Category: Books

Sunday was a bad day for football with both the Cowboys and Saints losing pretty close games.  I had anticipated a more severe Cowboys beating by the Seattle Seahawks, and as usual us battered fans were treated to moments of brilliance amidst the overall error prone performance.  This was the first football Sunday with the new TV unit and all the audio components fully installed and functional.  I’m really happy with Diana’s design and how it all turned out.

While I was enjoying football, McD was hacking away at bushes with her new power tool – please keep a safe distance!  That’s actually the neighbours’ side yard beside our driveway that’s she’s attacking.

I watched the movie “Youth” during elliptical exercise time.  Starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, the movie tells the story of two friends on the verge of turning eighty, vacationing at a resort in the Alps, and looking to each other for support as they face momentous career landmarks, realizing that time is no longer on their side.  Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, to say this is a quirky movie would be quite an understatement – just flat out weird in some places.  It was a pleasant distraction from the boredom of aerobic exercise.

On Friday we loaded up and made the all day drive from McKinney to New Orleans to visit the Ogans for a few days, prior to all caravanning over to the Florida panhandle for a week by the beach.  The drive was relatively leisurely with a stop at Athena in Shreveport for some fantastic Mediterranean cuisine.  We were amazed at the quality of everything we ordered in this unassuming restaurant.  The hummus was some of the best we’ve had.  Our second stop was in Opelousas for coffee prior to arrival on Webster Street around 7pm.

Saturday began with two laps around Audobon Park for Diana and me – the weather was gorgeous and perfect for a nice long walk.  This is the least humidity I remember experiencing in New Orleans.  In the afternoon we made a short visit to the French Quarter with a stop into Cuban Creations for a cigar and a drink.  Bourbon Street was very quiet with the majority of bars and clubs shut down and all boarded up.

Dinner on Saturday was at Patois – a short walk from Chez Ogan.  We’ve been here several times over the years and always loved the food and ambience.  This is the restaurant that was featured on the Treme HBO series with the female chef inspired by Susan Spicer.  Even with very few tables, due to density restrictions, the menu was still pretty extensive.  We started with pumpkin and crabmeat soup (bursting with flavour) and chicken liver mousse.  I couldn’t resist a fancy meat pie as well.  Denny and Anne shared some of the crabmeat gnocchi and crab claws they chose with us as well.  It would be easy to have a good meal of a couple of appetizers.

Denny and I both had the beef short rib special – so much amazing flavour again.  I made an omelet with my leftovers this morning.

We’re currently debating where to go for brunch and Saints game watching.  No firm conclusions have been reached.  It’s a process with Anne involved.

I finished “The Beekeeper of Aleppo” by Christy Lefteri this week – a recommendation from my Mum.

Lefteri was brought up in London and is the child of Cypriot refugees.  The Beekeeper of Aleppo was born out of her time working as a volunteer at a UNICEF supported refugee center in Athens.

The book begins with the violence of the Syrian war starting to ramp up and destroy normal life  in Aleppo:

“Things will get bad.  We all know it, don’t we?  But we’re trying to continue living like we did before.  He stuffed a dough ball in his mouth as if to prove his point.  It was late June, and in March of that year the civil war had just begun with protests in Damascus, bringing unrest and violence to Syria.  I must have looked down at this point, and maybe he saw the worry on my face, for, when I glanced up again, he was smiling.”

Nuri and his wife Afra resist leaving Syria when it would have been dramatically easier than their escape ended up being:

“When the trouble first started, Dahab and Aya left.  Mustafa convinced them to go without him.  As his fears began to be confirmed, he very quickly made plans, but he needed to stay a while longer to see the bees.  At the time I thought he was being too hasty.”

A description of a simple act of kindness that says so much more about the horror than any description of conflict could:

“A middle-aged woman knelt on the floor next to another bucket, full of water.  She was going to clean the faces of the dead men, she said, so that the women who loved them would recognize them when they came searching.  If I had been one of the dead men in the river, Afra  would have climbed mountains to find me.  She would have swum to the bottom of that river, but that was before they blinded her.”

Both main couples in the book lose children through the conflict and much of the story is dedicated to showing their differing reactions to the loss:

“sitting down at his desk, he opened the black book and wrote:

Name – My beautiful boy.

Cause of death – This broken world.

And that was the very last time Mustafa recorded the names of the dead.”

Finally, and almost too late, Afra agrees to leave Syria with Nuri:

“‘Nuri,’ Afra said, breaking the silence, ‘I’m done.  Please.  Take me away from here.’  And she stood there with her eyes moving about the room as if she could see it all.”

In an email from Mustafa to Nuri:

“Spend your money wisely – the smugglers will try to get as much out of you as they can, but keep in mind that there is a longer journey ahead.  You must learn to haggle.  People are not like bees.  We do not work together, we have no real sense of a greater good – I’ve come to realize this now.”

Mustafa adjusting to British behaviours:

“Apparently queuing is important here.  People actually form a single line in a shop.  It’s advisable to take your place in the queue and not try to push your way to the front, as this usually pisses people off!  This is what the woman in Tesco told me last week.”

Nuri enjoying the simple pleasure of a cup of coffee during his journey to England:

“and when my coffee was brought out I savored it, sip by sip.  I never thought I would be sitting down somewhere, next to other families, drinking coffee, without the sound of bombs, without the fear of snipers.  It was as this time, when the chaos stopped, that I thought of Sami.  Then there was guilt, for being able to taste the coffee.”

“‘You’re lucky you’re rich,’ he said.  His eyes in the mirror were smiling now.  ‘Most people have to make a terrible journey through the whole of Europe to reach England.  Money gets you everywhere.  This is what I always say.  Without it you live your entire life traveling, trying to get to where you think you need to go.”

