April 2006
March is gone. Good riddance to it.
Garrison Keillor's Radio Romance is a delightful novel. I'm surprised it has taken me so long to discover it.
Tradewinds and sunshine made for a very pleasant weekend and Monday was especially fine. Alas, the Weather Guessers tell us more rain is coming.
Maybe it was the depressingly wet beginning or maybe it's just because I'm getting old, but Aries this year just hasn't brought the usual boost in spirits that it usually does.
A pleasant, uneventful weekend. Massenet's Manon doesn't come close to making my list of favorite operas, but I'm more than happy to hear Fleming sing anything she wants to.
Radio wasn't as enjoyable a part of the weekend, though, as it usually is because of the continuing begging bowl routine. They did, mercifully, not interrupt the opera but did preempt all the intermission features, and from what was said after one of them, I assume it was an interview with Fleming. I'd certainly rather have heard that than these confounded telephone numbers they repeat over and over and over again.
Call one of them and give money, please.
Nothing very special about a sixty-sixth birthday except for a slightly amazed feeling about having survived so long.
"What's your favorite thing to eat?"
"Pizza, spaghetti and tacos." (So much for the cuisine of the islands.)
"Pizza because it's French, spaghetti because it's Italian and tacos because they're Spanish."
Hmmm ... the French can be justly proud of many culinary inventions, but I don't think pizza is one of them.
Nevertheless, I took him to eat pizza at Sbarro's and it was a fine birthday feast, especially with the Sleeptalker as company.
The Sleeptalker stayed in town for only two days. On the second, he complained about how cold it had been at the Cloisters during the night. I could sympathize, especially since he was wearing only a tee shirt and shorts. Even with long trousers, two tee shirts and a long-sleeved shirt, I'd felt rather cold during the night, too. Brisk winds don't help.
But mercifully, the cafe at the Dark Corner closed on Good Friday so I had three mornings when I could sleep until the birds started greeting dawn.
Elizabeth the Second's 80th birthday.
Felix wrote recently that he doesn't expect to be around for much longer. I feel the same way.
The idea of surviving until the age of eighty is a nightmare.
I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto an empty page, into the empty air.
Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin
Helen R kindly gave me a copy, so now I have read Dan Brown's notorious The Da Vinci Code. I am puzzled by all the fuss over it and its enormous success. There's nothing new in it with the possible exception of the notion that there may be direct descendents of Jesus still living. I don't recall having read that before. But everything else ... the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene may have been married goes back centuries. And I not long ago read another contemporary novel which stressed the supposition that Jesus really intended Magdalene, not Peter, to head his church. Indeed, little wonder there have been plagiarism lawsuits.
There has been something of an outbreak of these kinds of novels, all based on the idea of some long lost artifact or document which, if revealed, would shake the foundations of authority, history, and more often than not, the Catholic Church. And like this one, they almost always end with the rather lame decision by the discoverers that, no matter what travails and risks they'd been through, it's better for humanity that the discovery remains secret.
Oh well, most of them do provide a few hours of amusing reading, as did Brown's book.
One of my favorite moments of each day comes in the early morning, just after six on weekdays, seven on weekends, when the supermarket opens and I buy a pint of milk and a little snack, cookies or a slice of pie.
I love the taste of cold milk, am grateful my undependable interior plumbing allows me to enjoy a pint of the stuff each day.
It does seem somehow peculiar that milk is more expensive than beer.
may
the tales