46. Favorite movies

Every so often, I google "long-term apartment rentals in ______"—typically some locality in Europe, because anywhere in Europe is surrounded by Europe, meaning travel opportunities; plus, I more or less can get by in some of the European languages. Tonight the winning city was Bruges, Belgium, where I found small but cozy flats in the €1,000 range. I could afford that. Why Bruges? Because it's a charming city, the climate might be not quite so hot in summer as southern France, I can speak some Flemish, and... why not? In any case, it's important to dream. 

That brought to mind the movie In Bruges, which is one of my all-time favorites. And that got me to thinking about other all-time favorites. So here's an off-the-cuff list, just because. (Not in any particular order. The numbers are meaningless, but I feel they're needed for "a list.")

And need I say: "all-time favorite" doesn't necessarily mean a masterpiece. It's just something that if I were stranded on a desert island (with electricity and a TV) I could watch over and over and over and, yes, over again. I have certainly done that already with all of these.

(I did have a little help, after I got to #9, from the iMDB list of the Top 250 movies. The rankings below reflect that list, which also explains the order of titles after #9. But then occasionally another favorite title, one not in the list, would hit me, disrupting the flow.)

1. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
2. Strictly Ballroom
3. Wings of Desire
4. Dirty Dancing
5. Looper
6. African Queen
7. The Music Man (I like to sing along)
8. The Matrix (#16)
9. Rashomon (#169)
10. The Usual Suspects (#48)
11. WALL-E (#56)
12. Singin' in the Rain (if only for the title-song scene) (#89)
13. North by Northwest (#105)
14. Die Hard (#115)
15. Mad Max: Fury Road (#184)
16. Beautiful Days 
17. The Great Escape (#159)
18. Bridge over the River Kwai (#174)
19. Fargo (#177)
20. The Sound of Music (again, to sing along) (#229)
21. The Wizard of Oz—of course (#234)
22. Back to the Future (#30)
23. Se7en (#20)
24. Casablanca (#45)
25. Diva

Btw, the iMDB rankings are calculated thus:

• The list is ranked by a formula which includes the number of ratings each movie received from users, and value of ratings received from regular users
• To be included on the list, a movie must receive ratings from at least 25000 users

As you may have noted, many of my favorites that came straight out of my head, not from a list, are not on said list. I'm not sure what that means. If anything. But it definitely makes me wonder what other favorite movies just aren't popping into my mind. I'll add any that do.

Book Report: King of Ashes

19. S. A. Cosby, King of Ashes (2025) (8/30/25)

This is the fourth book of Cosby's that I've read, and although it delivered in the dark-underbelly-of-criminal-activity realm—i.e., it's a decent thriller—I was really disappointed in the writing. The metaphors were laughable—so much so that I started keeping a running list. I know, most readers probably won't care about this, but every time one popped up I was thrown completely out of the story. Didn't Cosby have an editor? (Never mind a proofreader: the book is also riddled with sloppy errors.) Here is the list—which I started compiling only halfway through the book, so there are more examples:

The dusk-to-dawn security lights were just coming alive one by one like fireflies.
He plucked up his glass like it was a brittle rose.
Roman stared at the crowd over the roof of the car, breathing in the cool night like a locomotive.
Roman’s eyelids shot up like a pair of roller shades. . . . A gentle silence fell over them like a plush blanket.
In the distance he heard a train cutting through the dark like a scimitar.
Recognition bloomed in Roman’s mind like a moonflower unfurling its petals. Slowly at first, then as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.
That was the far horizon he had to focus on, even as bodies fell all around him like falling stars.
The window rolled down and a telephoto lens emerged like a viper from a hole in the ground.
He laughed. It was a bitter sound like the rattle of bones in a graveyard.
Wiz’s body dropped like a bag of wet laundry. . . . He fell face down, half in the freezer, half out, moaning like a wounded deer. . . . Eddie cut off his giggle like he’d shut off a water faucet. 
He was sealing the second bag and putting it in the urn when an epiphany hit him like a cinder block to the face.
Rain, quiet as a secret promise, began to fall. [Okay. This one isn't execrable.]
The scotch began to warm his body slowly, like the pilot light in an oven igniting a burner.
“She ran upstairs like a scalded dog” [says one character who throughout the book is either drunk or high on serious drugs, or both, and who certainly doesn't think in similes . . .]
Traffic zipped by him as he grabbed on to the steering wheel like it was a life preserver.
He had dived into a life of casual connections or professional companionship because the idea that he was worthy of love was a notion that was slipping through his fingers as the years flew by like sand sifting through a sieve. Bit by bit, grain of sand by grain of sand, it had waned from his soul.
As his hand gripped the weathered brass handle, his heart jumped up into his throat like a startled rabbit.
He didn’t feel angry, but resentment like hot steam from a kettle rose through his body from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head.
Neveah sat at the foot of her father’s hospital bed in a chair that was about as comfortable as she was at a formal dinner for the Jefferson Run Chamber of Commerce.
A discordance that ripped through the atmosphere like a bag of nails in a washing machine.
Her long hair draped down over her shoulders like a tidal wave of black water.
The full moon shown down [through the skylight] like a beacon from a distant ship. 
Roman fired up the Challenger and peeled out of the parking lot, roaring through the night like a rider on a steed that had never known defeat.
The last streetlight blinked out like a lantern being extinguished as shots rang out through the night.
They had met at Trout’s, then driven out here to the Skids in a caravan that sliced through the night like a dagger.
In between them were a couple of piles of trash and debris like small yurts.
Chauncey’s smile faded away like a ghost in the morning light.
Chauncey collapsed like a bag of laundry tossed on the floor.
Dishes broke and shattered and spilled across the floor like confetti.

Every single one of those similes could have been dispensed with—they added absolutely nothing. On the contrary: they're plain bad.

As for the plot and the main protagonist—as in Cosby's other books, we find the hero pulled into unspeakable acts all in the name of "family," and so far I've appreciated that conflictedness. Though this time part of me also wanted him to just say, "Screw it, brother, sister, dad, I'm getting you out of here"—and not descend into the depths of criminality at all. And the way the story ends? Really? I'd say it's completely unbelievable, but then, in sum, the entire story is.

And if Cosby hit us over the head one more time with an "ashes" metaphor (the protagonist is the son of a crematorium operator), well, I don't know what . . . Maybe I would have had to burn the book? It actually ends with the oft-repeated phrase (in case we didn't get it the first time), "Everything burns."

I've enjoyed Cosby before, but this will be the last one I read. My other reports can be found here, here and here, if you're interested. In one of them I call the writing "great," so I don't know if Cosby has just gotten lazy, if the editing has gotten lazy, or if I was simply overlooking all the laziness in the past, caught up in the story instead. But this time? This time I'm simply disappointed and, yes, burnt out.

45. Moss Landing

My friend Barb and I met today for a walk around the nearby (halfway between us) harbor town of Moss Landing, home of MBARI—the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute—and of whale-watching enterprises. Here are a few photos.

The Moss Landing Power Plant (no longer active)

MBARI's newest research vessel, the David Packard,
named for the institute's visionary founder (and the
Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame)

MBARI's older research vessel the Rachel Carson.
We also saw the Western Flyer in the harbor, a 
reconstruction of the boat John Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts
traveled on in the Gulf of Mexico. It recently returned
from a 100-day voyage back in those parts. 

The dredging vessel, the Sea Horse—though it wasn't
actively doing any dredging that we saw.
A sizable barge did pull up alongside, as well as a
large tugboat. So it's definitely about to get going. 

Overhead at lunchtime.

This is Katie. I profiled her on Flickr,
on my 100 Strangers project. You can
read more about her—and the project
surrounding these enthusiastically-legged
seastars—there. It was super fun talking
with her.

A 156 million year old ammonite, one of several
beautifully preserved fossils in the courtyard
outside the Sunflower Star Laboratory and
Woodward Marine Market Restaurant. 

44. Three poems by Chris Abani

A friend of mine recently got her MFA in creative writing (way to go, Jenny!), and one of her mentors was Chris Abani. I enjoyed hearing about his teaching style, which sounded a little like You've found an interesting theme to explore, now run with it. Among other, I'm sure, helpful tips. Abani was in the teaching faculty at Antioch University, where I got my MFA almost twenty years ago. I didn't encounter him because I was nonfiction, he was fiction. But his presence was felt. Anyway, hearing his name again prompted me to seek out his work. Here are three of his poems.

