a Sunday

This is my first experiment in using my laptop as a laptop. Typically it sits on my desk, fettered by numerous cords, attached variously to a monitor, speakers, and a keyboard, its portability--perhaps its proudest achievement--ignored. Today though, in a sudden writerly frame of mind, I've rescued it from the living room and brought it to the kitchen table where I was already sitting with my tea and a book next to the apartment's best window. I think of this as practice. This computer and I will have stories to tell from an international assortment of kitchen tables this summer: a window in Amsterdam, a cup of tea in Glasgow, a book in Berlin.... It is fitting to begin at home at what was one my grandmother's kitchen table. Some 35 years ago, it used to live across town in a dark kitchen facing a wall, but now enjoys a view of a cherry tree just beginning to bloom in a neighboring garden. Though the table may miss the radio broadcast Giants' games and the solitaire games of its young life, the two of us are equally delighted by this bright kitchen. If we move, it will be the room we miss most.  Framed in the window: stark branches, pink blossoms, and a backdrop of pale blue sky. This city every bit as famous as those I'll soon be visiting. I am grateful when I remember that my quotidian is someone else's romantic daydream.

Today is Superbowl Sunday, a thing I had steeled myself to endure, certain that the boys upstairs would find this an irresistible occasion for group drinking and communal bellowing. Instead, the two loudest are away, as indeed they were last weekend, and the one who remains is my dearest dream of an upstairs neighbor: whatever his solitary pastimes, they are quiet indeed.  To my astonishment, the loudest thing in the building just now is the ticking of my own kitchen clock.  God bless absent neighbors.

In yesterday's quiet I wrote a fourteen-page letter and finally finished the last hundred pages of the Charlotte Brontë I'd been reading for weeks. Today, I began Patti Smith's M Train, which has been assigned by my book club. I was very resolute in my disinterest in this book, which, much like every time I exhibit a resolute disinterest in something I know nothing about whatsoever, has left me sheepish.  Oh. Right.  Try first, judge later. That lesson, despite being offered ad infinitem, continues to elude me.  I have barely begun the book, but the first chapter is something of a melancholy travelogue, and a ghost of a love story, very much in concert with my own typical Sunday frame of mind.

I set it down, looked at the cherry tree and thought about places I've been and men I've loved--the ones who knew and the ones who didn't. And the ones who knew and were unmoved.

Quiet Sundays are dangerous like that. Perhaps that accounts for the popularity of football.

R.I.P.

I have said nothing in the wake of David Bowie's death. I recognize that he is a major cultural icon and possibly a musical genius of some sort and, naturally, I am sorry that he has died. But I notice these things at a significant remove. It was this morning that, making a tricky turn from 18th to Castro, I gasped, hand flying involuntarily to mouth, eyes widening in disbelief. If David Bowie's passing left me in perfect control of my car, today's news made me a danger on the road.  Alan Rickman has died. For me, that is personal.

Not truly personal, of course. I did not know Alan Rickman (more's the pity). But neither did scores of mourners know David Bowie. People can be meaningful from a distance; indeed, that may be the very definition of celebrity.

I have carried the small torch of a celebrity crush on Alan Rickman since I was twenty years old and saw Truly, Madly, Deeply again and again and again.  For the world, he may be Severus Snape, but for me he will always be. more than any character, that freezing, wry, grouchy, cello-playing ghost who came back to his true love, bringing with him a cohort of dead friends to while away some of the hours of eternity by watching videos.  God, I love that movie.

More than anything else, I cannot imagine the world without the voice of Alan Rickman resonating through it.

That voice.

How will we ever do without it?  He speaks, I swoon. And so it has been for the whole of my adult life.

Not is the earth the less or loseth aught
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought

For there is nothing lost, but may be found,
if sought

--Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
 

Two famous Englishmen. Same age, same disease, gone the same week.

If there is some gathering place of the departed, I like to imagine that one will say to the other, "Well, fuck me. We've only gone and died, haven't we?" And then they'll laugh.

Goodbye, gents. You'll be missed. You are missed already.

Breaking News

As I lay in bed this morning trying to find the will to get up, I listened to the news on NPR.  This, incidentally, is a pretty terrible way to begin the day, but while demoralizing as all get out, it is, at least, informative.

