No, Thursday's Out....

There’s an Irish bar in Portland where a group of James Joyce fans used to meet one night a week, to work through Ulysses – ten pages a week, bounteous amounts of Guinness, then back to the beginning. I have mildly fantasized about joining this group when and if the time comes. I have actually read Ulysses, once, but it would be fun to do it with some Ulysses Buddies. Speaking of Buddies, I paused (let’s not say “gave up”) on Remembrance of Things Past, because it came due at the library and I returned it. Also because it would have been so much better to be reading it with someone. (Even Ulysses, I read for a class, and got to discuss with other folks.) To everyone who made it only as far as the madeleine scene, I want to say, I made it past page 146, where we find out why Volume 1 is called “Swann’s Way.” Yes, you could find that in Wikipedia, but I made it there on foot, as it were. A couple of weeks ago, when I said I was giving Proust a go, several friends said they had tried and ...

Port Townsend, Washington, has a street along the harbor – Water Street! - that features charming shops and restaurants and fountains and a ferry terminal.   There’s very little parking, so delivery trucks park over the center line. You can edge past them by going into the bike lane, which just has to be wrong, but which is the custom. The whole driving and parking vibe feels both highly adaptive and vaguely Wild West: Port Townsenders seem to have fashioned their own set of exceptions to the rules. But they do have rules! Woe betide those who overshoot their target on Water Street, and want to turn around. Once you get past Old Downtown, there is an occasional tiny parking lot on the inland side of the road, so you can pull in there. But when you exit the parking lot, the signs say Right Turn Only, so you’ve gained nothing. Plus, there’s a double yellow line down the middle of Water Street.   If you drive much further than you wanted to go, the Bayview Restaurant appears on...

Pre-pandemic, my friends and I rented a house on the coast where we hoped to stay while attending another friend’s kid’s wedding. The date was to be Labor Day weekend 2020, not any easy time for coast rentals, which is why we booked so far in advance.  And then they took a rain check, because 2020.  But we three who had booked the rental went to the house anyway.Because we could. Because we had seen virtually no one for months. Because we yearned to get out of town.  We opened all the doors and windows. We are our meals in the porch. We hugged once, looking away from each other.  The bride and groom rescheduled, for today. We booked a rental for the weekend.  But long story short, the guest list had to be cut back severely because 2021, and once restrictions were lifted, the venue said no, you can’t expand. Meaning, I am again at the beach  to attend a wedding, but not attending a wedding.  I’m beginning to like this.  Please, somebody, plan somet...

I'm currently on the hunt for bright spots, after four days out of town attending a "celebration of life" for a dear friend who died (cancer, not COVID). I'm not crazy about the "celebration of life" phrase. I have been calling the event a memorial. It wasn't somber. It was a celebration. But the phrase bugs me, and makes me feel that I'm letting the team down by feeling sad that my friend is gone. Sadness is appropriate, is the thing. I suppose celebration is, too. Maybe I'm quibbling. In any case, I'm on the hunt for bright spots, and I found one - the child tax credit that has begun hitting the bank accounts of 80% of American families-with-kids, as of today. I'm happy about the child tax credit. But Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times says I'm jumping the gun. Mr. Appelbaum - a man I suspect is not given to inordinate enthusiasm - says it's too early to celebrate just yet. He has some good reasons for saying that, but I...

  “…[T]hose determined to be dead from the heat wave are overwhelmingly men and the mean age is 68.” I am sure I’ve noticed the two uses of “determined” before, but never quite like this. The first time I read it, I thought some grown men had set out with great determination to die from the heat. Then the sentence spun around and settled. I don’t know anybody who died, but I am sad and distressed that people did. I read that they were mostly old and alone. One of our less-lovely neighbors, the mom from Casa Irresponsible, stopped by this morning to chat while her dog peed on our plants. I was hanging out by the alley, waiting to ask the garbage guys a favor.     I asked how she and her family had managed in the heat storm? They had AC. They went to the basement. And did we have AC?, she asked. Our one window unit broke on the first day, alas. She morphed into Mama Responsible and said hers was the yellow house, and if this happened again, we should come hang i...

The heat storm was awful. It was scary, and brutally uncomfortable, and some people died.  The weather is fine today, has been fine for four days, and I’m still slightly wigged out, as if my emergency alarm system went off and I have managed to get the siren to stop sounding, but I can’t get the blinking red light to stop blinking. I’m hyper-vigilant. We had a weird thing happen on the first record-breaking day, which was that the basement started to stink. The basement was the only cool-ish part of the house, and a possible refuge, except that, to me, it smelled toxic. It wasn’t an organic smell – I did not smell a rat, as it were. It smelled chemical. I called the kid from the natural gas company, who walked in the front door with his little monitor and said, “DUDE!" That was gratifying, because Rick has less sense of smell than I do, so what smelled horrific to me was unpleasant to him. Not to young Mr. Natural Gas! His monitor said it wasn’t a gas leak. He said he had smelle...