Tiger, Lucy, Lexi, and Michelle

Good news, Tiger is going to play next week. And just watch the tv ratings soar. It’s especially good news because this must mean he’ll be playing in the Open and the PGA, and I can get back to viewing golf with more than one eye. The LPGA is playing its open at Pinehurst 2 this week, and thanks to some fortuitous occurrences, the ladies will be have the most viewers they’ve ever had. Why? It’s being held on the same course (although quite a bit shortened) on which the men played for the U.S. Open last week; we were fascinated with seeing the 11-year-old Lucy Li swing a club (very well, by the way); and on Saturday, the two LPGA bombers are paired in the final group, Michelle Wie and Lexi Thompson. Young Miss Li has put the whip and the snap back in “whippersnapper.”

I can’t remember what I was doing when I was her age, but it certainly wasn’t playing in a major golf tournament. She played very well, despite a few, as she refers to them, big numbers. And her post-play interviews were delightful, this tiny, but oh so poised little girl eating an ice cream bar as she discussed with the media how she had played. We’ll be seeing more of Lucy Li in years to come. Then there are the other two golf prodigies—Michelle Wie, whom we all thought a decade ago was going to accomplish Tiger-like goals, and Lexi Thompson, known affectionately by her brothers as Twinkle Toes because of the way she finishes her swing, up on both toes. Michelle Wie finally looks like the player we expected ten years ago.

Lexi Thompson, only nineteen, is simply a joy to watch as she swings with abandon and swing-fury. This pairing today should really be something.

Acceptance

Every day I find more and more things that are less and less important to me. That’s such a negative admittance, isn’t it? But you’ll notice I said “things,” not people. The people I care for are still important to me. It’s the “stuff” of life that I’m pushing away. Thoreau, from the very beginning, never let his life be weighed down by possessions. I’m only now, late in life, finding the truth in what he preached. “Our life is frittered away by detail,” he tells us. “Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” Well, I’m getting down to just a thumb-nail. All the books I brought with me from New York, the books I had when I was teaching English, the books I loved for all my life, are now gone. Nearly all the books I now have are the latest by thriller authors I read as they write them,-- buying them, reading them, then passing them on. After Rosalie finishes with them, I give them to friends who just love free books. All the music I collected and put on my hard drive is now gone. I saved all the tracks on mp3s, but when I try to download the music onto my new computer, it accepts only part of them. And I don’t even care. There are now so many different avenues for listening to music that one doesn’t need cds. I have music channels on tv; I have Spotify on my computer; I have countless internet radio stations. I feel myself pulling away from the things I used to love, especially golf, a game that dominated most of my life. Now that I can’t play it the way I once did, I don’t seem to care as much and I find it easier and easier to stop playing. Sounds like a slow slide to oblivion, doesn’t it? Friends from the past, friends I’ve made here in Arizona, are all moving to the background, either through their deaths, their failing health, or a discontinuance of what brought us together in the first place. And I don’t seem to miss them. My mother told me a year before she died that virtually all her friends or people she ever knew were dead. Some relatives still around, yes, but no one else. She was ninety-three then, legally blind, living alone in a small apartment with Meals on Wheels delivering most of the food she needed. Her life diminished more and more with every passing day. I think she was more than ready to die when she finally gave up the ghost at ninety-four. No Dylan Thomas raging, just acceptance. I’m beginning to understand that attitude.

Old Food, Old Spices

I was hungry for something but I didn’t know what, just that boredom that comes from too much tv or reading or staring mindlessly out a window. So it was more a cure for boredom that an actual hunger. I found a small pack of sliced turkey breast, but it was a little slippery when I tried to take out a slice. Been there longer than I could remember. Some six or seven bananas that looked really sorry—black and mushy and just waiting for a trip to the disposal. A half full (or half empty, depending on your optimism or pessimism)) quart of milk. I opened it and sniffed it, and saw on the top “Sell before 6-7-14.” Since it was now almost two weeks past that date, pessimist that I am, I poured it in the sink. We now buy too much food that doesn’t get entirely eaten, too much that goes into some oven dish that’s enough for six people, but since we’re only two, we have a two-meal leftover that we never get around to eating. I’m amazed that more old people don’t die of food poisoning. Maybe they do and just get misdiagnosed by the attending physician. How many canned foods do we have in our cupboards that have been there way too long? The other day I found way back behind some cans of tomato sauce a Little Debbie cinnamon bun, plastic wrapped and hard as a frisbee. Sorry, Little Debbie, we misplaced you. In the other far corner of the pantry cupboard are four containers of hot-and-sour soup mix I bought on line about three years ago, tried once, and discovered that the preparation wasn't worth the effort. Did I throw it away? Nah, who knows when I might reconsider the preparation thereof? Several years ago, I remember finally throwing out a package of vegetable Jell-O that we’d brought with us from New York. It had been in the cupboard here for at least twelve years and had been in New York for a few years before the twelve. Would package Jell-O ever go bad? Probably not. But it’s been years and years since they’ve even made such a product, and why why why would we have packed it up with other kitchen items and brought it with us? That led me to an examination of our spice collection. Too bad spices don’t stamp their bottles and boxes with expiration dates. We have one very suspicious box of corn starch (dusty top, faded front), three boxes of baking soda, three bottles of ground cloves, three half-filled containers of chili powder, three of minced onion, two of parsley flakes, two of ground mustard, two of Italian seasonings, two of cinnamon, two of ginger, and one each of stuff I don’t have a clue about what they’re for or why we’d have bought them in the first place: dill weed (Did I ever eat weeds in any dishes we created?), cream of tartar (to make a fish sauce? But why would we buy that when the grocery store sells it read-made?), ground oregano, ground cumin, rosemary leaves, sage leaves. See? All stuff that only a gourmet cook would need. And way back on a high shelf there was a dusty-lidded jar of beef bouillon with only about a teaspoon remaining. I can’t remember ever needing a jar of beef bouillon for any reason. And why all the duplicates of so many spices? Well, obviously, because whenever one of us tried a new recipe, we didn’t check to see if we already had a called-for spice, just went out and bought another. We now have literally enough ground cloves to supply a household for several generations. In our wills we should specify which child will get which spices. That’d serve ‘em right for all the gray hairs they’ve caused. Here, Mike, for you, all the chili powder you’ll ever need. For Laura, three bottles of ground clove, and for Jeri, the Travis cache of cinnamon. Idle thoughts while I go to the store for a quart of milk.

Blogger's Block

I think I’ve hit a wall. Not exactly a blogger’s block because it isn’t as though I simply can’t write, but because I don’t have any new things to write about. Nearly 850 posts seem to have exhausted my topics. What do I do? Stop blogging altogether? Take a break from blogging? Write blogs that ramble on about any personal thing that comes to mind? There are people out there who find my blog and read it, mostly from the US, but quite a few also from Russia, the UK, Germany, Latvia, Sweden, Canada, even one from Qatar and several from other remote places in the world. If I stop writing, I lose those readers. But how egomaniacal am I that I need these people to acknowledge me? I’m like a little boy, jumping up and down, shouting, “I’m here! Look at me! Love me! Don’t leave me alone in this chaotic universe!” I scour the news for subjects: Bergdahl’s return from Afghanistan (did he or didn’t he desert?), school shootings here, there, and everywhere, the obituaries of famous people (Casey Kasem dies at 82), sports news (yes, Martin Kaymer really kicked ass, the Spurs really did a number on the Heat, the D-backs can’t seem to hit out of a paper bag, will the US win the World Cup?), suicide bombers over and over again. Will Hillary run? Another war in Iraq? Too many questions, not enough answers. How do I break through this wall?

I guess I’ll just ramble.

Sleep Time

One of the cats came in this morning and held a tiny mirror in front of my face to see if I was alive. I was. When he found out, he left me and I went back to sleep. Sleep is funny. Normally, after I’ve been out for seven or eight hours, I get up to begin another day. I guess my mind is saying that I can’t afford to waste any hours lying in bed like a corpse. This morning, though, after the mirror check, I slept again . . . for almost three hours, my eyes simply whirling around in REM sleep. There seems to be a sleep demarcation line that once you’ve crossed you can sleep and sleep and sleep. In My New York days, I remember Chuck, my song-writing buddy, would sometimes sleep for fourteen or fifteen hours on the weekends. I remember wondering how he could do that, just wasting hours from his life. But we were both young then and didn’t care about wasted hours. It’s a different story now. I almost wish I could be a Ben Franklin and sleep only three or four hours a night. Or even like the Lawrence Block character, Evan Tanner, who didn’t sleep at all, couldn’t sleep even if he wanted to. No wasted hours there.

