January 13, 2000

neighborhood and Zoey's birthday

Work, walk in the neighborhood, dinner, newspaper and TV, bed. That's my day.

We took a long walk because it was Zoey's birthday (2). SuRu and I walk mostly because Zoey is walk-needy. Chalow loves it, but only gets excited when she knows it is going to happen.

Our neighborhood can be interesting as the picture shows. Actually we didn't go by Atomic Tatoos. We went the other direction, on the other side of Medical Parkway and all the way to 39th. Instead we passed businesses like the motorcyle salvage (They've cleaned off their window art which included a motorcyle, yes, but also a barber chair which may have been left over from a former leaseholder but it's gone, but they left the old bike on a pole outside. I have pictures somewhere to prove it but not scanned in.)

Oh, and we walked by Upper Crust, of course, and the Chinese herbalist. One of the store fronts on Burnet used to be a Chinese restaurant. (There is still one which never has any business we can see but stays open anyway.) Anyway, the vacant Chinese restaurant had paper on the windows like it was going to open again.

We walked close enough to Chili's (yes, a Chili's showed up here...they aren't all in the burbs) to smell the grilling beef. Made me want a chili burger, something that I, in fact, rarely eat.

But I had baked monk fish, steamed carrots, spinach salad with currants, tangerine and cheese for dessert and a ginger ale. Oh, and some crackers with the cheese. Forrest cooked. This new hobby is cool.

Read the papers and watched 'The Tender Trap,' an old and sappy movie with Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds. I read in the New York Times about an exhibit of photographs and memorabilia of lynchings. Most of the photos were postcards. I'd intended to mention that some of the more fascinating things I looked for on ebay were postcards and to comment sagely that there were always photo postcards of train wrecks! But lynchings, I'm still reeling about this. The commentator says that more shocking than the victims (which are intensely shocking) are the bystanders. The collector who put it together clearly had history in mind, but it still is hard to think about, like collecting Nazi memorabilia.

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn."

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice