Coincidences

1) Last Christmas I gave Mother a Mary Engelbreit calendar with a page a day. She had really gone beyond wanting “things” for presents, and after you use a calendar, you usually don’t save it, right? My sister pointed out to me what the calendar page said for Friday, February 1, the day Mother died: “My train of thought derailed. There were no survivors . . . Today’s the day…to clear your mind.”

1a) The day of the funeral it read “Today’s the day…to be unstoppable.” And we had to be, and we were.

2) Mother had also saved all her Chinese fortune cookie fortunes (I used to do this, too, and for all I know Mother did it because I suggested it to her), and the day of the funeral Laura made me draw one from the ramekin in which Mother kept them. It said something like “It takes strength to do something you would rather not do.” And of course I had to deliver the eulogy that afternoon.

3) The day before we left Lake Charles we had to make a return visit to the lawyer's office on Moss Street to sign some paperwork. Our departure was delayed by his assistant, who wanted to share her own fond feelings for Mother, which led her to talk more about how much she loved talking to older people . . . which led me to wonder when we were ever going to get out of there. I kept that to myself of course, remembering the many times that Mother said "This is an opportunity to practice patience." Finally, we were able to approach the car . . . and BAM! An enormous noise! I turned toward the intersection of Broad and Moss to see a piece of black car bumper flying through the air. Two cars had collided at significant speed. Mercifully law enforcement was already in the area, and it didn't look like anyone was injured. After we were on our way, driving down Division Street, Laura pointed out "If we'd left the office any earlier, we'd've been right at that spot when that accident happened." Mother is looking out for us.

Friday Morning, February 8

1) The temperature dropped 30 degrees since yesterday. The gentle humidity and the poignant fragrance of sweet olive have given way to the fresh briskness of the low forties. I remember days like this in March in my childhood, and I loved them.

2) Filling time before departing for the airport with thank-you notes to a few neighbors. The house has taken on that pre-travel air it always has before I leave for the airport: is everything packed, what else is there to do, did you remember, did I forget, what about this, what about that, is it time yet, WHY isn’t it time yet, etc. etc. etc.

3) I am very tired - we all are - and I hope and expect that being out of this house will provide some perspective and some clarity. What has been truly overwhelming is all the kindness and support from every quarter: Mother’s neighbors, my own friends and colleagues, and very especially from the church. Mother’s “six-word life story” - “Lost. Found. Saved by church family.” - told how central First Methodist was to her life. Everyone there has been present for us in every way.

Thursday Morning, February 7

1) In case you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been blogging much, well, we’ve had a lot going on. This is only part of the struggle.

1a) The stand-up crying baby covered with spaghetti photo is captioned by Psalms 118: 24: “This is the day the Lord hath made . . . Rejoice and be glad in it.” And it rather fit my mood last night, well after 11 PM, when Laura and I finally called it a day. This was definitely the longest, latest work day of the trip.

2) Reflecting this morning on our adventure through the dining room (and a few kitchen cabinets) last night after dinner, the message I’m receiving is “Oh my God people, use your nice things!” Phalanxes of table linens and other things that I’d never even seen. Beautiful bits of everything just hidden away in cabinets or gathering dust on shelves. Understandably Mother hadn’t been doing any serious entertaining for quite a few years, but I don’t have that excuse.

2a) Speaking of which, we found five years’ worth of menu assignment grids for their supper club back in the early 1970s.

3) I had maybe - maybe - five hours of sleep, and today has to be a full court press. I’m on duty at home while Laura will be out and about on errands.

Grampa, the Pole Vaulter from Manila

Going through the house - so much to go through - my sister found this photograph of my grampa when he was a doughboy. This is as good a time as any to tell his story as it’s been told to me over the years.

My grampa, Ira, was the fourth of five children. He had three older sisters - Myrtie, Effie, and Bessie - and a younger brother Willis for whom my father was named. His parents died within three days of each other of typhoid fever when he was five years old, out at Turkey Creek, Louisiana. Some say that the children had to ride back to their grandfather’s in Opelousas in a wagon with the corpse of one of their parents.