As I was reading a passage where Nuri finds a bee in the English boarding house garden that has a genetic defect and no wings, my Spotify playlist was serving up “Beeswing” by Richard Thompson with the lyric:

She was a rare thing
Fine as a beeswing
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away

Weird how coincidences like that happen – or are they really coincidental and not something more?

“I know that Mohammed will not be coming – I understand that I created him, but the wind picks up and leaves rustle and there is a chill in the air that gets beneath my skin, and I imagine his tiny figure in the shadows of the garden.  The memory of him lives on, as if somehow, in some dark corner of my heart, he had a life of his own.  When I come to this realization, it is Sami who fills my mind.”

Mustafa and Nuri finally reunite in England:

“In my pajamas and with bare feet, I go down the stairs, and standing there, with the full light of the morning sun behind him, is Mustafa.  And the memories flash before my eyes – Yuanfen, the mysterious force that causes two lives to cross paths – and our apiaries, the open field full of light, thousands of bees, employees smoking the colonies, the meals beneath the canopies.  It all flashes before my eyes as if I am about to take my last breath.”

“And there we both stand, battered by life, two men, brothers, finally reunited in a world that is not our home.”

In the Author’s Note at the end of the book:

“I met Dr. Ryad Alsous, a refugee living in the north of England, who had once been a beekeeper in Syria.  He taught me a lot about the life of bees and how they are a symbol of vulnerability and life and hope.”

“The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a piece of fiction.  But Nuri and Afra developed as a result of every step I had taken beside the children and the families who made it to Greece.  I wanted to explore the internal conflicts, the way memory is affected, the way were are with the people we care about most in the world when we have suffered so much loss that we are broken.  I wanted to set forth the idea that among profound, unspeakable loss, humans can still find love and light  – and see one another.”

Yusuf/Cat Stevens has just re-recorded his classic 70s album “Tea For the Tillerman”.  I’m not really sure why – the original is wonderful and I don’t hear anything meaningfully better in the new version.  Take a listen on this video of  “Where Do the Children Play”.

I got a bit optimistic in my piano piece  for this week.  Always having enjoyed the chromatic sound and triplet rhythm of “Firth of Fifth” by Genesis, from the 1973 album “Selling England by the Pound”, I thought I could tackle the introduction.

I don’t even have the first page really down yet, so will spare you my performance.  Here is an amazing performance of what it could sound like:

In other music news this week, the Band of Heathens were all together in Austin for the first time in months and broadcast a great sounding show:

“Bathroom Completion!”

I just watched the the craziest Cowboy’s game against the Atlanta Falcons.  They fumbled 4 times in the first quarter and were losing by a large margin – a completely futile performance.  I was watching while doing my elliptical workout, otherwise the hour would have been a total loss.  Then, amazingly, they got it together and started making circus plays like this Amari Cooper catch:

A last minute touchdown, recovered onside kick, and successful field goal led to a 40-39 win.  The Cowboys never win close games like this.  Wow!

On an even more positive and important front, we received a picture of our Australian friend Stan’s new grandson on Monday – Henry Stanley.  Stan used to work with us at AIG and moved back home several years ago.  A couple of years ago they found several large tumors in his brain and he was diagnosed with 6 months to live.  The doctors involved in that diagnosis clearly didn’t know Stan like we do.  We had a FaceTime with Stan on Saturday night and weren’t sure what to expect.  He popped right up and recognized me straight away.  Full of his usual kindness, positive energy, and humour, he participated in a delightful conversation with us for over 30 minutes.  What a treat to see him in such good spirits after a long battle that he appears to be winning.  His short term memory is compromised but he still has all of his older memories.  As we discussed the impact of COVID on schools and universities, Stan used the term “staccato learning” to describe the starts and stops of online versus in school learning – not a term you would hear from someone who’s brain isn’t alive and very active.

Diana completed her first official 5K running distance this morning – actually over-achieved at 3.25 miles.  Even after that she still had a lot of pent up energy and decided to start consolidating all CDs, cassettes, and DVDs from their various locations in the house to the newly redesigned family room TV/stereo wall unit.  I installed shelves that she couldn’t reach and dutifully retrieved mounds of CDs from my office closet.

Out in smoky California, Finn was out and about in downtown San Jose with his new girlfriend, Amanda, and sent me this picture with some Panda art.  He’s a huge fan of pandas and also still too skinny for my liking.

This was the week that we lost Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Notorious RBG.  What a huge loss that is for the nation at this trying time.  There are a couple of great documentaries readily available on her contributions to the Supreme Court, and I enjoyed the interview with Bill Clinton on CBS this morning as he remembered the reasons that he nominated her:

The “Good Time Supper Club” with Band of Heathens on Tuesday evening included a video of them covering “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison, with special guest Raul Malo of The Mavericks.  Ed was playing the slide intro part and I thought to myself, “Self, I might quite like to have a try at that.” So I purchased a Dunlop bottle top slide overnight from Amazon and started to give it a try.  The Might Orq slide that I have  doesn’t work well for getting way up high on the neck – 21st fret and beyond.  I hope to have some video on the guitar to share next week.

Oopsy!  I almost forgot to include some of the most exciting news from the week.  After 9 weeks and 2 days, the bathroom remodel is essentially complete.  We’re waiting on one last piece of glass to seal in the steam shower area – but can use the regular shower now.  The master bedroom was reoccupied on Friday night and we’ve used the new shower, with fancy sound system and lighting, a couple of times now.  It’s excellent!  Here are the long awaited pictures:

We’re both exceptionally relieved that the project is complete and very pleased with the results.

I’ve had the sheet music for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” around for a while but for some reason have never given it a try.  That was remedied this week as I worked on the first couple of sections.  I’m going to need a break for a week or two to work on something else, and will try the remaining sections after that.  Here’s my attempt.  Do you like the new elevated camera angle?

