What do you know, Juneteenth’s a federal holiday. I have to say that I made a correct prediction on that score. But it wasn’t really that hard to guess. Anyway, I welcome it, and in fact have tomorrow off.
August-like heat has returned here in northern Illinois, though it looks like next week will cool off a bit after possible rain, as summers tend to do in the North. We could use the rain.
So far much of June has been more like summer down South: early and sustained heat, though not quite as bad as all that, since we haven’t hit 100 F yet. The high was supposedly 90 F today, and it felt like that outside. I had a simple lunch of a sandwich and a banana today out on the deck, make tolerable by the deck umbrella, which cut at least 10 degrees out of that high for me.
An HVAC tech, who has been looking after our air conditioning and heating for years now — I don’t remember how I found his company, it’s been so long — came by the other day for the annual check of the AC. Our antediluvian AC, whose mechanicals were assembled in the 20th century.
It’s a miracle it’s still running, the tech said (I’m paraphrasing). Got my fingers crossed that this won’t be the summer it gives up the mechanical ghost. We shall see. Years ago we bought a central AC unit for our small, postwar-vintage house in the western suburbs, not because the old one failed, but because the house didn’t have one. Imagine taking a new house to market these days without AC. Bet that’s a nonstarter even in a place like Fairbanks.
Much work these days. Lots going on. Will post again on January 19. The more holidays the better, and I’ll bet — considering the inclinations of the incoming administration — Juneteenth will be a federal holiday before long. Or at least the closest Monday.
Ice crystals on our deck. They didn’t last long. Later came snow, which mostly melted. To follow Sink the Bismarck!, a taut 1960 British war movie, for contrast I recently watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), an engaging French love story set just before the Revolution. I haven’t seen many movies as painterly Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
A few weeks ago, before the violent national scrum, we started watching the short series The People vs. OJ Simpson. Top-quality historical fiction. Doesn’t feel historic, just like a good while ago. An increasingly long time ago, more in feeling than strict chronology. When the trial was actually happening, I remember thinking, do I have to hear about that again? Enough time has now passed for the subject to be of some interest.
That said, do I ever feel nostalgic for the ’90s? No. The underappreciated ’70s is more my flavor, and for the exact same uninteresting reason as most people. Nostalgia for one’s youth.
I didn’t know until I read about it a little while ago, but The Great Gatsby is in the public domain now. I could publish 100 words from that book, in order, or maybe reverse order, until I’d gone through the entire book, with the time needed to put the text in my only real cost. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it’s nice to know I could.
The immortal Ella.
A much later version. Recent, in fact, by the highly talented Hot Sardines.
The Hot Sardines’ singing is top notch, but I’m really taken with the animation in the video.
Another recent version by the Speakeasy Three.
Fine harmonies. The video is so stylized that it approaches parody, but doesn’t quite get there. Somehow, that works. Also, am I right in thinking there are celebrity lookalikes in this video? Recent celebrities, not swing-era ones. I don’t care enough about celebrities to find out, but I get that sense.
A site that visit every few months: The Comics Curmudgeon. On Jan 13, he mocks the comic strip Crock, which isn’t hard, but it is hard to be funny while doing it. The writer of the site, Joshua Fruhlinger, pulls it off.
One the characters says to another one, “I can’t wait to meet the blind date you got me. When can I call her?”
“Anytime but the weekends,” the other character says. “That’s the busiest time for blacksmiths.”
Fruhlinger comments: “I was going to go all in on ‘Why is it funny that this woman is a blacksmith,’ but we all know the reason why it’s supposed to be funny: blacksmithery is not a traditional feminine job so can you even imagine going on a date with a woman who would engage in it? What would you even call her? A blacksmithrix? Haw haw! Anyway, that’s stupid, so instead I’m going to focus on something actually puzzling: the assertion that weekends are ‘the busiest time for blacksmiths.’ I guess that’s when most Renn Faires are? Are we dealing with a universe where blacksmiths are a vital part of the everyday economy, making horseshoes and tools and such, or are we in a more modern environment where mass manufactured goods are omnipresent and easy to get, and the only people who go to blacksmiths are weirdos who are obsessed with swords? This is the Crock worldbuilding background that I have a million times more in interest in than I do in Poulet’s love life.”
