Quiet Birthday

Yay, I'm 67. I have been geared for this day, one, because I feel MUCH better than I did at this time last year, and two, because last week I got good numbers, when I saw my doc: blood pressure 120 over 60, cholesterol 100 points lower, good cholesterol 4 points higher. Pills, better food choices and Yoga seem to have helped. Hurrah!

I did not have any special plans for this day, actually. I did hope to go birding today, but the rain detered me.

So, it has been a quiet day--somehow the timing or the weather off for doing any of the things we thought we might do, like the birding trip or dinner and a movie. My daughter and two granddaughters came over with breakfast from Delfina's and a little present, this morning. That was very special. I was quite touched that my daughter made the effort.

After they went off to the mall, we went for a long drive and have been watching videos. And napping. I rarely nap, but today took two cat naps--what luxury and those beasts do it every day! Last night I read until after two; I can no longer get by on five hours sleep.

I can celebrate my birthday all this coming year, not just on this one day: this is a new beginning, after all, the first day of my 68th year. Yesterday I spoke on the phone with friends I have known for decades, although we have not seen one another face to face for fifteen years. He is now 80, she was 65 in April. We talk now and again by phone and it is remarkable how, the minute we start talking, it hardly seems that any time has passed since we played interminable Continental Rummy games and Scrabble and Charades and held pot-lucks with elaborate menus. (She always mentions those cook outs, and then I say I no longer cook anything requiring lengthy preparation. She doesn't believe me.)

67 does not seem like a special number, except that it means I am creeping (good word, esp. after sitting too long) towards 70. But 68 has a fine ring to it.

It might be a good year, in fact, to go and see old friends. My life was sundered in two fifteen years ago. But I feel now that breach has healed. The halves are one again. I have finally let go of much that caused me pain. How much lighter I feel. I don't know what to credit that to. Maybe just time--and the late recognition of what is truly precious.

To Blog or Not to Blog

It is the "B" in that word that I am musing over. As in Being. I would guess that phrase pops into the mind of every blogger, at least once.

Here is the thing. I am getting hooked on reading other blogs--spending more time in other bloggers' minds than my own. Maybe that is the point?

And, off on Mernit's trip to Amsterdam, which might just be my favorite city in the world (clouds/rain here in Portland remind me of that city) I realise that blogging works the way that my poor mind works, already. Here I am, tripping from one idea to another, navigating stepping stones with no particular destination in mind. Seining, along the way, for yet another bzillion reads.

In the poetic words of my favorite commercial, "That cain't be good!"

Or can it?

4 Page Turners--4 quick and dirty recommends

One Shot by Lee Child. The ninth Jack Reacher thriller. Jack Reacher is something of a superhero, a superman, really--doesn't put a foot wrong. Neither does Child, in this fast smooth read, except for one ridiculous glitch where he has a bad guy speak some ridiculous lines just to help wrap up the plot. How could he do that? Not cool. But I forgive him, for the rest of the ride.

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly. The MC here is Michael Haller, the lawyer of the title, a sleaze lawyer with sleazes for clients: it is really hard to like the guy. But he has a code he lives by and being a citizen of the U.S. one has to respect that code, right? that all people are presumed innocent, esp. if they can afford a lawyer who will get them off on a technicality. In this page turner--I staying awake until 3 A.M. to find out how it ended--Haller risks his and his young daughter's lives, searching for the truth about a friend's murder. Lots of twists and even a few surprises.

End of Story by Peter Abrahams. This is billed as a thriller. I have always thought that technically in a thriller the reader gets a glimpse into the mind of the villain--sees the world from his POV. This novel is unrolled strictly from the third person point of view of an aspiring writer, Ivy, who works as a waitress to pay her bills. (The strict POV makes for some fancy dancing, on the part of the author.) Ivy gets a job teaching writing at a local prison and becomes convinced that one of the inmates in her class is innocent. It probably helps his case with her that he is very attractive. There is a lot about writing in this novel, and that was a definite plus. But the draw is the story, of course. There were a lot of moments when I said (yeah, out loud, they were those kinds of moments!) 'Oh, no, she didn't do that?' This book is a page turner, "a novel of suspense" (it says on the cover) yeah, but somehow in a category all its own. I will definitely check out more of Abrahams' work.

