April 2023

 1 April  2023 

Clear, bright, calm.  

4 April  

UTI check scenario this morning.  Windy.  Sand across the foot of the crest. We got to Quest Lovelace about 11 for the 11:30 appointment.  Used the chair to go in and wait.  Got the robot check-in to locate and approve us.  Once Vicki took us in she had to copy once more, photo, both medical coverage cards.  Provided wipes and a hat.  All went well.  Wind and cold convinced Va we would not try walking the rail.   Drove to Walmart Ellison.  She sat in front the pharmacy while I shopped.  She asked for eggs!  So often she says she hates eggs but today she thought we should have some this evening and that would help her not be so tired as she was yesterday when we tried walking.  While there Pablo called and reminded us he was coming today at 1:30.  It was almost 12:30 so I said better make it 2.  We got home, changed Va's panties (some slip occurred sometime in the morning) and then I whipped up an omelet with salsa.  Finished eating about 1:40.  Pablo just arrived about 2:08.  Va was practicing, playing more all week.  

Finished Tóibín's The Story of the Night yesterday afternoon. Will wait to comment.  Started Modiano's latest and back to The Master.  They all run together.  

5 April   Weds   

Tom Lee sent another note.  He's helping students resuscitate The Clock.  Plans to visit Joe in Maine with Hale in the summer.  I looked up reviews of Joe's book, excellent one by Art Fried.  He retired to Costa Rica in 2012.  Mean I must have retired spring of 2011, right? and Dad died that December of 2010. ?  

Messaged Anne and Rich to see if I remember seeing the diving horse on Steel Pier in Atlantic City.  Or did I just hear about it in those years?  

Nothing on top today.  We'll probably go charge the car.  Intense visit with Pablo yesterday, piano and chat.  I mostly dozed and read more of the Master.  I now think I read a few years back about the first hundred pages and gave up.  Will forge on now.  Can give comments too on the Buenos Aires novel Tóibín wrote.  Agree with one goodreads review that it falls into three parts, the first part being the best.  The last part on the aids crisis most generic and disappointing.  History is harsh on contemporary topics once they are over.  Or sort of over.  

Petie in the hospital again, now with covid pneumonia.  

5 April   

Charge.  Wal walk.  Bentobox for two at Ichiban.  Nap.  

7 April Friday   Lou snafued, will show at 12:30.  Locked her car keys in the car again.  Swimming still on.  

Visit to Max for Va's haircut yesterday.  Depressed to realize we have only one more visit to her before we return East.  She wants the safe so I'll give it to her, maybe swap for the last haircut.  Will finish Toibin's James book but have had enough of him.  Even he says he is too Irish, can't get out from under the Irish sense that stories should end in melancholy of one sort or another.  Or sadness.  That explains why his Argentine novel is so good at the start and then locks into a generic set of "rules and regulations" that overwhelm the characters.  I.E. an Irish sort of NJ outlook.  Either Irish or Toibin's personality itself.  Or both.  

Wolfe is ok.  wiki reassures "His father, William Oliver Wolfe (1851-1922), was descended from hardy Pennsylvania German-English-Dutch farmers; his mother, Julia Elizabeth Westall Wolfe (1860-1945), was a third-generation North Carolinian of Scots-Irish-English stock."  Can the Scots allow for happy endings?  

VW Recall note arrived in today's mail.  Made an appt for next week.  Have to call to see if Loaner is available.  

Lou and Willow had a great swim.  

10 April  Monday  

Nails at little Wally.  

"He was ready to listen, always ready to do that, but not prepared to reveal the mind at work, the imagination, or the depth of feeling.  At times, he knew, the blankness was much more than a mask.  It made its way inwards as well as outwards, so that . . . the possibility of future meetings . . . had quickly becomea subject of indifference to him."  213  Master 

"The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, 

"her husband's theories about the need to discover and explore the secret pleasures of the self through reading and thinking . . . .  151 

"No one reading the story, he thought, would guess that he was playing with such vital elements, masking and unmasking himself." 287 

11 April  Tuesday

Text from Ken gave us a photo of their Easter decorations, their safe arrival home and news of Ed Wixson's death on the 6th, at 91.  

Dave texted that Mike Pesca mentioned Kenneth Burke on his podcast.  Listened to today's but no mention.  Now I see that I heard a summary but if one subscribed you'd get a fuller podcast and not just highlights.  

We liked TransAtlantic over the weekend on Netflix and just watched a short background episode on the making of it.  

