Getting Ready for Company

Well, I finished the article and got it submitted to the newspaper by noon, or shortly after.  I would have submitted it earlier, but I was waiting for a promised comment from the mayor, who said he would send me something by late morning.  But he's a politician, so I waited all morning and didn't hear from him.   I finally sent him an e-mail showing what I would write without his statement and he sent me a statement by return mail which is, of course, better than I had written.   I got that worked into the article and sent it off.  The rest of my day was free and clear.

We are expecting Jeri & Phil and Walt's sister here tomorrow, to spend the night.  We don't really do overnight guests.  The only folks who have stayed overnight here in the last 10 years or so are Jeri & Phil and Ashley, who takes care of our dogs.

Cleaning or straightening needed to take place.  

Walt does about 99% of the work around here, without a complaint, and I'm very grateful. I'm trying to get the kitchen clean and the laundry folded before they get here, which of course at 1:30 a.m., when I'm writing this, still hasn't been done.

And naturally, with my little goals for pre-arrival cleaning, the first thing I did was to take off for Atria to visit my mother.

It was a surprise when she wasn't in her room, and it was full of "stuff" -- a basket, some boxes, a shirt, casually thrown over a chair, and a dish of plums. My acute powers of deduction immediately figured out that my cousin Niecie had come for a visit and to give her a pedicure again.  When I was there 2 days ago, that was not on her calendar, but I noticed that it was today. 

I had already checked the dining room and hadn't seen my mother, so I figure Niecie had managed to convince her to have dinner somewhere other than Atria.  I left a note for her and left the apartment.  When I got to the lobby, there were my mother and Niecie sitting on a couch, eating an ice cream cone and chatting. I just hadn't noticed them when I checked the dining room.

I chatted with them for a bit, but had to get to the supermarket to do some shopping, so said my goodbyes and left, telling my mother I would return in 2 days, with Jeri.

I went off to Nugget Market and managed to stock up on nearly $200 worth of impulse buys.  We were out of a lot of things

On the way to and from, I was listening to my audio book, "Drop Shot," by Harlan Coben and it had only 10 minutes to go when I left the supermarket.  I took the long way home and finished the story about the time I arrived back to the house.  I've decided I like Coben's sardonic/ wise-cracking hero, Martin Bolitar, who isn't a detective, but a sports representative, yet he seems to get involves in a lot of crime solving.  This was Book #2 of the series and I've put book #3 on my Audible.com wish list so that when my monthly credit is activated, I will choose that as my next download.

I made a teensy dent in the laundry before All in with Chris Hayes was on. Hayes is reporting from Ferguson and I had read this morning that he had been threatened by the police with macing and I was interested to see what, if anything, he would say about it, but he didn't mention it. Guess he didn't feel the need to inflame resentment in the Ferguson police any more.

The whole situation is so distressing because it is a continuing sign of the disintegration of our society. The thought crossed my mind that maybe Robin Williams was the lucky one.

Walt announced he was going downtown to help Ned hang lights on the plaza for their upcoming concert on Friday  I could, of course, have used his being gone as an excuse to finish either the kitchen or the laundry, but instead I watched Dead Poets Society.  I am watching a lot of Robin Williams right now, it seems, and I am finding it very cathartic.  I didn't know him personally and only saw him on film anyway, and watching these old films seems to make his loss less painful for me anyway.  He's still there, just a click away on my TV or computer screen, just as accessible as he was to me in real life.

Walt didn't get home until 9.  I asked if he and Ned had eaten anything and he said they had a snack from a local Indian restaurant, but not a real dinner, so I cooked up a batch of tortellini I had bought this afternoon.  A quick, easy dinner that he likes.  Especially good topped with home grown fresh basil snipped off the plant on my kitchen sink.

Now it's way past my bedtime and I have just written one of my more boring entries, but it's done and I can go off to sleep without worrying about it.

Tomorrow will be more interesting, because Jeri will have arrived...and it will be anybody's guess whether I get the laundry and/or the kitchen finished before they all get here.

Day 50:  This makes me very happy

Me and Will Hunting

Whenever I tell my mother about a review I'm writing or an article I'm working on, she will think about it and always asks me "how long does it take to write your thing" (because she can never remember what you call that thing I'm doing).