I finished reading two books this week, and my reactions to them are almost polar opposites.  The multi-week slog to complete Erik Larson’s “The Splendid and the Vile” left me tired and frustrated.  On the other hand Phuc Tran’s “Sigh, Gone” (he’s a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Sai Gon in 1975) left me in awe of a beautifully crafted and written biography.  Warning – now I’m going to go on a bit of an extended ramble about the two books with some quotes that I particularly enjoyed (or didn’t in Larson’s case).

My first big question on meeting Erik  Larson would be, “Do you nae ken that Scotland and Glasgow are not part of England?”

“Over the next two nights the Luftwaffe struck Clydeside, the region encompassing Glasgow, killing 1,085.

Joseph Goebbels, writing in his diary on Saturday, March 15, exulted.  “our fliers are talking of two new Coventrys.  We shall see how long England can put up with this.””

Ok, you’re right, that’s a quote from Goebbels, but there are a number of other passages where Larson uses “England” when he means the “United Kingdom” or “Britain”.  One wonders why he thinks much of what he is describing in this 500 page slog is called “The Battle of Britain” and not “The Battle of England”.  In the over 50 pages dedicated to sources and references, Larson talks about many visits to the National archives and other sources but apparently didn’t have time to master the high level geography of the country he was visiting.

This is a typically disconnected paragraph.  Larson apparently enjoyed this fact and quote, and was determined to include it in the book, whether or not it fit in with the progress of the plot or not.

“In Bloomsbury, flares began to fall, flooding the streets with brilliant light.  Author Graham Green, whose novel “The Power and the Glory” had been published the previous year, was just finishing dinner with his mistress, writer Dorothy Glover.  Both were about to go on duty, he as an air-raid warden, she as a fire watcher.  Greene accompanied her to her assigned lookout.  “Standing on the roof of a garage we saw the flares come slowly floating down, dribbling their flames,” Greene wrote in his journal.  “They drift like great yellow peonies.”

Here’s a quote that my brother in law, David, would appreciate (the Bond aficionado):

“Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attache in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond.”

One of the more interesting things I learned was about Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s number two, flying a solo trip to Scotland to visit the Duke of Hamilton.  He was spotted by folks in West Kilbride and Eaglesham – both short drives from Stewarton, where I grew up from the age of 6.  In typical disconnected fashion, Larson talks about his capture and initial imprisonment, and then leaves the entire topic there.

“As they spoke, Donald studied the prisoner.  Something about his face struck a chord.  A few beats later, Donald realized who the man was, though his conclusion seemed too incredible to be true.  “I am not expecting to be believed immediately, that our prisoner is actually No. 3 in the Nazi hierarchy.”

I do not recommend this book at all.  500 pages of loose history, chock full of incongruous anecdotes and gossip.  People magazine of the 1940s meets a lightweight biography of Churchill and his family meets an even lighter weight chronicle of the Battle of Britain.

On the other hand, “Sigh, Gone” by Phuc Tran was a delightful read and I highly recommend it.  Tran’s family escaped Vietnam in 1975, just as Saigon was falling.  They ended up as refugees in Carlisle, a small town in Pennsylvania.  The book tracks his life from arrival until graduation from high school.

Let’s begin at the end with his description of the typical high school make up:

“Carlisle High School stocked its seats and bleachers with a familiar cast form the eighties:  the athletes who towered above the rest of us; the cheerleaders who lay supine beneath them; the geeks with their physics books under their arms; the preps with their Tretorns, Swatches, and impeccable Benetton sweaters; a handful of black kids with MC Hammer pants and tall, square Afros, tightly faded; punks and skaters with their leather jackets and black Converse; a few swirly hippies; the rednecks with their oily palms and cigarettes and trucks.  Carlisle High School was another cultural cul-de-sac built with the craftsman blueprint of John Hughes, the Frank Lloyd Wright of teen malaise.”

“From what I gleaned from television, Carlisle seemed like a slice of American apple pie a la mode.  We bottled lightning bugs on summer nights.  Trucks flew Confederate flags.  We loitered at 7-Elevens and truck stops.  We shopped at flea markets and shot pellet guns.  My high school provided a day care for girls who had gotten pregnant but were still attending classes.  We stirred up marching band pride and fomented football rivalries.  The auto shop kids rattled by in muscle cars and smoked in ashen cabals before the first-period bell.  We were rural royalty: Dairy Queens and Burger Kings.

This was small-town PA.  Poorly read.  Very white.  Collar blue.”

Tran discovers the advantages of reading in middle school – way ahead of 99% of the population:

“Then I hit the jackpot.  Triple cherries.  Working at my town’s public library as a library page, I bought a discarded copy of Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan.”

There are so many paragraphs with perfect descriptions:

“Our apartment’s kitchen, my ersatz O.K. Corral, was a twelve-by-nine rectangular combo eat-in kitchen – the apogee of postwar efficiency and the nadir of seventies style – a kitchen into which my parents had shoved a secondhand white-and-gold-flecked Formica kitchen table and four matching chrome seats with squeaky patched vinyl upholstery.”

As Tran struggles with whether to be offended by the racial insults hurled his way on a regular basis:

“if we want to loose whatever words fly into our minds- then we render words powerless, ineffectual, and meaningless, like the playground bromide of “sticks and stones.”  That childhood logic leads you to believe that suffering corporal trauma is worse than verbal trauma.

Nathaniel Hawthorne would beg to differ.”

“But if I allowed myself to be harmed by words, I was showing them that I belonged at least by virtue of understanding their language.  And all I wanted was to belong.”