The family was split after that, with Grampa being sent to California to live with an uncle. They didn’t get along, and after a year, Grampa ran away and lived under an assumed name in a newsboy’s home. He was only six years old! The headmistress liked him, and gradually Grampa trusted her enough that he shared his true identity. That led her to find another uncle, this one back in Louisiana, and he was sent back home for the rest of his childhood.

Perhaps around ten years later, Grampa lied about his age to get into the army. He was shipped out to the Philippines where he was stationed at a frontier outpost. It was not a great place to be. One day at reveille the call came for a new pole vaulter to be sent to Manila for some sort of Army athletic competition; the regiment’s pole vaulter had been taken ill. Grampa was first to respond. At the competition, he made a dad-blame fool of himself. He didn’t know a thing about pole vaulting, but he knew enough how to get out of that frontier outpost to Manila!

Fast forward a few years, and America enters World War I. Grampa was commissioned a second lieutenant - Granny said that was “as low an officer as you can be and still be an officer” - and shipped across the pond. On his first day in France he walked into the officers’ mess and before you know a sergeant called out from across the room: “HEY! Aren’t you that pole vaulter from Manila?!”

After the war, Grampa was still poor, of course, and returned to Opelousas. One day he was walking up the front walk at a house where my granny, Mary Ella, was visiting from New Orleans. She was in the kitchen cooking or something, took one look at him, and said to her friend “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” And she did! The married in the parlor of her mother’s boarding house on Canal Boulevard in New Orleans, and Grampa was so poor he had to get married in his Army uniform; he couldn’t afford a suit. I vaguely remember from a newspaper clipping (who knows where it is now) that Granny wore a green traveling suit with a fur scarf. But through ups and downs, they lived happily ever after.

My Eulogy for Mother

Today was Mother’s funeral service. The first floor of the church was quite full, and I was touched to speak with so many people who had had such wonderful memories of and interactions with Mother. We were all especially grateful that the full-size church choir was present to sing, and that the preacher, who both Mother and Daddy loved, ran the service so well.

I was called to the pulpit early in the service to give the eulogy, and though my voice cracked in a few places throughout, once I got into a rhythm, I just said to myself “Stick with the script and just keep going.”

Several people asked for a copy of what I had to say, so I’m reproducing (with some names redacted) here:

Mother used to tell the story of the brief period of her early childhood when her family lived in *******, Pennsylvania. When she’d awaken from her afternoon nap, her mother would put her in a fresh playdress and send her out to play with the other neighborhood children. There was a sloping alley down to a back yard where the children played, and Mother would recall standing at the top, stretching her arms wide and saying “Here’s me!” before running down to join the others.

I love that story about her, because she retained that childlike openness throughout her life. Her big memorable smile and her many good deeds were always just out in the open, as simple as sunshine.

She always retained a childlike sense of wonder, too. Anything and everything could be a source of absorbing interest to her - which could be a problem on family vacations. Given any set of exhibits labeled A through Z, in the same amount of time, my sister would be at Y, I would be at R, Daddy would be at G, and Mother would be at B. We stayed with their high school friend B**** S**** on a 1980 vacation in Washington, DC. When we visited the National Gallery of Art, he observed to me “I just rushed through all those boring Madonnas, but she was absorbed by every detail.” The week before she died, Mother and her dear friend L***** M*** went out to a restaurant for lunch, and unfortunately L***** got lost on the way. Mother, fascinated by the passing view, said only “Wow, I’ve never been through this part of town before!” This is all the more notable since Mother first arrived in Lake Charles in 1944, a Yankee from Wisconsin by way of New Jersey.

Some of you here knew both Mother and Daddy from Lake Charles High Class of 1947, and Mother would tell stories sometime about trying to fit in at the beginning. One day she overheard a girl say that she needed to go get some Fem. “What’s Fem?” Mother asked, thinking it was some special product for girls. “You know,” the girl answered, “fi’m, for a camera!” Perhaps that incident started Mother acclimating to the South by taking on a Southern accent. Certainly by the time I was born she talked like a native. In later life Mother and Daddy were both involved in Class of 1947 reunions and get-togethers. They loved their class and their classmates.