As she's proud of not using assistive devices to walk and not socializing with those other people at Atria, she is also coyly proud of not being a writer.  It tickles her that she has never written anything (I may have received one or two letters from her in my life).  She's proud of her failure to communicate with anybody about anything by writing.  I don't understand that, but...whatever.

When people talk to me about being a critic, they often say to me "I don't know how you can do that."  I am reminded of Good Will Hunting, where everyone was so impressed with Will's ability to solve complicated problems that stumped even the best mathemeticians.  He says something like "you can't do this, so you don't know how easy this is for me.  Do you have any clue how easy this is for me?"  He doesn't intend to lord it over anybody, but is just trying to let them know that they may have a talent in one direction and his lies in mathematics, he doesn't know why he has that talent, but he does, and it just is, not because of anything directly that he has done.

That's kind of what it's like for me with writing.  I have always written.  I come from a long line of writers.  My great grandfather started a newspaper and was its editor, and columnist for many years.  My great, great grandfather wrote eloquent letters from Iowa to his children in California.  My aunt was a wonderful writer.  I aspire to be as entertaining as she was. It's not because of anything directly that I have done, it just is.

I'm not a great writer.  I'm an OK writer.  I'm a sloppy writer who has never bothered to study writing, but who can put my thoughts on paper.  Occasionally I research something, but basically this is just verbal diarrhea put on the page.

My journal entries, like everything else I write, kind of grow organically.  I may have an idea in mind where I think an entry (or an article) is going to go, and as I start writing it, it veers off in directions I had never expected, planned, or anticipated.  I don't write fiction.  I'm terrible at fiction, but I hear fiction writers talk about how the characters they create take them in different directions and insist that they be written in a certain way.  I understand that.

And so it has been with my project today.  I can't tell my mother how long it has taken (or will take, since it's not finished yet) to write the article I'm working on, but I've pretty much been at it for the better part of three days.

I always thought my writing process was strange, but the more I read things from other writers, the more I discover that I'm not so strange after all.  I write a little bit and then I have to leave the computer.  I eat, or make something, or clean something (rarely the latter), or I might go to sleep for the night.  While I do this, thoughts percolate around in my head that I'm not even aware of.  When I finish my break, I come back to the computer with renewed thought energy.

Today I am working on an article celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Davis Musical Theater Company (DMTC).  This group started in 1984 (see?  I'm a math whiz) with a production of Peter Pan that both Walt and Jeri worked on.  Its next show was The King and I, where Jeri was one of the king's children, and had dyed black hair and darkened skin.  Walt was the company's first set builder. So we are part of the history of DMTC.  

Five years ago, I wrote an article to celebrate its 25th anniversary and I went back and reviewed that article as I prepared to write the one for the 30th anniversary.  It seemed that I'd said it all then.  I figured my approach this time around would be to rehash the old article, intervew a couple of people who have been around for a long time, and the article would pretty much write itself.  But no.   My brain doesn't work like that, even when I want it to.

I first interviewed Steve and Jan Isaacson, the founders of the company, people we have known since before there was a DMTC.  It wasn't a formal interview.  We just sat around and chatted while the tape recorder ran and I figured I'd pull bits and pieces from that.

But I had forgotten my aversion to transcribing.   Something weird happened to me after 30+ years of being a transcriptionist.  I literally could not STAND the thought of transcribing anything ever, ever again.  So I kept putting off this transcription.  Fortunately it wasn't going to be a literal translation, but just playing the audio and picking out salient pieces for the article.   But I put it off for a couple of days and had to actually FORCE myself, by reason of a looming deadline to actually sit down and just. do. it.

As I transcribed, I got an idea of how to start the article and wrote that...or, more accurately, copied it from five years ago.  With something on the screen, I began to fill in.  The article grew like Topsey.  One thing would suggest something else, an incident would suggest an interview subject whom I would then call, something totally changed my mind on how to start the article and I rewrote the beginning.   Things that seemed to be in the right order suddenly were out of order and I had to move them around (thank God for computers!).

I did phone interviews (I don't mind doing them because I can transcribe as the person talks and I don't have to listen to it a second time to transcribe...thank God for learning how to be a fast typist!)

