My 2001 Oprah Magazine Article About J is Now Online.
As the first anniversary of J’s death comes around (it’s Saturday, and I will, coincidentally or not, be back visiting Chapel Hill), “Journey to Healing”, the article I wrote about him for O, the Oprah Magazine—the one that hit the newsstands on September 10, 2001—has been published online in the archives of Oprah’s website, where it will be available and linkable from now on. One curious thing about this article is that I didn’t realize then that he was already showing the early signs of dementia. I thought it was just post-traumatic stress—and certainly it was that, too.
Just Jack
The last time I bought a new (or used) car was December, 1996. As saving for old age is no longer a necessity, I threw caution to the wind and ordered this Mini Cooper S. A friend insisted on naming it – at first we chose “Black Jack” because of the decal I ordered to disguise the sunroof, but we figured that was already a popular name, so we went with “Just Jack.”
Jack is actually dark grey-green but need the right light to show it off. The likely ultimate owner of this car was also intimately involved in selecting the various options.
It’s a “happy car” and I can’t help smiling every time I see it.
Impatient Impatiens
For the past six years, I’ve planted impatiens underneath the entry archway to my house. Most of the time, they don’t turn out as well as could be. They sure made up for it this year, though!
The Mother of Invention
Operating in the no-man’s-land between languages can challenge you to get inventive. I’ve thus (knowing mostly just karate words in Japanese) had some of my most delicious conversations with English-impaired Japanese friends, and I had one tonight. Trying to explain to a brilliant, gentle philosopher and his (ditto) poet wife the inexaggerable (?) importance of one writer for English, I found myself saying (with lots of help from my hands): You know when you’re making a pot you put it on a wheel, you make it round, and then you put it in the fire and it gets hard? It was the same with English, and the fire was Shakespeare.
The Lounge: Crazy Cat Lady Update
Imagine two cats curled up near the warmth of that blazing fireplace.
Now imagine three.
* * *
I walked into the laundromat and one of the Mexican guys who works there started meowing loudly.
As I walked towards the back to get quarters for the machines, he said to me, “You want cat? Free for you!”
The laundromat owner, who is Chinese or Korean (the same guy who owned the place when I left more than five years ago—greeted me in May as if no time had passed), confirmed that he has an employee who is probably allergic and a wife who is maybe not too crazy about taking care of two rambunctious kittens at home. A month ago already I had fallen in love with the white one with the Ash Wednesday smudge, when she was tiny, strutting across the counter looking wildly around for comical protrusions of the world that could be played with, pausing to rub against my arm as if we were old best buds. I had gotten as far as telling the laundromat owner, “If you decide you don’t want that cat, talk to me!”
Now the kittens have come home to roost. (I can really only take one. The other, whom I haven’t met close up, is black with white trim. Anyone?)
I told him I’m going away next week (to Chapel Hill) and wouldn’t be back till the 21st. Could he keep the cat till then? Sure.
Then? I’ll have to take her straight to the vet, at flamboyant expense, to get deflea’d, wormed, and checked out for nasty viruses before I combine her with my cats. I’ll need to find someplace for her to stay the night until she’s cleared. I’ll need to face the higher tower of cat carriers and the tonally enriched symphony of wretched yowls on my forthcoming drive down to Florida. Oy vey. What am I getting myself into?
Life. Life is trouble.
The Lounge: Invasion! and other atrocities [updated]
My heart nearly stopped when I saw a single mama roach with a big shiny egg case skulk across the kitchen counter. It was as horrifying as finding a pod in the cellar in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Because she was logy, probably from the ex-man’s gel, I was able to pounce, crush the egg case and flush her and it down the john. Close call. And not a good sign: word is finally out that there’s cat food here. What will happen when I’m away in Chapel Hill for almost a week??
Meanwhile, here are a couple of topics du jour I would rather talk about here than on Facebook.
According to a friend, and to this story http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/story/2011-11-06/joe-frazier-dead-liver-cancer/51118056/1, Joe Frazier was a much kinder-hearted guy than Muhammad Ali, and was the victim of racism—Ali’s own black-on-black racism and pandering to white preference for a light-skinned pretty boy, even though Frazier had made sacrifices to defend him. (I don’t know how J, my beloved b.s. detector, felt about Frazier, but he sure didn’t care for Ali.)
* * *
Why the Cain flap is nothing but entertainment: he wasn’t a serious contender for the nomination anyway.
(Since I haven’t sought permission to reprint others’ excellent comments, I’ll just copy some of mine. If you spend any time in the airport, take a look at theirs.)
The high polls at this point are just for entertainment value, too. Polling pro Herman Cain expresses people’s impractical frustration, rather as does OWS.