The Calculus of Faith

In the end I realize
every human body is a scripture.
The first miracle was a mango,
full and weighty with ripeness.
The second miracle was a sheet of onionskin
paper torn from a King James Bible
filled with oregano and thyme and smoked.
The third miracle was the smooth
turquoise of my mother's fountain pen.
The scrape of it, the insistent pull of its nib
and words, glorious and alive.
My fear is a hole I crawl into,
a hollowed-out log, a curve in a stump.
If you listen, if you listen—
in the book I am reading it is raining.

Durban, South Africa—Some Notations of Value

Metal giraffes march up the bluff
toward the lighthouse. In the moonlight,
whales, or their ghosts, litter the sand.

There is a museum by the park that houses
apartheid; contained in stiff wax dummies.

The tour bus stops on the road’s edge.
On the right a black town, the left Indian.
Pointing he says: This is the racial divide.

Stopping at the bar, the drink menu offers—
Red’s Divas only five rand each.

Each night the pounding sea reminds me
that, here, women are older than God.

These people carry their dead with them,
plastering them onto every met face.

Yet love hums like tuning forks
and the fading spreading sound
is the growth of something more.

Their absence is loud and I long
for the confetti flutter of butterflies.

Abattoirs litter the landscape with the sinister
air of murder, signs proclaiming: Zumba Butchery,
as though this is where the Zumba’s blood-
lust got the better of them.

The air conditioner in my room hums
a dirge to a sea too busy spreading rumors.

Death skips between street children
playing hopscotch in the traffic.

The woman singing in Zulu, in a Jamaican bar,
is calling down fire, calling down fire.
There is no contradiction.

White Egret

The whole earth is filled with the love of God. —Kwame Dawes

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is it that death can open up
an alleluia from the core of a man?
How easily the profound fritters away in words.
And the simple wisdom of my brother:
What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you.
All my life, men with blackened insides
have fought to keep
the flutter of a white egret in my chest
from bursting into flight, into glory.

Chris Abani was born in Nigeria and became a vocal opponent of the government there. He was imprisoned several times, ending up on death row—but managed to escape to England. He now lives in the U.S. He once stated of literature, "The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison."

The Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes was faculty at a week-long writing workshop I attended. I still, somewhere, have a video of him dancing with joy at an evening gathering. A couple of inspirations.

Book Report: Iron Lake

18. William Kent Krueger, Iron Lake (1998) (8/24/25)

A friend in a book group I once belonged to mentioned reading a couple of Krueger's titles lately and liking his style, so of course I had to look him up, having never heard of him. And then, learning he's a mystery writer, known, it seems, especially for his series featuring the former sheriff of a small northern Minnesota town, Cork O'Connor, I had to start with the first in the series (there are 20 in all, plus a prequel—so far). And it was good. It's moody and atmospheric. Several people die, one boy goes missing. There's an interesting interplay of Native American (Ojibwe/Anishinaabe) and Anglo culture. (O'Connor himself is part Irish, part Anishinaabe.) It's the dead of winter, so snow and frozen lakes figure in, along with saunas and Christmas trees. A corrupt judge, an ambitious politician (they happen to be related), an Indian casino, Cork's troubled marriage, and a trove of photographic negatives all enter into the story. 

Judging from the star ratings of the entire series on Goodreads, the books get better and better. I might try another one. I liked Cork in all his tenacity. And then there are Krueger's non-Cork books This Tender Land and Ordinary Grace, which also sound good.  

43. Tuolumne backpack

This last weekend my friend Lynn (whom I walked across England with last year) and I took a few days to backpack 30 miles down the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River, from Tuolumne Meadows to White Wolf. We spent three nights. The days got increasingly warm as we descended, and a few uphills caught us by surprise—so it was not exactly an easy trip. But it was gloriously beautiful, and it took me out of my comfort zone in a very good way. 

I posted photos on FB, which I'll link to here. Two sets: one from the hike itself, and another from White Wolf, where we had to cool our heels for four long hours while we waited for the YARTS bus to take us back to Tuolumne and our car. (We traversed those last seven miles faster than I could have imagined—in less than five hours—especially given that we had to climb 2,500 feet.)