Here’s one of my favourite descriptions – “like angry origami” – perfect:

“After mass, we piled into our red Ford LTD (which had replaced the green Pontiac), Lou and I anticipating some repercussions of our misbehavior in mass.  My father’s brow was creased, symmetrically folded and ruddy, like angry origami.  His chin, flecked with the weekend’s stubble, bent an unmoving frown.  Trouble was up ahead.  Lou and I were relieved when, in the car ride home, my father announced, “I’m not going to spank you.””

An interesting perspective from a young Vietnamese immigrant taken by his father to watch “Chariots of Fire”:

“An eternity passed.  Still more running on the beach and through town.  There were long close-ups of faces and even more running.  The time period was not a mythical era with Medusas or Krakens.  It was twentieth-century England.  There were no swords, sandals, or togas.  It was just supercilious Englishmen, talking and running against the synthetic willing ch-ch-ch-ch-ch of Vangelis’s theme song.  At least that sounded cool.”

Well, I called out Erik Larson for lumping Scotland in as part of England, and so can’t let Tran away with a free pass on this paragraph either.  Much of “Chariots of Fire” was filmed in Scotland and at least one of the runners was Scottish.  A more forgivable error from a Vietnamese kid than from a biographer who has conducted deep research in England.

Here’s an excellent paragraph on the mindset of elementary school students moving up to middle school, though I’m quite sure none of them are thinking of it in these eloquent terms:

“My small worries about changing schools were eclipsed by my opportunism:  I had hopes for my new school.  At Wilson Middle School, I could break free from the chains of nerditude.  Eighth grade in 1986 was the middle arc of adolescent Darwinism.  We were amoebae in elementary school, gradually growing some spines when we entered middle school.  But now it was going to be eighth grade.  Everyone’s genus and species in the natural pecking order was ossifying, evolving for high school’s law of the jungle.  Jocks.  Preps.  Freaks.  Geeks.  Rednecks.  I was determined to make an evolutionary jump – if not into a cool kingdom, at least our from the nerd phylum.”

A father and son’s shared love for the library:

“My father loved the library because it was a safe haven for him – no missed cultural clues, no bigoted insults from his coworkers, no glaring reminders of what was lost.  All patrons of the library were pilgrims to the oracle, all seeking the same thing: knowledge.  And in their pursuit of the same thing, they were all equals.”

An awakening that you could be a cool skate/punk kid and also a good student:

“Could you love reading and still love punk?  I had assumed that you couldn’t be a skate punk and geek out on books, but Philip had changed that perspective.  I had wanted to ensure that I would fit in, and suppressed my nerdiness as an anathema to punk rock.  But Philip had obliterated that premise in an instant with a copy of The Stranger.”

Here’s a transformation that happened to Tran in high school, not to me until much later in life:

“I savored the academic clout that reading a book gave me in school, and beyond that, I discovered that I actually liked the books my teachers recommended to me.  My perceived need to read changed, slowly and surprisingly, into a desire to read – a desire that I didn’t fight.”

A sad reflection on Tran’s home life, after attending “The Importance of Being Earnest” with a high school English teacher:

“Mrs. Krebs listened to what I had to say, and she replied with thoughtfulness and care as if she were speaking to an equal.  In her tone and engagement with me, I was uplifted from the lowly caste of teenagers and felt for a moment like a valued, adult counterpart.  I wasn’t relegated to the back seat, as I often was in my parents’ car.”

On receiving his ideal college acceptance:

“But then I got a large white envelope from NYU the next week.  It was after school, and I tore it open, and I saw the words:  Congratulations, I had gotten into NYU.  I called everyone, did a crazy dance – that whole celebratory montage that you see on TV when someone hits the jackpot.”

“Sigh, Gone” has been added to the section of my library that contains the books that I enjoyed reading the very most:

These days Tran is a high school Latin teacher – has been for 20 years.  Interestingly, he also owns and operates a tattoo parlor in Portland and is apparently highly sought after.  Here’s some of his work:

Some music that I’ve enjoyed while working this week:

The excellent gentle touch of Bill Evans:

An interesting cover of Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today”.  I haven’t had a chance to investigate these artists.  Swedish perhaps?

And finally for this week, a sad tribute to his father, that I heard Tommy Malone of the Subdudes play on Anders Osborne’s Friday livestream:

Have I told you my Tommy Malone stories?  No… well let’s see:

Story #1:  We were attending an oyster bake at Macon’s baturre (a house on stilts on the wrong side of the New Orleans Mississippi river levee).  I was underneath the house watching Denny very dangerously shucking a huge sack of oysters without a glove.  Macon was telling a story about his friend, saxophone player Derek Houston, who was attending the Grammy awards in Los Angeles.  On checking into the Beverly Hills hotel, he noticed that the font for “Coat Check” looked remarkably like “Goat Check” and called to report this to Macon, who keeps a couple of goats out in front of the batture.  I asked Macon what kind of music the Grammy nominated band (Roddy Romero) played.  He said something about swamp rock and I asked if that was like Tommy Malone’s band (I couldn’t remember the Subdudes – old age).  He thought I was kidding because Tommy was standing right behind him.  I hadn’t registered that was him.  I know – a rambling story and you kinda had to be there, but I like it.

Story #2:  Not as much a story as a fond memory.  We attended a Subdudes concert at Poor David’s Pub in south Dallas – a great place to see them play acoustically with the amazing sound in that venue.  At the end of the show, Tommy said they wanted to get closer to the audience and so they formed a circle and asked everyone to gather round and join in as they performed a few more songs.  A real treat.

Stay kind and patient amid the craziness of these times!

“Hello in There”

It’s been two weeks again – just not that much to post about.  The same old routine here – work, swimming, and elliptical for me and work, running, early morning walks, and elliptical for Diana.

