Uncategorized | dual personalities

Much ado about nothing

by chuckofish

Friday again and another week has skated by.

My buddies are coming over after work today to have a drink and open the Florida room for business. It’s about time it warmed up enough to do so!

I will toast Eudora Welty (1909–2001) whose birthday is today.

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily–perhaps not possibly–chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.” (One Writer’s Beginnings)

Then I plan to spend the weekend doing what I like to do. I will read/look at some of the books I bought last weekend at the estate sale in Elsah.

Screen Shot 2018-04-12 at 8.52.29 AM.png

There are also lots more vintage New Yorker magazines to plow through.

This past week I watched two very vintage Cary Grant movies (His Girl Friday and My Favorite Wife) and I see more of that genre in my weekend. Old Cary is good for what ails you, for sure.

Screen Shot 2018-04-12 at 9.09.15 AM.png

And, by the way, the wee lassie has stepped out in faith and is walking! Look, Ma, no hands! You go, girl! Of course, this means we will be chasing both of them around now! C’est la vie!

Don’t look so innocent!

I’m not sure where my DP is in her travels, but hopefully we will hear from her soon. Have a great weekend!

3 Comments

“What news on the Rialto?”*

by chuckofish

It seems like a good time to bring back this classic photo of antics in Mayberry.

While we’re at it, let us remember that on this day in 1945 Harry Truman became President when President Roosevelt died. He had been vice president for 82 days and had only met with the President alone twice. He had rarely discussed world affairs or domestic politics with Roosevelt; he was uninformed about major initiatives relating to the war and the top-secret Manhattan Project.

That afternoon, Truman presided over the Senate as usual. He had just adjourned the session for the day and was preparing to have a drink in House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office when he received an urgent message to go immediately to the White House. Truman assumed President Roosevelt wanted to meet with him, but the First Lady informed him her husband had died after suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

Shortly after taking the oath of office, plain-spoken Truman told reporters: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Screen Shot 2018-04-11 at 2.49.25 PM

Truman’s presidency was full of discord and his approval ratings fluctuated wildly. You will recall that we went to war in Korea and that 78% of the people believed hat Soviet agents had infiltrated the government. There were serious steel and coal strikes and an assassination attempt. Truman’s longtime friend and chairman of the Democratic National Committee was forced to resign after being charged with financial corruption. Never one to respond calmly, the President replied to a bad review of his daughter’s concert by the music critic of the Washington Post thusly:

I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you’re off the beam and at least four of your ulcers are at work. Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below! Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry.

I wonder what Harry would have done with a Twitter account?

Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit.

*The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene III

3 Comments

April 11, 2018

“Time is so strange and life is twice as strange.”*

by chuckofish

This past weekend I read Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Written in 1957, the novel takes place in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, based on Bradbury’s childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois. The main character of the story is Douglas Spaulding, a 12-year-old boy loosely patterned after Bradbury. I found it diverting and worth reading.

Of course, it sparked my curiosity about Waukegan. Waukegan is kind of a depressing place these days, but back in the days when Bradbury was a boy, it was quite idyllic–at least in his memory.

I found this blogpost from 2011 about Waukegan which has a current photo of Ray Bradbury Park and the “ravine” which figures prominently in the book. I had a hard time visualizing it, so this helped me a lot!

(It is amazing what you can find on the internet when you take the time to look!)

One of Bradbury’s themes is the necessity for keeping track of things, of noticing things and another is the relentless passing of time.

“It won’t work,’ Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. ‘No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

He writes about what happiness is and what it means to be alive. All good things to contemplate. Clearly he was still contemplating them a few weeks before he died, when this was published in The New Yorker.

It all reminded me of this song by Gregory Alan Isakov

What are you reading?

*Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

3 Comments

April 10, 2018

Roll on Mississippi*

by chuckofish

I was definitely jumping the gun when I posted this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon last January. But really now, spring IS coming! Maybe even this week. The daffodils, despite the freezing temperatures, are doing quite well, thank you.

Anyway, my quiet weekend turned out to be busy per usual. I got my hair cut and did a little shopping. And I convinced the OM to drive me to Elsah, Illinois to go to an estate sale on Sunday.

Elsah is a lovely little historic town on the Mississippi River. It is the home of Principia College which sits on the bluffs overlooking the river. The village has a total population of 673 (as of the 2010 census.) The entire village was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The estate sale was in a neat old house, owned by a couple who had been professors at the college. I got some books.

After perusing the sale, we drove up the River Road to Grafton, hoping to find somewhere to eat lunch, but the “season” it seems has not started yet, so rather than dine at some biker bar, we headed back to Alton, which was on the way home. We had lunch at My Just Desserts and bought a pie, because they are “downright famous for their homemade pies.”

