Post-operative

It’s Wednesday. I worked from home today, unusual (though not unheard-of) for a Wednesday. I have far too much work to do right now, and the panic helped me to focus and direct my energies. I got quite a lot accomplished today, enough that I have some breathing room. Enough, in fact, that I can stop working now and write about having too much to do, instead of just doing it.

Yes, I know.

I finished Not that Kind of Girl, and now I’m reading Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. I like Nora Ephron, God rest her soul, though I sometimes find her intimidating. She was a very successful journalist and writer and cultural observer and influencer, who probably accomplished more in a day than I do in a month. I don’t think I could have kept up with her in real life.

I Feel Bad About My Neck is good, though not nearly as good as Wallflower at the Orgy. It reads as a little lazy and scattershot, a little fast and loose. It was published in 2006, when she was NORA EPHRON, Nora Fucking Ephron, and so people were willing to read anything she wrote. I’m still willing to read anything she wrote, but I know the difference between really good Nora Ephron and phoning-it-in Nora Ephron.

I don’t feel bad about my neck just yet. But I don’t feel good about it either. I’m aware of it. I suppose that’s the first step, the beginning of the slippery slope. Once you start to notice your neck, a completely utilitarian body part that you used to be able to ignore, you’re on the downward spiral from middle-aged to old. And I hate turtlenecks.

*****
What is middle age anyway? What does it mean to be middle aged? I have heard comedians and others suggest that it's absurdly optimistic to call 50 middle aged because it assumes that a person should expect to live to be 100. Not an unreasonable argument, I suppose. But if you remove childhood from the equation and count only the phases of adulthood, then 50 or so is right in the middle of middle age.

Let's establish the ranges right now:

• Young adulthood, 21 - 39
• Middle age, 40 - 64
• Old age, 65 and beyond 

That's my final word. If you're 40 or 65, don't @ me to argue about your placement. It is what it is.

By these final and incontrovertible rules, my husband (almost 50) and I (over 50) are both middle-aged. Because we have been middle-aged for a while, it's long past time for at least one of us to accept that there are certain things that middle aged people shouldn't do. Like playing softball.

By now, you're thinking "this is going somewhere, isn't it?" And it is. We're at Montgomery Medstar Medical Center right now, waiting for an anesthesiologist to put my husband under so that a surgeon can fix his mangled hand. Softball. Ridiculous.

We're in the pre-surgery waiting area, in a semi private little curtained-off cubicle, with just a tiny hospital bed, a visitor's chair, and a hand-painted ceiling tile that I suppose is there to relax the patient. It's a nice, thoughtful touch.

Don't worry about the guy with the scalpel.
Just look at the ceiling. 

My husband is uncharacteristically nervous. He's wearing a hospital gown and hospital-issued fuzzy socks and he has an IV for fluids. He can't eat or drink anything and he can't sleep because of the IV. The surgeon, a very energetic, wiry Asian man with close-cropped gray hair and an unnaturally unwrinkled face, just stopped by to check on my husband. He seems like a nice man and he comes very highly recommended, but I'm not sure I trust a man who has what appears to be quite a bit of Botox. And his neck is very very tight. Nora Ephron would be envious.

I don't know about your neck, Doctor.
You're suspect. 

*****
This is the second time this year that I've been here at this hospital, waiting for someone else to endure the attentions of medical professionals. Last time I was only in the waiting room, feeling sorry for the obviously sick people who had to sit in a public place, visible to all, when they were at their most vulnerable. Today I'm in the pre-surgery waiting area and even here, the patients are exposed to the prying eyes of every passer-by. I feel intrusive and unfairly advantaged, with my street clothes and my shoes and my car keys that allow me to walk out of here and drive away if I want to.

*****
My husband’s surgery went well. He spent Thursday afternoon in bed, napping and watching sports and recovering. He returned to work on Friday, at least three days before he should have, but there’s no stopping him. I hope that everyone else who had surgery last week is doing as well.

40 hours

It's Sunday afternoon, 1 PM, and I'm sitting on a school bus in the parking lot at St. Patrick's, on my way to do what the priest at Mass this morning called a "crazy Catholic thing." Rosaries and scapulars and the Blessed Sacrament. Me and 100 old ladies and a bunch of Knights of Columbus.

Yesterday was the first truly fall-like day this year. It was sunny and very breezy and cool enough for an outdoor fire. We had friends and family over, and we sat around the fire pit all day long. I had awakened that morning feeling so depressed that I didn't want to get out of bed. But I had to. We had plans and I had to do what felt impossible, which was to stand upright and put one foot in front of the other, and smile and greet and welcome people. It turned out better than I expected.

So now I'm standing in a field on Norbeck Road with a rosary wrapped around my wrist and my phone in my hand, writing about the traffic whizzing by and the overcast, almost-leaden sky and the almost-damp, almost-chilly breeze that made me decide to put on a jacket before I left the house. In a few minutes, the priests will arrive, and the old ladies and the handful of young people and the Knights of Columbus and I will walk a mile or so back up Norbeck to St Patrick's, praying and singing and making something of a spectacle of ourselves. Catholics. We are a mysterious crew.

*****
My jacket and my sneakers and my handbag are all a similar color. Burgundy is probably the best word to describe it, or maybe maroon. That's what my mother always calls this color. I think that wine is the best word. Wine, like the wine-dark sea. My son is a freshman in college, and I remember two phrases from my freshman year in college: Wine-dark sea, and bare, ruined choirs. My literature professor tried his hardest to make us see the beauty in those words. And I do see it now, more than 30 years later, so his time wasn't wasted.

*****
It’s Monday now, I had to stop writing when the procession got underway. We shuffled rather than walked up Norbeck Road, singing and praying, Repetitive prayer is soothing and meditative. I don’t often forget myself, but I did forget myself for a few minutes as a drop of rain or two fell and the procession inched up the road, led by a lights-flashing silent police car. The trees have just begun to turn; and I pondered bare, ruined choirs as I listened to the chanting. The choir was the huddled and barely moving crowd of humanity making its way to the waiting church, and it didn’t feel bare or ruined at all. A wine-dark sea of maroon jackets and wine-colored jackets and burgundy sweaters and dark red raincoats made its way into the church for an hour of quiet prayer for the world. And then we went home.

Sleepless

I don’t sleep sometimes. Sometimes, I sleep almost through the night, for days at a time; and other times, I just don’t sleep. Or I sleep for a few hours, and then I’m awake at 2 and can’t fall back asleep.

Last night was one of those nights. It wasn’t so bad, really. I’d gone to bed early so I’d already slept for almost three hours. I read for a while, and I thought about nothing for a while, and I prayed for a while. I could have written, I suppose, but I was holding on to the hope that I’d fall back asleep, so I didn’t want to do anything that would keep my brain too active.

Like it takes an active brain to write about meatballs. I flatter myself.

*****

Forget about writing. Let’s talk about reading. I’m temporarily giving up on Postwar. It’s just so mercilessly long. It’s taking too long to finish and I have lots of other books to read. Maybe I’ll get back to it. I’m all the way to the late 1970s, a pretty dreary time in Europe, East and West. And everywhere else, really. In Eastern Europe, especially, people were weary and resigned, and too tired for despair. The gray, low-level terror and oppression was a morning-to-night fact of life and most people thought that their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would live under the same oppression for their whole lives. No one saw the end coming, though it was just a few years away.

So far during my Postwar break, I’ve read Heather King’s Ravished: Notes on Womanhood, which was great, though not as great as Shirt of Flame. Now I’m reading Carlene Bauer’s Not That Kind of Girl. At least ten people have written memoirs with this title or a variation of it. Maybe I should write one and call it Exactly That Kind of Girl. Anyway, I like this book very much. She writes honestly and beautifully about what it’s like to be a girl who is both introspective and outspoken, who struggles with faith but wants to believe, who longs to be noticed and desired but doesn’t know how to deal with boys, who wants to be New York-cool but can’t hide her wide-open mind and heart. Yes, exactly that kind of girl. I know her.

But wasn’t I writing about insomnia? That’s what kind of girl I am--the kind who can’t string two thoughts together on her best day, never mind after a night of little or no sleep.