The bathroom remodel continues and should be completely finished by the next post here.  The original contractor quit after hiring a tile guy that made a complete mess of 256 square feet of glass wall tiles.  He realized he was too far in the hole and was going to lose a lot of money on the job.  We now have the original contractor back (he was too busy to do it on our previous timeline) and he will finish up, with some different wall tiles, in a week or so.  Meanwhile we have to decide what to do about recovering money from the guy who quit on us.  We’ve learned a lot of lessons through this process.

My leg is doing well – I can do the elliptical or swim for an hour at a time with no ill effects.  The orthopedist checks it out on Tuesday and I’m hoping this is my last visit.

In addition to continuing to plow through my Winston Churchill book, I read “Normal People” by Sally Rooney this week.  It was a quick and reasonably light read, contrasting with the dense detail of the World War II history.

The story is set in Ireland and revolves around two friends who meet in high school and then attend Trinity College together.  At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers—one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

I started the new Stewart O’Nan book yesterday and should finish that up today – it’s only 175 pages long.  If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that O’Nan is one of my favourite authors – more on this novel next week.

This week I’ve been working on the chorus to John Prine’s “Hello in There” on the piano.  Here’s what John Prine had to say about this song, one that he composed in his head while walking his mail delivery route in his early twenties:

“I heard the John Lennon song “Across the Universe,” and he had a lot of reverb on his voice. I was thinking about hollering into a hollow log, trying to get through to somebody—“Hello in there.” That was the beginning thought, then it went to old people

I’ve always had an affinity for old people. I used to help a buddy with his newspaper route, and I delivered to a Baptist old peoples home where we’d have to go room-to-room. And some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head.

It was all that stuff together, along with that pretty melody. I don’t think I’ve done a show without singing “Hello in There.” Nothing in it wears on me.”

It’s amazing to me that someone that young can write such a mature and indelible song.  Here’s a bit of the wonderful chorus on my piano:

Certainly one of my top five all time songs!

On the guitar I decided to try and learn some of “Sweet Child Of Mine” by Guns & Roses.  I don’t have the echo and other pedals that Slash uses to get this sound on the introduction, but gave it my best shot.  I’m working on the solos and may have one of those in rough form for the next post.

Practicing this inspired me to finally put some new strings on my guitar.  It must be close to 10 years since I changed them.  Not too much of an operation but it does take a little work.  And then there’s the constant tuning until the strings settle down – I rarely had to tune with the ancient strings. Here’s my weak attempt – I enjoyed trying it if nothing else:

Continuing the guitar theme, The Allman Betts Band have a new album out.  This is the band made up of sons of Greg Allman and Dickey Betts.  We loved their show at the Kessler a year or so ago – back when live music was a big part of our lives.  Here’s my early favourite from their new stuff:

From a completely different genre, Yo-Yo Ma and a few friends have an eclectic new album out.  Here’s “Waltz Whitman” – Ma is certainly one of those musicians you can pick out almost immediately from his sound – absolutely gorgeous:

And finally, some female folk rock from the early seventies, courtesy of Sandy Denny.  Denny was the lead singer for the epochal English folk group Fairport Convention (Richard Thompson on guitar).  This one caught my attention on a play list – something about the sound just grabbed my ears, maybe the key change right before the vocals start, and the sound of Thompson’s guitar:

A pretty severe storm rolled through on Sunday evening after I published the blog last week.  The forecast had said this would miss us completely, so Diana had to scramble to get the sunbathing area all covered up.

My Best Man Denny’s Mum passed away this week after a lengthy battle with cancer.  We enjoyed so many laughs, often at Denny’s expense,  and meals with Diann over the years, and will really miss her kindness and her smile.

I watched an episode of “Mediterranean Living” on television that showed an American family moving to Almunecar on the Spanish Andalusian coast.  The weather was much nicer there and the town looked perfect.  I had Diana watch it and she was as shocked as me at how inexpensive the rent was on some gorgeous villas.  Should we start learning Spanish?  Might be worth a visit when we can travel again.

The calendar for August is completely open.  We remember when it was a complicated tracker of me going one direction, Diana going another, and trying to figure out when we would go to Austin rather than staying in McKinney.  All that as well as concerts and restaurant reservations.  I did have three outings this week – a haircut on Monday, physical therapy on Tuesday, and a trip to Filtered in downtown McKinney for coffee with Penelope and Diana – those and four trips to the gym for swims.

Saturday was a lovely, cooler morning to sit outside and enjoy that coffee.  There was only one fly in the ointment – McD beat me at the crossword by a full minute plus.  She completed the puzzle in 7:03 with me straggling behind at 8:08.

Prior to the coffee excursion, we enjoyed a fast paced 3 mile walk.  The Apple watch refuses to count Diana’s walks unless she gets her heart rate up above 100 eats per minute – a big source of annoyance.  No matter how fast she walks, her heart rate doesn’t get there.  So…she’s taken to doing regular runs to boost her rate – she runs away from me and then turns around to rejoin me.  Speaking of running McD – she did run a 5K distance this week – effectively fully completing the couch to 5K program.

It happened again on Sunday.  We went to Duino for coffee and the crossword.  I lost again!  McD finished in 7 minutes again, besting me by at least 30 seconds.  All that running has got her brain firing on all cylinders.  I’m going to have to up my speed solving abilities.  Losing two days in a row is a non-starter for sure.

The “memories” feature of the iPhone showed me these excellent memories of August 20, 2019.  The Marc Cohn and Blind Boys of Alabama concert form the wonderful Saratoga Mountain Winery.  What a great memory indeed.

We had Laureano, a new colleague from our Guatemala Technology Center, join our Happy Hour on Thursday evening.  We started talking about traveling and he shared a story from his honeymoon a few years ago – he and his new bride had toured the Vatican and asked about a special service for newly weds.  It was a couple of days out and would disrupt their travel plans, but his wife convinced Laureano that they should try to attend.  Do you think it was worth staying?:

Laureano couldn’t find the picture on his computer and I was quite impressed as he navigated through the Vatican website (all Italian) to find this shot.