The Depths of Solitude by Jo Bannister. "...Mr Turnbull had met dogs like that. They didn't bark, they didn't growl, they didn't show their teeth--but you knew that if you handled the next few minutes wrong, you were going to be picking fangs out of your leg." Mr. Turnbull is thinking about the protagonist, Brodie Farrell. Elsewhere described by her lover this way: "She looked like a geisha, thought like a samurai and talked like a sumo wrestler." But to get back to those fangs--that description could be used to characterize Bannister's prose. She is fond of similes, and they are usually sharp and stab you unexpectedly: "Deacon followed him; not exactly like a lamb, more like a wolf who has unaccountably been mistaken for a lamb and is wondering whether he should eat very fast or try bleating." This is the English (cosy ?) novel of the group and it is as much a suspenseful thriller as the others--picture Brodie being stalked by a villain (old fashioned word, but he is of the old fashioned tie 'em to the tracks variety) with the technical genius to rig up fun rides on a run away elevator. (Bannister unleashes lots of similes, describing that ride.) The villain is the sort who is able to conjure up the darkest most awful moments a person can suffer.

I read these in quick succession. I hadn't read any of the writers before--not sure how I missed Child and Connelly. Great fare for the beach.

Just doodling

I have heard this song by Paul Simon twice in the last week and now I can't get this lyric out of my head: "Who's gonna love ya when your looks are gone?" It repeats over and over and over.

About Paul Simon: It seems the wheel has turned and his social commentary is in style again? The other song of his I heard was about the environment. But none of that song stuck in my head like the line above.

Non sequitur: I wonder if a female feline's fur is softer than a males. My sable cat has very silky fur, unlike her stepbrother. All the cats in this neighborhood (six regularly hang out in my back yard) are males, and none are as sweetly soft as she is. [Obviously I am no scientist and also a little nutty to boot, or I wouldn't even entertain such speculation.]

'Nother non sequitur: Played in the yard a while this afternoon, finally putting out plants that have been languishing, including some I got for Mother's Day. It was about 70 degrees and delightful. What is it about digging in the dirt? We have a combo of plants in the ground and plants in pots. Somehow the number of pots keeps increasing. My plum tree got another spritz of Mentholatum, to keep off the ants that keep attacking it. It has 8 plums on it, that I am treating like golden eggs. I am not an ardent, obsessive gardner, like my daughter, but I love looking out our back window and seeing flowers, esp. those that over-flow the container, like Million Bells. Two of the pots with plants that wintered over were so huge that I could hardly get them down our back steps. I have to pace myself, or I will find myself unable to go out and water the precious plants we have.

And a last non-sequitur: Yesterday watched what I think of as the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And afterward wondered: why? Why does that Austen stuff appeal to an almost-67 yo woman in 2006? Well, it was funny. On first viewing I enjoyed the scenery and costumes. It was romantic. (We all have a seam of romanticism lurking somewhere, but I am an unabashed romantic/cynic.) It was not only romantic, a few moments were almost steamy.

I wondered about the cuts and changes a bit--sure that made that version more palatable to a contemporary audience, but what was lost. Heck, I decided, I don't care. I even found the bit tacked on, the Mrs. Darcy refrain acceptable.

I kept thinking that people of that day did not talk like that--but what do we know, really, about how they sounded? We just have Austin's (and other's) word for it, right?

It was good entertainment, an afternoon well spent.

Short Review of a Long Movie

Went to see The Da Vinci Code this evening and I liked it, though I understand perfectly those that say it drags. I did not mind, for, instance, the long expository dialogues about the codes and secret sects. I did mind that what should have been really important dramatic moments (how many have been told they were direct descendents of Christ?) were considerably less exciting than the violent, gory crimes committed by a zealot albino. On a scale of 5 stars? ***for trying **** at least, for the music. Dan Brown actually played and performed something. Renaissance Man.

Those crafty bandits!

Caution: This entry contains material which may cause nausea.

There are four racoons who come nearly nightly to scarf up the food I put out for Odie, the black feral cat who lives under our house. I try to outsmart them by timing her feeding so that it comes after their visits, but I am not always successful--like last night.