*****
Some people think that it’s better to stay up for the whole rest of the night than to fall asleep at dawn only to have to wake up again in an hour or half an hour. I could not disagree more. After several hours of walking around the house and reading and thinking and praying, I finally fell asleep, about 30 minutes before I had to get up for the day. And it was deep, hard sleep, like a whole night distilled into a concentrated half-hour. I felt fine when I woke up.

*****

At some point--during the early part of the night, or during the 30 minutes in the early morning-- I dreamed about lobster. Specifically, I dreamed about cooking and eating a lobster, by myself. I don’t like lobster that much, and I would never ever cook one. I don’t know what a dream about solo lobster cooking and eating should mean, if anything. The lobster had the texture of calamari. Vile. I’m glad it was only a dream.

I’m pretty tired now. I hope I’ll sleep tonight. I hope I’ll have more interesting dreams. If not, I have plenty of books to read.

*****

Note to self

Did you know that it’s really easy to make your own meatballs? You probably did know that. But I didn’t, until today. For some reason, I had always been afraid to make meatballs, so I just made sauce with meat in it, and that was what we had with our spaghetti. But today, I found a recipe, and decided to make meatballs. And it was astonishingly easy, and they were very good. The End.

Were you waiting for me to turn that into some kind of lesson about overcoming fears or leaving comfort zones or some shit? No, sorry. I have nothing for you but meatballs. Slightly too-spicy but very delicious meatballs.

*****
When I say that it was easy, I don’t mean that it was fun. Rolling meatballs is like making cookies, and I hate making cookies. And I’m terrible at quantities, too. I had two pounds of ground beef, because the recipe called for one pound, and I wanted to make enough to freeze, so I wouldn’t have to roll meatballs again. But then I looked at the two pounds of meat and I thought that it wouldn’t make nearly enough meatballs to serve everyone and then have enough left over to freeze. And I was wrong, because two pounds of ground beef turns into a quantity of meatballs best described by the measurement “shitload.” Look it up. It’s somewhere between a buttload and a shit-ton.

*****
That was yesterday. My kids are still talking about those meatballs. A culinary triumph. Today, I went to an after-work happy hour, and then to Barnes and Noble to pick up a birthday present for a three-year-old girl. I’m sure she’ll get lots of toys, so I bought her a lovely hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables. It’s so pretty that I was tempted to buy a copy for myself.

I bought a notebook instead, because my current notebook is almost full. I’m picky about notebooks, and I usually like the selection at Barnes and Noble. But I skip the Moleskine section. Moleskine is full of itself. They lost me when they introduced the silly Evernote thing and the $179 pen. I do like their bright, hard-cover notebooks, though.

Barnes and Noble also carries Leuchturm1917 notebooks. These are like Moleskine notebooks for people who don’t think Moleskine is hard enough to pronounce. I liked their red cover color, too, but they only had the red one with graph paper. So no Leuchturm1917.

I was tempted. The red cover is very nice. 

The clearance section had what appeared to be lots of options, but the selection narrowed after I ruled out the ones with the inspirational sayings on the covers, and the obviously ugly ones, and the ones with the hand-tooled leather covers, and the ones from the 300 Writing (Creative/Sketching/Drawing) Prompt series.

No. 

I mean, I’m writing about shopping for a notebook. Yesterday, I wrote about meatballs. I don’t need writing prompts.

Among the remaining notebooks, at least half were bullet journals. Bullet journals are a big trend now. And because this trend combines technology rejection in the name of “authenticity” (use real notebooks with paper and real pens, not electronics!) and consumerism (not just any notebook and pen--THIS kind of notebook and THIS kind of pen!) and social media influencers (hundreds of Instagram-filtered notebook photos accompanied by multiple hashtags), it is an easy target for mockery.

Silly as it may be, though, I’m not going to make fun of bullet journaling, because if I’m being honest (and I’m always being honest), I really love the whole idea. Bullet journals are neat and pretty, two of my favorite characteristics of anything. Do a Google image search and see if you don’t want to stop what you’re doing right now and make a beautiful bullet journal. I do. I mean, what am I doing, anyway? Writing about meatballs? I could be bullet journaling.

But I know myself. My handwriting is appallingly bad, and I doodle, and I write in the margins, and I scribble. Notebooks, in fact, are my only refuge of untidiness. Notebooks and my sock drawers. Marie Kondo didn’t get to them yet. So my bullet journal wouldn't look anything like the ones that litter the Pinterest landscape. I'd feel like a failure.

Or worse. Because it's just as likely that I'd start bullet journaling and become compulsive about it, and then it would become another chore that I have to do every day. As I said, I know myself.

I saw one very nice-looking bullet journal notebook and was still tempted to buy it, bullet journal reservations notwithstanding. The notebook was covered with cellophane wrapping with a paper band for the price and brand name. "For the iist-makers and note-takers," it read. Well that's me, right? I spend a good part of my life taking notes and making lists so this notebook was obviously meant for me. But the back side of the wrapper also had a little illustration of the notebook pages and they were way too complicated. A dashboard for your notes. That’s too much to do. It’s too much work. It's the compulsivity again--give me a notebook page with seven different sections dedicated to specific content types, and I will feel compelled to use them appropriately.

Simple on the outside, complicated on the inside.
I'd have needed a training class to use this notebook effectively.
Ain't nobody got time. 

Assuming you’re still reading this, at what point did you thank God you're not me? Was it the part about thinking that two pounds of meatballs wasn't enough to feed four people, or the 45 minutes of deliberation over a notebook?

And that's a slight exaggeration. Maybe 20 minutes, or 25 at the most. After no more than 25 or 30 minutes, I picked a "modular" notebook with a very lovely soft blue faux leather cover. It's modular because it comes with three interchangeable and refillable inserts, so you can have blank paper for drawing if you draw, and graph paper for graphing stuff if you do that, and lined paper for writing. I will use all three of the inserts for writing, with a few doodles here and there, and then I’ll get more inserts because the cover really is so pretty that I’ll want to keep using it. And it’s an unusual size, compact but much longer than wide than most notebooks. It’s very well suited to both lists and notes. It has a clear pocket in the front for business cards, and a clear zipper pocket in the back, where I can keep my little ruler (neat underlines under dates and list titles being my only concession to neatness in my notebooks).

*****
The notebook is just right, and my notes are very neat and well-organized, as they always are during the three- to four-day notebook honeymoon period. The inside of the notebook will soon be a jumble of scribble, comprehensible only to me. And that’s the way I like it. And now it’s time to cook dinner. I have a new perfect-for-weeknights chicken recipe that looks very promising. If it’s anywhere near as good as the meatballs, then maybe I’ll have to use one of the little notebook sections for recipes. Maybe I like to cook now. I have a new notebook, so anything is possible, anything at all.

Spectator

It's Friday night and I'm in Section 108 at Nationals Park, watching the Nats facing the Atlanta Braves. The Braves are running away with the National League East, but the Nats are playing really well, too. It should be a good game.

We're in almost the same section where we sat last time but it's 20 degrees cooler. In fact it's 20 degrees cooler than it was yesterday, too. I'm wearing long sleeves and I'm still a little cold. September. Go figure.

*****
It's the top of the third inning now, with no score. The Braves are a patient team. They know how to work a count. They're in no rush.

Baseball games are much more bright and colorful than they were when I was young. The Jumbotrons and scoreboards and advertisements are a visual riot, and the sensory overload doesn’t end there. Counting walk-up songs (Juan Soto’s are the best) and between-inning music and the national anthem, I've heard at least 30 different songs tonight. That doesn't include the organ music, which used to be the only music a person would hear at a baseball game. I like it. It's louder and more fun than it used to be.

There are ten different design elements on that scoreboard,
and that doesn't count the actual box score display, which is tracking more data than a NASA mission control center. 

It’s Saturday morning now, and the Braves beat the Nats 5-0. But the music was good, and after a cloudy day, the sky turned clear and inky dark blue with just a few clouds floating past the yellow-white harvest moon. And Teddy won the Presidents’ Race. He cheated, of course. Teddy only wins when he cheats. It was Friday the 13th, so Jason Voorhees joined the race, hockey mask and all, and dispatched George, Tom, and Abe, leaving Teddy the only contender. Teddy is my favorite. After the game, we walked along the Anacostia Riverwalk to our car, about ¾ of a mile from the ballpark. It was a good evening.