(Here Jaltcoh asks me whether I didn’t think he could have won Iowa)
Maybe; but I think he would have flamed out and would not have won the nomination, and I think that’s pretty obvious to all. On the other hand, I have the impression Gingrich might have been courting him for the bottom of a ticket.
It just seems as if the process is intolerant of colorful (no pun intended), offbeat candidates.
There seems a weary inevitability about Romney.
I don’t know a lot about Cain, I’m mostly commenting on the media’s and the culture’s love of a flap, especially one with sex mixed in. I don’t really think it’s politically substantive, I think it’s a sideshow. Pretending it’s politically substantive enables people to enjoy the sideshow with a clearer conscience.
A friend who voted today reports a strikingly dour and unenthusiastic mood at the polls, and isn’t sure whether her own political mood is coloring what she saw, or just matching it.
UPDATE: More foofaraw fodder:
“In some ways, entrepreneurial individuality and heterodoxy IS the new orthodoxy.” ~ “Steve Jobs: The Capitalist-as-Romantic” http://www.quotesaboutpeople.com/2011/11/05/steve-jobs-the-capitalist-as-romantic/
The Lounge: Feelings About the Time Change
It’s always a big deal when Daylight Saving ends—a kind of artificial, ritual kick in the pants accelerating the season change. Our unheralded modern version of the Day of the Dead. Naturally, I’m ambivalent about it. :) Part of me wishes they’d never started with this Daylight Saving crap in the first place. Part of me dreads and enjoys the jolt. I’m surprised to discover that in a way I like “fall back” better than “spring forward.” I like the cushy extra hour, and I like the prod to withdraw indoors and get convivial and contemplative earlier, the warning to bar the door because here comes the dark and cold. In the spring, you get robbed of an hour, robbed of the early mornings, and you (or I) generally feel rousted out of hibernation too rudely.
Yesterday evening when dusk fell between 4:30 and 5 I was walking into the midtown city from the river with a friend. The sky behind the buildings turned dove color, stone buildings were a bloodless pale red, and glass buildings catching the western sky were silver or pale silk green. (For the initiated, kind of like those evenings on Fort Myers Beach when the Gulf of Mexico is pale green and the sky is deep purple.) Japanese robe colors. Stray marathon survivors hobbled here and there in bare legs and Thinsulate blankets; only the one with a completion medal, a woman, wasn’t limping. I looked up at the glass towers—luxury river view condos, no doubt—and part of my mind went “I wonder if they’re fully occupied in this economy” and another part went, “I need to feel awe.”
The Lounge: Blogger’s Remorse
I heard from Randy! I will let him tell you whatever he wishes about how things are going, but what’s most important, he sounds good in himself.
In my answer to him I found myself expressing regret and remorse at abandoning my “innkeeper” role at this blog:
I haven’t been blogging hardly at all, and realize vaguely that this is like being “a bad hostess” — a blog can be a sort of gathering place. I’ve been posting little odds and ends on Facebook only because they don’t seem to make it to the blog post threshold in length or substance; but I think this is . . . inhospitable. I feel like an innkeeper who just walked away one day. I suppose I could post these little dribs and drabs on Ambiance just to form the nucleus of/excuse for a conversation. I don’t seem to have it in me to provoke serious discussions, so much. But Facebook is about as cozy a place for a conversation as an airport gate area. Still, I’m becoming very in-turned. I’m getting ready to write something about life with Jacques, I think, and this is preceded by a very long inhale in preparation for sinking down into the depths where such things come from.
I wonder whether, instead of writing those little conversational things on Facebook, I should just write them here in a kind of running post—call it “The Lounge.” We need a place to meet and hang out, to come in out of the cold November rain and dark. I would like it to look like the cozy, classy bar I passed last night on the way to nearby friends’ place. The lights were low, candles and tiny white Christmas bulbs; the polished oak wood glowed golden. I think it was called “One If By Land, Two If By Sea.” It just made you want to turn aside and go in. I don’t know if it had a fireplace but it felt as if it did.
By comparison, Facebook is a fluorescent-lit airport concourse. Every time I go over there I smell synthetic carpeting. It seems public, exposed, impersonal, and ugly. It’s partly the bad (nonexistent, airport-concourse-like) design, partly the boring, trivial nature of so many of the posts (including my own). Yet, as I told Randy, I don’t feel up to starting substantive conversations any more.
Sit down by the fire and make small talk with me.
Younger still…and still ridiculous
There’s 1962 Me in Harry Truman’s Presidential Limo with my Old Man (still wearing hats!) taken in the Henry Ford Museum.
Ambiance 