One byproduct of revamping the blog is that due to various formating issues, I’ve had to touch just about every entry again. It gives a girl a chance to rethink the blog — why I started it, what I want to do with it. Among the many things I noticed was that although I started out with faith as a real topic on this blog (see the Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days series from 2003), it’s not something I’ve written about much in the last couple of years. There are a number of reasons for that, of course, and cruising…
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Okay, I admit it, when I saw the news, I got a little weepy. I’ve written before about how the Kentucky Derby kills me every time, and there are times, like watching Barbaro in the Preakness that having grown up surrounded by horses and horse shows, in houses cluttered with boots and tack, having spent most of my childhood in barns with people who live and breathe horses — even if you were a kid like me mostly reading a book over in the viewing room waiting to go home, you wind up with an eye for when something has…
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I’ve been sort of following this story for the last couple of weeks, and today comes the sad news that they found Charlie Fowler’s body on a peak in China. I didn’t know Charlie well, but for a couple of years, he was my next door neighbor in Telluride. He was a kind, softspoken guy who was a little older than we were and who had climbed a whole bunch of impressive peaks in Asia and South America. I lived next to this big blue house full of climber guys — it was an ever-changing group. This was before Telluride…
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Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that on the day that we’re about to swear in Samuel Alito, the man responsible for this statement: ”Why do you keep bringing up the fact that this case involves the strip search of a 10-year-old child?”(and a black girl child at that), that Coretta Scott King would choose to leave the planet? Does no one else see this as a Very Bad Sign?
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Yesterday was the second anniversary of that sad event Maryanne has named, “Patrick’s Very Bad Day”. Last year I was in Paris for this day, wandering around in a tres melodramatic haze, thinking to myself “Mais, il est mort. Mon frere. Il est mort.” Paris is, in general a good place to go when you are feeling sad, melancholy or blue, because the city lends itself to soulful lingering at cafes, gazing into the middle distance while every once in a while using that little tiny spoon to stir the sugar you have, so sacreligiously, put into your cafe. Luckily,…
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I transplanted the tomatoes into the garden this afternoon … they’re cozy in their wall o’water cones as are the zucchini, some of the cucumbers, and the eggplants. The peppers are on their own, and I hope they’ll be okay — the temperatures have been in the mid-fifties during the day with intermittent rain, and down into the forties at night. The sides of the cucumber peat pots were growing little tiny oyster mushrooms on them. Interesting. But we’ve had lots of lovely soft rain, perfect rain for transplants, and it’s supposed to keep up for about the next ten…
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Sunday I built the Patrick Shrine — or, as I alternatively call it — the Wall of Dead Brothers. Right after Patrick died I ordered a set of those crown moulding shelves from Pottery Barn but I haven’t had the energy to figure out how to put them up. My walls are very old, very fragile, very bumpy but wonderful real plaster and so, putting up these moulding shelves was going to involve a lot of measuring, finding studs, and careful use of the drill. Until Sunday, I just didn’t have the energy. It all seemed too complicated. And frankly,…
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James Patrick McGuinn September 13, 1965-September 29, 2003 “He was my North, my South, my East, my West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song: I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” W.H. Auden My younger brother (known on this blog as the Darling Brother, or DB), my most boon companion, my only sibling, has been killed in a car wreck. Blogging will resume when I can think straight again, and unfortunately, the tone here at LivingSmall will never be quite the same. Pray for us.
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Something is odd in the universe when we lose Edward Said, George Plimpton (who it turns out, is not the father of Martha, as I had always assumed), and Robert Palmer all in the same day. I don’t know what it means, but it’s just weird.
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Johnny’s gone home to June Oh — Johnny Cash is dead — it feels like a loss that should be met with wailing, with rending of garments, with church bells tolling. While I’m happy for him, because he seemed so bereft without June, I am so so sad for the rest of us. That voice, that gravity, that deep sense that absolute ruin was just a moment away. I think that’s what I loved most about Cash, his music doesn’t just acknowledge that we can all fuck up our lives beyond repair, but that we are always just a few…