They make a disgusting mess! Today I wore gloves when I cleaned the cat's bowls. Ugh! the smell! Wet dog hair. They wash their food before they eat it, so I can tell when they have been by--the water bowl is always muddy.

This afternoon, while watching an OPB video about forensics, I learned something new about the smartest mammals in North America: they are ranchers. That is, just as we raise livestock to ingest, they raise GLEH! maggots. When they come across a piece of carrion, they poke a hole in it, to allow flies admittance, then they return and dig out those little white larva and eat 'em. Actually return again and again for that tasty snack.

(The video had footage from the body farm in Tennessee of the cute little guys in action.)

I will never look at that water dish the same way again.

A Good Day for Japanese Maples

Pure joy: Lingering to look up at bronze-red leaves of an old Japanese maple, patches of sun bleeding through.

Oops! Back again, to look without sunglasses.

Closer to home, a finer-leaved green maple. I stand a while under its cool canopy, but a squirrel barks at me.

Poet Power

"The exile of a poet, is today a simple function of a relatively recent discovery; that whoever wields power is also able to control language, and not only with the prohibition of censorship, but also by changing the meaning of words." Czeslaw Milosz, from Nobel Lecture

I cried today when I read those words. Remembered tears. I remember how I cried decades ago when I read the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and read about her life. Not because of the horrors she lived through: because elsewhere there exist countries where poets have such power that they are imprisoned.

Surprise

My sable cat moves from sill to sill, with the sun. She stretches out to catch the rays, body flattened, chin on her forepaws. When I walk by she yeowls to be brushed. A brush hangs from a hook, by each sill.

Her favorite sill, where she watches birds and any four-legged intruders to our yard, is nearly four feet high--pretty much the limit of her leaping abilities.

Seeing her there, I go in and stroke her throat and chest, which makes her purr. For the first time, in the bright May sunshine, I see that she has a good-sized patch of white hair on her chest. Alarmed, I try to compute how old she is. Let's see, we got her when she was about six week's old from my granddaughter's nursery school teacher. My granddaughter was about four then--now she is fourteen.

We call this still-feral cat "the Baby." She is small and somewhat younger than our neutered male.

I stroke her hot fur. She mews and then purrs. She can't be ten.

Antidote

A quote from Henry James: "Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."

My daughter sent me this. Kindness is the quality she values most in a person.

How timely! I was hardly a kind, compassionate person today, as I zipped around, full of beans and trying to get lots done. I was in fact impatient and argumentative. Grumpy and impatient. Did I mention I was short of patience?

She could not know that, so her choosing to send the quote (a forward from an old, dear friend) was serendipitous.

Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta

I generally put holds on books based on lists and reviews and interests. Tonight I Said Goodbye was one I just grabbed, while picking up my holds. A lucky grab--I don't read the blurb until after reading the novel, so I was happily surprised at how first rate the writing was. Set in Cleveland, a city I am pretty familiar with, the book has a lot of light humor and the drily witty main character, Lincoln Perry (first person narrator) is, as he says, a very good private eye.

He and his partner, Joe Pritchard, are hired to uncover the truth about the supposed suicide/domestic homicide of another private eye (small world), Wayne Weston, by Weston's father. John Weston is sure his son did not kill himself and sure as hell did not kill his wife and daughter. The wife and daughter are missing, so the police have come up with the scenario that Wayne Weston killed them and disposed of the bodies, then offed himself. Sounds fishy, huh?

Once I had zoomed through the book, which was a real page turner, what with the Cleveland Russian mafia going after Perry and Pritchard, I was interested in just who Michael Koryta was, anyway. I had never heard of him.

Well, it seems that he wrote the book while he was only 20, and it has won a number of prizes, such as the prize for the "Best First Private Eye Novel" from St. Martin's Press (he was the youngest to win that prize), a Great Lakes Award, and was nominated for an Edgar Award. Pretty good credentials since he was still in college when he wrote the book. Koryta works for a legal investigator, having attended IU, studying criminal justice. He already has a new book out, at 22, Sorrow's Anthem, and is at work on a third. To which I say Hurray! I love it when a good writer is also prolific!