Another work friend had a bit of a scary experience this week.  His son was crouched down by a river on their deer lease at night and he noticed a coiled up rattlesnake less than 2 feet away from his bottom.  Dad took care of the issue as a native Texan would:

I’ve started reading the “Splendid and the Vile” by Erik Larson.  It’s about Churchill, his family, and the years 1940 and 1941 when Britain stood strong against a potential invasion by Germany.  Reading about Churchill brought to mind an old Supertramp song that I first heard on the “Paris” double live album (remember those?).  I believe that “Fool’s Overture” is largely about World War II and the lessons to be learned about ignoring growing threats.  Here’s the first verse:

“History recalls how great the fall can be
While everybody’s sleeping, the boats put out to sea
Borne on the wings of time
It seemed the answers were so easy to find
“Too late, ” the prophets cry
The island’s sinking, let’s take to the sky”

Here’s the live version:

The song first appeared on the album “Even in the Quietest Moments”, released in 1977.  Supertramp is often referred to as an English group, although their bass player, Dougie Thompson, is Scottish – as evidenced by the Glasgow Herald he’s reading in the diner picture on the back of the “Breakfast in America” album.  I like the album cover art with the snow covered grand piano in the mountains.  Some research revealed that the group recorded the album in Colorado and put the piano (which doesn’t have any insides) on a ski slope one evening, photographing it the next morning after a snow storm had cleared.  The small details really make their album covers.  What’s the music on the piano?  It’s titled “Fool’s Overture” but is actually “The Star Spangled Banner”.

I decided to try and learn the introduction to “Fool’s Overture” for my piano tune this week.  It’s a bit challenging as you can see in this video of my efforts:

More work required.  I can play it through just fine without the video recording going.  No, really!

I don’t have a guitar song to share this week – the piano one occupied all of my free time.  Back to the book now.

Here’s an interesting picture from the inside front cover.  Look at the men selecting books from library shelves that are still standing in the rubble:

I’m 125 pages in at this point and here are some interesting passages from what I’ve read:

“Mine is an intimate account that delves into how Churchill and his circle went about surviving on a daily basis:  the dark moments and the light, the romantic entanglements and debacles, the sorrows and laughter, and the odd little episodes that reveal how life was really lived under Hitler’s tempest of steel.  This was the year in which Churchill became Churchill, the cigar-smoking bulldog we all think we know, when he made his greatest speeches and showed the world what courage and leadership looked like.”

“Coveting power for power’s sake was a “base” pursuit, he wrote, adding, “But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.”  He felt great relief.  “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene.  I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial…”

“With a German victory in France nearly certain, British intelligence now forecast that Germany might invade England immediately, without waiting for a formal French surrender.  The British expected that an invasion would begin with a titanic onslaught by the German air force, potentially a “knock out” blow – or, as Churchill called it, and aerial “banquet” – with as many as fourteen thousand aircraft darkening the sky.”

“But fighter production lagged.  England’s aircraft plants operated on a prewar schedule that did not take into account the new reality of having a hostile force based just across the channel.  Production, though increasing, was suppressed by the fusty practices of a peacetime bureaucracy.”

I love the picture painted by the word fusty, and remember my parents asking me why I had such a “fusty face” going.

“Goring harbored a distorted perception of what by now was unfolding off the coast of Dunkirk, as British soldiers – nicknamed Tommies – prepared to evacuate.  “Only a few fishing boats are coming across,” he said on Monday, May 27.  “One hopes that the Tommies know how to swim.”

“The Tommies did not, after all, have to swim.  In the end, 887 vessels carried out the Dunkirk evacuation, of which only a quarter belonged to the Royal Navy.  Another 91 were passenger ships, the rest an armada of fishing boats, yachts, and other small craft.  In all, 338, 226 men got away.”

His most famous speech:

“As he neared the conclusion of the speech, he fired his boilers.  “We shall go on to the end,” he said, in a crescendo of ferocity and confidence.  “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.   We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

“To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath.”

I’m reminded of the bomb shelters that were in back gardens of the big cities in Britain during this time – about 2 million were distributed.  My Dad was a kid living in Glasgow and so was the potential target of bombing raids.  My Mum lived in the country and so was less at risk.  I think I remember a bomb shelter out behind where my Grandpa Robertson lived.  Not sure if I’m imagining that or not.  These days, many of the shelters remain in gardens and are often used as garden sheds.  Here’s a link to an interesting article in The Guardian about these:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/how-britains-abandoned-anderson-shelters-are-being-brought-back-to-life

I’ve been listening to “American Dirt” by Jeanine Cummins during my swims this week.  It’s a story about Lydia and her son, who try to escape Acapulco and Mexico after her husband and most of her family are killed by a drug cartel.  An initial twist is that Lydia is a bookstore owner and one of her best and favourite customers is the head of the cartel that carried out the killings.  She is devastated when she discovers this and thus begins an attempted escape to Colorado.  It’s still early in the story but I suspect her escape exploits are about to become quite harrowing.

What’s happening in the week ahead?  Absolutely nothing exciting that I can think of, other than exercise, physical therapy and a busy week of work.  We’re hopeful that the bathroom will be usable next weekend.  I’m contemplating trying John Prine’s “Hello in There” on the piano and will search for something good for the guitar.