I got far enough in the article and it had taken such a different path than I anticipated that I was able to write the closing paragraphs, which I really like.  I still needed to fill in some stuff, but if I can't, for whatever reason, the article is good to go as is.

I'm waiting for 3 people to call me and if they don't I'll live without it, but I really would like their input.  When I got up this morning, the "thing" (as my mother would call it) loomed threateningly over me, because I knew it had to be at the newspaper office tomorrow, but as I've worked on this, pretty much all day long (with those busywork breaks I mentioned), I've become familiar with it.   I've read it dozens of times.  I've tweaked it, I know what I want to add, but if I can't, because I don't hear from the people I need, I can work around it.

Like Will Hunting, I don't know how I do this, I just know that I do it and that for me, it is an easy thing to do.

Sort of.

Day 49:  A sight to make anybody happy!

Growing Up Meme

At the time I always write these things, there is no new Sunday Stealing, so I'll pull a meme from my files that I dont think I've done before.

How much schooling have you had?
8 years Catholic grammar school, 4 years Catholic high school, 1 yr at UC Berkeley.

Did you enjoy school?
Neutral on grammar school, loved high school, hated the school part of UC Berkeley.

Stop and count, Since you were born until today; how many homes have you lived in?
1. The flat my parents rented in San Francisco from 1943 until about 1974, when they finally bought a house.
2. Dorm at UC Berkeley in 1961
3. Apartment in Berkeley, living alone
4. Apartment in Berkeley, living with Gerry (Ned's godmother)
5. Living with Mike and Char for about six months
6. Apartment in Berkeley, living alone
7. The first apartment Walt and I had after we married, in Berkeley
8. A house we rented in Albany (next door to Berkeley)
9. The house we bought in Oakland in 1971
10. The house we bought in Davis in 1973

While growing up, did you have any role models?
My typing teacher, Sister Anne, who was my teacher, then my good friend for the rest of her life, until she died about 20 years ago.

While growing up, how did you get along with the other members of your family?
My sister (who was 4-1/2 years younger) and I were never close; I got alone well with my mother, not so well with my father. We were all united in our dislike of my grandmother (my father's mother), though I loved my mother's mother. My two grandfathers were always kind of distant. My cousin Peach was my good friend from the time we were both very young.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
First, a nurse (until I thought about the smells and yucky stuff I'd have to deal with), then a nun.

What were your favorite activities 3 years ago?
Pretty much the same activities that I do today. Things don't change much when you retire!

As a child, what kinds of personality traits did you display?
I was untidy, uncoordinated, shy, lazy, but good natured and lovable with a good sense of humor. I have not changed

As a child, were you popular?
No. I had a few friends, but was never one of the popular guys.

When and with whom was your first kiss?
I don't remember when, but I was 13 and it was from Bill Farrington, who was my boyfriend for 3 years, until he went into the seminary to become a Jesuit brother.

Describe any influences in your past that led you to do the things you do today.
* Sister Anne, of course, had a HUGE influence on me. I can't imagine where I would be today if I had not had a solid foundation in typing.
* I credit Sister Mary William, the music teacher, with getting me started on writing, since she was also in charge of the school yearbook and newspaper and got me on the staff of both.
* From my father I got my love of music my sense of humor.
*I wish I could say I got the ability to keep house, cook, or garden from my mother, but somehow those traits never "took" with me.

What's next?
Beats me. Too many completely unexpected things have happened in my life for me to predict "what's next"? It's all an adventure.

Day 48:  Happiness is hearing from a friend who hasn't written in more than a year--and having it be a 30 page letter!

Yesterday at Logos

My report on Kaiser yesterday got so long that I never did get to Logos so I will do that today, for all of you out there who have written to say how much you enjoy these reports. Though, as I said, it was a pretty dull day.

First, for an update on my mother, I went to put cream on her arms this morning and she had no clue why I was doing it, or any memory of ever having been itchy.  She also -- and this is the saddest part of her dementia, for me -- didn't recognize Brianna and Lacie.  I showed her a video and she asked "what kids are those?"  I expressed surprise that she didn't know and said "they're your great grandchildren."  She got very defensive and said "Well I don't know them.  I've only seen them a couple of times" and then when I got the video started, she looked at them and said "now who are those kids?"

After waiting so long for grandchildren and feeling like I can't really be an obnoxious grandma to people around me whose grandchildren are now in high school by bragging about how adorable my grandchildren are, it makes me very sad that I can't even share joy at the girls with their great grandmother.  She feels absolutely NO emotional connection to them.

Dementia is a terrible condition.

When I got to Logos yesterday, I was pleased to see Sandy, back from her vacation.  She's been gone for the last 3 or so weeks.  I always miss our chats when we do the changing of the guard.  She told me about her vacation and especially glowed when she mentioned having been to Emily Dickinson's house.  (They had also been to Hyde Park and she was proudly sporting her new Eleanor Roosevelt t-shirt).

She had purchased two books by a Buddhist writer and we began to talk about my friend Toni Bernhard (author of the wonderful book "How to Be Sick"), which Sandy had read, though had not met Toni.  A guy looking through the store joined in on the conversation, as he was famliar with the author whose books Sandy had purchased.   The conversation evolved into a discussion of Buddhism, Tibet and China.  The guy's son lives in Chongqing.  It turned out all three of us had been to China.

The China guy bought about $30 worth of books, which looked like a promising start for the day, but alas, it was not.

There were no shoppers in the store for the next half hour.   Then a woman came in with two boxes of books to donate.  The boxes were heavy and Bruce was passing by, so held the door for her, but he didn't come in.  I'm feeling like I am starting to know the familiar folks of downtown Davis, after 40 years.

Again things were quiet for another 15 minutes until a guy with a big guitar-shaped backpack came in.  He was looking for the music to the song, "Rise Up Singing," didn't find it, and left.

I was so sleepy by then all I wanted was a nap.

Another 15 minutes before a couple came in to check the personal improvement section, but I guess they didn't find anything to help improve themselves and they left without either speaking or buying anything.

A trio came in, a man and a woman and the guy known as "The Compassion Guy" around town. His name is really David Breaux and he is a Stanford graduate and Davis resident who can usually be found standing on a corner downtown, near Central Park, asking people what their definition of compassion is. He has had a compilation book published with writings from this experience.  He also got permission from AT&T (which owns the property where he stands every day) to build a "compassion bench," which was done with the assistance of local artists.

The three looked around for awhile, but also left without buying anything.

A guy in a green and black Ladbroke shirt (Ladbrokes is the world's leader in on line betting and gaming.  I wonder if the "...broke" in the name is a sign!).  He was looking for a book by Richard Armour (we have one here at home, but not at the store) and, disappointed that he couldn't find one, left without making a purchase.

A very military looking guy strode purposefully into the store, asked if we hired veterans, and marched out again when I explained that we are all volunteers.

It was now 4 p.m. and I had made no sale since the first one to the Buddhist guy with the son in China.  I was feeling I should have brought a cot so I could take a nap.

Finally my friend arrived at 4:22 and bought a book on Japanese Textiles and one called "Through African Eyes."  My second sale in 2-1/2 hours.

A guy who reminded me of our kids' friend Kag, even down to his clothes, striking white and black long shorts and black shirt, was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the literature section.   He eventually pulled out four books and took them to the front table to read.   He wanted to know if I could give feedback on the book "Story of an African Farm," but I couldn't help him with that one.  He eventually left with a Walter Raleigh book.

A guy came in to check out the old books, laughing at some of the titles, "Pollyanna in Hollywood," and a Bobbsey Twins book (he confessed he had been a Hardy Boys guy).  He left without buying anything.

Finally to make sure the cash register still worked, I bought a book of Fodor's Paris to help us plan our free time in that city later this year.  My third sale.

"Eliza" came in, still heavily bundled up in blankets, but with very dirty bare feet.  She bought two volumes of i Ching and came to the desk.   Her eyes were deeply sunk in her head with big circles around them and she handed me money with very dirty hands.  I just want to take her home, give her a shower and feed her!

A guy came in talking on the phone about a video game, finished his converstion and left.

Peter arrived and I got ready to leave.  I had been there 4 hours and had four sales, one to myself.  So I was shocked to get a note from Susan saying that the store had taken in nearly $400.  Sandy must have had herself a VERY busy morning!