*****
I don’t spend many Saturday nights at the opera, but that’s what I did last night. With free tickets from a musician friend, I got to see the Maryland Lyric Opera perform Il Tabarro and Cavalleria Rusticana, two very different one-act Italian operas with a common ending--the husbands kill the men who slept with their wives.

The operas were performed concert-style, with the singers in recital dress rather than costumes, and no stage sets or props other than music stands (and very amusingly, a jacket used as a shroud--you had to be there).

Both of the operas are tragedies, but Il Tabarro has comedic elements and characters, including Tinca and Talpa the stevedores and Talpa’s wife, Frugola. Cavalleria Rusticana is more dramatic and intense; but Il Tabarro is ultimately sadder, because we know that Giorgetta’s infidelity is driven by grief at the loss of her baby. When her husband kills her lover, poor Giorgetta is left with nothing. A mother also loses her child in Cavelleria; in this case, he’s an adult child, murdered by his lover’s husband.

Super fun, right? But it really was. The English supertitles played on a screen high above the stage, so we could follow the story while listening to the glorious music; and the performances were amazing, both musically and dramatically. All of the singers were wonderful. Susan Bullock as Cavalleria’s Santuzza was heartbroken and desperate and when the beautiful Joowon Chae sang Lola’s first notes, it was all I could do not to shout “Whore! This is all your fault!” And when Il Tabarro’s Frugola, played by the amazing Allegra De Vita, sings that it’s better to be the boss in  a hovel than a servant in a castle, it sounds like a happily defiant rallying cry.

*****

It’s Monday now, 8:30 PM. I worked a longer-than-usual day, then attended a meeting at Rockville High School, and then came home, five minutes ago. I wish sometimes that I was the kind of person who could walk in after a long day and just stop working, but I’m not that kind of person. So here I am.

And hockey starts tonight! Yes, it’s 90 degrees outside again after Friday’s short preview of fall, and I wish I was still swimming; and yes, it’s only pre-season, but it’s HOCKEY! And I’m not watching it. My husband and younger son are toggling between Nats baseball, about which I care to some extent; and NFL football, about which I care not one tiny little bit. Fortunately, I’m here to help them re-adjust their priorities. In five minutes or so, we’ll be swinging to the sweet sounds of Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin.

*****
Tuesday, 9:05 PM. I’m watching “To Sir With Love,” a movie that I first saw when I was 14 or so. I read the book, too. It’s astonishingly old-fashioned now, but I still love it. I love the scene when the class shows up at their classmate’s mother’s funeral, as the camera pans back on the coal-stained East End brick rowhouses and the pale gray sky. Now I’m going to watch to the end so I can watch Sidney Poitier dance with Judy Geeson, and hear Lulu sing the title song. And that is a wrap on a few days of fandom. I think it’s time to read a book.

Shopping

We’re buying a car for my son today. His very old car’s last legs are wearing out, and it’s probably better for us to bite the bullet and hand over our savings for a new car than to keep sinking money into the old one.

My son is very excited, as well he should be. My husband and I grew up poor and I don't know what we find most amazing: that an 18-year-old will be pretty much handed a new(ish) car (he's contributing $1000), or that we are now the kind of people who can go out on a Sunday afternoon and buy our child a car. Amazing.

*****
Now we're test-driving; rather, he is test-driving, and I’m sitting in the back. He's a good driver, enough that the salesman complimented him. Getting into cars with strangers all day long must be the hardest thing about selling cars for a living.

*****
Car buying is much faster than it used to be. We walked in to Carmax about 2.5 hours ago, and now we have paperwork in hand, and we're just waiting for the staff to put the tags on the new car and to make it even cleaner than it already was. We bought a 2016 Nissan Rogue, black exterior and interior. It's very nice looking. My son loves it and if he's happy, then I'm happy.

He looks happy, doesn't he? 

*****
That was Sunday, and today is Monday. It’s actually my birthday. It feels like a slightly more festive than normal regular day. And that’s pretty good.

I went clothes-shopping on Saturday, and I bought some things. There are fashion moments when the prevailing look matches my aesthetic and my body type and my idea of how to live in clothes, and when those moments arise, I stock up. It might be too soon to tell, though, if this is really one of those moments. Because I’m going out to dinner soon, as nice middle-aged ladies tend to do on their birthdays; and I just perused my very well-stocked closet, but I can’t find anything to wear. It’s partly a weather thing. I’m terrible at the dreaded “transitional” seasons, when you have to balance the appropriate seasonal mood with the actual temperature. But it’s partly because I’m very bad at shopping and I keep buying the wrong things. I should stick with handbags.

Most of my clothes come from one store. I had a bad experience there on Saturday and instead of just letting it go, I told the company’s customer service department that I’d never shop there again. I know. I’m ridiculous. In my defense, it was a really bad experience and it’s their fault and they were utterly indifferent to my very valid concerns. But now I’m committed to this thing and I have to either find a new store, or find a way to shop there without them ever finding out. All cash, I suppose. Completely ridiculous, that's what I am. Fortunately, I have lots of company in the rest of the entire human race.

*****
It was a good birthday. I'm a year older. That’s better, as they say, than the alternative

Meanwhile it's going to be hot for another week or so, and the transitional clothing dilemma persists. The store that so upset me has my favorite kind of mid-calf length print rayon skirts because it’s apparently 1995 again. Those skirts will be just the thing to carry me through the warm days of the final transition from summer to fall. So I borrowed my husband’s Visa, set up a new online account with the store, and had the skirts shipped to my mother-in-law’s house. I get my skirts, and my boycott continues, as far as they know. Everyone wins.

I used to think that car-shopping was difficult, It’s nothing compared to buying a skirt.

Senioritis

If you're a person who has a hard time accepting that summer is over, then one Montgomery County Public Schools Back to School Night will yank you right back to reality. Kick and scream if you want to but you are strapped onto a freight train of lunches and homework and sports and concerts and meetings, and there are no stops between here and June.

Yes, it's BTS night at Rockville High School and I'm sitting in a stairwell waiting for the festivities to begin. Four years of Rockville BTS nights taught me that arriving early enough to get a parking spot near the exit is key, so I arrived at 6. I joined the Booster Club and the PTSA, so I'm $60 poorer but rich in the knowledge that I am a responsible member of the Rockville High School community.

It's 6:30 now so class rotations will begin soon. I don't need a map and I don't need directions from the student guides and I don't need to visit the counseling office. I'm an alumni parent so I know these ropes. I'll walk the halls when the bell rings, adding considerably to my step count for today; and I'll meet my son's teachers (several of whom I already know). Then I will skip out midway through 8th period and run to my car, and I'll be on Baltimore Road before the rest of the suckers even get out of the building. Freshmen. SMH.

Uptown problems

It’s the next-to-last Friday in August and autumn is coming, whether I want it or not, and I don’t. I worked from home today, the first day in a week that the daytime temperatures fell below 90, and I listened as the rain pounded my roof, drops falling faster than my hands move on the keyboard (and they move pretty fast). My younger son’s high school orientation is next Thursday and then school starts on the day after Labor Day. We still have a few days of summer to cling to but it’s slipping away.

*****
I try to swim almost every day in the summer, but during the last few days of August, swimming becomes an act driven by desperation. If it’s August 23, as it is today; and I have a choice between swimming and almost anything else in life, then I will swim because time is running out. Yes, I can swim indoors all year round if I want to, but it’s not the same. It’s not even close.

It rained all day so I never did get a chance to swim, but tomorrow is another day.

*****
I was right about tomorrow, which is now today and is in fact another day, but completely different from yesterday. It’s Saturday, bright and sunny and at least 20 degrees cooler than it was two days ago. I’m still going to swim, because the water will still be warm and because I’d swim even if it wasn’t.

It’s Saturday, so I really have no idea what’s going on in the world. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that there’s no way to consult any news source without violating my weekend Trump embargo, so whatever is happening on the world stage right now will have to wait until Monday.

WIth current events off limits for now, I’m continuing to read Postwar. Normally, I finish a book in a few days, but this one is quite long. One of the things that this book has made me think about is how many of the things that we think of as history or tradition or culture are incredibly fleeting and short-lived. Things change so much in the course of a hundred years; and while a hundred years is a long time in one sense, it’s just a single human lifespan, give or take. My great-grandmother lived to age 106. My grandmother will be 96 in December. American constitutional democracy has been around for over 200 years, but what we think of as the American way of life is a product of the last 70 years. Almost everything is temporary. Practically nothing lasts forever.

