I’m posting about items and events I find interesting:
memories of second grade, visiting William Faulkner’s
home town, starting a diet to combat diabetes.
You get the range.
John
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In Notting Hill, Spike – Hugh Grant’s sketchy roommate, played by an off-the-wall Rhys Ifans – announces, “I’ll tell you a story that will make your balls shrink to the size of raisins.” I’ve got a story like that. It’s about a time-share.
First, you need the background:
More than a quarter century ago,
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In 1963, when I was a sophomore at Williams, fraternity rush happened, and Phi Gamma Delta happened to me. I had no idea what this event would mean for me, still haven’t, in any but the crudest sense. As I talk now with classmates, though, it seems as though many others felt I had entered The Cabin in the Woods.
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John
3 Comments ↓
Yesterday I bought some real estate. Not much, really: probably about a square foot, maybe two. By the square footage it was pretty pricey – $750. But we have to remember that the construction we will put on it is longlasting; as the gravedigger in Hamlet puts it,
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(I wrote this piece in 1983, for Historic Preservation, and I’ve always felt warmly about it. Recently I was reading Kent Haruf’s glorious novel Benediction, and lo, he mentions a windowhook. So I thought, let’s bring it back. Older readers will know right away what I’m talking about.
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The night before last my wife Jane and I returned from nearly two weeks in Italy, my first visit there (in 70 years), her second. We landed in Boston shortly before 10 PM, having changed planes twice, once in Barcelona, and again at London’s Heathrow. We were pooped of course,
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John
2 Comments ↓
This morning my glucometer read 102. For those who have never had to worry about blood sugar, this is a “So, what?” fact. But for the last ten years or so I’ve been dealing – and dealing way too cavalierly, I have to confess – with so-called adult-onset diabetes mellitus.
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I’ve been thinking about my father lately. There’s no real reason for it; he died right after the new year in 1998, some 16 years ago. He’s just been popping into my mind. He was a handsome man, who looked something like the golfer Arnold Palmer, always tanned from his outdoor work as a civil engineer building bridges and then a plant engineer at a Maine shipyard.
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Right now it’s mid-March, and I’m in Kissimmee, Florida, sitting in a really nice Starbucks. I’m outside on a roofed terrace, where there are wicker-y couches and tables, with a venti dark roast by my side. It’s five in the afternoon, warmly breezy; most of the rest of the country,
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John
2 Comments ↓
I’ve just undergone a sobering experience. In 1975 I completed a novel, The Greenleaf Fires, which was eventually, in 1977, published by Scribner’s. Over the last three weeks – 37 years later – I have retyped the whole damned thing.
When this winter I finally decided to join the 21st century,
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