Moons & Opens & Gone Girl

Not going to happen again until August 13, 2049. I think I’ll probably miss that one. The full moon coinciding with Friday the 13th, that is. I kept watching for crazies who were out howling in the night, but none appeared. The true crazies don’t need any lunar lunacies or triskaideka phobias to send them ‘round the bend. They can just pick up a gun any old time and go to a school or church or mall to mow down strangers. Every day to them is a Friday the 13th.

I’m here in front of the tv watching the 2014 U.S. Open and I see it with one eye only. Without Tiger in the mix my heart just isn’t in it. I’ve been a faithful follower of every major golf tournament for the past fifty years, but without Tiger, who cares? Will Martin Kaymer hold on without choking? Will anyone mount a charge to catch him? I don’t know and I don’t really care. Come on, Tiger, get back on the course so I and millions of others can watch with bated breath to see what magic you perform.

I’m reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. It’s been on the best-seller list for well over two years and I can now understand why. She’s a stylist. The way she writes is more important that what she writes about. The character studies are more important than the plot. Not that this novel has no plot. Amy Dunne has gone missing at the beginning and then we move back and forth between Nick, the husband, telling us in the first person what’s going on in the search for Amy, and Amy’s flashback entries in her diary. With every entry, we learn more and more about the relationship between Nick and Amy. The style’s the thing. We first hear Nick ruminating about Amy, his wife: “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.” In an early diary entry, seven years in the past, Amy speaks of first meeting Nick at a New York cocktail party. “Anyway, the party is being thrown by one of Carmen’s good friends who writes about movies for a movie magazine, and is very funny, according to Carmen. I worry for a second that she wants to set us up:. am not interested in being set up. I need to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love-jackal. I’m too self-conscious otherwise. I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.” The characterization of these two in the way they think and speak is what makes this stylistically so good. I think Kate Atkinson may be the best stylist writing today. Nearly everything she writes is so well written, so clever, that it becomes so quotable. The same is true of Gillian Flynn. Most writers today are more interested in the stories they’re devising than in how they write. Nearly all the financially successful writers today crank out one, two, or three novels a year, watching with pleasure how the bucks pile up. James Patterson is the prime example of that. The same can be said of other prolific writers: John Sandford, Jonathan Kellerman, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and many others. I’d advise anyone to find Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life or Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to see what great writing style is all about.

To Squizzle or Not to Squizzle

Squizzle. For whatever reason the mind does such bouncing around on the edge of sleep, this word popped into my head around 3:00 a.m. a few nights ago. Squizzle. The word exists only in my family’s jargon dating back to my childhood and probably back to the childhood of my older sister and brothers. There is no such word according to Webster. It’s a verb, to squizzle, and means the same as to urinate or, in the vulgar, to piss. The Roman aristocracy said “urinare” and the hoi polloi said “pissiare.” English speakers tend to devise all kinds of euphemisms for various bodily functions and body parts. Instead of urinate, we have pee, peepee, go potty, go toi toi, tinkle, go to the bathroom (but not to bathe), go to the restroom (but not to rest), go to the washroom or lavatory (but to wash only after we’ve tinkled), and, of course, piss (an echoic derivation from the sound our tinkling creates). Then there are all the slang terms (not all euphemisms) for “defecate”: shit, crap, dump, poo, poopoo (parallel to pee pee), and move our bowels. Body parts. For mammary glands we have boobs, tits, jugs, melons. For a penis we have cock, dick, pecker, hose. The socially acceptable “penis,” from Latin, is just so . . . tiny, whereas the vulgar “cock,” from Anglo Saxon, is large and hefty. Even the voice elevates when one says “penis,” and goes down an octave when one says “cock!” (with an exclamatory mark suggesting that large, Anglo Saxon organ). Testicles are tiny, gonads a bit larger, but balls are grapefruits. And now back to the ladies, who have vaginas, also known as cunt, snatch, pussy, bush, poontang. All such flattering terms. And now I’m back to squizzle. I’ve had enough wine that I think I need to go do that.

South Dakota Flight & Cell Phones

Tomorrow we’re flying out of Phoenix Sky Harbor for a really short trip to South Dakota for the interment of my brother’s ashes. He died last December and was cremated, but wanted his ashes to be buried in the family plot along with his first wife and their young son, both of whom were killed almost fifty years ago in a tragic plane crash. So, nearly the entire Travis clan is converging on this tiny prairie town, Mobridge, SD, for the service. It’s really more about a reunion and a celebration than a funeral, as I’m sure my brother would like it to be. I’m the last sibling, but with all the nephews and cousins and kids and their kids and grandkids, we should add up to nearly seventy. And it will very likely be the last time we see most of them. One final get-together before we say our last farewell to our old hometown, our last goodbye to most of the people in attendance. Just another of the doors that must be closed before mine and Rosalie’s doors close. But that won't happen for many years to come . . . I hope.

I’m still trying to figure out all the elements of our new cell phones. One thing I didn’t know: that even when turned off, a cell phone can still wake itself to ring out a set alarm. Just to see if I knew what I was doing, I went to the alarm setting and set it to ring at 4:00 a.m. That’s what time we need to get up for our 7:00 flight out of Phoenix tomorrow, but I had set it a day ahead of time. When we went to bed last night, I made sure my phone was turned off. At 4:00 a.m. I heard a phone ringing in the living room, ringing fifteen times. I counted them off. Went back to sleep, thinking the wakeup was over. Nah. At 4:05 it did it again . . . and again at 4:10, at which time I stomped out to the living room, turned the phone off, put it in the back room, went back to bed. At 4:15 and 4:20 and 4:25 and 4:30 I could hear the distant, subdued ringing. At 4:35, as I lay there waiting, there was only blessed silence. The phone got tired of trying to get me up. Now I know better than to use it as an alarm clock. I wonder how many other things about my new phone will try to drive me crazy. I don’t have all that far to go . . . to crazy, that is.

Robert Crais & Young Frankenstein

I’ve written about Robert Crais and his Elvis Cole series in the past, and here he is again. I’m in the middle of a re-read, just as I’ve done with so many other action/thriller authors. Once I find an author I really like, I latch on like a dog on a bone, having to read him /her again to see what makes him/her tick. Crais, like so many others, begins simply, with short novels, only semi-serious about his cast of characters and the initial plots, almost like he’s searching around to find what works and what doesn’t work, with a style in need of improving. A lot like the early works by Ed McBain and Robert B. Parker, who both began writing and selling manuscripts in the days of pulp fiction in the Fifties and Sixties. But just as they kept stylistically improving, writing ever longer novels and more serious examinations of character and plot, so too has Robert Crais. The Elvis Cole series lengthens, deepens, grows ever darker and more serious as we learn more and more about Cole and his Hawklike sidekick Joe Pike. Joe Pike, Cole’s friend and partner in the agency, is as tough and taciturn as Spenser’s Hawk. Elvis Cole is the West Coast equivalent of the Boston Spenser, with an office decorated with odd, rather flippant adornments: the Felix the Cat clock on the wall, with eyes and tail moving back and forth with each second, the collection of Disney figurines he keeps on his desk, the collection of business cards he keeps in his desk, proclaiming himself to be the world’s greatest detective. The writing improves through each of the sixteen in the series. Here’s a tiny taste reflecting the weather-related insecurities of Californians: “People who lived on the hillsides would soon emerge from their homes to inspect the slopes, searching for cracks and bulges. The world grew unstable when rain fell in Los Angeles. Soil held firm only moments before could flow without warning like lava, sweeping away cars and houses like toys. The earth lost its certainty, and anchors failed.” (p. 28, The Forgotten Man) That’s not great writing, but it’s sure not bad.

The Arizona Broadway Theatre’s latest show is Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein, and it was laughably obscene and another wonderful example of what ABT can do with a tiny stage and maximum seating for only about four hundred diners. I continue to be amazed at how professional ABT is, with elaborate sets, hand-made costumes, talented singers and dancers, and a seven-piece pit band that performs as well as any much larger orchestra. A long time ago I’d seen the film version starring Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Peter Boyle, and Gene Hackman, a very funny flick, but I’d never seen the musical version. It was every bit as good as the movie, and ABT did it proud.

Million Dollar Arm & Golf

We saw Million Dollar Arm mainly because there was nothing else we wanted to see, and it was okay but not very good. Disney fluff about an agent’s search for pitchers in India. Jon Hamm, as J. B. Bernstein, is trying to rescue his failing sports agency by conducting a talent contest in India, the two winners of which would be brought to the United States for a major league tryout. And the contest was based entirely on how fast the contestants could throw the ball and still hit the strike zone. This film was based on a true story but anyone who knows baseball would spot the fallacy in the contest: Pitching is a bunch more than just how fast one can throw the ball, and yet none of that is seen in the film. Alan Arkin plays a snoozing scout who goes with Bernstein to India to see how the contestants were doing. Not doing well enough to get him to open his eyes. But finally, two winners emerge: Dinesh Patel (played by Madhur Mittal, whom we remember from Life of Pi) and Rinku Singh (played by Suraj Sharma, whom we remember from Slumdog Millionaire). They are brought to the U.S. to work out with the unorthodox baseball coach at USC, Tom House, who tried to get the two Indian boys ready in less than a year. It was a somewhat pleasant two hours that didn’t have any nudity or sexual scenes and a language that avoided all the F-bombs that are so pervasive in most films today. Pretty much Disney fluff with a too obvious conclusion that even included the requisite romance between Bernstein and his doctor friend who was renting Bernstein’s guest house. A nice unassuming two hours, but two completely forgettable hours.

A few words about professional golf. Tiger news suggests that he may not play any for the rest of this season. How sad. At my age, I don’t have many years left to watch his wizardry. Without Tiger, I find myself ho-humming through the weekly tournaments, not really caring who wins or loses. I watch the LPGA more than the PGA. Lexi Thompson and Michelle Wie are fun to watch, and eleven-year-old Lucy Li, who qualified for the women’s Open at Pinehurst, should spike ratings for that event. I and nearly all other fans of golf can’t wait to see what this tiny phenom can do.

Hugs & GW-Mentalist Finales

I’m a hugger. There’s just something about a hug that can’t be duplicated in any other form of human connection. Well, there’s always that other connection, but it’s not the same thing. A hug needs to be with both arms and full frontal. None of this one-armed stuff or the sort of ambivalent one-sided hug. How long should a hug last? Five seconds is about as long as it can go without turning it into some sort of sexual encounter. Some people don’t want to touch anyone, not for a hug or a handshake, and even their handshakes are usually some kind of limp-wristed, dead fish thing. A handshake says hello or oh yuck, depending on the strength of the grip. But a hug says I love you or really care about you. Since I love or like most of the people I meet, that’s why I’m a hugger.

We watched the season finales of The Good Wife and The Mentalist, and both gave us little cliff-hangers. Diane on GW asked Alicia and Cary if she could join their firm, and Eli Gold , with a surprised look, asked Alicia if she’d consider running for state’s attorney. The Mentalist did a takeoff of The Graduate and a bunch of other rom-coms with the male running after a plane or train or car to get to a woman before she makes a mistake and leaves forever, to tell her that he loves her. The Patrick Jane we’ve known for six seasons, the man who could give everyone that endearing smile but would not allow anyone inside the barriers around him, leaped a tall fence and raced across the tarmac to get to Teresa to proclaim his love. And after he left the plane and returned to the FBI office, we see Teresa come up to him and tell him she feels the same way. Wow! It was almost as though the writers had assumed the show wouldn’t be renewed, so they gave it a fitting conclusion. But now we have a seventh season coming up and whatever will they do with the romantic entanglement? See? Two tiny cliffhangers.

Nosey News

So much news lately, most of it bad: kidnapped girls in Nigeria, civil war in Ukraine and Syria, a drunk wacko in Phoenix who drove nearly thirty-five freeway miles . . . the wrong way, finally striking and killing an off-duty police officer, horrible fires in California fueled by high temps and low humidity and winds up to fifty mph, the threat of the MERS virus, and the stories go on and on. And most of the news people are just thrilled to have so much to report on. You know, the old on-the-scene reporter shoving a mike in the face of a car crash survivor: “And how did you feel when you saw your entire family trapped in your burning car?” I know, I know, that’s unfair and not likely to have actually happened, but too often something only somewhat less sensitive happens. I was leafing through some of my journal entries from years back, almost fifteen years ago, and found this, regarding the tragic deaths of John F. Kennedy jr and his wife and sister-in-law. They were on their way to Hyannis Port and Martha’s Vineyard for one of his cousin’s wedding. He was flying and they were supposed to arrive late in the evening. But they never made it and the plane was missing. “I’m not an insensitive person,” I wrote at that time. “I feel for the death of any person, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind,’ as John Donne put it four centuries ago. But I feel that the news people are a bit ghoulish when it comes to news of important people missing or dying. I could just imagine them this morning when the news first broke about the leading figure in America’s royal family. They must have been washing their hands and nearly salivating over the meal that lay before them. Things to do, old Kennedy film to round up, people to interview, clever commentary to write. So they took over the air for nearly the entire day, hashing and rehashing the same facts and details. They interviewed the JFK biographer, they interviewed Barbara Walters, they had the ABC aviation editor on to tell us all about the kind of plane Kennedy was flying and how it worked and what it looked like and other details we really had no need for. They brought in yards of old Kennedy film, most of which was unrelated to anything except the Kennedy mythology, even that old chestnut when he said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you.’ We saw several times the footage of JFK jr announcing the start of his magazine George. We watched minute after minute of aerial shots of the open sea out from Martha’s Vineyard. We learned about the locator box designed to be triggered on impact, sending out a signal to rescuers. They went back and forth from one reporter to another, each looking more and more smug as he or she reported his or her particular tidbit of Kennedy lore. It always strikes me that reporters try to report too much. They always claim the public’s right to know. But does the public have to know EVERYTHING about a story? They cover a bloody homicide and go into peripheral detail the public not only doesn’t need to know, doesn’t want to know. They cover a horrific accident and then interview virtually everyone who ever knew anything at all about the victims.” And nothing seems to have changed in these past fifteen years. Same terrible stories, same over-coverage by the news media.

Idol & Wacky Weather

We’re still watching American Idol even though I’ve sworn off that show too many times to count. In fact, last week, after watching Jennifer Lopez and Keith Urban do their irritating neck bobs during performances, I told Rosalie that if I ever again succumb to the Idol idiocy, she should just take a gun and shoot me. Knowing her, though, she’d probably shoot to miss, maybe just wound me in my remote hand (the tv remote hand, not my hand remotely giving the show the bird). They’re now down to the final three, who have all gotten quite a bit better throughout the season. But they’re still not very good.

We’ve had a lot of wind in the Valley this spring, more than we can remember in our twenty Arizona years. And no rain. So the Southwestern drought continues. Then there’s the wacky weather in other parts of the country—rains that come down like a frenetic faucet, flooding homes and towns and cities, causing tragic death and destruction, making great sink holes in Florida; tornadoes that sweep through communities in the inner East Coast; odd-ball earthquakes in California and unexpected states in the east; snow storms and ice storms across the upper tier well into what we would normally consider docile spring. What have we done to our planet to cause these dramatic climatological changes? We now have northern and southern pole icebergs melting at an astounding rate, threatening to raise sea levels enough to inundate coastal cities. What have we done and what can we do about it? I don’t know, but I certainly hope our brainiacs can find solutions. Until then, I thank my lucky stars that I’m living out my life in Happy Valley, Arizona.

