It’s Monday now, and I’m better, I think. I thought a little bit yesterday about sickness and why it exists and what we’re meant to learn from it. From our own sickness, we learn to appreciate our health; and from the sickness of others, we learn compassion; or rather, we should learn compassion. Illnesses are clues about the human body that medical science can eventually decipher, and when all the clues are solved, they can cure all disease or even eliminate it altogether. And then what? Everyone just lives until age 95 or so? The place would get crowded. 

Wait, is that it? Is the earth too crowded? Is that why crusty old men start wars every decade or so? Just a big old Marie Kondo clear out the human clutter population purge? I took a break to watch the President’s speech today; or rather, I watched it until he veered off topic and started yammering about pile drivers and curtains. This took about five minutes. How is it possible for anyone to be so evil and yet so entirely unserious? And how is it possible that this is the person who is now running the country with the literal power of life and death? 

*****

It’s Tuesday and I worked in the office so I didn’t see today’s Q&A session. I also didn’t see any of Kristi Noem’s Senate hearing, but I read that even Republican Senators were roasting her. And they probably roasted her for all the wrong reasons - because she’s making Trump look bad and because (of course) she’s a woman - but I don’t even care because she’s just that awful. If Kristi is roasting then I do not care who is turning the spit. Just make sure she’s done on both sides. 

*****

And now Ecuador? We’re at war in Ecuador? What in the actual hell? 

OK, what else is going on? Let’s talk about Maryland weather for a few minutes. It snowed all day on Monday, and the high temperature was about 35 degrees. In Maryland, March comes in like a jerk. March comes in like Stephen Miller around here. And it’s way too early to predict how March will go out, but we’re expecting temperatures in the 70s and low 80s next week. Madness. 

We could also talk about books. I just finished Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, about which I will have much to say. Right now, I’m reading The Little Princesses, Marion Crawford’s memoir of her time as governess to Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret when they were little girls whose father wasn’t supposed to become King. It’s surprisingly good, but there’s quite a sad history behind it. I’ll report on that one later, too. 

*****

Well, well, well. No more private jets and high-fashion tactical gear for you, Kristi Noem. 

Noem’s firing is actually neither good news nor bad news. It’s fun to see terrible people get their well-deserved comeuppances, but nothing is really going to change. Her successor is just as terrible and possibly even more stupid, which scarcely seems possible, but we’re a long way from the bottom. Senator Markwayne Mullin is the guy who tried to square off with the President of the Teamsters during a Senate hearing. He’s just dumb enough to think that a few MMA fights prepared him to go mano a mano with a Teamster. Sean O’Brien would have dog-walked Markwayne Mullin. 

Senator Mullin also made some comments that seemed to indicate that he did not know that the Ayatollah who died in the US bombing raid last week was not the same Ayatollah who oversaw the attack on the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. Khomeini (old guy, now dead) and Khamenei (new guy, also now dead): two different guys. Hopefully, soon-to-be Secretary Mullin is doing his homework and will assume his new role with a basic understanding of the Iranian hierarchy seeing as they are one of the chief threats to homeland security right now. And at least he’ll be out of the Senate. Always a bright side. 

*****

At this point, my blog is nothing more than a personal journal, so I’m not even going to worry about tying this post together in a coherent and logical way. You didn’t come here for logic and coherence, did you? If the answer is yes, then you're in the wrong place. Allow me to introduce myself. Please refer to every other entry in this blog ever. Please refer to the rest of my life. 

*****

It was a bleak and dreary week, but it’s Friday now. I love my job but I’m tired. A little downtime might be just what the doctor ordered. Still, weekends are dodgy under Trump 47. God willing, the President will restrict the bomb-dropping to the countries where we’re already at war. Hopefully, we won’t wake up on Sunday morning to find that we sent troops into Canada or that we’re blockading Guam. I was going to be really petty and say that I hoped it would rain on Mar a Lago all weekend long, but we can’t have him bored and restless. I guess I’ll have to indulge my pettiness by celebrating Kristi Noem’s downfall. Meanwhile, keep your dogs inside. Someone has a lot of time on her hands.