Here's the hike proper (just a selection of the 150+ photos I took).

Here's White Wolf. 

It was a wonderful long weekend. Here are a random bonus shots:

Lynn at the sunken picnic table we settled in at
at White Wolf

Lynn wishing the store was open so we
could get ice cream!

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and sunset

Sulfur buckwheat

Pine cone

Water-sculpted granite

Pine spikes (a saprophyte)

42. Travel

I've written here before about the travel I've done. I'm not such a big traveler as some, but I've certainly been more places than most people. All the continents. Almost 50 countries. I've lived in Australia, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands.

Now, I am about to embark on another trip: to Kuala Lumpur—a place that was never on my radar, but a cryptography society is giving David an award there next month, for a paper he wrote that has stood the "test of time" (he presented the paper 20 years ago, in Edinburgh), and he will go collect it, by gum. Followed up by a couple of weeks in Western Australia—where I was some thirty years ago with my mother, on a beautiful wildflower tour. 

This time, it will be three of us: me, David, and David's sister, Patty. Patty, in fact, was the instigator. She was all in for an adventure. I wasn't so sure—until she was.

Since deciding that, yes, this trip is on, I've been doing research. I found an excellent itinerary for wildflower spots north of Perth, and then I started exploring to the south. I have managed to book hotels on a punctuated course all along the way: north to Kalbarri, on down to York, and then a long drive to Bremer Bay, and eventually up to Margaret River before returning to Perth and home. Two weeks.

In there toward the end, we'll meet up with a friend we made almost twenty years ago while hiking, biking, rafting, and kayaking across Costa Rica, an Aussie who lives in Albany, one of our stopping points. That'll be fun. (Thank you FB for keeping us in touch.)

It's interesting to witness the anxiety I'm feeling, though. I have been in charge of booking hotels (all except KL). Mostly, it's been fine—and good grief, how did we do it without the internet? (Oh, right: all those travel agents, now jobless. Which makes me wonder how they did it, without the internet. Good grief, what a chore!) There were a few hiccups, but now I've got all but Perth booked—and yes, I should get to that this week. Also a car. 

I've been feeling a mix of excitement and dread. So strange. I love to travel. Don't I?

Well, yes—once I'm there. The lead-up, though—not so fun. Did I find the best information? Did I make the right decisions? And air travel anymore—it is something to be endured.

Oh heck. It really doesn't matter. We will make of the experience what we do. And the three of us? We will have a good time. I can guarantee that. And it'll be great to see Albany Keith again. Something to look forward to, for sure. It'll be great! 

Book Report: So Far Gone

17. Jess Walter, So Far Gone (2025) (8/11/25)

I have read a few of Jess Walter's ten books—Beautiful Ruins, The Financial Lives of Poets, Over Tumbled Graves—and enjoyed them. This one was no exception.

It's the story of Rhys Kinnick, in his early sixties, who seven years ago, after punching his Christian nationalist son-in-law, Shane, at a family Thanksgiving get-together, moved to an isolated, run-down piece of property that was in the family, and went off-grid. Now, a woman shows up on his porch with two children, 8 and 13, whom it takes a moment for him to recognize: his grandchildren, Asher and Leah. That morning their mother, Rhys's daughter, Bethany, pointed Leah to a note tucked in a snowboot, then took off. The note directed their neighbor to bring the kids to Rhys. But Shane is still around, and he's none too happy about this—either his wife's taking off or the fact that she sent the kids to her father. Events ensue, which involve a militarized religious compound in Idaho known as the Rampart, a psychedelic music festival in British Columbia—as well as some philosophy and current events and lots of driving. The chapters are all titled some variation on "What Happened to . . .": first Kinnick himself; then Lucy, an old flame of his from the newspaper they both once worked at; Chuck, an ex-cop; Bethany, then Leah, then Asher each get a brief chapter; and Brian, a Native American friend of Rhys's (they manage to patch up an old rift). It's a clever way of weaving various stories and memories together as Kinnick sets about rescuing his family. 

At the center of the story, perhaps, is love, and how to stay present and true to the people you care about. In the end, Rhys (literally) limps back into his daughter's, and grandchildren's, lives—back into the world. 