*****
Except winter. Winter lasts forever. Is it too early to start complaining about winter when it’s still August (Sunday, August 25 to be exact) and it’s sunny and bright with temperatures in the low 70s?

No. It is not too early at all. August high temperatures in the low 70s are the slippery slope (Trump didn’t invent that expression) to autumn, which is the even steeper slippery slope to six months of winter. Yesterday, the pool water was still almost warm and I had a lovely swim with a short sharp shock of cold air at the end. Last night the temperatures dropped
into the 50s, and today is the kind of day that pumpkin spice latte drinkers dream about all summer long: cool, breezy, with low humidity--the worst kind of day for outdoor swimming.

You know what? It’ll be bracing.

*****
I’ll get there eventually. Meanwhile, my son and I are watching “Any Given Sunday,” a movie that I haven’t seen or thought about for a long time. I like this movie, probably more than any other Oliver Stone movie. My husband disliked it because of the fictionalized football league and teams--he thought that Stone should have paid for licensing rights to use real NFL teams. I disagree. I think that the stylized versions of NFL uniforms and the predator team names lay bare what professional football really is, without the veneer of family and inclusiveness that the NFL is always trying to impose on it. Professional football and the whole one-percent corporate edifice that supports it is a simple matter of strong vs. weak; and strong always wins.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about right now. I feel for John C. McGinley’s character, the blowhard broadcaster. There’s a lot of pressure in talking or writing for a living. You have to churn out a lot of words in a day, and not all of them are going to be good. Not all of them are even going to make any sense.

*****
It’s Monday now and I’m all caught up on current events. And even though it’s still August, it stayed in the 60s all day today. It was cloudy when I got home, with a breeze that made it downright chilly. The water was cold yesterday (I did finally swim) and I knew it would be much worse today and I didn’t have the heart to get into a cold dank pool on an October-looking night. It feels like summer is a rug that’s been yanked out from under me without so much as a by-your-leave. I went for a walk instead. It was fine.

*****
It’s Tuesday, so there's less than a week left of real summer. It was a few degrees warmer outside today; still unseasonably cool and overcast, but the air was still and soft and humid and the sun was trying to break through the heavy cloud cover. I came home from work and grocery shopping, and my whole body yearned for a swim. The air was just warm enough and really, i thought, how cold can the water have gotten in just two days.

It was freezing cold and glorious. I swam laps and wrapped myself in a towel and went on my way rejoicing, having snatched summer from the jaws of winter. It’s not over yet.

*****
OK, so maybe it’s over. It’s Wednesday night, 8 PM, and I’m working on a proposal (well, I was until a minute ago, and I will again in another minute) and tomorrow morning, I’ll take my younger son to his high school orientation. It’s a half-day, and then he’s off on Friday and for the rest of the weekend until school starts in earnest next Tuesday. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--the moment I have to drop a child off in front of a school building in the morning, and then wade through the pile of paperwork that will come home with him in the afternoon is the moment that summer is pretty much over.

I almost forgot to write something today because proposal deadlines wait for no one. This probably isn’t how I should be spending my time right now, but writing (like swimming) is one of only many things that I’m compulsive about. A 4 pm thunderstorm curtailed my swimming plans, which is just as well because I have a proposal to write. Hasta manana.

*****
And now it’s manana, meaning Thursday. I’m knee-deep in proposals, but that’s a big improvement over yesterday, when I was neck-deep. And speaking of deep, I also got to swim again today. The pool was even colder than it was on Tuesday, and I impressed myself by slipping right into the water without a moment’s hesitation. I didn’t have much time, and every minute I spent trying to steel myself to the cold was a minute that I wouldn’t have have been swimming, on one of the very last swimming days of the summer. Four days to go and I plan to immerse myself in that icy water on every single one of them.

*****
“I got uptown problems, and they’re not really problems at all.”

Brad Pitt’s character says this to his daughter in “Moneyball,” a movie that my 14-year-old son and I will watch any time it’s on. It was on last night, so of course, we watched part of it.  It’s Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, and I’m almost finished working, and I’m gearing up for the three-day celebration (for other people) and period of mourning (for me) that is the official end of summer. Yes, I know that summer doesn’t really end for three weeks, but Labor Day is the end of summer for those of us who define summer as no school, no bedtime, and no day complete without at least a short swim. It’s my least favorite weekend of the year, but that’s an uptown problem, isn’t it? There are lots of good things about fall if you don’t count pumpkin spice latte, and as soon as I finish complaining about the end of summer, I’ll figure out what those good things might be.

*****
It’s Labor Day now. I’m writing something else so I worked on that on Saturday and Sunday. And now I’m back to lamenting the end of summer. And I’m doing other things, too. I mean, I don’t sit around and bitch all day long. That you know of.

Labor Day is a combination holiday and prep day. Now that everyone is back to school again, I need to get things ready. Lunches and breakfast and dinner and clothes and supplies and stuff. They’re actually old enough to do all of that themselves. And they do all of it themselves. It’s just that I feel that I still need to oversee and supervise and coordinate. I like being needed.

It’s 11:50 AM now. The pool opens in ten minutes, so I’m going to do some stuff, and then I’m going to do some more stuff, and then I”m going to get out of the house and stay out of the house until 9 PM. And then tomorrow, it’s officially fall. And that’s not the best thing, but it’s not the worst thing. It’s an uptown problem, and that’s not a problem at all.

Terrible beauty

As I mentioned here, I read Say Nothing this summer. As I also mentioned to all three of you who eagerly await my critical opinion, I wrote a whole post about it. So here it is.

*****
I went to Ireland in March. In one of the many supreme ironies that make up my life, I cannot stop thinking about the place that I had absolutely no desire to visit in the first place. Like many Irish-Americans, I grew up with sentimental Irish-Catholic parents who overdid St. Patrick’s Day and hung Cead Mile Failte signs on the front door and had 26+6=1 bumper stickers on their cars. My mother still has that bumper sticker on her car. By the time I reached my twenties, I had developed a hard shell of dismissive cynicism about what I thought of as my so-called Irish roots. So, no, I didn’t want to go to Ireland; and I really didn’t want to go to Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day, which is what we did. And then when I finally went, I loved the place and felt more at home there than in any place I’ve ever been. And I miss it and I can’t wait to go back. Oh, the irony.

So anyway, I have been reading more about Ireland, north and south, in sort of a piecemeal, whatever-looks-interesting way. In addition to being about Ireland, Say Nothing is also a critical-mass kind of book--I kept hearing about it until there was no longer any way to avoid it.

The author, Patrick Radden Keefe (who is American) appeared on the Chris Hayes show on MSNBC. I have been avoiding political media, especially TV, but one night as critical mass for this book was still building, I flipped past MSNBC only to flip right back when I noticed the words “Author of Say Nothing” on the lower third of the screen. Keefe was Hayes’s guest.

I had to turn the show off after just a few minutes of listening to these two American thought leaders recoiling in horror at the primitive Irish-Catholic way of life in which families simply accept as many children as they’re given without resort to contraception or other forms of family planning, as Jean McConville and her family apparently did. I don’t criticize anyone who wants to limit their family size. I have only two children and sometimes they’re two more than I can handle. And I would not want to live in Divis Flats or anything like it. But the materialistic worldview that believes that too many children and not enough comfort leads inevitably to misery is just so boring and tiresome.

But I digress. You should be used to that.

*****

If you had any doubt that race is a factor in how the world judges wrongdoing, then any history of the IRA should make you reconsider. If like me, you grew up in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in a northeastern city of the United States - - Philadelphia in my case, but New York or Providence or (of course) Boston will do just as well - - then perhaps you had parents or grandparents who had a "yes but…" attitude toward the IRA. "Aren't they terrorists?" you might have asked. "Yes but…" insert excuse about religious persecution and civil rights.

