dual personalities

Did you have a nice weekend? While I continue to swing in mood, I would say overall that I have settled in to the isolated lifestyle, particularly on Friday afternoons (freedom from work!) and Saturday mornings. This is truly my vibe when I tackle my domestic chores:

What is it about vacuuming that is so satisfying?

Other small pleasures this weekend included opening the windows, baking another batch of blueberry muffins, walking outside, doing a mud mask, taking a nap, and folding laundry while watching Three Men and A Baby. I have also gotten the nursery/home office more organized with each passing week, with some new and old touches. I am especially grateful for all of the vintage items my mother has passed on to me from my own childhood, as well as her own!

This bunny is at the entrance to the room — an original relief print made by a family friend

Pretty soon, I might move this plant outside, as it’s a bit large for this dresser top…

I spy Winnie the Pooh & Piglet, plus silver cups and other baby mugs

These little touches make me very happy. Not pictured are the absent piles of random items that have piled up in this room — we are finally finding homes for various shelves, linens, etc.

As ever, my iPhone takes terrible photos in the low light of our apartment. However, DN received a fancy camera for his birthday and promises to help me up my blog and Instagram game.

I am glad he has a new hobby acceptable for social distancing.

And so we chug along into our fourth week of quarantine and telework! Hang in there, perhaps with some motivation from QEII, quoted in the title.

This week I really hit the entertainment jackpot. I found a 1964 adventure/drama starring Yul Brynner, Richard Whidmark and George Chakiris! Flight from Ashiya is no Kings of the Sun, but it certainly entertained me. Spoiler alert! The following leaves almost nothing out. The film begins as a typhoon rages around Ashiya, Japan. As part of the U.S. Army’s Air Rescue Service, our heroes must save some Japanese civilians adrift on a small raft after their ship goes down in the typhoon. George and Richard will fly the plane, while Yul, a very bald, very virile half-Japanese medic, will lead the actual rescue. So far, so good. They board the plane and start the flight, but then….

George has a FLASHBACK! Now we’re in the Alps a few years earlier flying a different rescue mission — one that goes tragically wrong. The crew manages to save one group of victims, including a mother whose baby Yul delivers, but when, despite Richard’s warning against it, George insists on making a second trip to rescue the remaining victims, tragedy ensues. Yul, who has the flight door wide open even in a blizzard, notices that George has flown too close to the mountain. Though he yells a warning, it is too late.

“Is that what I think it is?”

Somehow the vibration of the helicopter rotors has started an avalanche.

George has managed to kill the very people he is desperate to save. He feels terrible.

“I killed them!”

Returning to the present and the typhoon, George has doubts about whether he can fly the mission without killing everyone. Fortunately, Richard, the crusty veteran flyer, has plenty of confidence AND a cigar —

until he, too, has a FLASHBACK — this time to the Philippines just before WWII, where he meets the love of his life and we enjoy (?) a twenty- five minute love-story interlude until the war intervenes and tragedy strikes again. Richard’s new wife dies in a filthy Japanese POW camp. By some weird miracle, Richard arrives just in time to hold her in his arms one last time. Oh, and did I mention that she has lost their baby as well?

“They killed my wife and child!”

Meanwhile, back in the typhoon, after one rescue plane crashes in an attempt to land at sea, Yul offers to jump into the water, inflate a lifeboat and thereby save the people stranded on the raft. The plan works perfectly until a little boy gets swept overboard and Yul has to leap into the sea to rescue him. He manages to save the boy but a wave sweeps Yul away from the raft.

His last thought are of his first love…

As his strength fails, he has a FLASHBACK — this time to somewhere in North Africa during WWII, where he falls hopelessly in love with a young local beauty. An even lengthier love-interlude (after all, Yul has top billing) ends in tragedy. The enemy has arrived and Yul has to leave in a hurry. His love Leila runs after him

only to get blown up by the bomb that Yul himself set.

Yul feels too bad for a close-up, but he does get rescued from the sea. Then both George and Richard pull themselves together enough to rescue everyone in the lifeboat, although Richard breaks his arm in the process. Everyone gets back to Ashiya safely. With only one arm, Richard comforts the wife of one of the men lost in the plane crash.

His confidence restored, George greets his lovely wife.

And the studly Yul returns to his latest lady-love but then abandons her for the little boy that he saved.

“We’ll get the biggest mess of sukiyaki you ever did see” (I kid you not, that’s a line in the movie).

His girl understands and smiles quietly to herself.

That Yul is quite a guy!

Let’s review. Location-wise, the movie goes to Ashiya, Japan, somewhere in the Alps, the Philippines, somewhere in North Africa, and back to Ashiya. It involves at least three long FLASHBACKS, some racial tension (Richard’s hatred of the Japanese ‘runs deep’ but Yul understands), loads of trauma, and a very ‘fine’ script. Perfect viewing for an evening in quarantine!

Flight from Ashiya is available on Amazon Prime and on Youtube. You really should see it.

*Voice-over from Flight from Ashiya

My mother’s comment on my last post pointed to a Stubb quotation from Moby-Dick: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.” This got me thinking about Stubb, Starbuck, and Ahab, and it dawned on me that Moby-Dick might be the perfect novel for these self-isolation, social distancing, quarantine times. I couldn’t resist sharing a couple of lengthy passages, below.

From “The Gilder,” three approaches to stormy weather:

Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, — though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life,- in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured: —

“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eyes! — Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scale, leaped up in that same golden light: —

“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!”

And from “The Symphony,” if we really want to go there with Ahab…

When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without — oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! — when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before — and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare — fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul! — when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts — away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow — wife? wife? — rather a widow with her husband alive? Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey — more a demon than a man! — aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool — fool — old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! — crack my heart! — stave my brain! — mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! — lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!

Needless to say, I hope we are not aboard our (metaphorical) ship for forty years. Might I suggest cracking Moby-Dick to help weather the coronavirus storm in the meantime?

Well here we are. These unprecedented times continue. I moved my office to my front sunroom and it has really improved the quality of my life. Not only am I looking out a window, I can monitor the comings and goings of the Capitol police (they do a lot of circling the block) and the grounds crew at the Supreme Court. I’ve also observed that one of my neighbors (who works for the Governor) drives to work (across the street) and drives home for lunch before driving back across the street to work.

In less thrilling news, we had a monstrous hail storm in Jefferson City on Friday night and my poor car was severely damaged. While I have wiled away my days waiting for the insurance adjustor to come look at my car, I did not get to make my trip to the grocery store so I’ve entered that stage of digging in the freezer. Thankfully, I bought all of that wine last week–but I ran out of candy yesterday!

I’ve been breaking up my days by taking a walk after lunch. We’ve had sunshine the past few days and it has been a real treat. I can walk up to several scenic overlooks and gaze at the Missouri River.

I’ve also spent some time working on my stitching. I have started working on a sampler I began over a year ago and I’ve made real progress. Stitching is a great diversion because it is hard to think about anything other than counting while doing it. This is the perfect activity for me. I like listening to music and podcasts while stitching.

Today, I indulged in a little Cousin Dwight and it really lifted my spirits. I’d be remiss if I didn’t pay tribute to Joe Diffie, who died this weekend from COVID-19. He is a staple on the Mid-MO country station I’ve written about–and had a lot more hits than I realized. And truly his hair and mustache were among the greats of country music. He was a member of the Opry and will be missed.

Also, don’t forget to check out the blooming trees in your neighborhoods. They are lovely!