Open in Spotify

I’m finally able to get some exercise again.  Swimming seems to be the best bet for my leg and I’ve been amazed at all the data my new Apple watch captures from my swims – total laps and yards, average and peak heart rate, yards of breaststroke versus freestyle, active and total calories expended.  I did 1400 yards on Tuesday and 1500 on Friday – picking up the pace quite a bit on Friday as I got comfortable that my leg would handle it.  All that technology is great and we currently have a week long competition going between Diana, Alicia and me to see who gets the most exercise and burns the most calories.  McD is quite upset that she doesn’t burn as many calories for the same amount of effort – as I’ve told her, it takes a lot less effort to move her little body around than it does mine.

I saw this crazy video of Katie Ledecky balancing a glass of milk on her head while she swims a full lap.  What amazing body control and balance:

The nagging and prodding all got too much and I succumbed to Physical Therapy on Tuesday.  My therapist, Shenpagavadivu Sathiyamoorthy, thankfully goes by Shenda and was very thorough in understanding my situation.  She’s probably nowhere close to winning a most vowels in your name contest, but should at least get a bronze star.  Taking a baseline of my recovery, she had me walk in the corridor for 2 minutes and noticed that my left foot turns out when I walk and my weight is all on the outside of my foot.  I explained that’s the way I’ve always walked since breaking my left ankle in University.  She thinks that running in that same way put the strain on my left hip as it tried to compensate for my foot turning out, causing the stress fracture.  Interesting.  Now we start the exercises to strengthen everything and work on turning that left foot back in.

We’re hoping that the bathroom remodel woes are mostly behind us now.  The steam shower installation is complete and all the peripherals appear to be working now.  Diana and I had to play a very hands on role in supervising the initial plumber and helping him to correct his mistakes.  All that remains is some argy bargy with the plumbing company over how much they would like to charge us for the first plumber that didn’t know what he was doing and spent way too much time redoing and troubleshooting his work.  Diana will take the good cop first pass at that and hopefully bad cop K won’t need to make an appearance.  The bathtub may be able to come inside from the front porch soon.

Will and Christine moved to a new apartment this week – a penthouse in the same building as his old one.  He’s quite excited about the 20 foot vaulted ceilings, the extra bedroom, and the mountain view.

I finished “Blood” by Allison Moorer this week and I can’t remember being as affected by a book since Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights”, as you’ll be able to tell by the number of quotes and comments that I’m sharing.   The way that Moorer conveys her emotions over the years as she continues to deal with her tragic upbringing is beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time.

“I call the B-25 Daddy’s guitar because that’s what it is and always will be.  It’s a 1964 Gibson.  I’ve played it on every record I’ve ever made.”

A guitar as old as me that’s still going strong.  Clearly a very good year.

“I keep it out where I, or anyone who comes into my house, can pick it up and play a tune.  Daddy would like that, I think.  I don’t treat it like a precious thing, but it is even though it’s so scarred.”

Even after the devastating pain and suffering inflicted on Moorer by her father, she still plays his guitar.  A great example of the healing power of music.

“Guitars are mysterious.  A person can practice playing one for a lifetime and never really figure out how they work.”

“Music was second nature to Mama, while Daddy had to work hard just to be an average songwriter, singer, and player.  He probably had more talent for other things – but the desire to make music was deeply in him, even more than it seemed to be in her.  He always looked to her for the right chord when he couldn’t find it and for the harmony parts he couldn’t hear.  She was just plainly better and more naturally talented than he was.  It made him deeply frustrated because she had something he didn’t but wanted badly.  He despised the part of her that didn’t treat her talent for music as the most important thing in life besides, of course, him.”

This is an extreme version of the feeling I have with people who squander a  natural music talent and ability.  I have to work very hard to make something sound half way decent, while so many others can just sit down and do it with zero effort.  And that is quite frustrating.

“Daddy’s main disease was alcoholism.  But I don’t think it began and ended there.  I have more than a suspicion that there was very likely something else going on, something else that didn’t allow his mind to operate properly.  Normally?  I don’t know what normal is.”

“Was he bipolar?  I know he was depressed.  His moods swung violently.  He was unpredictable.   He did dangerous things.  I’m pretty certain he didn’t care if he lived or died.  He would come up out of the misery every once in a while and when he did it felt like the sun was shining directly on you and only for you.  That’s what his happiness felt like.  He’d deliver a sweet “That’s my girl” and a pat on the back or the head when he was pleased with you.  But that was only every once in a while.”

“He didn’t like competition.  Everyone loved her.  So he shrank her.  He shrank her until she almost disappeared.  She decided that she didn’t want to disappear anymore.  Then he disappeared her for good.  No more speaking too much, no more personality, no more competition, no more chance that she might possibly have a life outside of the one she had with him.”

Hard to imagine someone who wants to shrink their wife.  But there are a lot of them out there.  Then the story gets worse, in my opinion:

“What happens when you hit your daughter:  First, she will bond to you out of fear, mistakenly thinking she has done something wrong and if she can just manage to not do it again or somehow please you, you might not hit her or anyone else anymore.  She will even think you will love her properly if she can earn your approval.  She won’t realize this is impossible.  Then, she will either do that with every man she comes within a hundred feed of for the rest of her life or until she learns not to (this will take much doing), or she will despise them with such vehemence that she can barely stomach one around.  Sometimes she will do a combination of both of those things, working herself into a pattern of push and pull.  I love you I hate you, I need you I don’t need anyone, that will drive her a little crazy.  She won’t understand at first, if ever, why she only attracts other masochists.”

And then some more positive commentary on music and innate ability:

“I was always a stickler for details even as a girl, and noticed that someone had hit the wrong chord upon first hearing the recording.  When I revealed this to my sister, she looked at me like I had three heads.  It was true that I was almost missing the point entirely, but the little things meant everything to me.  I’d pick out the smallest details on a recording and would often fixate on them, waiting for them to come around every time I’d listen – a faraway harmony part, a double-time strum on a guitar, the acoustic upstrokes between every spelled-out letter on the chorus of “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”  The details always connected me to the ground and reminded me that even if everything else around me was too unpredictable to depend on, I could count on the records to not vary.  I could trust them, and not a whole lot else.”