From Lake Charles High Mother went to LSU, where she loved being a Pi Phi and majored in math and music. Mother and Daddy’s friend D*** S***** responded to news of Mother’s death with this memory: "I always thought JoAnn was the prettiest girl at LSU and actually became associated with her before meeting your father. I had a beginning geology class with her, and she always set the curve, sometimes making a perfect score. She was one of the few females in the class, and her good grades did not go over well with the males.” Having met a lot of women who went through MIT in those years, too, I think it’s wonderful how attitudes about education for women have evolved in the last 75 years.

Mother met Daddy at Lake Charles High, in the best all-American traditional way, on a blind date set up by Mother’s friend Billie Goux. Nine years later Daddy made her a part of First Methodist when they married at this altar in 1955. Mother loved being part of First Methodist Church. In the last few years she loved sharing her “six word life story:” “Lost. Found. Saved by church family.” It meant the world for her to be here, for the joy she found, and for the joy she spread. She always wanted to be active of the life of the church, too. Not long ago Mother told me there was a calendar of service opportunities out for members of the church to volunteer. She was maybe starting to feel like she should get busy and sign up for something to do some good . . . until a friend said something along the lines of, “JoAnn, I think you’ve already done plenty for First Methodist.” And when you think about it, she did an AWFUL lot.

Mother was a creator, and we saw her create many things, from clothes to burlap flowers and decoupaged items to china painting to running the church craft fair for many many years. Perhaps her greatest achievement was the papier mache Mad Hatter’s hat she made for me to wear in a local production of Alice in Wonderland. When the director said “And then I want a cuckoo bird to pop out of the top,” I think she nearly threw in the towel. BUT SHE DID IT - she found a way for a cuckoo bird to come out of the top! - and I think in some ways it was her proudest craft achievement. She could take simple assignments and make something beautiful out of them. At one time during my childhood she was given the task of arranging the altar in their Sunday School classroom. This coincided with the camellias blooming, so rather than simply trot out a cross and an altar cloth, Mother harvested batches of blossoms to lay out in carefully considered patterns. I remember how grateful all the ladies were to take a camellia home with them.

And what a good cook! Did you ever get to eat my mother’s cookin’? I was shocked when I got to college and learned that everyone did not grow up with a mother who was a good cook. And many people here received during some difficulty or other a big batch of her beef barley vegetable soup.

All of us know what a good wife she was to our Daddy, Bill, especially in his last years. A long time ago I found a quote from President Grant’s funeral which, to me, perfectly summed up their marriage: “Husband and wife, the happy supplement of each other . . . He the Doric column to sustain; she the Corinthian column to beautify. He the oak to support; she the ivy to entwine . . . She shared his trials and his triumphs, his sorrows and his joys, his toils and his rewards.” Though in later years their roles reversed, and Mother became the oak to support Daddy’s entwining ivy. And she did it with enormous strength and patience and courage.

She loved children in general, and she loved her grandchildren. Any interaction with Stephen, Evan, and Megan brightened her day. They all made a difference to her in their own ways.

In the 1970s Mother had a personal epiphany that led her to recognize herself as a sinner and to stop trying to be a perfectionist. This was when “Pobody’s Nerfect” became her motto, and she had a bookmark - with a tassel in a deliberately wrong place - with that motto on it over her desk throughout her life. Pobody’s Nerfect.

That said, she didn’t stop trying to be a better person. Mother always had a problem with timeliness - one result of which is that I am early to everything - and she sometimes she joked about being “the late Mrs. Dimmick.” Until just a few months ago, when a kind friend finally whispered in her ear “You know it’s not funny, right?” And Mother, chastened, started making a new effort to show up on time and not keep everyone waiting. Her ongoing fascination with her junk mail was very much in the same vein.

But Mother had another little sign above her desk in the kitchen. This one read “Please be patient. God isn’t finished with me yet.” Well, I guess he found there were no more improvements to make. Lovely in her life, now she makes Heaven lovelier.

One blossom is a camellia from Mother’s front yard.

A House Full of Objects/Memories

1) As most people know by now, night before last my mother died in the middle of the night, and I have returned home for the funeral, and to start dealing with all the possessions. I don’t want to intrude on the privacy of anyone in my family at such a sensitive time, so while they’re very much a part of what’s going on right now in my life, what I’m writing here concerns just me.