I flagged a couple of passages, which don't give a sense of Walter's strong way with character, with dialogue, with quirky details. But they point to a philosophical underpinning that I appreciated.

How to explain self-exile? Part of it had been the fight with Shane. And Bethany's reaction. It symbolized the dark, sour turn the whole country had taken. As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he'd thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.
     But, if he was being honest, it wasn't those people, his fellow Americans, many of whom had probably always been as distracted or as scared or as cynical as they revealed themselves to be by electing a ridiculous racist con man. No, they weren't really the problem. Most of them probably just wanted lower taxes, or liked bad television, or, like Shane, had fallen into the fake-Christian faux-conservative Nationalist cesspool; or maybe they were just burned-out and believed that corruption had rotted everything, that one party was as bad as the next; or maybe they really did long for some nonexistent past.
     Whatever their motivation, for Kinnick, it was all just part of a long sad cultural slide that he'd had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand (celebrity entertainment bleeding into government, cable TV eroding newspapers, information collapsing into a huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in American got elected president). There was inside of Kinnick an emptiness that felt like depression. [. . .]
     No, it was he who had failed, he who couldn't adjust, he who couldn't deal with this banal, brutal idiocracy, he who couldn't admit that this was the world now. And so . . . he'd stepped aside. Moved to the last sliver of land once owned by his wannabe sheep-rancher grandfather. But once he began withdrawing, erasing himself, he couldn't stop. Until now, when Kinnick saw that he'd been living entirely in his own head for a year now, and had inexplicably reached a place where he didn't even recognize his own grandchildren.

There's also a good disquisition on the evils of smartphones, but I'll just end with a "cold epiphany" Kinnick has in the final pages of the book (which his newly acquired phone reminds him of):

All cruelty springs from weakness. Seneca said that, along with: Ignorance is the cause of fear. Kinnick had always believed these adages to be true, but now [. . .] Rhys wondered if Seneca might have been a little silly to believe in the causal roots of evil. He wondered if cruelty and its bride, fear, didn't just exist spontaneously, forces as elemental and eternal as gravity.

But as a contrast to these forces, he also rediscovers love and devotion and begins to seek forgiveness and connection, even amidst the pain and struggle of living. 

41. Frivolity

This week we took a little break from Monterey County and headed south to our neighbor county of San Luis Obispo—a 44th anniversary getaway. The dog came too. We stayed in the seaside town of Cambria. And we geocached (which is what I mean by this post's title: geocaching is our frivolous pleasure). Here are some pictures I took.

Breakfast on Main Street

The beautiful coastline

A boardwalk walk

Tbere are many benches in Fiscalini Ranch Preserve—
and some of them (like this one) harbor geocaches

A fun cache at the amazing Cambria Nursery & Florists

One isn't usually invited to just go
opening random chests

Heading east on Hwy 46—beautiful California

One of a half dozen "Monster" caches
we found on our way home (there are
more than 60 altogether: we'll have to
come back!). This one was The Werewolf.

The clue to open the combination lock
was a shaggy dog—or rather, horse, monkey,
and bicycle—story. Super fun. And once
we got inside, we discovered the silver bullet
that would protect us from the werewolf.

Another in the Monster series: this one
a rather winsome jackalope, in the 
Paso Robles Public Library.

The Grim Reaper (the cache is tucked
into the upper upright)

Official Geocache

Though you wouldn't know it from the
signage...

Another chest!

As David signs the log

San Miguel Fire Station: the cache is
the "lantern" in the dalmatian's jaws

Finally, the cache unscrewed from the
bottom of the antenna

Here it is

And here's the view from the cache location

We had a fine time caching. We also got to have dinner with some good friends who live in Morro Bay. And it was just nice to have a change of scene. Win win win!

38. Nyckelharpa

(This post is out of order because I intended to write it several weeks ago but I got distracted.)

The other week we went to the Carmel Bach Festival to hear the program put together by violinist Edwin Huizinga, "Nordic Folklore." It featured (most prominently) Edwin, his Fire & Grace partner, Bill Coulter, on guitar, and a third player—let's call him Joy: Fire, Grace & Joy—Olov Johansson, on nyckelharpa. 