 

Day 47:  Happiness is learning that before even the second episode airs,
the show has been renewed for at least 13 more episodes in Season 2!

Today at Kaiser

I may or may not get to Logos in this entry -- it was a pretty boring day at the book store.  But it started with a day at Kaiser.   Actually the "day at Kaiser" really started the previous morning.

I had gone to have lunch with her and she complained that she had what looked like bug bites on her left arm.  She said it itched badly and she kept hitting her arm and saying "stupid! stupid! stupid!" because she didn't know how to make it feel better. I thought some critter must have bit her in bed and figured it would be OK the next day because they had changed her sheets that day.

That night someone from Atria called me to say she was in a lot of discomfort and should go to Urgent Care NOW. I explained that we would have to take her to Kaiser ER in Sacramento and asked if they thought it could wait until she could see her own doctor this morning. The LVN said that she really needed to be seen that night.

I called the Kaiser advice nurse and she said she would set up a telephone consult with an ER doctor for 6:50. I got there at 6:25 and he had already called. My mother didn't know why he was calling, and said I would be there shortly. She told me he would call back. 45 minutes later, he still had not called, so I called the advice nurse again.  He said that the doctor made no notes about calling back, and the Advice guy talked to Momma to get her permission for him to read me the doctor's notes. Apparently she told the doctor she had no problems except she was a little dizzy.  Never mentioned her itching. (arrrggghhhhh!)

The upshot, after I talked with the advice person for awhile is that he made an appointment with her doctor for this morning.

Well, I missed the time and had to call my mother and hope she would figure out how to meet me outside. Thank God she did. We had less than 15 minutes to get to Kaiser (thank God, we made it!) She got in the car and, with all the anticipation of a kid going to Disneyland, she said "well, where are we going and what are we doing there?" I told her that she had a doctor appointment. She asked what for. I said for the bumps and itching. She said "I don't have any itching" and said she didn't want to see any doctor. I checked her arms and you could barely see what was so violent yesterday. I nearly cried. But then she decided that she DID feel a bit itchy. I checked her more closely and where the raised, flesh-colored patches weren't there, what replaced them were red patches that she finally admitted were itchy.

But she still didn't want to go to the doctor. ("You know I hate doctors.") However, thank God she has the retention of a sieve. It probably took 13 minutes to get to Kaiser and as many times in 13 minutes that you can say "where are we going and why are we going there?" is how many times she said it. It's like taking a little kid somewhere.

We finally got into the office, though she still didn't remember why she was there, but when she took off her shirt, I could see that she has several places where she has red sections and she admitted that her back was very itchy, so I'm glad that we went.

Because she lives in a facility, the doctor decided to give her a scabies treatment (which involves lathering her all over with cream, leaving it on for 8 hours, then showering it off and starting benadryl cream), though she didn't think there was any sign of scables. We went to the lab to get blood work and to the pharmacy to pick up $30 worth of meds and then home. :"Where are we going and what are we going to do next?" she asked as we got in the car.

Interspersed with where are we going were profound apologies for putting me out and letting me know that she is so stupid she should be able to do this herself and she feels SO BAD that I have to do it for her. I love my mother and as frustrating as this is, I feel honored to be able to do it for her and profoundly glad we made the choice to move her to Davis instead of leaving her in Marin county.  There are days when I can put up with her constant repeated questions just fine, other times my patience is a bit less and it drives me crazy, but I am glad I can be here.

She was still complaining about itching, asking what it was and how she got it, and slapping her arms to say "stupid, stupid, stupid" when we got back to Atria. I pointed out to her that Walt's mother had whole body itching for years and managed to put up with it.  She had to have lotion applied all over her body a few times daily.  That actually kind of shut her up for a bit.

I got her home and lathered up with scabies cream and I added benadryl too since she was so itchy and the pharmacist said that would be OK. I told her I'd be back at 8 after she took her shower (she was supposed to wash the cream off after several hours) and would put benadryl on again. She forgot to take her shower, I called to remind her and gave her 15 minutes to do it, since she said she was getting in the shower  "right then" but while I was on the way to Atria, she called Walt to tell him she was just getting into the shower. I arrived while she was in the shower and when she got out she asked "now why was I supposed to take a shower?" I told her why and then said I would put cream on her. She asked what the cream was for. I told her it was for her bumps. She said she didn't have any and had forgotten that she was ever itchy.