And they had a point of course, to the extent that stops short of murder. Catholics in Northern Ireland endured ridiculous discrimination and persecution at the hands of the Protestant majority, who were empowered and enabled by the British. They had every right to be outraged. But the same Americans who despise Islamic terrorists excuse the IRA terrorists, who were just as murderous and just as fanatical, but also white and poetic and wryly funny and Aran sweater-clad and so just romantic enough that Irish-Americans could excuse or at least understand their cruelty and violence. If only al-Qaeda terrorists quoted Yeats or Joyce. If only ISIS looked good in cable knit.

*****
Extreme dedication to a political cause can overcome a person’s humanity. In communist countries, children were taught to betray their families in loyalty to the state. In the United States in 2019, people end friendships or stop speaking to parents and siblings who support Trump (or who don’t). In Northern Ireland in 1972, a mother of ten, a recent widow, was abducted from her home in front of her children, driven to a secret location, and then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave, because she was believed to have betrayed the IRA. Her body was found 30 years later. Her children grew up not knowing what had happened to her, wondering if she had disappeared, wondering if they’d ever see her alive again. What cause justifies a heartless cold-blooded murder without even the comfort of the dead body to bury and give certainty of the loved one’s death? How do the murderers live with the dreadful suffering of 10 orphaned children?

Gerry Adams is the main villain of Say Nothing, though not the only one. The book firmly dismisses Adams' claim that he was never an IRA member, and also partially blames him for the deaths of six of the 1981 hunger strikers. It also confirms Brendan Hughes' and Dolours Price's assertion that Adams alone ordered the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Hughes and Price are treated with more understanding but their moral responsibility for the murder (and several other murders) is also clear. Other than Jean McConville and her poor children, Hughes is the saddest figure in the book. To his death, he defended the decision to kill McConville. He claimed to be certain that she was an informer, and like many other IRA soldiers, he believed that death was the only reasonable punishment for informers.

Apparently, no evidence exists that would prove that Jean McConville was an informer; and the circumstantial evidence--she was a widowed mother of 10 children, poorly educated, overwhelmed, not well-connected, not political--seems to suggest strongly that she wasn't. Brendan Hughes suffered from PTSD and alcoholism and remained a believer in the republican cause until he died. Maybe he really believed that Jean McConville was an informer and that she deserved to die. Or maybe he had to convince himself that she was, in order to live with the guilt of murdering her and leaving her 10 children to the tender mercies of the Northern Irish social welfare system.

Dolours Price was more complicated. Like Hughes, she rejected the Good Friday Agreement and condemned Gerry Adams and the other establishment figures who agreed to abandon the armed struggle. But she was motivated by something other than politics, too. She was proud of the hunger strike; proud of her determination and endurance. Keefe writes that Price “retained a ferocious pride in her own headlong personal history. When an American graduate student named Tara Keenan visited her in 2003, Price said, ‘I would like to think that what I did was to illustrate to the world the ability of any regular human being to push themselves to the limits and beyond, physically and mentally, because of some deeply felt belief.’”

In another life, Dolours Price might have been a great athlete or scholar or something else that requires extreme dedication and self-discipline. Of course, by participating in the murder of the widowed mother of ten children, she also pushed herself past the limits of human compassion and decency. The hunger strike ruined her body, and the flashbacks from the murders she committed ruined her mind and she died alone, addicted to drugs and alcohol. Maybe she found peace and reconciliation with God before she died. Maybe Brendan Hughes did, too. I hope so.

*****

"Now and in time to be
Wherever green is worn
All changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born."

(W. B. Yeats, “Easter 1916”)

Yeats was an idiot, for lots of reasons other than this stupid poem. I can’t think about what happened to Jean McConville, nor the sad and broken-down later lives and deaths of Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes and reconcile the words “terrible” and “beauty.” There was no beauty in Jean McConville’s murder, no beauty in the abuse that her orphaned children endured, no beauty in the self-destruction of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price and so many others who sacrificed their humanity to the Republican cause. It was only terrible. Terrible and a waste and not noble at all.

I have only been to Ireland once, 21 years after the Good Friday agreement. The country that I became acquainted with is peaceful and prosperous and happy, and that’s the only experience I have of Ireland. It's hard for me to reconcile the green and happy place that I loved at first sight with the dark maze of menace and secrets and violence and fear that was Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

There are grown people on both sides of the border who don't remember the Troubles, who only really know Ireland as it is now. But they have parents and grandparents who do remember the past, and who know that it could happen again. It’s happening again already.

*****
I finally finished the book. I was so absorbed in the story that it was hard to pull myself back to Maryland in 2019. And I found myself as angry with Gerry Adams as Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes were and more sympathetic toward Price and Hughes than any reasonable person should have been. Another day or so and I'd probably have burned a Union Jack and bought a 26+6=1 bumper sticker.

This is probably why I resisted going to Ireland for so long. There was always the danger that I would get attached. There was always the possibility that I'd go native.

*****
After I finished Say Nothing, I read Can You Ever Forgive Me? I’ll write about that later. Then I read Thatcher, a biography of one of the IRA’s  greatest nemeses.

Last week, I had to take a selfie. I was the employee of the week at my job (I went from employee of the year to employee of the week--how the mighty have fallen) and HR wanted to post a picture of me on the company social media accounts. I was working from home and no one else was around to take a picture of me, so I had to do it myself. It was a mess. I took one really, really good one--my hair looked amazing, and the light must have been just right because my face was clear and unlined and glowing. I could have passed for 35 in that picture. Unfortunately, I took it in front of the bathroom door, and I didn’t want to send a picture that had a toilet as a backdrop. So I took another one from another angle, and it was horrifying. I looked like Barbara Bush, God rest her soul.

*****

I ended up finding a picture of myself from 2018 that was not terribly flattering, but not hideous either. It kind of looked like I actually look. It was as close to the truth as a picture can get, And somewhere in between Margaret Thatcher and Dolours Price, there might be something close to the truth about the Northern Ireland and the Troubles.. I won’t actually get to that truth by reading two books, but it’s a start. One question that anyone who has ever studied Northern Ireland must ask is who can ever understand anything, ever? Who but God can ever know the whole truth?

Waiting for the hammer to fall

It’s Friday night, the first Friday night in months when I haven’t had anything to do, so I’m sitting on my couch and watching “In the Name of the Father,” a movie that I really can’t believe that I”ve never seen before. Just another night of The Troubles, here in Silver Spring, Maryland in 2019. Catch yourself on.

Did I mention before that I have too many handbags? I think I did. Well I also have too many products. Too many creams and lotions and serums and lotions and stupid too many lipsticks. Stupid. So now I have a project. I’m going to use everything up. I finished one lipstick today, and I’m at the very end of a container of facial cleanser. It’s very satisfying to dispose of the empty containers. It’s like crossing something off a list, and I do love to cross things off a list.

It’s 9 PM now. The movie’s over, and that’s enough for today, because the kitchen isn’t going to compulsively clean itself. It won’t take long. It’s not that dirty.

*****
So now it's Saturday and I'm at Nationals Park, waiting for the Nats game to begin. It's my first Nats game of the season. They're playing the Brewers. Game time in 35 minutes or so.

We're in section 109, just a few rows back from the field, on the shady side of the stadium. They're really good seats. I was a Phillies fan when I was young, and I used to dream about the day when I'd be able to afford seats like these. If this was a Phillies game circa 1984 or so, I'd be sitting in the 400 level of Veterans' Stadium. And we wouldn't be playing the Brewers because in those days (I love being old enough to say or write that without sounding ridiculous) the only inter-league play was during the World Series. But of course, this isn't an inter-league game anyway, because the Brewers are National League now. Time marches resolutely on.

*****
It's nice being here early. It's a bobblehead night and my husband insists that we arrive early on bobblehead nights. They might run out. So we have our Patrick Corbin bobbleheads, our drinks, and plenty of legroom. My 14-year-old son is standing at the rail, watching the pregame warm-up. He said that he wants to use his kid advantage to catch a player's eye and maybe get a ball. He's small for his age. But he's getting taller and he'll be 15 soon. Like most things, the kid advantage does not last forever. One day you're a cute little kid and the next day you're just another punk-ass teenager. The march of time continues.