Screen Shot 2018-04-09 at 10.19.35 AM.png That evening the wee babes came over for dinner with their parents.

They enjoyed their meatloaf and playing with vintage toys. They even tried the pie!

This weekend the OM and I also watched Darkest Hour (2017) with Gary Oldham as Winston Churchill. As my DP noted earlier, it is a remarkable movie.

Screen Shot 2018-04-09 at 10.33.41 AM.png

We enjoyed it immensely. The OM even put his iPhone down and watched the whole thing. I couldn’t help feeling surprised that they can still make a movie like this in Hollywood. Bravo. And bravo, Gary Oldham, who really deserves that Oscar!

*Charley Pride

8 Comments

April 8, 2018

Postcards from Bluegrass Country

by chuckofish

This is dual personality #2 with a late weekend post. I started an epic road trip last Wednesday that has taken me through a wild windstorm, snow, and rain to a conference in Louisville, Kentucky, and thence to son #3’s apartment in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In a few days I’ll drive on to visit my brother in Michigan and then head on home again. That’s a lot of driving for an old lady like me to do all on her own, but so far so good.

I’d never been to Louisville before. I liked it a lot. The highlight of the visit was a tour of historic Locust Grove, a Georgian house built in about 1792.

Here’s the back view.

The inside of this gem is filled with lovingly restored rooms and beautiful period furniture like this gorgeous grandfather clock.

This is the dining room,

and here are a couple of the bedrooms.

It was the nicest house I’ve seen in a long time and I highly recommend a visit.

I would also add that Louisville has several large antique malls that actually sell nice furniture — much of it is vintage rather than antique, but I found a surprising amount of fine reproduction furniture. I bought a sweet mahogany bachelor’s chest here that I’ll post about once I get home.

It was great to be back in the Midwest, where people are friendly and there are wide open spaces. Much as I like mountains, I miss my plains. However, I do wish that the highway drivers were less crazy. I am not slow on the highway, but when the speed limit is 55, I try to go about 63. Everyone else went about 75, and when the speed limit was 70, they all went at least 80. That’s too fast for me. Maybe I am getting old!

Stay tuned for more tales of my adventures. Next time, I’ll tell you about Hoosier life!

4 Comments

April 6, 2018

Floating downstream

by chuckofish

Screen Shot 2018-04-05 at 10.32.34 AM.png I am looking forward to a relatively quiet weekend with not much on the radar. I hope to catch up with some “desk work” and puttering, which I have been too busy to do lately. If it is cold and snowy, all the better.

I am going to continue to peruse my New Yorker magazines from 1947-48…

…and I’m going to read/listen to some more sermons by the Rev. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC.

“The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.”

He is really good. Listen to his sermons here.

The wee babes are coming over on Sunday for dinner, God willing and the creek don’t rise.

Screen Shot 2018-04-05 at 1.34.05 PM.png

In the meantime, here’s another 1947 vintage cartoon that made me smile.

Screen Shot 2018-04-05 at 1.21.15 PM.png

Have a great weekend!

2 Comments

April 5, 2018

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

Here in flyover country we are still experiencing winter…although the daffodils are blooming, they are forecasting snow. This is not unusual for us. People just forget from year to year that Mother Nature is a big tease. C’est la vie.

Someone at work brought in a pile of old New Yorker magazines from the year 1947. I grabbed them from the “take one” basket and I am happily going through them. It was a different world in 1947, that’s for sure. All My Sons opened on Broadway, as did A Streetcar Named Desire, where Harvey, Brigadoon, Born Yesterday, Annie Get Your Gun, Finian’s Rainbow, and Oklahoma! were enjoying long runs.

The cartoons are dated, but very funny. These two made me LOL.

Screen Shot 2018-04-04 at 11.17.31 AM.png Screen Shot 2018-04-04 at 11.47.57 AM.png The movie reviews are short and very subjective:

“The Romance of Rosy Ridge” presents us with Van Johnson as a schoolteacher in 1865, out to settle the postwar animosities between Confederate and Union sympathizers in the fur-cap area of the Ozarks. Mr. Johnson performs on the harmonica and banjo, and also sings. Even if he cut loose on an organ, however, he couldn’t make this one anything but relentlessly boring.

Well, gee whiz, personally I think this is an unfair evaluation of this particular movie, but I guess we know how John McCarten, the reviewer, felt.