As the printed program describes it: 

The nyckelharpa, often called the "keyed fiddle," is a traditional Swedish instrument with a history that stretches back over 600 years. Its name comes from the Swedish words nyckel (key) and harpa (an old term for stringed instruments). Played with a short bow and operated by pressing keys that change the pitch of the strings, the nyckelharpa produces a haunting, resonant tone enriched by sympathetic strings that vibrate along with the melody—much like a viola d'amore or a Hardanger fiddle.

The earliest known image of the nyckelharpa appears in a 14th-century church carving in Gotland, Sweden, and written references begin to appear around the same time. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, various forms of keyed fiddles were played in different parts of Europe. However, it was in Sweden—particularly in the Uppland region north of Stockholm—that the instrument evolved and survived into the modern era.

By the 17th century, the nyckelharpa had taken on a more recognizable form, but its popularity declined in the 18th and 19th centuries as new musical tastes and instruments took hold. It wasn't until the 20th century, through the efforts of folk musicians and instrument makers like August Bohlin and Eric Sahlström, that the nyckelharpa experienced a revival. Modern versions of the instrument—typically with 16 strings (3 melody, 1 drone, and 12 sympathetic)—are now used in a variety of musical styles, from Swedish folk to early music and contemporary classical compositions.

Today, the nyckelharpa is experiencing a true revival, both in Sweden and abroad. Among those who took up Salhström's mantle is Olov Johansson, considered by many to be the finest living practitioner of the nyckelharpa. 

Here are a few videos about and featuring the nyckelharpa. Starting with a basic introduction to the instrument:

And here the nyckelharpa and violin are compared:

Finally, here is Olov, playing a very short polska (polonaise) that he wrote (he loves polskas):

And as it turns out, I have known Olov's playing for years—with the Swedish folk group Väsen, of which I have several (of their 18) recordings. Here is a Tiny Desk Concert they performed a few years ago:

It was delightful to meet Olov in person, and to experience his Joy. 

Book Report: I See You've Called in Dead

16. John Kenney, I See You've Called in Dead (2025) (8/2/25)

After the last book—which continues to stick with me, so perhaps I liked it better than I thought (if "like" is the operative word)—I needed something light. A FB friend, in her daily status post, had mentioned this book, said it was delightful. Sold!

It's the story of a lost-his-way obituary writer who accidentally one drunken night publishes a mock obit—for himself: "Bud Stanley, forty-four, former Mr. Universe, failed porn star, and mediocre obituary writer, is dead." His employer, the largest wire service news organization in the world, is not amused.  

From there the story doesn't really do much, except meander through New York City with, mostly, Bud's landlord, a paraplegic named Tim, and Clara, a woman he encounters at his ex-mother-in-law's funeral and whom he starts meeting at other funerals, of strangers. He has conversations with his boss, Howard, and a young neighbor boy, Leo. And he waits for word on whether he will be fired—and if so, what then? He's hardly employable.

It's a bit of sentimental fluff, really—but it was just what I needed. Nothing heavy; on the contrary, Kenney (who writes regularly for the New Yorker's "Shouts & Murmurs" humor column) is very funny and gives the self-deprecating Bud some great lines. The other characters are mostly foils, helping Bud to find the joy in life again. (Clara, perhaps, especially: yes, they fall in love—though at the end of the book she's off to Bhutan for a year; still, you know they'll come together again. Love is love.)

The passages I flagged, though, weren't the funny bits, but the "Life is a gift" bits of wisdom. Schmaltzy, maybe. But no less important for all that. I flagged six. I'll just go ahead and quote them here, though I'll start with a one-liner, the last thing I flagged: "How many days do you experience something for the first time?" The occasion being a helicopter ride that Bud has gifted to Tim. "We banked right over the Bronx, over Yankee Stadium, to the East River. The city small and quiet below. We should be required to take flight from time to time, to see anew, to see how small and fragile we are."

