Winter and the Wolf Moon
Saturday gratefuls: Kate and our IRA. Enough money to keep me alive. Another new knee. Warren. Ode. Now Stefan. Age and its attendant insults. Medicine and its remedies for them. Rich’s new class. Looks fun. The Muddy Buck. Old Evergreen. The Evergreen Hotel, long gone. Evergreen. A mighty fine Mountain town. Living in the Mountains. The silence of a Shadow Mountain Night. Sleeping. Kep, the dogged. Solving problems. Accepting reality.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Silent Night, Holy Night. Every Night
All that. Money stuff. Doctor and pharmaceutical stuff. Put to bed for now. Moving on. Occupied me for two days straight. Gotta have stuff to do when you old.
Reading two new books. Stunners. The first South To America by Imani Perry. A professor of African Studies at Princeton. A delicate, hard fisted, beautiful intelligent travelogue of her journey to her home state of Alabama. She begins at Harpers Ferry with thoughts on John Brown, Confederate reenactors, an unexpected conversation with one who volunteers at a store that’s part of the historic Harpers Ferry.
She writes about race and racism in a way that enfolds and unfolds its complexity. An example. Her feelings of tenderness toward the exploited coal miners of Appalachia. All of them. Then an observation about how even in the mines Blacks had the filthiest most dangerous jobs. Lived on the fringes of white poverty.
I’m still early in the book. Virginia. Trenchant and profound observations about Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. Both owned slaves. Both believed it was wrong. But lust overcame Jefferson and ambition overcame Patrick Henry. They kept their slaves.
The second. The Good Life. By Robert Waldinger and Marc Shultz. Director and Assistant Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Longest running longitudinal study of human development in the world. Its message. Develop and keep good relationships. Intimate ones. Friendship. Family. Even strangers. Well written, clear. Helpful. Reinforcing.
In that spirit I have breakfast with Alan this morning at the Parkside Cafe in Evergreen. The newer part of Evergreen. For locals. Tourists sneak in on occasion, too. Near the Bread Lounge. Often has folks I know.
Rebecca Martin should be back from India and we can resume our breakfasts. Luke and I have our lunches. Diane and Tom. The Ancient Brothers. MVP. Mussar on Thursday. Staying connected. Rich again in two weeks. Knowing and being known. Seeing and being seen. The human, the primate, way. Love in its many forms.
How about those classified files at the Bidens? Ooops. There goes a second term. So. Damned. Stupid. And right now? He’s overperformed. Rich and I agreed. Then stepped right on his well you know. And hard. Without necessity. Come on, man!
Takes the stage away from that lying George Santos. The Long Island prevaricator.
How bout those Bolsanorans? I mean. Guys. He fled the country. To Florida. On an A-1 visa reserved for heads of state. He left Brazil before he left office. Trump went to Florida, too. Lots of parallels, eh? Trump and his like are cancers in the body politic of many countries. As 1st graders used to say, He’s copying!
All for now.
501 Latin verbs fully conjugated. Once I begin to learn Latin and could see more learning ahead, I purchased the OLD, the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which is the gold standard of Latin-English works. Thanks to Amazon I got one for a very good price.
bookshelves are full and many have books piled on top of them. Each one I want to read. Some I want to use only as reference, but most I want to read cover to cover. The books range in topic from fairy tales and folklore to basic scientific texts on biology and geology, from philosophy to theology, art history to renaissance life, china, japan, india and cambodia to single dictionaries and the multiple volumes of the OED and the Dictionary of Art. Of course there is fiction, too, and poetry, works on historiography and works on the enlightenment. This doesn’t count the 90 books I now have on my kindle, many fiction, but many non-fiction, too.
include the histories of Herodotus and substantial commentary. The Mahabharata. Several works on Asia art. A cabinet full of books on the enlightenment and liberalism. Another cabinet full on calendars and holidays. I will never do it. Why? Because I do have interests, obsessions maybe, that take me out into the garden or over to the State Capitol and the Minnesota Institute of Arts, the homes of the Woolly Mammoths and our children. Kate and I will, I imagine, resume at least some of our SPCO attending when she retires and there will be travel, too.