2) Since I got home yesterday evening, in the midst of all the planning, texting, calling, emailing, and talking with family, neighbors, friends, etc., every object in this house has looked at me as if to say “Do you remember my origin? Do you remember why I’m important? What are you going to do with me?”

2a) And this is really the objects of two households, because there are so very many things here from Gramma and Uncle Bill’s house, too.

3) I’d say eight times out of ten I can answer those first two questions with “Yes and yes.”

• There’s the little alabaster urn full of beach stones that Mother brought back from Mexico in 1971, but without the one piece of beach glass because when Mother realized it was glass she thought it was unimportant and threw it away.

• There’s the rosewood walking stick Gramma bought me at the antique expo that I used as a prop in The Visions of Simone Machard after I sprained my ankle on Dance Day senior year at Interlochen.

• There’s Great-Gramma Houska’s Windsor rocking chair that Gramma used to keep in her guest room.

• There’s the gigantic mirror from the dining room at Aunt Kate and Aunt Lal’s house on Moss Street, which does not have the original mirror glass in it because Mother thought it looked too smoky with age, but I wanted her to keep the original glass because that was what made it so special.

• There’s the plate Mother painted in that china-painting class.

• There’s that Brykkestynne alarm clock thingy I gave Daddy that one Christmas that goes off every day at 8:15 or so and no one can figure out how to stop it.

• There’s the boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia that Cousin Susan gave us all after her stay at our Toledo Bend camp when I was in 8th grade.

• There’s the sampler Gramma made that used to hang in her kitchen: “No matter where I serve my guests, it seems they like my kitchen best.”

• There’s that wooden casket I would pretend contained the diamonds from The Three Musketeers.

• There’s Art Treasures of the Louvre, which was so, um, inspiring, when I was a teenager.

• There’s this, there’s that, there’s the other.

4) And this does not even encompass photographs. We had to go through quite a lot to find photos for the funeral home to make a slide show, and that’s a rabbit hole you could fall into and never climb out of.

5) At one time in my life I was very much “Feed me all the things!” And now, much, much less so. I may love a thing, its associations, its colors, its purpose - but do I need it? Can I use this thing, or is my desire for it just an impulse borne from a need not to “lose” a home?

6) The other side of the question is pondering what will need to leave my Boston home before anything arrives from here. What needs to go, and how do I get rid of it? What vision do I have for my life in a post-parental world?

7) Am I thinking about things to avoid thinking about other things?!

7a) Gurrrrrllllllll, I think we know.

7b) Perhaps that could be my memoir: A Life in Objects.

8) Just now I started a load of laundry in the utility room and took the time to glance at the vastness of Mother’s sewing supplies. I don’t think she ever threw out a dress pattern, button, or spool of thread. And that’s just one example.

9) I remember, I remember, I remember, I remember.

10) I never lived in this house - Mother and Daddy built this after I’d moved to Boston permanently - but it was their home 33 years, the longest of anyplace they’d ever lived. Almost everything in it, for me, has its story, no matter how brief. How do I honor that and, perhaps, let it go?

Tuesday Evening, January 29 - Anniversaries

1) The last week of January is the anniversary of my coming out, and this year that makes 30 years. “And what a lot has happened since,” as they say in the novels.

1a) The photo is from the Debutante Party of 1992, which I held to celebrate the third anniversary. I was looking through a couple photo albums this afternoon . . .

2) And I almost forgot that today, January 29, is the anniversary of my first day of work at ye Instytytte . . . and that was 29 years ago! At least I remembered during the cocktail hour and could call Original Boss and His Lovely Wife to wish them a happy anniversary.

3) It’s no fun observing these milestones in bed with a bad cold, but there you are. At least it doesnt seem to be the flu! And I keep reminding myself that compared to so many others, my burdens are light.

Tuesday Midday, January 29 - Jumble

1) Day Three home sick with a cold; Day Two home sick from work. Cold now traced to workplace of Best Friend, who fell ill at same time as I, but who now has the honest-to-goodness flu!

2) While the flesh is weak, the mind is jumbled. Thoughts of workplace, family, milestones, future - all tumble together.

3) One consequence of my new iPhone is, at last, the disposal of my old alarm clock. I’ve owned it over 30 years. The snooze alarm broke decades ago - I can remember the twang of the spring breaking when I dropped it or threw it across the room or something. The bottom had broken in half so it had to be lifted with care. But it still worked. Now that I no longer need it . . . well, thanks for a job well done.