The book reviews contain comments like: “The writing is banal; the love scenes read like excerpts from a novel by a solemn child” and “this one…isn’t helped very much by what appears to be an awkward attempt to pilfer the best prose style of the Old Testament.”

Well, I am getting a big kick out of reading these old magazines, which is like looking through a window into another world–a postwar world where my parents were finishing up at college.

There has been a lot of talk about Mr. Rogers lately, I guess because it is the 50th anniversary of his show premiering on PBS and a movie with Tom Hanks is in the making. The movie is not a biography of Mr. Rogers, but is based on the book You Are My Friend by journalist Tom Junod, which I have read. I found it quite self-serving by the author and more about him than Mr. Rogers, who was just a very nice (famous) man who was nice to the journalist and the journalist figured out a way to work that up into a book and make a buck. Phooey.

Anyway, this article is lovely.

And my Liz Climo calendar, which I received for Christmas, gives me joy every morning:

And I like this new song by Matt Maher.

And the end of the week is just around the corner!

4 Comments

April 4, 2018

A day of remembrance

by chuckofish

Lord…
We thank you for your church, founded upon your Word, that challenges us to do more than sing and pray,
but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not upon you.
Help us to realize that humanity was created to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity.
Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace.
Help us to walk together,
pray together,
sing together,
and live together
until that day when all God’s children
– Black, White, Red, Brown and Yellow –
will rejoice in one common band of humanity
in the reign of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.
– The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Today we remember the tragic event that happened 50 years ago, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. Bells will toll at places of worship, college campuses and institutions 39 times across the nation “to honor the number of years Dr. King dwelled on this earth and to pay homage to his legacy.” Oddly, I see no mention of this on our cathedral’s website–only a link to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

I do not have many memories of this event. I was in the sixth grade and not terribly clued in to current events. I remember that it was our father’s birthday and we were focused on that. He turned 46. A pall was thrown over the day, much as a pall was thrown over daughter #1’s birthday years later on September 11 in 2001. The world intrudes.

My father had many shortcomings, but he was a gentleman of the old school. He treated everyone the same; he was kind and courteous, regardless of race, color or creed. I try to be like that as well. There is certainly not enough kindness or courtesy around these days.

Screen Shot 2018-03-30 at 10.05.27 AM.png

2 Comments

April 3, 2018

“I had a vague idea that I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean and perhaps drown in it…”*

by chuckofish

Well, today happens to be the birthday of two of my favorite actors: Leslie Howard (1893-1943)

and Doris Day (b. 1922).

Pillow Talk3.jpg

What a quandary this puts me in! TCM is showing Doris Day films all day:

Screen Shot 2018-04-02 at 10.52.31 AM.png

(so set your DVR)…

but I think I will opt for an evening of Leslie Howard. The Petrified Forest (1936) was the movie that made me a lifetime fan. I was in the tenth grade and was just dumbstruck by how great he was. I still think so.

Add Humphrey Bogart, a young and appealing Bette Davis, funny, old Charlie Grapewin and you have a stellar cast in a really good play by Robert Emmett Sherwood, who was one of the original members of the Algonquin Round Table and won four Pulitzer Prizes and an Academy Award (for the screenplay of The Best Years of Our Lives.) You can’t go wrong.

Anyway, a toast tonight to Leslie Howard AND Doris Day!

P.S. I will also toast Stephen Bochco, who died on Sunday. You remember, he was the producer behind such groundbreaking series as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and L.A. Law. He enjoyed pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. Those shows (especially NYPD Blue) were terrific, and so much better than anything on television today. With large ensemble casts supported by great writing, these shows were character-driven and real. Andy Sipowicz is, in my humble opinion, one of (if not) the all-time best characters in TV history.

Screen Shot 2018-04-02 at 6.31.25 PM.png

*Alan Squier in The Petrified Forest

4 Comments

April 2, 2018

“Jesus paid it all, All to him I owe”*

by chuckofish

It was a busy weekend and I feel like the wee laddie (above) at church–overstimulated and worn out.

I don’t want to give you the wrong idea though–It was a joyful and fun weekend. Daughter #1 and I managed to fit in an estate sale, margaritas, and watching Ben-Hur (1959) in its entirety. We enjoyed Ben-Hur immensely as always. Traditions are a great thing and I encourage you to start your own movie-watching ones. Teach your children (and grandchildren) to sit and pay attention to movies–I fear this is fast becoming a lost art.

We toasted Yakima Canutt, did you?

I made Episcopal Soufflé, a family favorite, for Easter brunch (because that’s what the boy always requests) and it was a crowd pleaser. The wee babes liked it too. They are little Episcopalians in the making, I tell you.