Finished Toibin's The Master.  I had read most of it but missed the crucial final third or so.  Since I know now much more about how and why Toibin works, I appreciated it much more.  Maybe even more than The Magician.  In the Master you can see Toibin throwing himself into James in order to study his ways of shifting masks, being silent, craving solitude, using loneliness to discover his stories, devoting himself to writing them as his primary way of finding himself, finding you he is and isn't, has been, might have been, will never be, and wanting to become.  

Today it is 82 once more.  So beautiful and wonderful, the air clear.  Willow took it easy to heal her shoulder some more.  Pablo came for the piano collaboration.  Text from Pt that she is now back home from the hospital.  

Hoping her "covid pneumonia" is healed for once and all.  Va now watching multiple episode drama about ice skating called Spinning which I'm sure we watched all of in 2020 during the first months of covid lockdown.  

Reading Lerner again, Topeka School.  And Zapruder, memoir of raising an autistic son and writing both poem and prose about it.  He's now about 52.

Lou about to arrive for swim lunch.  Bright and heading to 82 again.  

14 May Friday 

Ken sent news that Grace Fraser passed away and Gloria is now in hospice care at home.  Alainy there with Keith.  K and C went to the wake at Mayhew's for Ed, talked with Jon about Dave's wedding.  

Phil had asked what we were up to, sky diving or robbing banks. 

Yesterday we varied the routine because Idalyia the cleaning person who happens to be a lovely Mexican young

woman came to clean the house.  Every two weeks.  On Thursdays we drive across town to charge our ev for

free at the Walmart.  After the charging we walked a short while in the store.  Then for a change of pace we

came back to our side of town and lunched at a little Thai restaurant.  Better than we had expected.  

Routine is a walk at a big store after breakfast.  Come back and have a salad and toasted veggie burger for lunch

followed by an ice cream Mochi---small ball of ice cream is a rice powder coating.  Then nap of 20-30 minutes

(Va often also naps in the car while we drive).  After nap, "gôuter", French for snack, while watching

General Hospital for half an hour (recorded so we can zip through commercials).  Then some reading usually

and piano playing which Va is doing now.  She was able to find a Mexican guy in his 40s who now comes every

Tuesday for an hour to play left hand while she plays right.  Pablo.  He's a bit wacky, musician and artist, lived

in Denver for years, divorced from American, teen-age son who is going blind slowly from some terrible condition.

$50 for the hour.    Wednesdays Va's friend Lou takes her swimming.  I drive them to the fitness center.  Always

takes her two days to recover because she overdoes it, but her walking for two days is weak.  She doesn't feel tired or 

weak but it shows.  Tomorrow Beckie will come at 10 to take her for a walk and lunch.  My day off, I get back by

4.  

Sunday we're slated to go to a matinee of community theater production of Nunsense.  Got roped into it by her

niece.  Will meet them there.  She and her husband newly retired at 55.  

That's about it.  Wake back in Plymouth for colleague in math who died a few weeks ago at 91.  News today

that one of our friends who has been ill for three or so years has gone into hospice care at her home.  Wants

no calls or visitors. News too that another colleague died last week.  

I'm reading a bit here and there in a few novels, nothing has "caught" to make me really interested in it.  

Scanned a bit of a column in the Post today.  Woman worrying that the Chinese are using Tik Tok to bring

down our civilization and conquer us by making us stupid and distracted.  The silly "conservative" paranoid

mindset at it's best/worst.  Meanwhile one of our supreme justices as corrupt as possible.  And the

horrendous intelligence leaker is a poor dweeby nerd kid who has no friends and likes guns and god.  Oh and

Warren Buffet is scolding the silicon bankers for not doing a real day's work.  

When is your sky diving scheduled?  

——

Barb and Ed have Covid, won't go to Chatter Sunday.  Lou and Bob on their jaunt to Silver City.

19 Wednesday

Ramon and Joe working on the patio lights outlets.  

Gloria died yesterday.  Pattie called us.  Nancy also emailed.  

Irving Account Number  2416970 

Swimming is On for today.  Pablo canceled yesterday so we went to the Museum to see the photo show.  Carlos Ortega was at the front desk, friendly hello with him.  

Reading Johnno and Modiano's Scene of the Crime.   Bistro in RRancho called Lilli and Liam.  