Monday Morning, January 28

1) Saturday afternoon Best Friend and I met at the mall and ended up having a late lunch*. In the night leading up to Sunday morning I recognized that telltale tickle in my throat that indicated a cold was coming. And indeed, that sluggish wave lapped at me all Sunday, and has now engulfed me. Bleah!

2) Yesterday’s devotional included this one sentence, again from Baltasar Gracián, in #292: “The person with a narrow mind and heart will be easily caught, and eventually the weight of his duties will crush his reputation.” Who does this sound like to you?

3) I’m slowly working my way through the Gospel of Mark, chapter by chapter, and this morning it included verse 10:50: “And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus.” There are several different interpretations on this website.

4) Realizing that I haven’t read the news at all since late Friday, and almost scared to do so now.

5) I still want you to check out David Opdyke’s “This Land.” This is an enormously important work of art!

*I’d say “Like girlfriends, with hats on,” except that CPK is hardly the sort of place you could call “smart.”

The Songs of Myra Breckinridge

“During the decade between 1935 and 1945 no unimportant film was made in the United States.” — Myra Breckinridge

Inexplicably - one might say fatally - over the last couple weeks I’ve been drawn in the Vortex of Myra Breckinridge, legendary as being one of the worst movies ever made. This means I’ve watched it several times on the Yewtybbe, and now you can, too.

Two groups of songs figure in the Festival of Bad: songs sung by Mae West, and songs taken from Old Hollywood Movies. I’m more interested in the latter, but let’s lead off with the former, “You’ve Got to Taste All the Fruit” and “Girl on the Scene,” both of which are included in this clip:

But as I said, finding the other songs, and the movies they came from, has been much more interesting. The opening credits play out to Shirley Temple singing ”You’ve Got to S M I L E” from Stowaway of 1936:

“May I Tempt You With a Big Red Rosy Apple?” introduces a scene between Myra and Mary Ann (memorably played by Farrah Fawcett Herself). It turns to be from a Betty Grable/Victor Mature/Phil Harris vehicle called Wabash Avenue. Go to 00:52 for the start of the song:

Last, but far from least, we have Alice Faye and John Payne singing “America, I Love You” in Tin Pan Alley from 1940. In Myra Breckinridge this is used twice: once as background music for what appears to be a streetside drug bust, and again as a soundtrack for a quartet of aged cowboy actors (including Andy Devine and Grady Sutton) playing poker and ranting about “commie perverts turning out filth.”

I’d never heard of John Payne, but just look at that smiling expression! Further research proved he’s an awesome hunk of man:

Time for the high-waisted swim brief to make a comeback!

Oomph!

Finally, I thought I recognized the instrumental music when Buck Loner (John Huston) greets the ladies by the pool at the card party, and it turns out I was right. It’s the music from the fashion show in How to Marry a Millionaire:

So, have fun viewing . . . if you dare!

BONUS! Myra refers to “Ella Mae Morse and the Cow Cow Boogie” after Mary Ann leaves. Here’s the song:

Saturday Morning, January 26

1) This morning’s devotional included #291 from Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom: ‘Know how to test others. Let attentiveness and good judgment penetrate gravity and reserve. It takes great powers of judgment to measure someone else’s. It is more important to know the qualities and temperaments of people than those of stones and herbs. This is one of the subtlest things in life. Metals are identified by their sounds, and people by their speech. Words demonstrate integrity, and deeds even more so. Here is where one needs extraordinary care, profound observation, and critical power.” Read it, and reread it. It’s powerful.

2) Listening to Pod Save America’s discussion about Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy for President. Thoughts, feelings, thoughts, feelings, thoughts, feelings. A gay President would be so awesome, especially a gay veteran Rhodes scholar. But would he be a candidate that unites the country? Because we need a uniting candidate so much right now.

3) Coming off a low-energy week, and by low energy I mean in bed with the lights out sound asleep before 9 PM. This is rare!

Friday Evening, January 25

1) Pleased with the news of the arrest and indictment of ye Rygyr Stynne. Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. America will survive this presidency.