*****
Sunday afternoon. I think I mentioned once before that when I go to a baseball game, it tends to be an eventful one. Last night was no exception. First of all, it was extraordinarily hot, even in the evening, even on the shady side of the stadium. I think I suffered a little bit of heatstroke, and I’m pretty heat-proof. The players must have really suffered, especially since the game went for 14 innings (we left after 9). The Nats lost 15-14. Not only was it a marathon game, but a fan sitting four rows in front of us got beaned by a foul ball. Rumor has it that his jaw is broken. I can’t find a story about it online because there have been so many foul ball vs. fan incidents at Nats Park this year that this one seems to have fallen off the radar. But it happened. I saw it and heard it.

We listened to more of the game on the way home, and then watched the end on TV, well after midnight. The Nats literally ran out of relief pitchers (and they don’t have that many to begin with). With a temperature of 85 degrees at midnight, it was a war of attrition more than anything else. That might be my last baseball game this year. It’s almost hockey season.

In other news, Operation Use it Up proceeds apace. Do you know how long it takes to use up a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker? Do you have any idea why a middle-aged lady even has a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker? I have two. I don’t know why. I don’t remember acquiring these articles, but there they are and I’m going to use them up if it’s the last thing I do. It might be the last thing I do.

*****
Monday

“What the hell are we fighting for?
Ah, just surrender and it won't hurt at all
You just got time to say your prayers
Yeah, while you're waiting for the hammer to, hammer to fall.”

--Queen, “Hammer to Fall”

It’s 8:45. I just cleaned up dinner. I made pork chops in orange juice, which I haven’t made since 2014. It wasn’t very good. I suppose this is why I haven’t made it for five years. Now I’m watching the end of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I love Queen. God rest Freddie Mercury’s soul.

How did I know that I made pork chops and orange juice in 2014? I’m glad you asked. It’s because I wrote about it, proving (if the entire paragraph about a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker wasn’t proof enough) that there’s no bit of ephemera that’s too trifling for me to document.

I’m about a quarter of the way through Postwar, and it’s instructive. I’m pretty solid on 20th century Europe, so I’m not learning anything new in terms of bare facts. But the blinding-speed cataclysm and upheaval that was Europe from 1914 to 1989 offers useful perspective for those of us who are shocked by how much American political life has changed in just the last three years. It’s helpful and bracingly terrifying to remember that things might well just be getting started; and that a year from now, 2019 might be the good old days.

I’m fun to be around, am I not?

*****
So now it’s Tuesday, one day later; and, this happened. Did I not predict this? Did I not tell you all that something like this was going to happen? Of course, I was thinking that it would happen in the next year or so, not the next 24 hours, but wasn’t that the point? “Blinding speed” was the phrase I used, in fact.

But that’s enough about the march of history. Let’s talk about the half-life of a Bonne Bell Lipsmacker. I’m pretty sure that this one Lipsmacker will take longer to finish than the Conte government was in power. It might outlast NATO and the entire postwar structure of Western Europe. It’s nice to know that some things were made to last. Did I mention that it’s a Starburst-flavored Lipsmacker? Does anyone have any insight whatsoever into why a woman who should be planning for her old age would buy such a thing? What was I thinking? And why do Italian people have all the luck? No heads of government are resigning on this side of the Atlantic, that’s for sure. Non è giusto.

*****
It’s Wednesday now and I haven’t seen or heard news all day. I’m going to assume for purposes of this blog that Western Europe is still standing and that no other world governments have fallen since yesterday.

Today I went with my older son to his college orientation. My younger son’s high school orientation is next week. Work is getting busy again, and the summer is drawing to an end. The last few weeks--quiet mornings, slow-paced workdays, evening swims, movies on the couch with my family, reading in bed--have been almost like a vacation. I wish it could last a little longer, but nothing lasts forever, not even a lip balm, and especially not summer.

Bookbag

I've been feeling the call of a new tote bag. If you hang around here at all, then you know that this is the last thing I need in the world, so I'm going to stop shopping for a few minutes and catch up on book reviews. I've been reading a lot.

*****
It's not that I need a bag, it's just that the bags that I have don't exactly fulfill all of my bag requirements. Some are too big, and some are too small. My current favorite work bag is almost big enough, but not quite; and it's an open top bag, with no zipper or closure at all. So I can fit a lot in there but then everyone can see everything I'm carrying. It's not ideal. And stuff falls out, too.

I guess I could carry less stuff.

Ridiculous. I'm not here to spout nonsense.

*****
One thing that I don't tend to carry around is books, because I read on a Kindle. I carry the Kindle just about everywhere, because you never know when you'll have a spare few minutes and it's always best to have something to read that has nothing to do with Donald Trump. But the Kindle doesn't take up very much space so it alone would not and could not justify purchase of a new bag of any sort.

*****
OK, so I just bought a tote bag. I can always return it. It might be the Holy Grail of tote bags and if I hadn't bought it, I'd never know, now would I? I'll report back later.

*****
Back to the books. Here are some short reviews of some recently read books:

Goodbye Mr. Chips, James Hilton. Did you read Lost Horizon when you were in high school? I did. I think I liked it, but my memory isn't what it was and I don't remember much about it other than Shangri-La. Attempts to create perfection on earth are always interesting fodder for literature, since they always end in disaster. Relentless tote bag hunt aside, however, this post isn't about perfection-seeking. It's about books. I loved Goodbye, Mr. Chips. I read it in the car on the way to the beach (it's very short, less than 100 pages), and the short break from work was the perfect time to think about how a person can accomplish the thing that they were put on Earth to accomplish, which is what this book is about more than anything else. A lovely book.

Frances and Bernard, Carlene Bauer. I liked this, though I was prepared and fully expecting to hate it. It's a true epistolary novel, 100 percent letters, mostly between the two title characters; and although I didn't accept the premise (the book was supposedly inspired by the friendship between Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell) for a hot second, I still liked the characters and the writing and the story very much. Bauer imagines Frances Reardon, the O'Connor character, as a working-class Philadelphian rather than a landowning southerner; but the Robert Lowell character is very much like I imagine the real Lowell probably was. The very idea that Flannery O'Connor would sleep with Robert Lowell or anyone else outside the confines of marriage is ridiculous (not offensive, just ridiculous). It's not clear why Bauer chose to relocate the Flannery character from Georgia to Philadelphia but not the Lowell character who was a Harvard-educated New Englander in the book as in real life. But the letters are beautiful and the story is compelling as long as you don't try to sustain any belief in the O'Connor-Lowell idea. I liked this well enough that I'm going to read Bauer's memoir, Not that Kind of Girl (a very popular memoir title, by the way).

*****
I had second thoughts about the first tote bag, so I bought a second tote bag. I'm not 100 percent sure about either of them, really. Print vs. solid, large vs. really large--so much to think about. At least one will go back, and possibly both of them.

*****
Back to the books.

Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe. My number one book of 2019 so far, in a year that includes Graham Greene, Joan Didion, and C.S. Lewis. I wrote a whole separate post on this, which I'll publish soon. It's missing something (the post, not the book). I'll figure it out.

Thatcher, Jacob Bannister. Believe it or not, this showed up in my daily cheap books newsletter the very day that I finished Say Nothing, so I read a biography of Margaret Thatcher right after a book about the IRA. This was very short and superficial, running from the IRA hunger strikes to the Falklands war to the coal miners' strike to the fall of the Berlin Wall in just a few quick chapters. I didn't learn much about Margaret Thatcher that I didn't already know, except that she started her career as a chemist. That was something new.

*****

Tote bag #1 arrived today. It's lovely and well-designed, and appears to be very durable. It's also absurdly too large. I could carry a microwave oven in that bag, with room left over for the popcorn. Ridiculous. So now it's a decision between tote bag #2, or returning to the drawing board. I do earnestly hope that tote bag #2 will work. I don't think I have the mental capacity to start this whole process over again.

Maybe I should carry less stuff.

*****
I'll Tell You in Person, Chloe Caldwell.  This reminded me a little bit of Domenica Ruta's With or Without You, though Caldwell is much more matter-of-fact and less dramatic about her drug use and other high-risk behavior. That's neither praise nor criticism. I liked this book better than I expected to. Caldwell seems to be writing to try to shock women her mother's age, but she comes across as droll and rather sweet, not bratty and self-important. I'll watch Ms. Caldwell's career with considerable interest. If I ever run into her, I'll tell her to be more careful. That way, she'll know that she rattled at least one middle-aged lady.

