Amour

Lughnasa                                                                        Honey Moon

Kate and I watched Amour last night.  It struck us differently.  I saw two people whose reserve prevented them from opening up to each other, whose Gallic stoicism bordered on emotional neglect.  Georges was dutiful, sometimes loving, always patient and persevering.  Anne had a stubborn fear of medical care and a resignation that set in almost immediately after her first incident.

The dynamic between the two of them left little room for graceful moments.  As I saw it.  Kate saw two people in love who stuck with each other through a horrible and realistically presented slip off a medical precipice.

Perhaps it was the absence of a story line other than the grim decline of Anne, but I don’t believe the unrelenting grayness fading to black represents the whole truth of any such episode.  To be fair there were a couple of moments, when Anne and Georges sang together and when she first got her motorized wheel chair, that had a hint of another mood; but, the bed wetting, the second stroke, the firing of the second nurse, the nasty exchange between Georges and Eva, their daughter, kept piling on and on and on.

I do know this.  It is not the end I want and I will work from this point to see that it doesn’t happen that way.

Lunch with a Friend

Lughnasa                                                                         Honey Moon

Had lunch with Tom Byfield.  An extraordinary guy.  After 37 years of living, as he said, “on the lake bucolic” and conducting a dental practice in Bagley, Minnesota, he and his wife moved to the Twin Cities.  He became a docent 17 years ago.  We both resigned this year, he to take care of his ailing wife, who has since died, and me to finish my novel.

He draws, paints, writes humor articles, has traveled the world and knows a lot about art.  He can, and I have seen him do this, take very legible notes in the dark.  A useful skill in art history lectures.

We’ve both found friendships in the docent program, not the least of them each other.

Lughnasa                                                                                        Honey Moon

Why I write and why I write fantasy.

“The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. wood rots. people, well, they die. but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.”

Chuck Palahniuk