1a) We should all launch into a chorus of “America, I Love You,” from Tin Pan Alley . . . which I only know about because a clip of this is also in Myra Breckinridge:

2) This morning I was part of a workshop on dementia which involved taping the knuckles of my index fingers, putting on two pairs of gloves, a pair of vision-impairing glasses, and inserting a bag of popcorn into one shoe. An illuminating experience!

3) Rye and cheddar.

Thursday Morning, January 24

1) Yesterday evening I was just overwhelmed by all the anger and outrage on my Fycebykke feed. So I’m taking a break from ye Fycebykke.

2) As Julianne Moore said in Boogie Nights, “Too many things, too many things, too many things, too many things.”

3) This morning’s devotional included (but was not limited to) the chapter of Mark that told the story of the loaves and the fishes and the story of Salomé and the head of John the Baptist, Henry Beston’s passage on garden sage, the work habits of Simone de Beauvoir, and a stanza (or is it canto?) of Whitman’s Calamus Poems.

Wednesday Morning, January 23

1) Coffee and devotional in bed. This season always brings out my devotion to flannel sheets.

2) Such an interesting piece in the Times this morning on ghosting. Quotable Quote: “Sometimes the best course is to let someone go, even if you were once close. Growing apart can be a friendship’s natural evolution . . . “

2a) This comes back to my allegory of one’s life as a tapestry (which I may or may not have mentioned here before). The weft (the horizontal threads) are one’s days, and the woof (the vertical threads) are the people in one’s life. Very few threads run the entire length, and some might be so short as to be marked by only a knot or a bow.

3) This is an unoriginal observation, but it’s true: January is just whooshing by. It’s practically Valentine’s Day already!

Tuesday, January 22 - Commuting and Kaye

1) This morning’s commute, while nothing, nothing, like my three-hour journey home during the Great Winter of 2015, did take two hours, 15 minutes of which was spent walking timorously over the ice from my home to the station. At one moment of temporary despair, a Lady Older Than I appeared headed in the same direction - and we became each other’s moral support. I could just hear Julie Andrews saying “When God closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.

1a) The other big moment was sitting for about 20 minutes or so in the cruelly windswept lower busway of Ruggles Station with a colleague who was drinking an iced coffee.

2) This evening I was surprised to learn of the death of comedienne Kaye Ballard, giving me another opportunity to quote the elderly extra in Sunset Boulevard: “Why, I thought she was dead!” Remembered most for two years with Eve Arden on television in a show I’ve never seen, The Mothers-in-Law, a couple years ago I discovered her as one of the evil stepsisters to the Cinderella of Julie Andrews. (This clip is ONLY scenes with Kaye Ballard.)

2a) Why yes, that is Alice Ghostley.

2b) The obituary did not include her uproarious appearance in that outlandish comedy of 1976, The Ritz, OR her little-known photo as one of the nurses on page 8 of First Lady: My Thirty Days Upstairs at the White House, by Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, as told to Patrick Dennis and with 172 Photographs by Cris Alexander.

3) The only other thing worth noting is that, in an actual FB update, I misspelled vocabulary with an A. And I now have a definition for it: Vacabulary: noun; va-ˈka-byə-ˌler-ē; plural: vacabularez. Definition: a collection of words destined to be misspelled by hurried and/or careless typists.

Winter Reading 2019

At the moment I have quite a stack of new (or new to me) books to get me through the winter. Vertical books have already been finished; the others are arranged only by size.

• The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse, by Pru Marie Eatwell. Purchased at Strand Books when I was in NYC earlier this month and embarked on with enthusiasm before I even left the city. This is what happens when whackadoo ladies claim that their eccentric brother-in-law is also an eccentric duke. So many tangles it’s like a dish of delicious pasta with an unexpected mushroom or olive to surprise you.

• The Collector, by Nataya Semenova with André DeLocque. Purchased at Brattle Books and tells the story of Sergei Shchukin, his astonishing collection of modern art (and its fate in Soviet Russia), and interesting family.

• Letitia Baldrige’s New Manners for New Times. Purchased at Strand Books when I was in NYC earlier this month. The only Baldrige book I’ve ever read is A Lady, First, so I am eager to delve into one of her etiquette books.