According to this morning's report, American gun sales are up. This is, presumably, a result of President Obama suggesting that perhaps we should do a little research before indiscriminately selling sub-automatic weapons to criminals and insane people. Me, I'd opt for just not selling them at all, but then I am a naive, constitution-stomping, California peace nick. The announcer spoke with an expert who said, "This is the most polarizing, emotionally charged issue in America" and I thought, "well, except abortion."  And then it occurred to me that there is probably a Venn diagram with a big, fat overlapping middle (a phrase that may be unconsciously colored by my all-cake-all-the-time diet over the last month) that shows gun enthusiasts in one circle and anti-abortionists in the other, the irony of which made me laugh a bitter, hopeless little laugh. Then I put a pillow over my head and hit the snooze alarm.

When next the radio sprang to life, the discussion was about the American diet and the doom inscribed therein. Here's what we eat too much of:  Sugar.  And meat.  And simple carbohydrates.  And here is where I would like to point out that there has been no meat whatsoever in the cake I've been eating for every meal. So there.

When we become too sickly and obese to function properly, I imagine our gluten-free vegan overlords won't be armed with anything more than vegetables and superiority. That should be plenty.

Masterpiece

Today, as you probably know, marks the premiere of the last season of Downton Abbey, a show, the unbridled popularity of which, makes me believe that I am not alone in my love of the genre, though I may be afflicted with a slightly more severe case than many.  Indeed, even now, I am fretting lest the episode not be made available online until tomorrow (which, in an ironically 21st Century twist, is the only way I can see it) and that I will be Left Out and bitter.

I am already pretty miffed that I missed the Sherlock special, which aired on Friday, and for some reason, was available online only simultaneously with the Eastern Time television broadcast. This was unprecedented and, well, a little mean, frankly.  Was I sitting here at 6pm?  Of course I was. Was there anything keeping me from watching British people in the garb of olden times?  Nothing whatever.  But they broadcast it on the sly and I'm a little wounded.  Did they forget who I am?  I am the woman who last year at this time had just finished watching about 40 hours of a thing I'll call The Postmistress. There were bonnets involved and misunderstandings overcome at the harvest festival and the like. I'm telling you. I can't help myself.

A couple of days ago, Netflix, in a spirit of graciousness far exceeding that of PBS, which seems hardly right, sent me two emails. One informed me that Season 9 of Foyle's War is now available, and the other that Season 13 of Poirot was awaiting me.  At least someone knows me.

Just now, looking through HBOs newly available films, I ran across this (I think) unintentionally hilarious description of The Painted Veil:

The loveless marriage between an upper-class lady and a quiet scientist takes a turn upon their move to a remote, disease-filled Chinese village in this adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's novel. Naomi Watts stars as the flighty socialite; Edward Norton is the husband who forces her to move with him to cholera-riddled Mei-tan-fu--where they finally get to know each other.

Ah. Well, that would do it. If you're feeling estranged from your wife, you now have a plan of action.

Even that, I'd watch. In fact, I think I already have.  Maugham? Flighty socialite? Irresistible, cholera-riddled village notwithstanding. (Though, really, if you like that sort of thing, I'd recommend Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. Devastating.)

Meanwhile, I managed to muscle my way through Half of a Yellow Sun, which I do not recommend you read during a festive holiday season, unless you like a tall glass of civil war with your gingerbread. You might. Maybe you don't like to be too comfortable. It was a good book; I'm not saying it wasn't, but I'm glad to see the back of it.  Genocide!  Rape! Starvation!  Happy New Year!

I am now free to turn my attention to something else. Somewhere, I read an article that included the incredulous query, "Why don't more people read Charlotte Brontë's Villette?" For me, the answer was, "Because I didn't know it existed." But now, because some unknown lady in an unremembered piece of writing chided me about it, I'm making up for it.  I may be easily led. However, anything by a Brontë, though no doubt full of pathos, is, to me, automatically a better gingerbread accompaniment than the Nigerian civil war. 

Some days elapsed and it appeared that she was not likely to take much fancy to anybody in the house. She was not exactly naughty or willful; she was far from disobedient; but an object less conducive to comfort --to tranquility even--than she presented, it was scarcely possible to have before one's eyes. She moped: no grown person could have performed the task better; no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe's antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of homesickness than did her infant visage. [...] I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a door, I found her seated in the corner alone [...] that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.