I have to put benadryl on her 2x/day for the next 5 days. I may go crazy by then.

Day 46:  Happiness is finding little gems like this

Big Wheel Keeps on Turnin'

I've been a show biz buff all my life.  I read all the movie magazines as a kid, my mother was a show biz buff too.  We saw all the movies, I had movie star trading cards and always followed the news of the celebrities.

Never in the over-the-top way that some fans do.  I just liked knowing there were people like that in my world and I was curious to know what they were doing, to borrow small pieces of their lives as printed on the magazine pages (not realizing that so much of it was fiction written by the studios). Today not so much since they all look the same to me and I don't know one from the other.  Heck, with some of the names, I'm not even sure what gender they are (I didn't know Cat Stevens was a guy until recently!).

With all the celebrity deaths that have occurred in the past 71 years, there are only three that have affected me profoundly.  Judy Garland's death in 1969 was the first. Judy Garland was my one long-lasting celebrity crush. I collected Garland everything, saw her in performance four times, met her once, chased her limo one time, and was one of the folks who rushed the stage holding upraised hands at the end of her Carnegie Hall concert (in San Francisco).  I remember her hand felt very small and very, very cold.  I could cry at Garland memories for years afterward her death.

I didn't have that kind of connection with him, but for some reason I was profoundly affected by Jim Henson's death.  Maybe because it was so unexpected and probably because I spent every day for years with our kids watching muppets.  Our Kermit the Frog still wears the black arm band that I put on him in the week following Henson's death.  The idea of Kermit with no voice was unimaginable.   (Yeah, he has a voice now, but it's not the right voice.  Like Julie Andrews -- someone whose voice was so familiar and it still comes out of the familiar face and mouth, but it's somehow...just not right any more).

Henson died in 1990, so it's been 14 years since a celebrity death has affected me, but boy has Robin Williams' hit me hard. And I can't put my finger on why.  He was a force of nature.  I loved his performances, but I can't say I was a die hard fan.  If he were to be appearing in San Francisco again, I probably would not rush right out and buy tickets to attend.  I didn't watch all of his movies.  But I was so taken by him whenever I happened to catch him on TV.   

Maybe it's because of the similarity of the circumstances surrounding his death to those surrounding Paul's death.  I could not sleep at all the night after I learned of his death and I couldn't figure out why until I remembered that I had not slept the night of Paul's death either.  And the memorials for Williams have been so, so heartfelt, so many people in real emotional pain, as I have been.  I watched The Birdcage the night of his death and, as I wrote on Facebook, it didn't hurt less, but it made me forget for a bit.

Today someone mentioned a movie of Williams' I had not heard of - The World's Greatest Dad - and said that Netflix was streaming it, so I immediately went and watched it.  I was a basket case afterwards.  If I had seen it last week, I probably would have said it was an OK movie.

Alison Willmore of the staff of BuzzFeed wrote a powerful article about this film, from which I will quote liberally.

He plays a father in World’s Greatest Dad, a 2009 indie written and directed by fellow comedian Bobcat Goldthwait. That may be the Williams role that I love best of all. It’s also one that is, for many reasons, almost unbearably sad to revisit now, not the least because it deals with themes of suicide, but also because its emotional epiphany is so hard-fought and so uncompromised, directly dealing with how people mourn and how we sanctify the dead....

Williams plays Lance Clayton, a high school English teacher, failed writer, and the father of a teenager boy named Kyle (Daryl Sabara) who’s an unrepentant little shit.  Kyle’s nearly friendless and hates everything except for porn, and he’s fond of throwing around the terms “fag” and “retarded” to refer to everything else, including his loving but exasperated single dad. Kyle dies in an accident involving masturbation, and in an act of parental love, Lance restages the scene as a suicide, penning a note that gets published in the school paper and makes Kyle posthumously popular for the fineness of his writing and his unflinching observations about identity and belonging....