New Computer

I’ve been away for a while. Very little stuff that was blogworthy. But also because I finally decided to ditch my old, slow computer and spring for a new one. So, off to Best Buy. I looked at a new personal computer tower (minus the monitor) with a reasonable price tag. That’s all I really needed. Then I turned around and looked a the All-in-Ones, with big monitors and touch screens. Oh, my, did they look inviting with about a thousand apps on the screen that one could flip through with a finger, and the colors, and the details, and a monitor about twice as big as our first black and white television set. O, my, I’m such a quick sell. Ten minutes later I signed for the All-in-One, a Lenovo (which salesperson Jack told me was the company that took over IBM, a China-based takeover). Okay, I can live with an IBM with a Mandarin accent. I brought it home. I spent about an hour untangling all the cords and wires connected the old beast. I got everything undone and the old beast carted away. Then I lovingly set up the new baby. Very few cords and wires attached to the back of the monitor. Turned it on and went exploring through those thousand apps. How very complicated. And it seemed that nearly every app took me to the Internet where I could buy service for a really bargain price or I could rent the service monthly or annually for a really bargain price. And I discovered that my new Lenovo didn’t come with any version of Office, no Works or Word word processor. So I tried to download my old Office version for which I paid a pretty penny eight years ago. Nope. Not acceptable. I could, though, get a free month of Office, after which I could buy the new package or rent it by the month, either at a really bargain price. All I need it the Word word processor. Don’t need all that other Office stuff. So what do I do after my trial month is up? I don’t know. Then I tried to re-install my HP printer. Woops! Can’t be installed because I would need a driver upgrade. Go to the HP website, get an 800 number for tech support, connect with a young man who spoke very broken English. Why must nearly all tech support personnel have to be located in some other world location? Young man says, “Why, yes, Mr. Travis. We can send you a download for an 8.1 HP driver. However, the fee will be $99for the tech service.” I sucked a bit of shocked air and say, “But I can buy a new printer for less than that.” Silence. I say, “I think I’ll just buy a new printer.” Click. So much for tech support. And ever since I’ve been hit-or-miss learning about my new Lenovo, I keep getting popup windows telling me how much I need protection from all the bad guys out there in the ether, just waiting to hack into my computer and steal all my money and all muy personal information, and each service can be provided for a very nominal fee. I took my old and new computers into Best Buy to get a data transfer, which would cost me only a nominal fee of $80, and it would take only eight or nine days. I brought both computers home and transferred data the old-fashioned way, onto DVD discs out of one, downloaded onto the other. Then I deleted all the old stuff from the old beast in preparation to give it to my grandson, who now has a really old beast and needs a replacement. Then out to Best Buy tomorrow to buy a new printer to go with my new Lenovo. And then I’ll be back in the blogging business. Whew!

Broadway Movies & Heaven Is for Real

Passing thought on the nature of theatres and what we see there. They now advertise operas to be seen at selected venues, productions filmed as they took place on stage. I would think that any opera buff would leap at the chance to see his favorite operas with famous opera stars. No need to go to New York or London or Rome to see them. Maybe not quite as good as a live performance, but close. So, why don’t they do the same with Broadway musicals and plays? The cost of filming would be minimal, certainly a lot less than the millions now spent to produce a Broadway musical as a movie, and all too often the movie version isn’t nearly as good as the Broadway version. For example, the recent television special of The Sound of Music with Carrie Underwood actually wasn’t very good. I remember seeing Into the Woods on PBS, filmed as it was done on stage, and it was delightful. So, why don’t they do that with other shows and have them shown on a big screen in a theatre? I’d go to see them in a minute, in a second, and they could bypass all the money spent on converting them into movies. Maybe in my next life.

To celebrate daughter Jeri’s birthday, we went to see Heaven Is for Real and then to Black Angus for dinner. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this movie, based on a true story about a small boy’s experiences with a visit to heaven. I’m a life-long disbeliever and have always been a skeptic when it comes to formalized religion. Despite my misgivings, the film was moving and the Nebraska countryside beautiful. Greg Kinnear plays Pastor Todd Burpo, with Kelly Reully as wife Sonja Burpo, and Connor Corum as four-year-old Colton Burpo, the boy who went to heaven. Listening to one of several of the good pastor’s sermons, I thought that if I’d ever had a minister as good as Todd Burpo, I might have been a better little churchgoer. Instead, as a boy, I got Father Clark’s boring intonations on boring church liturgy, sermons that soon drove me away from his church and any other church along the way. Todd Burpo was almost too good to be true: a volunteer firefighter, wrestling coach at the high school, softballer, faithful husband and good father to his two children, and understanding merchant repairer of garage doors, accepting goods as payment instead of the cash he really needs. When his son nearly dies from a ruptured appendix, all the parishioners pray for him, and he barely makes it through the extensive surgery. And then this darling little boy begins telling his father and anyone else who’d care to listen about his experiences when Jesus took him to heaven. A moving story, with no sex or violence or bad language, and it was a nice relaxing way to spend two hours at the theater. Was it a great movie? Not even close.

Barbra & Shirley

Shirley MacLaine had her eightieth birthday today, Barbra Streisand her seventy-second. I can remember Shirley when she starred in a Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin flick called Artists and Models. That was when Jerry and Dean were still partners, before they had their big falling out. That was in 1955. That makes it fifty-nine years ago. Where in the world did all those years go? I remember telling my English classes that Barbra would become so huge a star that no one would be able to afford her. I said that in 1965, right after seeing the CBS special called My Name Is Barbra, forty-nine years ago. Where in the world did those forty-nine years go? Shirley went on to star in 64 films as well as countless tv shows, winning best actress Golden Globes for The Apartment and Irma la Douce, a best actress Oscar in 1983 for Terms of Endearment. Barbra went on to fulfill my prediction with roles on Broadway, tv specials, movies, Oscars for best actress in Funny Girl and best original song “Evergreen,” which she co-wrote with Paul Williams. She is one of only a few who have won an Oscar, Tony, Grammy, and Emmy. She’s recorded sixty-four albums, most of which have been best-sellers. She’s the only female artist who directed, wrote, produced, and starred in a movie, the 1983 Yentl. Wow! And she’s now seventy-two. And Shirley is eighty. Wow! And I’m older than either of them. That rates a very unemphatic wow.

Darwin's Theory

I read in the news that, according to a recent Harris poll, only 43% of teens and 47% of adults believe in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Wow! In an age of enlightenment (supposedly) less than half the people polled believe in evolution. Granted, 33% of teens and 25% of adults said they weren’t sure. But that still leaves a whopping one out of four who believes in a creationist explanation for the origin of man and the universe. Wow! I don’t mean to step on any Bible belters’ toes, but that number astounds me. I didn’t think we had that many stupid people in this country. Well, since I’ve now insulted a quarter of our population, I may as well go all the way. Most of that 25% reside in either Tennessee or Alabama. We’re on the brink of discovering life forms on other planets, or at least the probability of other life forms in the universe, and we still have that many people who regard the Bible as literal truth? Wow!

Time to lighten the mood. Here’s one of the funniest cat jokes I’ve ever seen.

An elderly lady called the vet to advise him she had a sick cat. “His eyes are dull and he’s listless, just mopes and sulks all day and he won’t eat,” she said.

“I see,” said the vet. “You’d better give it a cup of castor oil and I’ll be out about three this afternoon to have a look at it. You may have trouble giving that castor oil. With your left hand, force its mouth open and pour the castor oil with your right.”

The old lady had quite a struggle with the cat but her efforts were highly successful.

At three that afternoon the vet knocked on the door and asked, “How’s that sick calf of yours?”

“Calf? Why, I have no calf. I called about my sick cat.”

“Cat? Did you give it that cup of castor oil? We’ve got to do something about this mighty quick or you’re going to lose a good cat! Where is the animal now?”

“I don’t know,” she responded. “Last time I saw him he was taking out across the cornfield with nine other cats.”

“What in the world was he doing with nine other cats?” asked the vet.

“I don’t know for sure,” she said, “but I think he has formed an organization. He had three of them digging holes, three of them covering up, and the other three were out looking for new locations.”

And while I’m at it, how about a few clever sayings.
Happiness is like peeing in your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you can feel its warmth.
A river is like intelligence: The deeper it is, the less sound it makes.
Let’s eat Grandma. Let’s eat, Grandma. Commas save lives.
Don’t join dangerous cults: Practice safe sects.
The butcher backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.
Seven days without a pun makes one weak.

