June 8, 2026 – Keith Robertson

“A Relaxing Week at Home”

Pickleball kept Diana busy on Monday. She had a clinic in the morning and then a match with some new friends from the clinics in the aftenroon.

I watched the French Open tennis in the afternoon. The match between Tiafoe and was excellent. Tiafoe had multiple chances to win and couldn’t capitalize.

A real shame, as he had a chance to go far with many of the big names eliminated.

I suggested John Fohl at Dos Jefes to Diana and she jumped on it. John has been playing Monday nights at Dos Jefes cigar bar for around 30 years and always puts on an excellent show. There were very few people there, around ten, with Fohl commenting about how much things slow down after the Memorial Day weekend. As is typical, he started with some finger picked instrumentals before diving into his song repertoire. I heard all my favourites, particularly this one with the lyric “Left hand of Toussaint, right hand of God.”

John Fohl live always gives me a very nice boost.

While Diana attended another pickleball session on Tuesday morning, I headed over to Aidan Gill for a haircut. Then I spent an hour or so on a paint by numbers kit – heading straight back to my childhood. I did find it very relaxing, even if I had to use my phone magnifying glass to see the numbers in some of the sections, and paint them with a very fine tipped brush. I’ll share a picture when I’m finished. We visited the New Orleans Athletic Club in the afternoon – I had a swim and a steam while Diana used the treadmill.

Tennis entertained me again in the afternoon – this time Mescik and Fonseca with one of the better matches that I’ve seen in a long time.

We had another good trivia showing in the evening. The final question asked us to put these 4 events in chronological order:

The Geneva Conference
Five Easy Pieces movie
The launch of Reese’s Pieces
The publication of a Separate Peace

With a great team effort – Denny on Reese’s, Jack on Geneva, Thom on Separate Peace, and me on Five Easy Pieces – we bet the maximum 20 points and got it right for the win. Another great leadership job by Kenny!

More pickleball on Wednesday – this time a serving and returning clinic that Diana seemed to enjoy.

And the final pickle session for the week was the Thursday morning clinic. In the evening we attended a fun event – an outdoor movie at the wonderful Broadside theater. The offering this time was Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior from 1981, the second in George Miller’s popular series. An online summary of the plot:

“After avenging the death of his wife and young son at the hands of a vicious gang leader, Max drives the post-apocalyptic highways of the Australian outback, fending off attacks from nomadic tribes that prey on outsiders. Falling into an encampment led by the relatively peaceful Pappagallo, Max at first schemes to steal their oil, but soon becomes the group’s reluctant defender against the hulking Humungus and his ruthless marauders.”

I love the Humungus name, and one of my other favourite characters was the boomerang wielding “Feral Kid.” Listed just like that in the credits. Emil Minty was 9 years old at the time.

We really enjoyed sitting outside and enjoying the soundtrack on the massive Broadside sound system. There is very little dialogue in the movie and the orchestral soundtrack sounded great.

Kenny and Kara stopped into the Chicory house coffee shop across the street from us after their Saturday morning yoga. We had a nice visit and it was a good excuse for me to enjoy one of the ridiculously good mushroom, brie and shallot turnovers – they have a high butter content.

Anne’s sister, Mary Francis, passed through town on her way to Navarre and the continued condo clean out. We met the girls at Charmant for a delicious brunch. Diana did not enjoy the bacon infused Bloody Mary, so I had to help finish it.

I met the boys (Denny, Fred, Richard and various kids) in the afternoon to watch the USMNT play Germany in the last friendly before the World Cup gets underway. The game was relatively entertaining and it was nice to try a new place that is a close walk for me, the Rendezvous bar.

I wondered why the US team is denoted as the USMNT, when none of the other countries feel the need to append “Men’s National Team” to their country name. It’s just “Scotland.” Denny posited that it was in order to make internet searches more efficient. Perhaps.

I needed something lighter and quicker after the trudge through “Doxology.” Claire Keegan’s “So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men” was a perfect antidote. Three short stories that were easy and thought provoking reads.

Here’s an online review:

“So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men is a 2023 collection of three short stories by acclaimed Irish author Claire Keegan, exploring complex gender dynamics, misogyny, and missed connections through tales of regret, intrusion, and desire. The stories, “So Late in the Day,” “The Long and Painful Death,” and “Antarctica,” are praised for their precise, powerful writing and ability to pack significant emotional depth into a small space, often leaving readers with a sense of unease and haunting reflection. “

My next book was “Ghost Town” by Tom Perrotta. I read this in just over a day – it was another quick and enjoyable read. I enjoyed “The Leftovers” and was interested to read another of Perrotta’s novels. Here’s an online summary:

“Jimmy Perrini lives in 1970s suburban New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan, but a world apart. At the end of eighth grade, after tragedy strikes, Jimmy finds himself lost in a fog of grief that alienates him from friends and family, drifting instead into troubling friendships with two older teenagers: one a notorious local burnout with a fast car, an endless supply of weed, and a shaky grasp of reality; the other a smart, eccentric girl, whom Jimmy finds himself drawn to as they become entranced by her Ouija board, which may just offer the only salve to their grief.

As a fateful public drama unfolds, Jimmy is torn between the occult beyond and the cold realities of the place he has called home. Narrated by a much older Jimmy, a literary-turned-commercial novelist, Ghost Town is an “emotional wallop [that] nails the restless ennui of adolescence” (People Magazine), revealing how the past haunts the present and the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we’ve left them behind.”

Some highlights:

I enjoyed this paragraph – mainly because of the pickleball reference:

“She pursed her lips and tilted her head, making a poor-baby face to acknowledge my pain and maybe mock it a little too, because my problems weren’t all that serious in the grand scheme of things. I was just struggling a bit, emotionally and professionally, finding it difficult to visualize a happy and productive future for myself. It was a garden-variety case of the midlife blues, nothing that couldn’t be cured with a little Zoloft and some pickleball, or so everyone told me.”

I didn’t know the origin of the Ouija board:

“The first time she mentioned it, he thought she’d said weegee board, and she had to spell it out for him letter by letter. She explained that Ouija was a compound of the French and German words for yes, though in her opinion the name gave a misleading impression of what the board was for, and what it was capable of.”

A great question from the section at the end of the book with questions for book clubs:

“The story begins with Jimmy Perrini receiving an email invitation to return to his childhood home of Creamwood, New Jersey, to honor his late father’s memory with the naming of a new municipal building for him. While the message disturbs Jimmy, it causes him to reflect on that fateful summer of 1974 and the “bad memories” of his hometown that he had locked away. How does Jimmy’s attitude about his hometown, and his hesitation to return, set up the novel for what took place for him that summer?”