Moorer’s records are always impeccably produced and the paragraph above partially explains why.  The only record I remember bugging me every time I listen is “Easy Money” by Rickie Lee Jones.  The double bass is alone in the intro and quite out of tune – how does that happen?  I love the song but the bass always bugs me.

“That I cannot cancel my love and attachment to them is a testament to the bonds, good or bad, of blood.  It’s fascinating to try to figure it out, though, and I have a hunger to do so.  It’s medicine, a balm for the wounds still healing.  I need a balm.  Sorting through it makes me tired in the deepest part of myself.”

Talking about her son, John Henry, who has appeared in the background of some Hayes Carll livestreams, and who has non-verbal autism:

“He is here as an angel.  He is sometimes of the sort that tests my patience, fortitude, and endurance, sometimes of the sort that ruptures my heart, sometimes of the sort that makes me feel like every part of me that has any good in it will burst through my skin from the way he makes it increase in size.  I am here to learn to allow him to redeem me.”

About making music with her “Sissy”, Shelby Lynne:

“The sound of our voices blending as only those that belong to siblings can buzzed through them just as it did us.  Our voices are like two halves of a whole, and when we sing together we make one thing.  It was electric.  My chest and ribs vibrated in that perfect way that notes coming from my toes can make them do.  Sometimes I think I live for that feeling.”

The other siblings that come to mind when reading that paragraph:

“I watch my friends and H. with fascination as they talk about what their folks are up to, how they annoy them, how they love them.  I try not to cry when H. speaks to his folks on the phone, and cover up my longing for just one conversation that he’s having.  I am jealous and I am sad.  I am lonely.”

Sometimes simple phone calls are so precious.  We don’t always recognize that at the time.

My last quote from “Blood”:

“Guns:  I am farther away from them now than I have ever been.  The sight of a gun unnerves me – all that shiny metal clicking and clacking, heavy in a hand.  Maybe that’s how much fear weighs.  It weighs as much as the gun you tote.  you think you can ward off your fear if you have one.

I do not like firearms around me.  I will cross the street if I see a copy because they carry them.  I don’t like the sounds they make, I don’t like the damage they do, I don’t like the power they possess.”

Continuing on the musical front, I heard this great cover of the Grateful Dead’s “West L.A. Fadeaway” by moe.  I love the jazzy elements of their jamband sound.

I heard about this NPR listening test that let’s you see if you can really tell the difference in high quality audio recordings.  There are 3 choices for different styles of music and each is at a different audio quality (sampling frequency).  I got about 70% correct indicating that I really can’t hear high frequencies well enough any more to be able to tell the difference.  Put on some headphones and see what you think:

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

Staying with NPR, they put on what they call Tiny Desk concerts – performances at the desk of one of their reporters.  Those have obviously gone virtual these days.  Here’s one from Lucinda Williams.  Such an unabashedly Southern accent and she always has excellent guitar players:

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/27/894685942/lucinda-williams-tiny-desk-home-concert

And here’s the Tiny desk contest winner for this year –  Linda Diaz has such a gentle and smooth sound with a good message for now:

This John Hiatt song just popped up on Spotify as I was writing this post.  Listen to Ry Cooder’s slide guitar – Wow!

“You’ll Never Walk Alone”

Hello again.  This will be a brief update since I just posted about the last couple of weeks a few days ago, and we’re not off on any exciting adventures right now.

I love this video of Clorinda, my mother in law, puttering around and singing along to a record, completely oblivious to the fact that Alicia is recording her.

We celebrated my Mum’s birthday on Sunday as we do these days – by gathering on a Zoom call.  This was the first time all the cousins had been together, albeit virtually, since the wedding in Cozumel over 3 years ago.  Everyone enjoyed chatting and I left thinking that we should do this more often.

I watched the movie “The Trip to Greece” while Diana was sunbathing on Sunday.  This is the fourth in the series starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.  The formula is the same as the last three trips – Steve and Rob travel around, enjoying fabulous meals and trying to upstage each other with humour and impressions.  The impressions are very funny and well done.  The constant fight to one up each other gets a bit tiresome.  The scenery and food, often eaten al fresco by some aquamarine seascape, are lovely, particularly in this time when we can neither travel nor eat those fabulous meals.

I left the Susan Sontag in Austin, probably subconsciously ready for a change of reading material.  So, I’ve started re-reading “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole.  I didn’t make it very far through the first time, and I can’t remember why as this is a very funny and readable book.

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs.”  Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of this tragicomic tale.  He is 30 years old, lives with his mother, and gets into all sorts of hilarious mishaps throughout the New Orleans French Quarter.

This was Toole’s only published novel.  His mother went to great lengths to convince a Tulane University English professor to read it after his death, and that ultimately led to publishing, a  very positive public reception and a Pulitzer prize.

I’ve always enjoyed the cartoon contest on the back page of the New Yorker magazine and decided to enter my first caption this week.  What do you think?

I had fun with that one and so entered again for the contest this week.

We were watching “Little Voice”, a new series by Sarah Barielles on Apple TV, when one of the characters said, “We all have cracks, that’s how the light gets in.” I said, “That’s a Leonard Cohen quote”, right as the character said, “either Hemingway or Leonard Cohen.”  That set me off on a Cohen listening spree.  What a poet!

Here’s the song of Cohen’s that first introduced me to him.  The finger picked guitar, backing vocals and French verses had me hooked.

And we’ll finish out with one of his last songs, “You Want it Darker?”  No thanks.  Not right now!  I love the Gregorian sounding background vocals.

Please remain calm and kind to everyone.