I’ve started reading American Slavery, American Freedom, subtitled “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund S. Morgan (1975). I’m not far along, but enough to know he’s a good writer. The first chapter is unexpectedly about of Sir Francis Drake in Panama in 1572, but I think I can see where he seems to be going with the narrative, which will get to colonial Virginia before long.
Today was the last day for the Christmas tree. As usual, it’s been nice having it around, but its time had come. Before long, I’d removed the ornaments. No one volunteered to help. Including Eggplant. I think we bought that one at an impromptu crafts sale at an apartment building near where we lived the year Lilly was born. I expect she was there with us, strapped in a carrier. The lord. Got him about the same time as Eggplant, though I can’t remember where. I like to think of him as one of the 10 Lords A-Leaping, resting between leaps.
Soon all the ornaments were off. Except the Star of Bethlehem. It’s always the last to go. I bought it at a garage sale years ago because it is a gold colored version of a silver star I put on our tree growing up. The exact same style.
After everything was off, I dragged the tree outside. The dog decided to investigate the mass of needles left behind in the living room. We will find needles in odd spots for months. Until next Christmas, probably. Last stop (on our property, anyway): the curb. That’s the tree well-illuminated by the nearby street lamp.
Another Christmas, come and gone. We opened presents in the morning that day, as usual.
Not as usual, we had a family Zoom in the afternoon. My brothers, and my nephews and their expanding families, Lilly, and Yuriko and Ann and I were all linked. A geographic diversity: Texas, New York, Washington state and Illinois. We had an enjoyable time, even if the connection was wonky occasionally.
Later in the day, our Christmas movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original version, of course. I hadn’t seen it in at least 30 years, but it was as good as I remember. The movie also inspired me to look up its source story, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, originally published in Astounding in 1940. No doubt a copy of that edition is somewhere in the house in San Antonio, among my father’s sizable collection of SF. I’d never read the story before, so I found in on line. I did know about its unnerving, surprise ending, however. I heard about it from a college friend years ago.
Another New Year’s Day has gone as well, featuring ice precipitation on top of an inch of two or snow that had fallen a few days earlier. Not enough to rise to the level of an ice storm, but enough to keep us within our walls, occasionally listening to the tap-tap-tap of ice hitting the ground or roof, but mostly paying attention to electronic entertainment, or lost in a book or two, for me including American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Jon Meacham, 2009) that I put down this summer and which I’m finishing now, about half way through. Big things ahead: Old Hickory is going to destroy the Second Bank of the United States and go up against nullification, and win, along with a second term. He’s already set the Trail of Tears in motion.
The Great Conjunction was up there this winter solstice evening. For us, behind all the clouds.
As December days go, Sunday was above-freezing tolerable, and unlike today, mostly clear. A good day for being outdoors for a while, which is what I did at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois.
Queen of Heaven is the southernmost of a pair of large suburban Catholic cemeteries, adjacent to each other, with a major east-west thoroughfare, Roosevelt Road, separating them. To the north is Mount Carmel Cemetery, permanent home to bishops, gangsters, Boer sympathizers and many others.
Queen of Heaven is newer, post-WWII, and more understated of the two, but with its own charms.
Including a handful of stately mausoleums. Pretty soon I began to notice the Christmas decorations. A lot of them. I was inordinately pleased by the sight. I ought to visit more cemeteries in December.
I also noticed that the cemetery was busy. Not urban center busy, but busy for a cemetery. Even at the largest and most picturesque cemeteries, I’m very often the only person in sight, or one of two, including groundskeepers sometimes.
On Sunday at Queen of Heaven, I saw a dozen people or more by themselves or in couples, along with three or four small knots of people. Those gatherings didn’t have the look of funerals. I got close enough to one of the groups, driving by slowly, that I could see the people gathered around a new grave, maybe a few months old. Must have been their first Christmas without the deceased, and there were there to pay their respects. Talk about life-affirming.
Decorating the Christmas tree was a multi-day process this year. I remember earlier years with younger girls around, when there was no suggestion of delay. Those days are over.