The scene she describes shows Williams finding his son dead of autoerotic asphyxiation -- masturbating while cutting off his oxygen.  He walks in and sees his son with a necktie around his neck, connected to a closet door. When I watched the father's reaction to the son's death, I just wish Williams could have replayed that scene before he made his choice...would it have changed things to realize that his family would be feeling like this when they found his body?

It’s a role that showcases Williams’ underappreciated capacity for nuance — the scene in which he’s being comforted by a total stranger and can’t stop himself from giggling at the absurdity, a reaction the woman he’s talking to keeps mistaking for tears, passing him tissues. Or like this scene from the end (mild spoilers!), in which his face conveys such a quicksilver mix of sadness, regret, resignation, and the slightest touch of mischief. That clip doesn’t include the lines that follow, in voiceover, as the soundtrack kicks off the perfect song and a callback to earlier in the film: “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.” It’s an observation to break your heart, but the sequence that it’s a part of is filled with such complex but exhilarated joy and mourning all at once. It’s the kind of role Williams could pull off so well. God, he’ll be missed.

Life will go on.  The big wheel keeps on turnin'.  Already people are now mourning the death of Lauren Bacall.  But as with the deaths of Judy Garland and Jim Henson, my personal world is a little smaller and, with Allison Willmore, I say, "God, he'll be missed."

Day 45:  Happiness is shooting the breeze with people with whom you have a VERY LONG history!

Wear Grey

Today is the day we're supposed to wear grey for World Elephant Day, to raise awareness of the plight of elephants worldwide.  I read about elephants a lot, but I was not aware that 90 elephants a day are killed for their ivory tusks.

If we don’t all get involved the time’s going to come when the elephants are gone
Dr Jane Goodall

There are only 40,000 Asian elephants and 400,000 African elephants now, and at a death rate of 90 per day, that number can be reduced significantly very quickly. I would hate to think that the elephant could become extinct in my lifetime.

So I wore grey today, though I'm not sure my shirt is exactly conducive to raising awareness of the plight of elephants.

My shirt is more a "save the pinatas" shirt!  But it is grey...and by telling you about it, I am helping you understand the scope of the problem.

I wore my grey shirt to another lunch today.  This was mostly the lunch group with Grainne last week, with a slightly different make-up.

What a delightful lunch.  We were eating at the Jade Garden.   I thought I had been to every Chinese restaurant in town, but had never been to this one.  It may have become my new favorite Chinese restaurant. For starters there was that fabulous honey walnut shrimp.

Grainne shared that she was overseeing an exam in Ireland awhile back and started dreaming about this honey walnut shrimp and had to text someone in Davis about it...it was one of the things she has to have while visiting Davis.

But of course any meal is only as good as the group of people attending, and if I were to put together a group of people for an interesting meal, I couldn't choose better than this.  One of the people was someone I hadn't seen in a couple of years, who recently moved and has become somewhat of a recluse.  Another was a guy I may or may not have met 30 years ago.  It seems likely our paths have crossed, but I didn't recognize his name...or him.  And of course we are both 30 years older and while I haven't changed any in the past 30 years, it's possible he may have.

..

It is always so refreshing to be able to discuss current events with like-minded people and release some of that frustration that builds up inside the more one watches the news each evening, including the shocking and appalling rise in hatred in this country.  The "them vs. us" mentality and what it is doing to our country. And this was part of what went on at lunch, along with lots of good-natured taunts and lots and lots of laughs.

Grainne was pleased to hear that I had gone to Central Park to find her bench, sitting in front of the city carousel.

(The insert is what is written on the placque attached to the bench.)

I was sitting next to my friend Joan, whose daughter was the very first person I knew to die after we moved to Davis.  She was very young, in grammar school, and was killed in an auto accident on an icy street (one of the 2 or 3 days when it has snowed in Davis over the past 40 years).  In the "getting caught up" part of our lunch, someone asked Joan about her children.  She said "I have three girls...well, actually four girls, but Katie is deceased" and then went on to give an update on the remaining girls.

After I commented to her that the most difficult question I ever have to answer is "how many children do you have?" we agreed and shared how we handle that seemingly simple, innocent question. 

Grainne leaves in a couple of days to return to Ireland, so this was our last chance to see her.  But she will be back in December, so we will have a chance to do it all over again around Christmas time. 

Day 43:  Happiness is another lunch with long-time friends