21 Friday  

Neurosis busy with thinking reading all of Mann is inevitable so fall into place and get to it.  What about Wolfe?  key up Web and Rock on kindle and get back to it.  Meanwhile almost midway in Johnno, page 69, and . . . yeah, and.  Lunch today with Ed while the women lunch here.  Whispering Bean coffee this morning, noticeably pretty good.  Willow has started a new tome: Casa Alegre Tales.  Also made lists of which paintings and such to have shipped out.  

"Since he never, so far as I knew, kept a book (as objects he despised them, they were just receptacles to be emptied of their contents and thrown away) . . . . Johnno  107

22 April  Saturday 

will Max come for the safe?  Willow and Beckie off.  Gorgeous day.  

Saw a large beautiful bird on the back wall early.  Gray, maybe a hawk.  Taking one box to Fedex.  Will count how many Saturdays left.  Might

look up the railrunner station too.  Maybe a Saturday schedule is better than a weekday for us to give it a run.  

23 April  Sunday 

Fine Chatter.   So-so lunch at El Patron up in Bear Country on Montgomery

Malouf has a wonderful final paragraph to Johnno:  "'It's all lies,' Johnno would say.  And in the end, perhaps, it is.  Johnno's false disguise is the one image of him that has lasted, and the only one that could have jumped out from the page and demanded of me these few hours of my attention.  Maybe, in the end, even the lies we tell define us.  And better, some of them, than our most earnest attempts at the truth."  170  

Monday

Anton Arensky  String Quartet no. 2 in A minor, op.s 35 (1894)

Jean-Baptiste Barrière   Duo For Two Cellos  1737-40 

Kids are skiing this week.  !   Might try to snag them tomorrow.  We laughed lots at the final  episodes of Candice Renoir last night.  Season 6.  Great season.  They reprised the comic movie All of Me—-Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin.  Candice and Antoine went to a substitute therapist, English, who suggested they try hypnosis.  When they woke there were in one another's bodies.  

For some reason i've gotten a brain tick about sending this macbook back early.  Why?  Lighten the return load, simplify, see if I can live without it.

Brought the beautiful pens but have not touched them.  

Ready to buy a new pair of vivobarefoots too even though I fully love these Birchfields.  Vivo now has a competitor made in Ethiopia and their white mesh ones are made in Vietnam, like the Birchburys.  But higher priced.

Brexit prices.  !  

Interior paint is SW 7029 Agreeable Gray  243-C1  Kitchen is Gusto Gold 

This gray one of the most popular ever.  Now fashion has turned to the Beiges.  The HGTV dream house is in Santa Fe!  The interiors are painted a dark—dark—green.  One room a dark blue.  Can see it with the desert light and setting.  Box of a house even with all of the doodads.  Flat roof.  Roof terrace.  Even an elevatorized dumb waiter.  

May 25 

Official Declaration:  Andrew Porter the greatest of young writers and I will proceed to read his complete oeuvre to date.  One novel and two collections of short stories.  

Or I'll go back to Mann and/or others.  Right now in Modiano.  Gave up on Maurice.  Never been that crazy about Forster, after all.  

Or all of David Malouf.  

26

Phil sent obit of Cas Taylor from Washington Post.  Today is our big tea at Los Poblanos.  

28

Is it really the way things are, the way it always really was, or were these new tales of comfort to replace earlier versions?  And what will be the next, if, after, these also wear out?  

30 Sunday 

“mingle his being with theirs.”

  

few weeks ago someone paid our dinner at M'Tucci's.  Letter from PSU yesterday saying Phil Hart donated to the university in my honor!!!

how strange that strikes me —- something I'd never have considered —-

going up to above 80 today  

“In the mornings, in the village, he worked on his book, in his room or outdoors at one of the café tables. The book had a provisional title: The Dark of Summer. And in fact, there was a contrast between the light of the Midi and that of the Paris streets where the shady characters he’d known went about their business. As the pages accumulated, he slid these characters into a parallel world where he had nothing to fear from them. He’d been no more than a nocturnal spectator who ended up writing down everything he’d seen, guessed, or imagined around him.”

— Scene of the Crime: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Patrick Modiano

Chatter today   Luke Gullickson on piano and David Felberg on violin

Carola Bauckholt  Doppelbelichtung 2016

Franz Liszt  St Francis of Assisi's Sermon to the Birds 1863

poet Damien Flores 

Flight-Elegy  Jonathan Harvey  2011

The Lark Ascending 1914  Ralph Vaughan Williams  1872-1958