• All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson, by Mark Griffin. A Christmas gift from my friend D. I’ve already started it. Rock is not someone I know much about beyond McMillan and Wife and Pillow Talk (in that order), so this is already wonderful new information.

• Secret Societies and Crazy Cults, by Jonathan Moore. Purchased at the Coop last fall, barely begun.

• How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England, by Ruth Goodman. Purchased at the Coop last fall. I think I got through the first two chapters in November, but they were delicious.

• Fraud of the Century, by Roy Morris, Jr. All about the presidential election of 1876, the first in which the Electoral College vote did not reflect the popular vote.

• A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, by Ann Butler Greenfield. This sort of history I find truly engaging, and I expect this will take an honored place in my library with Color, Jewels, and Mauve.

• White Trash: The 400-Year History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. Purchased . . . oh, months ago! . . . and temporarily abandoned in favor of other books. But its importance was apparent from the first pages.

• How Not to Be a Dick: An Everyday Etiquette Guide, by Meghan Doherty. A Christmas gift from Oldest Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged. I know I am going to like this one!

• The Art of the Compliment, by Christie Matheson. Important because so few people even bother with compliments any more. If it can’t sting, why say it?

• Star-Spangled Manners, by Judith Martin. Purchased at Strand Books when I was in NYC earlier this month.

• Full Service, by Scotty Bowers. A Christmas gift from my friend H, this actually replaces the copy I lost when I was mugged in 2012. “Cheerfully unsubstantiated” sex gossip from golden age Hollywood, I found it a delicious romp at the time, except for the icky stories about Charles Laughton.

• Contagious: Why Things Catch On, by Jonah Berger. I forget where I bought this now, but it looks mighty interesting.

Monday, January 21 - MLK Day

1) Humidifier.

2) This morning’s devotional included #286 from Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom: “Don’t go completely into debt with anyone and everyone . . . Freedom is more precious than the gift that makes us lose it . . . Above all, when yo are given an obligation, don’t take it as a favor. Most of the time it is the cleverness of others that has placed you in that position.”

3) With less than two hours to go, it’s an open question whether I’ll get something significant accomplished by 11 AM, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up!

Sunday Midday, January 20

1) Awake at 5 AM. Parlor coffee and devotional. Mark 3:24; “And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” Also Mark 3: 5: “And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts . . . “

2) Team 75 got the shoveling done by 9:15! I served up some good chicory coffee afterward.

3) Published my column on the Gillette ad and those mean boys from Kentucky before 11 AM, so it’s a good day. I could not find a place for this important dialogue from Myra Breckinridge:

Myra: How should a man act?

Rusty: He should ball chicks!

You have to see the movie to understand how badly that worked out for him.

Saturday Midday, JANUARY 19 - The Coming Apocalypse

1) I have to say, I am compelled to view this ingenious mosaic of the Apocalypse created from vintage postcards by David Opdyke. You should, too. I learned about it yesterday in this NYT article, which is definitely worth reading. In the future we will be visited by plagues of butterflies, mosquitoes, frogs, tornados, and graffiti. The only escape is a risky one on the defunct technology of dirigibles - no pets allowed!

1a) Walking to the train a less apocalyptic message found me on the dove tree, which is still up on Green Street.

2) On the subway platform while headed into town for groceries I saw a dozen or more People Older Than I heading in for the Women’s March, including a couple women here and there wearing their pink pussy hats from 2017. One man held a sign with two pictures of the Earth and the caption “I’m With Her.”

3) Beautiful weather so far today. The changing forecast of What’s To Come indicates the weather - whatever it turns out to be - will start around the cocktail hour. The whole thing will probably turn out to be ye nythingebyrgyr - which is fine, but I rather miss the days when New Englanders took this sort of weather in stride.

3a) That said, I supposed I heeded the French Toast Alert, ‘cause I have bread, milk, and eggs in the house.

Friday Evening, February 18

1) Carol Channing and Tiny Tim sing “Wanting You” at the wedding of Gladys and Tyrone on Laugh-in.

1a) Sweet mercy goodness, I remember the wedding, but not the singing!

2) Now on ye Whytsypp!

3) Having just finished The Collector, about the great Russian collector of modern art Sergei Shchukin, I’m now moving on to Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.