But let's go back to the beginning—straight to the set-up for Bud's disaster:

I took down a bottle of sixteen-year-old Lagavulin from a shelf in the kitchen. My boss, Howard, gave it to me at our company Christmas party a few years ago.
     On occasion—a damp, cold evening, the house too quiet—I pour myself a glass, give it a gentle swirl, inhale the heady, fiery aroma, and imagine my ancestors in Ireland a long time ago, in a cottage, by a peat fire, rough hands, so tired, so much labor, wondering, perhaps, if there was something else out there, a better life, if they had the courage to find it, knowing they would, that they had to, that they owed it to themselves and their family, afraid, excited, eternally hopeful, dreaming of possibility for their children, their children's children, for me, this person sitting here now. Surely that was worth a toast.
     I sat on the couch with my computer and got lost, aimlessly clicking through cnn.com and tmz.com, nytimes.com. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, the algorithms knowing my tastes, pulling me in deeper, mindlessly following every new link. A Nick Drake video, a Stephen Fry talk, a Fry & Laurie skit, The Two Ronnies' "Fork Handles" skit, great catches in baseball, vintage wristwatches, yoga women of Malibu, Bill Maher, news anchor bloopers, a garbage truck that bursts into flames, Norman Mailer drunk on The Dick Cavett Show, squirrels dancing.
     The videos—half watch, click, half watch, skip ad, click—alternatingly intrigued and annoyed me, engaged me, sucked life from me. It was after eleven. Go to sleep, Bud. But Bud wasn't listening. Bud had pushed past tired into numbness, the brain buzz of too little sleep, the mistake of topping off his drink. What's the worst that could happen?

See, nothing deep here, but also something most of us can perhaps identify with. Not these specific details, perhaps, but our bad habit of seeking to escape, to entertain ourselves to death, to avoid what's right in front of us. Next up: a bit about Howard and their relationship:

Something happened after his wife's death, me being there, that drive to the hospital. I saw behind a door normally closed to others, these things in our personal lives that coworkers never know about. How well do we know a colleague? The ebb and flow of workdays, weeks, years. We might notice a new suit, a haircut, a bit of weight put on. We talk of work, a bit about life, we have drinks at office parties. But something changed in a way I couldn't quite explain. We had inched closer. How can you not, standing in the doorway of a hospital room as this man I had known for so long—this man I barely knew at all—wailed and sobbed over the body of his dead wife?
     I wondered how I could ever put that in an obituary. 

And here Bud and Howard meet up after the disastrous obit:

"The world changed," Howard said to his glass. "Broke in a way. I see things, read things, watch things, and I think . . . I don't understand that. The inanity, the vulgarity, the cruelty." He turned to look at me. "Is it just me, getting older?"
     "I think something has changed."
     "Something fundamental, perhaps. And so we retreat. Sure, we do our jobs, provide for our families. But then we seek cover. I subscribe to a channel on YouTube called Relaxing Mowing. It's speeded-up footage of people mowing their lawns, trimming their hedges. The world made clean and perfect. They put classical music over it. If someone described that to me five months ago, I would say that person was insane. Now, I love it. I watch these in bed at night. I watch videos of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing. The elegance and grace. Where has that gone? Now we have twerking."

The book is full of details like this, of wisdom like this, of regret but also hope. Tim, too, is full of wisdom, earned from being in a wheelchair—a bit heavyhanded, okay, but still. Here, at their first meeting, when Bud comes to interview for an apartment to let in Tim's brownstone, Tim has just asked Bud if he's ever sat with someone as they died. Yeah, not your typical first encounter, and also heavyhanded, but still.

"It's quite something. Especially if they're ready . . . if  . . . if they lived. Do you know what I mean?"
     "Totally," I lied. "Sorry. I lied. I'm not sure I understand."
     He laughed. "I don't really know what I mean either. I guess I mean this. That at the end—and I've had the privilege to be in the room with a few people now, my parents, two friends—I think, and it's just a guess, but I think we let go of everything ad the true nature of experience falls over us. This . . . miracle that is existence. Which we layer with so much. With anxiety and fear and greed and smallness and what's next and hurry up and I've got a meeting and all the . . . stuff . . . that gets in the way. I'm not saying we should all go live like a monk. I'm saying that if you haven't lived the life you want, if you haven't loved life, then at the end, I think a deep and very sad regret comes over you. And if you have, if you've lived well . . . friends and family and . . . if you've lived . . . then just as true is the peace you feel. I've seen it. Does this make any sense or do I sound mad?"