Blood Moon

Last Monday, Rosalie and I decided we’d stay up late enough to watch the lunar eclipse. It was scheduled to begin just after 11:00 p.m. So we pulled two lawn chairs out to our driveway and had a front row seat for the display. The night was still, with no one else out to share in the sight. The full moon made our street almost as light as day. And then it began with what looked like a dark bite something had taken out of the left side of the moon. The old man in the moon had lost a cheek. It took nearly an hour for the shadow to pass completely across the moon, and then we could see what the papers were calling a blood moon, an orange orb that looked like a golf ball. The red planet Mars perched just above and to the right of the moon and became much brighter and redder as the moon’s light faded. We sat, listening to appropriate songs on my iPad: “Paper Moon,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Blue Moon,” and Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” It was a wonderful experience, one that we’d never before had and one that we’ll never have again. I’m so very glad we were able to share this experience. Life is too short not to take advantage of celestial wonders, too short to let such moments slip away. If you missed it, shame on you.

Biding Time

For the last few years I seem to be just biding my time. Sort of moving from one memorable moment to the next, but the moments aren’t nearly as memorable as they once were and there aren’t nearly as many. Time is such a fickle beast, controlled by the things we remember. When we were children, we had many moments that were important to us and time seemed to move through a sea of molasses. I remember in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, he suggested that our lives are filled with moments worth remembering, that life was like a long hallway with coat hooks on the wall onto which we would hang those memories. The less space between hooks, the longer time seemed. Early on, it seemed like forever when we looked forward to those important events—a birthday or a Christmas or the end of a school year. Or, heaven forbid, graduation, that threshold leading to adulthood. And then the spaces between hooked memories grew wider and time sped up. One thing we oldsters can universally agree on is that life goes ever more swiftly the older we get. Now, I hook my memories on the rounds of golf I play three times a week. To help me bide my time till those days, I read and write, see movies, and follow favorite sports teams through their seasons. The Masters golf tournament begins this week, an event that I’ve faithfully watched for at least fifty years. But it doesn’t seem like a year since the last one. Tiger is now thirty-eight and, because of back surgery, will not be playing for the first time in more than two decades. Where did that young golf prodigy go, the one I can still see in 1994, raising his arm with a Tiger scream to celebrate making that downhiller on the seventeenth island green at the TPC Sawgrass to beat poor Trip Kuehne and win his second U. S. Amateur title? Where did they go, the twenty years between then and now? They sped by with too much distance between the coat hooks, and now here I am, biding my time. I see my life as a bobsled run, but three or four times longer than the Olympic run, a slight downhill at the beginning with gravity taking me down slowly, then speeding up in the middle, then rushing around that last turn and heading for the finish line. I don’t fear death nearly as much as I did a few decades ago. I could let go quite easily if I had to. Lots of unfinished business I’d regret, though. So, I’ll just go on living as well as I can, biding my time between my memorable moments. But oh how I wish the days wouldn’t go shooting by like heavenly debris during one of the Perseids showers.

Collecting

I’m a collector. I collect things that simply drive my wife crazy. One never knows when one will need one or more of the things I collect. The daily "Arizona Republic" arrives with a rubber band holding it together. I dutifully remove it from the paper and drop it into my collection drawer in the kitchen. I now have in the neighborhood of two thousand rubber bands in that drawer. One never knows when one will need a rubber band. They reside loosely in the drawer along with the many empty prescription bottles there. I collect those also. I just can’t bring myself to throw away perfectly good empty prescription bottles. I suppose I should start putting the rubber bands into the prescription bottles. Maybe next week. I also have a collection of cocktail picks for the many olives we consume in our evening Scotch-and-waters. My favorites are the black ones from Outback. Whenever we eat at Outback, we each have two dirty martinis with three olives and I carefully save the picks to bring home with me. We must have three or four hundred variously colored cocktail picks. One never knows when one will need another cocktail pick. We also go through a lot of kitty litter, which we buy at CostCo in forty-pound buckets, square white plastic containers with snap-down lids. What does one do with an empty plastic bucket? Well, one saves it. What else? And they make admirable containers for the many books I collect. I keep books by author in those plastic containers. I must now have twenty or more in the garage, filled with books by author. And my collecting of books can just barely keep up with the cats’ usage of their litter. I have about six empty buckets right now, so I think I’m safe for a while. The obvious question that comes up with all this collecting: What happens to it all when I die? In the old days, when I was a mere thirty or forty, death was never a consideration. The collections would always be around and would always be needed. But now, at eighty, I have to think about a cutoff point in my collecting. When I go to CostCo to buy "stuff" in quantity, how many cans of green beans or jars of olives or large boxes of cereal or cans of albacore tuna or chicken or plastic kitchen garbage bags or bags of frozen chicken breasts should I buy? I must always think ahead to the possibility of death. And one wouldn’t want to meet his maker leaving behind too much "stuff." Maybe I should get rid of some of the prescription bottles. Nah, the prescription bottles might come in handy for storing my ashes.

Bad Words & Butterflies

I spotted a cute saying on the side of a small truck I was following a few days ago: “Old upholsterers never die; they always recover.” So clever, I think I’d call them up if I ever needed any upholstering. But then, at my age it’s doubtful I’d ever need that service.

We’ve had two large butterflies hanging around our arbor vitae and fruit trees, swooping up and around and in and out. They look even larger than the monarchs we usually have, yellow with black striping. They’ve been here for nearly two weeks now. Makes me wonder how long they’ll stay, what they eat, where they sleep. Do they migrate like the monarchs? What sort of chrysalis do they make, what kind of caterpillar emerges? Do they, like the monarchs, have some kind of protection against birds? Monarchs feed on milkweed which gives them a poisonous toxin that keeps predators from making them a tasty meal. I did a little research (very little, because I’m lazy) and found that some species, without the monarch toxin, mimic the coloring of the monarch to keep birds away. One wouldn’t think a butterfly could reason that well. I know, I know, it’s instinctive, not brain-driven. I like to think, though, that these pretty creatures have personalities and the ability to reason, especially when one of them perches on my finger and looks me straight in the eye. We’ve already humanized our three cats, so why not do the same for our backyard buddies?

I went alone to see Bad Words, thinking that Rosalie wouldn’t want to have her ears assaulted by all the bad language. There wasn’t any more bad language than in nearly every other movie we’ve seen, and I laughed out loud at some of the dialogue, something I haven’t done in a long time. Jason Bateman starred in and directed it. Good job, Jason. He plays Guy Trilby, a disgruntled man who wants to punish the people who run the national spelling bee. He’s found a loophole in the eligibility rules that allows him to compete against the other tiny tot contestants. And he has an edge on them: he knows and can spell all the words in our lexicon. We don’t find out why he’s doing this until the final curtain. Along the way, he meets the cutest little boy named Chaitanya (Rohan Chand). Chaitanya wants to be Guy’s friend, almost insists that Guy accept him as his friend. Guy teaches the boy lots of “bad words” and some really bad behavior, but they actually do become friends, even though the two of them will be in the finals of the contest. I know Jason Bateman from the many rom-coms he’s been in. I also remember his older sister Justine Bateman from her role in Family Ties, Michael J. Fox’s sister Mallory. I have only good words to say about Bad Words. In the future, I think I’ll pay better attention to films he may star in or direct.

PGA & LPGA Golf

I watched both golf tournaments yesterday, the Houston Open with the PGA and the Kraft Nabisco with the LPGA, and both were well worth watching. I was rooting for Matt Kuchar but the other Matt from Australia, Matt Jones, simply snatched it away on eighteen. Kuchar had to make a par on the final hole, but he most uncharacteristically hit his approach into the water and had to scramble for a bogey to get into a playoff after Jones birdied the final hole. And then Jones did his other snatch when he chipped in from waaaay off the green for a birdie on the first playoff hole, number eighteen again. Kuchar will be agonizing over that shot in the water for a very long time, and Jones will be savoring his chip-in for the win for a very long time.

And then we had an amazing display of raw power and talent when Michelle Wie and Lexi Thompson went at it in what used to be called the Dinah Shore. Was that ever fun to watch. I’ve been rooting for Michelle to live up to her potential for over a decade now, and she’s only recently begun to look like what she might have been years ago.

Now if she’d only stop leaving putts short, and if she’d only give up that ridiculous stance she uses when putting. And the young colt Lexi looks like she’ll be winning tournaments for many more years. If her back can hold up, that is. She and Michelle take such huge swings off the tee that the extreme torque might cause some physical damage over time. I wonder if her swing coach has ever tried to get Lexi to abandon that chicken-wing follow-through on her irons. But if it works for her, why change it?