*****
Tote bag # 2 arrived today. I think it's the one. It has a zipper, and everything fits--computer, notebooks, lunch, pencil case, cosmetic case, water bottle, empty coffee cup, and even an umbrella if I need one. It's a nice shade of pink that might show dirt too easily, but I can wash it; and I work in a Federal government office, not a coal mine, so how dirty is it going to get?. Mission accomplished.

*****
South and West, Joan Didion.  I read this a while ago, and I don't remember a darn thing about it, except a part where Didion eats a grilled cheese sandwich. I haven't had a grilled cheese sandwich in years.

Educated, Tara Westover. This is another one that I read a few months ago, and I remember almost everything about it. It's an extraordinary story. I heard about it from my son (well, I heard about it from the entire world, but my son urged me to read it), so I knew the basic outline going in: Young girl grows up off the grid in a fundamentalist quasi-Mormon family with no birth certificate, Social Security number, or papers of any kind, never enters a classroom until age 17, and ends up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. There's so much more to the story than that, so much that's unexpected, and Tara Westover's writing is beautiful, very stark and spare but vivid. Very highly recommended.

*****
Day 1 carrying the new tote bag. The bag fell off my car seat, as they do, and nothing fell out because everything was securely zipped inside. The red and white striped lining is cheerful and pretty, a nice contrast with the pink. And it's comfortable to carry, even at full capacity. Altogether a good purchase.

There it is. It's bigger than it looks. 

*****
Right now, I'm reading a very long history of postwar Europe, aptly titled Postwar. It's very good and very readable but it'll take me a few weeks to finish. I'll probably alternate between a chapter or two of Postwar and another shorter book. I have about ten in my queue right now. An embarrassment of riches. If only I had an embarrassment of time. Does that even make sense? You know what I mean.

20-20, more or less

I don't really mind returning to work from vacation, though I do hate getting up on the first morning. I'm an early riser, but "rising" and "leaving the house" are two different things. One of my favorite things about vacation is that no matter how early you rise, you can take as long as you like to actually leave the house. But with that part out of the way, the re-entry into daily working life isn't bad at all. I have to admit that a few times during the morning, I found myself thinking about what I would have been doing at the same time last week, but by 2:30 or so, I was caught up on emails and fully abreast of developments that occurred during my absence and ready to just get back to work.

Normally, my vacation would just be getting started this week. Various family schedule conflicts made it necessary to go a week earlier than I normally do. This means that we have just about a month of summer remaining. It still feels like the back stretch, though. It's 7:40 PM as I write this and although it's still light out, it's not middle-of-the-day, sun-is-shining light out. It's get out while you can before twilight falls and the bats start swirling light out. Two entirely different things. 

Do bats really swirl? I don't know. Whatever they do, I'd prefer not to see it or hear it.

My son just called to let me know that the pool just reopened after thunder had forced it to close for 30 minutes, so I'm going to take advantage of the waning daylight and the warm water and end my day with a swim. I should get home just as the bats begin to swirl, if that's the right word for what bats do.

*****
It's Tuesday now, 6:17 PM. My plan was to swim as soon as I got home from work, and then cook dinner. But thunder forced me to alter my plans once again. I did some housework and prepped some vegetables and then I'll cook the food and hope that the thunder will stop so I can swim at 7 or so.

I'm watching local news right now, hoping to see the weather forecast. I know that I can just look at the radar online, but I never know what I'm looking at. I can see the big green spots (why green?) but I can never tell where and how fast they're moving. I'm not a meteorologist.

The anchorwoman's hair is bothering me, because it's doing something that my hair does. It's lopsided. One side looks just fine and the other side is crazy. I don't think that this is intentional. The weather woman, on the other hand, has perfect hair, but it's so straight and shiny that she must have spent 45 minutes beating it down with a flatiron. Ain't nobody got that kind of time, least of all me. I need to cook some food. The thunderstorm warning ends in fifteen minutes.

*****
OK, so I'm not the only person who can't read radar because that thunderstorm went on for the whole evening and the pool remained closed. I found other things to do.

No swimming today, either. I had some errands to run after work. For some reason, the normal after-work errand-running traffic was far worse than it usually is. I'm lucky that I have a very easy commute to work. I'd be a hideous, quaking mass of road rage if I had to spend more than 20 minutes each way on the road.

I usually write in Google Docs, but I just started using Writer, the Internet Typewriter, just to see what it's like. It's fun but I don't think I'll use it regularly. It's a little too bare bones. I'm not a Luddite. But I do like the typewriter sounds and the custom pink background. Maybe I'll use both. Google probably owns too much of my life anyway.

Sorry Google! Forget I said that! I didn't mean it! Don't erase me!

*****

Me after five minutes in the car: GOOOOO! Oh my GOD! GO! AAAAAUGH!

Yeah, I know. It's bad.

*****
It's Thursday now, and a work meeting that I had particularly dreaded went very well, and I accomplished a lot today, and I also got to go swimming after work. The water sparkled, clear and softly cool without even a slight edge of too-coldness.

Later, I vacuumed, because it was vacuuming day; and around here, we vacuum on vacuuming day, no matter what. By "we," I of course mean "I." About midway through the house, I heard a sound that could only mean that something was stuck in the intake, but I kept vacuuming, because maybe if I ignore that noise, it'll go away. That approach always works, right?

After a few more seconds, I couldn't ignore the noise anymore, so I pulled the plug and pulled a piece of string out of the vacuum cleaner and then finished up. And everything was fine. The End.

*****
No, not really the end, because now my eyesight is getting a tiny bit blurrier every day and I'm pretty sure that I have cataracts. And I'm thinking that if I just keep doing what I'm doing and ignore the cataracts, they'll probably go away.

I dread medical appointments. I marvel at people who just go to the doctor every time something is wrong, just like filling up the gas tank or picking up a gallon of milk. My mother-in-law, who is quite healthy, is like that. If she's even a little bit sick, she calls the doctor. My mother, on the other hand, won't go to a doctor unless she's bleeding from her eye sockets. That used to be my joke, anyway, until I just now pointed out to myself that I am walking around with what are very likely cataracts, and I'm doing absolutely zero about it. I hope I don't start bleeding from my eyes sockets. Then I'll probably have to go to the doctor.

*****

It's Friday night. I still haven't called the doctor, but I also didn't start bleeding from my eye sockets. I can see well enough to write, so as far as I'm concerned, it's not broke, and I ain't gonna fix it. 

I worked in the office today rather than from home as I normally do on Friday. Our team spent the day gathered around a single conference table, working and talking but mostly talking. After work, I went to my three-year-old niece's birthday party; and from there, to a going-away party for a neighborhood kid who is leaving for his LDS mission. I had just enough time to drop off my work bag at home and see that the house was not in order, but I had to leave it that way.

So maybe it was the whole day surrounded by people, or maybe it was the stress of leaving the house in disarray, but by 9:30, I was 100 percent done and I had to leave the party that minute and not one minute later. And so I did.

*****
It's Saturday and I just read over what I read last night and if spelling and punctuation are any indication (they are the only indication), then my claim that I could see well enough to write was quite false. In my defense, I was writing late at night, in the dark, on my phone, and with my contact lenses out. But still.

My eyes are just fine today, and I don't have a thing to do other than read and write and swim and clean my house. No parties, no errands, no road rage, and absolutely no doctor's appointments. It's almost like another vacation. 

All I ever wanted

It's Saturday, the first day of our biennial beach trip, and I'm in my car, heading north on I-95, about an hour north of Baltimore. Traffic is quite heavy, as it always is on Saturdays in July and August. We're not the only people trying to get the heck out of town.

A beach trip is different from a city vacation. We don't have any exploring to do this week because we know Avalon, NJ inside and out. We won't really see anything new. We'll swim in the Atlantic Ocean and ride our bikes and eat at our usual restaurants. I'll read a lot.

*****

An hour and a half later and we're finally on the right side of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Now we're really on vacation. Another hour or so and we’ll finally cross my favorite little bridge onto Seven Mile Island.

*****

Stone Harbor beach at 81st Street, 6:30 AM, Sunday July 28

Sunday of beach week is like a holiday. Everyone is happy, except maybe a handful of island residents who are sick of tourists. Too bad for them. I'm smelling saltwater and Coppertone right now, and I'm brushing a fine coating of sand off my skin. It's blazing hot in the sun but it's cool and shady under the umbrella.