The first day, no ornamentation. The next day, I added lights. Two days later, Ann and I got around to hanging ornaments and tossing icicles. Note the dog under the tree. She’s been parking herself there sometimes, unlike in pervious years when she’s mostly ignored this sudden and probably inexplicable (to dogs) plant presence. Even now, the Star of Bethlehem — the last thing to go on the tree and the last to come off, because personal tradition demands it — isn’t up yet. That’s because that would mean getting the lopper out of the garage and using it to remove part of the long top of the tree. I’ll get around to that task soon.
Clear and cool lately, with daytime temps in the 50s. Not bad for late November. So far, no snow yet except for a dusting we had a few days before Halloween. It didn’t last. Next time, it probably will.
Pleasant Thanksgiving at home. Nothing made from scratch this year except the gravy, but the boxed macaroni and stuffing you can get at Trader Joe’s isn’t bad at all. And what’s a Thanksgiving dinner without olives, I tell my family. They aren’t persuaded.
Took a walk last weekend at Fabbrini Park in Hoffman Estates.
The geese were still around, mucking up the place.
Peaked at about 65 degrees F today, which wasn’t too bad, though the wind was strong. A little cooler tomorrow, the NWS says, and then a string of days down toward freezing.
Back to posting around November 29. We aren’t going anywhere, but for us Thanksgiving hasn’t usually been a traveling holiday anyway. Got at least one Zoom with friends to look forward to, and conversations with Lilly.
We won’t be alone in sticking around at home. “Based on mid-October forecast models, AAA would have expected up to 50 million Americans to travel for Thanksgiving – a drop from 55 million in 2019,” AAA reports (for Memorial Day this year, the organization didn’t even publish an estimate).
“However, as the holiday approaches and Americans monitor the public health landscape, including rising COVID-19 positive case numbers, renewed quarantine restrictions and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) travel health notices, AAA expects the actual number of holiday travelers will be even lower.”
AAA also has advice for intrepid travelers who do brave the road, including what to do at hotels and when you rent a car. I have my own tips:
Hotels: Prior to any hotel stay, call ahead at least a dozen times, and ask very carefully and clearly, “Is it safe?” Like Laurence Olivier’s evil dentist in Marathon Man (see this hard-to-watch clip). Upon arrival, insist that the clerk throw the key card at you as you run through the lobby. Once in your room, don’t emerge for any reason. Close the curtains, take a two-hour shower and call the front desk a few more times to make sure it’s safe.
Rental cars: Under no circumstances approach the counter. Call from at least two city blocks away and explain that you want to car left another two blocks from your location, with the keys in the ignition and engine idling, so you don’t have to touch them. Once you reach the car, spray with disinfectant for at least 15 minutes, inside and out. Let dry for four hours and then you can drive it.
Just having fun with the current crisis. If you can’t do that, gloom will cloud your thoughts. At the same time, I’m not going to be one of those doorknobs who insists that a minor inconvenience like a mask is on par with a major abrogation of civil rights.
Image taken by Ernest Brooks during the Battle of Broodseinde, showing a group of soldiers of the 8th East Yorkshire Regiment moving up to the front, silhouetted against the skyline.
Five years ago this month, I made it to the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, in time to see its annual Día de los Muertos exhibit. This year it was cancelled as an in-person event, as you’d think. No visiting the Day of the Dead exhibit in person, to reduce the chance of Death coming your way.
I haven’t visited since, though there’s still time to see this year’s exhibit virtually, which is probably interesting, but not as satisfying as being there. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that primary experience is primary.
At the National Museum of Mexican Art, I experienced art skulls.
Two Puebla artists, Jose Antonio Cazabal Castro and Silverio Feliciano Reyes Sarmiento, created this monumental altar for Day of the Dead celebrations in the town of Huaquechula in the state of Puebla. Remembering a boy, looks like.
One more. A detail, most of it really, of “Skeletons of Quinn/Calacas de Quinn,” a 2015 work by Hugo Crosthwaite of Baja California.
Image taken by Ernest Brooks during the Battle of Broodseinde, showing a group of soldiers of the 8th East Yorkshire Regiment moving up to the front, silhouetted against the skyline.