And the Tiger-less Masters starts this week. It saddens me that he won’t be there. I’ll watch it as I always do, but it won’t be as thrilling as it would be with Tiger in the field. It was the same when Jack was in his prime. If he wasn’t playing in a tournament, I’d watch with one eye only. Same with Tiger. Many fans don’t care for Tiger, thinking he’s too aloof or too cocky (no pun intended) or that he even engages in cheating. I say poppycock (no pun intended) to all that. He truly is the best golfer of all time and I don’t want his career to end because of physical ailments. It’s what I said about Michelle and Lexi: swinging as hard as they all do, there’s bound to be physical problems. And Tiger is proof of that. But Augusta will be ravishingly beautiful this April, just as it always is, and there will be all kinds of drama on Sunday, just as there always is, and there will be all sorts of bowing and scraping to the overlords of that sanctum sanctorum, just as there always is. And I and millions of other golf fans will watch every minute of it.

J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock laments his becoming an old man, with a bald spot in the middle of his hair, with the bottoms of his trousers rolled, measuring out his life with coffee spoons. He describes “the Eternal Footman” holding his coat and snickering. He hears the mermaids singing to him until “human voices wake us and we drown.” What a neat paradox that is, both an awakening and a drowning. Measuring out his life with coffee spoons. One would have thought Eliot would have him measuring it out with tea spoons. More British, you know. In recent years I’ve been measuring out my life with equally mundane items. Every three weeks I sit down at the dining room table and measure out my life by re-filling my three weekly vitamin holders. Every three weeks. And it seems like I’m doing that ritual far more often than every three weeks. More related measuring sticks: the number of prescriptions that need constantly to be re-filled, the number of doctor and dentist appointments that fill my calendar, the increasing number of obituaries for old friends and relatives. I’m sounding morbid, I know, but that’s the nature of growing old, morbid thoughts while waiting for that Eternal Footman to take me by the hand. Dylan Thomas exhorts us to “not go gentle into that good night,” to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Emily Dickinson said that death was the “supple suitor” who woos us with pallid innuendoes and then whisks us away in a “bisected Coach,” leaving behind “Kindred as responsive as Porcelain.” In June we’re flying to South Dakota for my brother’s memorial service, and I’ll be one of those Porcelain Kindred, the last of my family still standing. I’m not looking forward to it.

Confusion 1

So Many things confuse me. Men who keep a three-day beard confuse me. Do women really find that sort of facial hair attractive? I see Harry Connick on American Idol with that unshaven look and I wonder why. He’s a rational man, the only one on that trifecta panel who makes any sensible comments about the performers, yet he has that grungy look in clothes and facial hair. Why? Have the show’s producers instructed the three of them to dress down, way down, to appeal to the young crowd? Why must Keith Urban wear grungy t-shirts that expose his tats? Why must JLo wear tiny little skirts that barely cover butt and pubic zone (making it a public zone)? Why must we get constant shots of her and Keith bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to the songs the performers are singing? Why, why, why? But enough about American Idol. Why do some men have to whip out a wrinkled, soiled handkerchief and blow their noses in public restaurants? Why do some men, outdoors (thank God), hold one nostril closed and then blow nasty stuff out the other, then reverse the process? Am I disgusted too easily? Are we on the brink of becoming a classless nation (and I don’t mean social classes)? Where is the class of yesteryear? Going, going, gone.

Divergent & Breaking Bad

We went to see Divergent with some misgivings—mixed reviews, science fictiony stuff based on a young adult series by Veronica Roth too much like Hunger Games. But at this time of year with so little that seems good, we went anyway. Quick review. It was too long by at least twenty minutes. It was too reliant on too many plot threads that got confusingly tangled. It had too many fight sequences. What was good about it? Shailene Woodley as the female divergent Tris was great, with huge brown eyes that brimmed with tears in the many facial closeups. The plot background was an interesting takeoff on the current trend of dystopian futures, with a desolate Chicago ringed by an immense fence to protect the survivors from the nastiness on the other side. We’ll probably get to see what’s on that other side in future segments. The surviving population was made up of five factions, into which young adults at the “choosing” ceremony can go into the faction that they’re aptitude tests have determined to be best for them. Or they can choose any faction they want. There’s the abnegation faction, made up of selfless people who govern the city; the amity who provide comfort and care; the candor faction made up of the lawgivers; the erudite or smart faction made up of scientists; and the wild bunch, the dauntless faction who guard the fence and serve as police. Tris’s tests show that she’s a divergent, or one of the rare people who would be good at more than one of the faction’s talents, maybe all of them. She chooses to go into the dauntless faction, where she’s put through a four-week course similar to but harder than an army basic training. And she learns to kick ass. Her instructor is the oh so handsome Four (Theo James) and it’s immediately apparent that they have strings that will bind them for all three episodes of this series. So far, a lot like Hunger Games. Kate Winslet steps out of her usual character to play the baddie who plans to take over the governing from the Abnegators. And the plot thickens and thickens. Not a great movie, but I’ll probably go see the next installments, just to see what’s really on the other side of that fence.

We finished the last Netflix disc of Breaking Bad, Season 4, and both can hardly wait to see what they do with Season 5. Now that bad guy Gus is dead and the elaborate meth lab in the laundry blown up, where can it go? Will Hank ever catch up with brother-in-law Walter? Will Jesse stick it out with Andrea and her son? Will Skylar continue to launder money in the car wash? I can’t wait to find out. Breaking Bad has unanimously been hailed as one of the best ever. Maybe even THE best ever. We heartily agree. The plots are unexpected, the characters all developed to a remarkable degree, the actors all doing Emmy-worthy work, especially that of Bryan Cranston as Walt White, Anna Gunn as Skyler, and Aaron Paul as Jesse. And all the rest are superior. Thank you, Netflix.

More Fictional Tough Guys

The Arizona Lottery likes to say in its tv ads, “You can’t win if you don’t play.” I like to think that the obverse is also true, “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In fact, I like to think that over the last thirty or so years, I’ve won a bunch of money by not buying any lottery tickets. If I bought one a day, as a lot of people do, “d have lost almost $11,000. That makes me an $11,000 winner.

Talking Stick Resort, in Scottsdale, Arizona, has an ad that plays over and over whenever I’m watching a Phoenix Suns game. What’s so memorable about it is a quick shot of a young woman whispering sweet nothings into a man’s ear. Then her eyes shift to the right, directly into the camera. All male viewers must feel as I do: She’s looking right at me, the eternal come-on by the eternal flirt. Every time the ad comes on, I wait for that look, eternally susceptible to that glance as old as Eve.

In my essay on mystery/suspense series (March 21), I forgot to mention a few very good ones. C. J. Box has 15 novels about his Wyoming game warden, Joe Picket. Good action, great characters. P. J. Parrish (pseudonym for Kristy Montee and Kelly Nichols, two sisters who write collaboratively) has written ten novels starring a biracial p.i named Louis Kincaid. Well worth looking at. Stephen White, despite some fights with publishers, gave me a bunch of novels about the Boulder psychologist Dr. Alan Gregory and his police pal, Sam Purdy. Jeffrey Deaver began with The Bone Collector in which the forensic genius Lincoln Rhyme did his thing despite being a paraplegic. David Wiltsie provided the rock climbing FBI agent John Becker in a good series about catching really bad psychopaths. Lawrence Block, whom I mentioned as the author of the Matt Scudder series, also gave us the anti-hero Keller, a hit man who, despite his occupation, makes us side with him. Laura Lippman wrote a bunch about Tess Monaghan. And, how could I forget one of the masters of prose, James Lee Burke, who introduced me to the Louisiana cop/private eye, Dave Robicheaux. All of these, as well as those mentioned in my earlier blog, are worth reading, more than worth reading. Find them. Read them. You won’t be disappointed. You’ll be as intrigued as I am with that Talking Stick lady.