I was just in the middle of a conversation with my 18-year-old son, when he suddenly yelled "ice cream man!" and then took off running. We're close to the water and the tide might force us to shift the whole operation a few feet back.

And it did, very abruptly. We were all under our respective umbrellas, chatting with our assorted children, when a rush of saltwater soaked our towels and bags, with another wave hitting just as we pulled up stakes to move. We'll plan better tomorrow. For today, we cut the beach day short and split up, some of us to swim at the pool, some to ride bikes, and a few more who decided to take naps.

*****
So that’s a lot of people, you might be thinking, and you would not be wrong. When we take city vacations, it’s just my immediate family--husband and two sons, now teenagers. But beach week is come one, come all. Right now, in three separate locations within a five-block radius, we are on vacation with two sisters (one mine and one his), two brothers-in-law, three nephews, and one niece. My mother will arrive later today and will split up her time between my house and my sister’s.

It’s exhausting being the one person who has a connection with every single other person here. My phone, as they say on the Internet, blows up every morning and every evening as both sides of the family check to see what time we’re planning to make camp on the beach, and what time we’re going to have dinner and what that dinner will consist of. I’m popular.

*****
Avalon and Stone Harbor are two of the blondest and whitest places in the United States. There are maybe some sororities at universities in the southern states that contain more tan, beautiful blond girls than Avalon and Stone Harbor in July, but you would have a hard time finding any other place in the U.S. with a higher ratio of blond girls to members of every other demographic. And there are maybe some lacrosse teams or some country clubs where blond-haired, Sperry-wearing college-age boys represent a greater percentage of those present on any given day than 96th Street in Stone Harbor on a Saturday night in August,  but if those country clubs and lacrosse teams are not in Connecticut or the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, then they’re in Stone Harbor or Avalon.

We were working class, so Avalon was not my beach town when I was growing up. We went to Wildwood. From 2009 to 2012, I worked for a small government contractor that eventually shut down (and that sentence sums up my entire working life from 2001 to 2015, by the way). One day in the lunchroom,  I overheard a group of young interns discussing the then-new phenomenon that was MTV’s “Jersey Shore.” Shaking his head, one of the interns said “That show has to be scripted, because those people can’t possibly be real.” I laughed at his naivete. I knew that those people were real, and Wildwood, New Jersey is the reason why I knew that. So the contrast between my childhood beach experience of beaches crowded and noisy with competing transistor radios, and Greek luncheonettes and Italian-run pizzerias, and Morey’s Pier, and sleazy t-shirt and souvenir shops; and the preppy, moneyed gentility of Avalon and Stone Harbor is pretty stark.

Wealth and social status aside, though, it’s still New Jersey. People still listen to the radio on the beach; and just like in Philadelphia, if the radio isn’t tuned to a Phillies game, then it’s on a station that plays no music recorded after 1985 or so. There are at least 25 places where you can
get pizza that is actually worthy of the name. People who summer in $7 million beachfront estates in Avalon call soft ice cream “custard,” just like the people who save up all year to rent a third-floor apartment in Wildwood for a week. And there are t-shirt stores everywhere, even though they’re the kind of t-shirt stores that sell $95 hoodies and softly washed blue and gray t-shirts screen-printed with crossed paddles. The beach is the beach.

*****
Vacation privileges:

• Two showers a day. More if I feel like it. 
• Never wiping down the shower walls.
• Doing only the minimum housework necessary to avoid squalor.
• Not keeping up with the news. Trump probably tweeted something today but if he did, I don't know about it. 
• Answering all questions with the words "I don't know." 
• Answering all followup questions, which are almost always slight paraphrases of the original question, with the words "I really don't know." 
• Reading as much as I want to. 

I just finished reading something that I liked so I have to find something new to read. It's only Tuesday and I would like to find a novel that with last through the rest of the week.

The view from our deck, where I wrote most of this. 

*****
It's Wednesday and I'm reading The End of the Affair. It's only my second Graham Greene, after Our Man in Havana, which I loved. I'm not sure why I didn't start reading him a long time ago but I will make up for lost time now. This book won't last me through the rest of the week. I'll probably finish it tomorrow.

I always get tired midway through our beach vacation. I love the beach, but it’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of carrying back and forth. A lot of schlepping, because that’s a good onomatopoeic word. After a day on the beach and a sweaty trek home under the merciless sun, burdened by bags and towels and chairs and umbrellas, I’m as tired as a coal miner. By Wednesday, I feel like a camel, midway through a long and thirsty journey across a burning desert.

Then Thursday comes, and I realize that I’ll only wake up to the sound of seagulls three more times this year. Only two more full days at the beach; only two more days of bicycle runs to the corner grocery store to buy Jersey peaches and Jersey tomatoes and wine and ice cream and nothing else. Maybe a bagel.

*****

We spent today with friends from home who are staying in Wildwood, a few miles and a world away from Avalon. My friend told me that she feels conspicuous for her lack of tattoos and body piercings. They are new to the Jersey shore and chose Wildwood because of its proximity to Cape May. They’re having a good time, though, with three children who love the wide beach and the crazy colorful noisy boardwalk that smells like french fries and pizza and funnel cake.

Our friends arrived on our doorstep at 7:30 this morning. The male 60 percent of the family joined my brother-in-law’s annual crabbing trip, while the ladies stayed behind with me. We walked to the shops in Stone Harbor and had a smoothie and shopped at Hoy’s, and then we packed a picnic and headed to the beach. Despite cold water, we all enjoyed a swim, and then my friend’s delightful 10-year-old daughter entertained my six-year-old nephew and three-year-old niece, while their mother read her book, amazed at the normally shy three-year-old’s willingness to make a new friend. After an afternoon on the beach, the men rejoined us for a quick swim in the pool, and then we took turns taking five-minute showers before walking to my sister’s house (carrying the aforementioned wine and ice cream) for the annual crab feast that follows the annual crabbing trip. My friends returned to Wildwood at 9 PM or so, as the week’s first thunder began to rumble. It was a perfect day.


*****
It's Thursday now, and I woke this morning to cloudy gray skies. It wasn’t gloomy; it was actually rather nice. The ocean and the bay and the sky were all the same pearly color; perfect for seagull camouflage. Everything was quiet. A handful of other people were out on their bikes. We nodded to one another as we passed.

It’s a little past 10 now and the sun is out, so we’ll head to the beach soon. We’re hoping for warmer water. The water has gotten a little colder each day this week. Apparently, a rip current is to blame. That’s what the surfers say, anyway, and who am I to argue with them?

*****
And now it's Friday. This morning dawned just like yesterday, with pearl gray skies and slightly lighter pearl gray clouds and a pale yellow sun trying to break through but not quite succeeding.

I hadn't been shopping this week so my son and I rode our bikes to the shops. He and I have a long tradition of early morning excursions during vacation, while the rest of the family sleeps in. We didn't do this every day that time. He's almost 15 now and he likes to sleep. It was nice to have him back again. We found a little used book and print store where we bought a framed vintage postcard and beach tag. It sounds silly but it spoke to us. Then I bought a sweatshirt blanket and St. Christopher medals, and a fancy donut for my son.

As we browsed at Hoy's, my son's favorite childhood shopping destination, I noticed a lady in her 70s carrying a basket of toys and gifts. She perused a rack of beaded bracelets, pursing her lips and tilting her head to the side, trying to choose the best bracelets for her granddaughters or nieces. She finally made her selections and headed to the register to pay. I guessed that it was her last day, too.

*****
Saturday again, and we're on Route 47 North along with all of the other slightly sad people who are returning home from the shore.

I woke up early this morning, as I always do. After one last bike ride and one last walk on the beach, I came back to wake up the rest of the family to pack up our house. And now here we are, winding our way through the Pine Barrens to the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

It was a good shell-collecting week. This was the very last one.
It had to end sometime. 

The End of the Affair actually did hold out until Friday. It's even better than Our Man in Havana. I'll write about it later. I just started the next book in my queue, a history of postwar Europe that will probably take weeks to read. No more novels for now.

I almost wish that I hadn't put my feet in the water this morning. But I can still go swimming later today. Beach week is over but summer is not.