No, not mad at all. And finally, here Tim and Bud are at the Frick Collection, looking at one of their two Vermeers, Officer and Laughing Girl. "Why is the girl laughing?" Tim asks. Bud says:

"It's a nervous laugh. He just made a bad joke, said something embarrassing."
     "Like what?"
     "He just showed her how he could burp the alphabet."
     "You don't deserve Vermeer. Look at the painting. Pretend you're not you. Let the picture speak to you. It wants to speak to you. It's speaking to you across hundreds of years. This is its power. It's trying to tell you something, a universal thing, a thing that has no boundary in time. Why is the girl laughing?"
     I stared at the painting. I waited. It seemed too obvious.
     "Because she's happy?" I said.
     Tim turned to me and smiled. "Yes."
     "That's it?"
     "What else is there?"

40. Another day

Another Friday, and another session with my English-learning friend. Today we worked on a dozen simple fill-in-the-blank exercises. Well, "simple" if you happen to already speak the language. One involved the words cope cop cup. The sentence: The _______ couldn't _______ with the bug he saw in his _______. I mean, if you speak English already, it's a no-brainer. But the more we worked on these sentences, the harder even I started to find them. 

So I was delighted when one of the fill-in words was am. There is only one context you will ever use am. I AM. Dammit. I am.

The last exercise included the word pen, which at first glance you would think would mean pluma, but in the case of this sentence, which also include pet and pep—a pet with too much pep needing to be put in a . . . —did not. I am a language person—I've studied, what, ten or more languages—and so I'm sure that if I were met with an exercise like this in any of those, I'd figure it out: it's a puzzle, a game. But my friend is not a language person. This is hard, it's challenging. And it's serious: she wants to stay in this country. She needs to speak the language.

But then she started laughing. She was having fun. It wasn't the sentences that she was finding fun, but our interaction, I think. Our connection, our friendship. As we parted she gave me a big hug. And out in the parking lot, she gave me an avocado. What more does a teacher need?

As I drove to our meeting, I noticed the parking lot near the local Russian Orthodox church filled with cars. As I drove home, I saw a hundred or more people spilling out onto the lawn, including a half dozen white-bearded men dressed in bright green chasubles wearing full-on crowns. All I find from googling is this: Престольный Праздник / Встреча Митрополита Николая: Parish Feast Day / Meeting Metropolitan Nikolai. This has nothing to do with my life, really, except that I noticed it: it's a part of the life of some of my neighbors, and that's meaningful. It was beautiful to see this crowd, and those bearded, crowned men in green.

In the afternoon, David and I headed to one of our favorite dog-walk spots, Carmel Meadows. We stopped awhile to watch the pelicans flomping their wings in the lagoon. (I took a short video, but it won't post, so here's a still shot.) The dog walks are getting shorter, but Milo, at almost 15, is still game. 

The way home ended up taking three times as long as it could/should have, but I'll spare the details. Road work; rush hour. Whatever. We got home.

And then had a lovely dinner at a new-to-us restaurant in the not-at-all-chic nextdoor town of Seaside, but the restaurant, Maligne, has made its way into the Michelin Guide, so we figured it was worth a try—and yeah. It was terrific. Halibut with corn and shishito peppers for me, pork belly and fancy rice for David, and a luscious peach and plum cobbler for dessert. The occasion: our 44th anniversary. 

We sure do hope to make it to 50. We'll see!

Finished the evening watching Tampopo. Delightful. 

What more can one ask of a day?  

 

39. Two and a half Instagram six-packs

Catching up here since my last IG post in May. I don't actually curate my Instagram feed. I just occasionally look at IG, then think, maybe it's time to post something. And I scroll back through my photos, find a shot or two, and there: posted. So, here: a recap of the latest posts.

My desk, my pens. A California buckeye blossom. Luna.
A wolf eel model. A Salinas mural. Milo.

A frog in Ontario. The view from our niece Jess's farm,
also in Ontario. July 4 on Monterey Bay. The cats.
The day we paid off our mortgage, huzzah! woohoo!
Luna again (the REAL tiger).

David and our friend Alastair, geocaching in Los Gatos.
David and a lovely little gopher snake.
Our nephew Aaron flinging the frisbee in Ontario.

A snapshot (or fifteen) of my life. So totally random it's silly. But silly is good. What would we do without silly?