Fictional Tough Guys

I read quite a bit, but for the last twenty years or so I’ve read exclusively in the mystery/action/suspense genre. Except for all the British horse racing novels by Dick Francis, my wife was mostly too busy or too disinterested to read, but lately she’s taken it up. Nasty habit, reading. When you get hooked that’s about all you want to do. She had never read any of the Ed McBain stuff, so I started her on the Matthew Hope series, thirteen novels about a Florida lawyer who just can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Or trouble keeps finding him. She raced her way through that series and then I started feeding her the 87th Precinct series with McBain’s memorable cast of characters set in a fictional New York. She’s now starting the 44th with ten to go. Keeps her out of mischief. The 87th Precinct series was always one of my favorites, and as I do with most writers I like, I read them and then re-read them, sometimes more than twice. I’ve read both McBains twice, the John Sandford Prey series twice, the Parker Spensers and Jesse Stones and Suunny Randalls all twice, the Lee Child’s Jack Reachers twice, all of the Dick Francis books twice, the Lawrence Block Matt Scudders twice, and my favorite of all, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series four times. Yeah, you could say I’m compulsive. I read the McGee series so often because I was trying to get a handle on MacDonald’s style and all the biographical details of Travis McGee in order to write the final in the series about this iconic tough guy, a novel I would call The Black Widow. But MacDonald’s son didn’t want anyone to touch his father’s legacy. I couldn’t feel too bad about his denial since he’d also said no Stephen King about doing the same thing. Right now I’m just beginning my second reading of Robert Crais’s series about Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, an obvious West Coast copy of Parker’s Spenser. I’ve read nearly all of what Stephen King has written, but he seems to be able to write faster than I can read. And Dean Koontz the same. A long time ago I began James Patterson’s Alex Cross series, but Patterson became so stupidly bloody that I gave him up, and he’s since become so commercial he writes four or five a year in collaboration with four or five other people. No thanks. I still have Michael Connelly and his Harry Bosch, Jonathan Kellerman and his Alex Delaware, James W. Hall and his Thorn, Kathy Reichs and her Temperance Brennan. What more do I need? I need more young authors with tough guy main characters. All the authors of my past preferences are dead or dying. If you’re looking for something to read and have never encountered any of the people I’ve mentioned, go there and rejoice.

Movie Memories

I’m a big movie fan. I’ve always been a big movie fan. I can’t even guess how many films I’ve seen over the years, but since I’ve got a lot of years on my odometer, it must be a lot of films. Often, when a movie or the people in it grab my attention, I’ll see it more than once, sometimes even three or four times. I remember when I first saw Joanne Woodward do her triple thing in Three Faces of Eve, I just had to see it twice more just to watch how she did it. The same thing happened with East of Eden. Not that James Dean was a great actor, but he was so different I wanted to share in his youthful infatuation with Julie Harris, so I sat through it twice in a row. Three times for the Gershwein score and the Gene Kelly dancing and the vision of the young Leslie Caron in An American in Paris. For Brando in maybe his best performance ever in On the Waterfront four times. And, yes, like a lot of Brando fans, I too tried to memorize some of his lines: (Terry to his brother Charlie): “You don’t understand. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.” Three viewings of Young at Heart just to hear a scrawny Sinatra sing “One More for the Road.” You get the idea. I’m a little OCD when it comes to movies. The only other person I know that’s like that is my old teaching pal Anne Smith. She and I could talk movies for hours. I’m a bit older than she is, so my memories go back further than hers. I store vivid images from old old movies: Gary Cooper licking his thumb and applying it to the front sight of his rifle as he turkey calls Germans out of hiding in the WWI epic Sergeant York. I see the two choices the girl had when she was returning home, the dark tunnel and the moonlit street and she mistakenly chose the light and then the sight of blood dripping under the door casing when she didn’t make it home in The Black Panther. I see it vividly in my memory, but when I went to the IMDB web site to confirm it, there was no sign of a movie like that or named that. Did I make it up? Did I just imagine that scene? I don’t know. But I can still see that page flip over by some ghostly hand in The Uninvited. I see that bottle of booze Ray Milland hid in the ceiling light fixture in Lost Weekend. I was shocked when Jan Sterling removed her makeup and wig in The High and the Mighty. I still hear Brandon DeWilde calling out to Alan Ladd in Shane, “Shane, come back,!” I see Richard Widmark pushing his mother down a flight of stairs in her wheelchair, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the movie was. I remember the Indians leaping out of hiding from the holes in the desert to ambush Robert Taylor and others in Ambush. I see Humphrey Bogart rolling those ball bearings in his hand as he visibly went bananas in The Caine Mutiny. I watched in relief when Cornell Wilde waved back to his African pursuer in Naked Prey. I toiled wearily along with Gregory Peck on his long trek across The Purple Plain. I hear more than see the action as Tyrone Power swashed and buckled his way through Mexico in Captain from Castille, hearing Alfred Newman’s “Conquest,” so entranced by that theme that I went out and bought a recording of it. I choked down all those hard boiled eggs along with Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. I fell in love over and over again with the girls and women of those early shows: Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver, Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain, Elizabeth Taylor in Black Beauty, Gene Tierney in Laura (in love so much that I talked my wife into naming our second daughter Laura, only to fall out of love with the awful Gene Tierney when she hooked her foot in the rug at the top of the stairs to fall down and abort her child in Leave Her to Heaven), and of course, Julia Roberts, the pretty woman all male viewers fell in love with in Pretty Woman, and the young Scarlet Johannson that both Bill Murray and I fell in love with in Lost in Translation. I’m such a fickle lover. I laughed along with all the comics of that long ago time: Danny Kaye in The Court Jester, Abbot and Costello with their “Who’s on First” routine first seen in The Naughty Nineties, Abbot and Costello with their “Slowly I turned” routine in Lost in a Harem, the “I believe in the power of voodoo” routine that I and my buddies kept alive in our youths but I can’t remember where we first heard it. Who were the male stars I admired? Tyrone Power even though he was in the closet at the time, Burt Lancaster and his acrobatics, Kirk Douglas and his gritted teeth, Bill Holden in almost anything but especially Picnic, Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Blue Knight, of course John Wayne in almost anything but especially The Quiet Man, and the other old blue eyes Paul Newman, especially in The Long Hot Summer, The Left Handed Gun, The Hustler, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting. Have I missed any? Well, certainly. But I’m old and forgetful. One last word about a movie that broke my heart more than any other. Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford fell in love and then fell out of love in The Way We Were, and I felt to the quick the poignancy of lost time and lost opportunity and lost love that this film dramatized. Life is short and this movie brought it home to me with a sledgehammer. I love movies. Until I die I’ll continue to go there for the popcorn and the darkened theatres and the escape they provide. You should too.

Band Concert

Last night we went to Glendale for our grandson’s band concert. He’s thirteen, just finishing the eighth grade, and has been playing the trumpet for four years. He’s taking after his grandmother’s family, who were practically all great players of the trumpet. Four years ago we’d given him my old cornet, the horn that I’d started playing almost seventy years ago. A local music store gave it new life, restoring its luster, unsticking the stuck valves, making it more playable than it was when I played it not very well those many years ago. He gave it two years before deciding he wanted a trumpet instead of the noticeably shorter cornet. Ah, the vagaries of youth. He’s tall, handsome, and extremely bright. This is not a grandfather saying what all grandparents say about their grandchildren. This kid really is all those accolades above. He’s representative of most young people today—taller, better looking, and smarter than my generation. They’re products of better nutrition and the information age. I can’t remember what I was like at his age, but I’m certain I wasn’t as well informed as he is. Back to the concert. It was held in the middle school gym with folding chairs along the sidewalls and bleachers at the back. We were unfortunate enough that we had to sit in the bleachers. Oh, my. Narrow bleacher seats made of the hardest wood I’ve ever experienced, and it wasn’t long before my butt began to complain. William, the tall, good-looking, bright grandson, had mentioned before we got there that the concert would probably last about two hours. As I sat on those steel-hard bleacher seats, I kept glancing at my watch to see how much time had passed. Not nearly enough. William was performing in a jazz ensemble on the stage, with what looked like hundreds of other musicians seated on the floor of the gym. The jazz group performed adequately but not greatly, with William and a sax player doing brief standup solos. The jazz wasn’t very jazzy with too much depending on too few notes repeated too many times. But they are young, and better jazz talent would come later in their lives. They were followed by a percussion/Stomp group with about a dozen drummers banging away on assorted plastic containers. I was impressed. I checked my watch: twenty minutes had passed oh so slowly. The concert action then moved to the gym floor, where what looked like hundreds of little people, sixth through eighth, were seated, waiting for their turn to perform. The reason for so many kids was the addition of two middle school bands from other nearby middle schools, invited for this concert. There were some twenty squeaky violins, about fifteen trumpets, eleven flutes in the front row, a scattering of other instruments, and only one trombone that I could spot. Is the trombone on the list of endangered species? Is the cornet an ignominious leftover from the past? Is the flute this generation’s instrument of choice? I noticed the faint aroma of sweaty children that I remembered from my years of teaching. Not necessarily unpleasant, just odorifically memorable. I checked my watch again. Yikes! Only forty minutes gone. I wanted to stand up, stretch my back, rub my butt, climb down from that fourth row bleacher seat, but I was hemmed in by too many other bleacherites and had to just sit there and take it. By this time, I could no longer feel my lower extremities and even if I’d been able to stand, I’d probably have pitched forward onto someone’s back or head. How embarrassing would that have been? I heaved a sigh and concentrated on the little people before me. They were all quite well-behaved, and some of them couldn’t be called little people. Many of the girls were tall and beautiful, and they had boobs. What are seventh and eighth grade girls doing with boobs? What must middle school boys think of those girls with boobs? Probably the same thing I once thought, what boys since the beginning of time have thought. The bands each played one selection separately, then one that included all of them. They played surprisingly well. When the combined groups finished their number, the director, a very young but very capable fellow who looked like he should have been playing IN the band instead of directing it, turned to us and bowed, then handed the mike over to the middle school principal, who thanked us all for coming to the concert, for supporting our sons and daughters, our grandsons and granddaughters. I looked at my watch as he waved his goodbye to us: just under an hour. And we were free after just an hour and not the dreaded two hours William had prophesied. I love music, I love William, but I think this may be my last band concert.