Put the kettle on, someone.  I'm in.

Finale

As a deeply committed procrastinator, my impulse is to wait about nine hours or so to write this, but having been rescued from New Year's Eve solitude by a late-breaking invitation entitled "New Year's Eve for the Lazy and Fearful" (a gathering of low-key revelers who live near enough to reach the hosts' home on foot) it is unlikely that I will be sitting here nine hours from now.

This, the big finale post of Write Every Day December, feels as though it should be weighty with meaning. What's more, it is the last day of the year, so maybe so weighty as to require a crane to lift?  Well, I have an idea. Let's all just manage our expectations. Let's pretend there's no reason for this to be any more weighty than anything else. I think that's best. It will be good practice for 2016, or, indeed New Year's Whatever (day, eve, resolutions, etc.) We don't need the pressure. January doesn't need the pressure. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to vow to eat a little less cake, but there's no reason for January to carry the whole burden of cake abstinence. I've sometimes vowed to eat less cake in, say, April. (I wish I liked whipping up a delicious vegetable stir fry as much as I like baking, but so far, no.) My point is, let's all just give ourselves a break, shall we?

Things I meant to do over winter vacation that I have not done:

1. Read at least two books
2. Do a thing for work that I failed to do before embarking on vacation
3. Proofread a 100-page thing about post-colonial Portuguese refugees
4. Learn to swing dance
5. See Carol, The Big Short, and The Danish Girl

I still have a few days, so some of these things are still in the running. Though the two-book plan was derailed by a gluttonous consumption of three seasons of The Newsroom, I do have to finish one book. Even if I keep wandering off from it, and can't pronounce the characters' names, and find genocide a kind of depressing topic for holiday reading, a dozen women are coming here on Monday to talk about it, so. There's that. I think I can probably see at least two of those movies by Monday. It's an ambitious goal, in that it involves leaving the house, but I think it's possible. The poor retornados are in a losing battle, I'm afraid, being as they are in direct conflict with about 300 pages of the Nigerian civil war, and since a dozen women are not coming here to discuss Portuguese post-colonial anything, it looks like Nigeria is ahead. I've exhausted my supply of The Newsroom, however, so, with all that time freed up, I suspect I can get through another 20 pages. That thing from work?  I offer you a derisive snort. That thing from work can go jump in a lake for all I care. Will I regret this cavalier attitude toward loathsome work task that will haunt me indefinitely?  Oh, you bet.

That just leaves swing dancing. I'm probably not going to learn the rudiments of swing dancing in the next three days. You're disappointed; I'm disappointed. I really wanted to sneak in at least an introduction before my would-be swing dance partner gets back into town so as not to die of mortification to the sprightly strains of a big band. However, in the spirit of Giving Oneself a Break, there will be no self flagellation. Who's to say that 2016 won't prove to be the year of the lindy hop? Bright new horizon, and so forth. Will I be instantly transformed into a motionless plank of self consciousness?  Quite possibly!  But that is now officially a problem for another week. A week during which I may be fueled by something healthful and dance-inspiring, which is to say, something other than cake, despite having a kitchen newly overflowing with cake pans.

For now, it's just me, the Nigerian war, and the radio. First, I tried the local classical station, but found whatever the piano concerto du moment was to be obscurely depressing. Then I tried the local jazz station, but the vocalist was be-scooby-wattle-deeing in a slightly frenzied fashion. A little lightbulb went on over my head --ding!-- and I looked up TSF jazz, a Paris jazz station I'd forgotten about, where you get to hear the announcer charmingly morph "Count Basie" into "Coun Bazzy" and therefore feel rather cosmopolitan even while still in your crumb covered pajamas at 2pm.

Guess what they're playing?
Frank Sinatra. I mean, nothing but Frank Sinatra. Whole concerts, including a couple from The Sands, one along with Dean Marteen and Sammy Davees Jr., and another with le orchestre du Coun Bazzy. And, friends, if that ees not a bon omen, je ne'sais pas what ees.

Bonne année à tous.
And a hearty merci for sticking around for 31 days of this. Don't wander too far off. I'll be seeing you.  Just not every day.