American Idol

We’ve been watching American Idol for all thirteen seasons, and nearly every year I complain about one thing or another—those irritating waving arms down front during a contestant’s song, that irritating audience noise during a contestant’s song, that irritatingly too loud band and backup singers during a contestant’s song, the inane and often meaningless comments from the judges, the nearly always awful song choices the contestants make. Then there’s Randy Jackson. I thought we were rid of him and his “Hey, Dog” when he stepped down, but this year he’s back as some sort of mentor to the contestants. I never did understand what his credentials were that qualified him as a musical judge or a mentor. And I still don’t. The judges seem to be more interested in how the contestants perform than how they sing, and this year they aren't singing very well. But despite my complaints, the final eight or ten contestants each season were always good enough to listen to. And despite Keith and Jennifer and Harry’s stock comments that this year’s group is excellent, I think that any of the top four or five from any of the previous seasons is better than any of the final twelve this season. Where is this year’s Jennifer Hudson or Carrie Underwood or Adam Lambert? Where’s Fantasia’s “Summertime”? Where’s Kelly Clarkson’s “A Moment Like This”? Where’s Katherine McPhee’s “Over the Rainbow”? This year, neither the quality of those past contestants nor the quality of the past song selections is anywhere to be found. And after last week’s set of stinky performances, we also aren’t going to be anywhere to be found.

Spotify

One of the most pleasant features I’ve found on my new iPad is a music app called “Spotify,” with an insane amount of music from which I can choose. In the old days of music listening we had records, then tapes, then cds with twelve to eighteen tracks on each disc, then MP3 discs with about two hundred tracks. We could put in ear buds for listening to our tapes and discs, set it to shuffle, and away we went, our heads filled with song for an entire day, free from the babble of too many smart (or dumb) phones around us. Now I have Sirius radio in my car and on my television with an almost infinite number of radio stations on my computer that let me choose from any number of musical styles and artists. And now I have Spotify. This is a web site where I can select a playlist that someone has placed on the site with anywhere from thirty to several hundred tracks of their favorites within a specific genre of music. And there are hundreds of different playlists. One I really like is called “Jazzy Romance,”with mostly female jazz singers, some of whom I’m already familiar with and a bunch I’ve never heard of. Those familiar to me: Karrin Allyson, Stacey Kent, Jane Monheit, Norah Jones, Natalie Cole. Some I’ve heard of but never heard, like Amy Winehouse singing an old Gershwin, “Someone to Watch over Me,” Nicole Henry with a wonderful song called “Make It Last,” Melody Gardot and “My One and Only Thrill.” And a bunch of singers who’ve been hiding from me: Sos Fenger, Marie Bergman, Margareta Bengtson, Sinne Eeg, Caecilie Norby, Malene Mortensen, and Térez Montcalm. From the spellings of those names, I can only assume they’re from well out of this country, but they all sing in English. I guess that speaks well of the influence our singers and songwriters have on the musicians of the world. There’s a galaxy of music out there just waiting for us, and we don’t have enough hours in our lives to listen to it all. But it’s now available on our television hookups, our computers, our iPods and iPads, our smart phones and our dumb phones. I recommend to anyone who might be reading this, anyone who loves music as I do, that they go to the Apple app store and download “Spotify.”

PB & J Oscars

That had to be one of the blandest Oscars I've ever seen. Ellen was okay but not very funny nor very surprising. The biggest surprise was when she ordered in three boxes of pizza and then handed out pieces to a few of the audience. Dumb and classless. The whole show was a little like eating a peanut butter & jelly sandwich on very white bread, tastes pretty good but not very exotic and really forgettable. My mouth was all set for duck a l'orange or Beef Wellington and I get a pb & j. Gravity's Cuarón won for best director and the movie grabbed a bunch of the peripheral stuff, but 12 Years a Slave got best picture. Everyone else was pretty much predictable. The acceptance speeches were mercifully brief with the best Kate Blanchett's for her win as best actress in Blue Jasmine. The four songs up for best original song were emminently unsingable, with the Frozen "Let It Go" the winner. But where in this last decade are the songs that stick around and around and we all know and can sing them? Pink reminded us of great songs from the movies when she sang "Over the Rainbow," the winner 75 years ago. And one could go tripping through nearly all the winning songs from the last 65 years of the 21st century and know them and be able to sing them from memory. For example, "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing," "All the Way," "Mona Lisa," "Moon River," "Days of Wine and Roses," "The Shadow of Your Smile," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," "For All We Know," "The Way We Were," "Evergreen," and "Beauty and the Beast." And then we get to the songs of this century: "Things Have Changed," "If I Didn't Have You," "Lose Yourself," "Into the West," "Al Otro Lado Del Rio" (I'd defy anyone to tell me they can hum this one), and one of the all time mistakes in this category, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." I think you get the idea. They should look at how Neil Patrick Harris has hosted the Tony Awards. Now there's a classy awards show, and no one has ever hosted anything better than Harris has. Let's hope the producers for the Academy Awards learned something from this year's debacle.

Oscar Buzz & Monuments Men

A rimshot comment about the upcoming Oscars: Dustin Hoffman claims his Tootsie role is better than Jay Leto’s Rayon in The Dallas Buyers Club. Leto seeks redress for the remark. But Jaye Davidson cries out that his role as Dil in The Crying Game takes them both by surprise.

Tonight’s Oscar show may be the most exciting in years, exciting in that so many of the films are all so good and the race for best actor/actress and supporting actor/actress are all so close. Let’s just say that all of them deserve to win. The buzz in the news seems to suggest that 12 Years a Slave will clean up in most of the categories. I hope not. 12 Years was a powerful examination of our nation’s most disgraceful chapter, our willing enslavement of other human beings. It needed to be said, and it was said powerfully, graphically, painfully. But was it the best film of 2013? I don’t think so. I’ll say gravely that Gravity should win it. I’m also looking forward to seeing Ellen as host. This isn’t her first time hosting the show, and she’ll certainly be better than the forgetable host a year ago, Seth MacFarlane, or three years ago with James Franco and Anne Hathaway. Now, there was a double stinker. Or maybe in the future they should just go with a proven winner as host, Billy Crystal, who has run the show eight times and made us laugh every time.

Quick note about a reasonably good film that should have been better, The Monuments Men, with a great cast that got misused—George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bill Murray, and Jean Dujardin. This film was based on a true story about a small squad of older men who tried to save the art stolen by Hitler during WWII. Clooney directed, and he went wrong by using a humorous tone, especially at the beginning, when a humorous tone wasn’t needed or necessary or effective. Great actor and director that Clooney is, I’d have thought he’d know better.