Saturday,
January 4, 2003
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the dogs pose in front of the library [no leash laws were broken]
the narrator in Richard Ford's short story Puppy [in the collection The Best American Short Stories 2002 edited by Sue Miller] It is not enough to be h |
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Saturday rhythm I wake up around seven and I really don't want to get up. However, my hips hurt and I don't feel good in this way that I know goes away when I get up. Finally, at 7:35 I tumble out. SuRu will call at eight. That call comes too early and I beg for ten more minutes. We arrive at a park on Berkman drive at 8:30. We walk through the park and down Berkman, back into the neighborhood. We finally head back toward Berkman on Briarcliff. The only really interesting thing we have seen is the branch library. It has a modern architecture with a lion in front with a baby lion between its paws. Impressive sculpture. It's entitled 'reading between the lions.' We walk on the west side of Berkman and through to Cameron and weave our way back. Still no real interesting things to see. Not like some of our other neighborhoods. Even our own. There may be a whimsical neighborhood here but we didn't find it. We did walk for an hour and a half, though and probably went three miles. SuRu doesn't think so, but I do. She has new shoes and she can feel them.
At home I feel really hungry so I have some raw vegies, dip, some leftover cheese bread things, a little cereal and milk. That fills me up. I have another cup of coffee. FFP is gone but he comes home and asks me if I want some salmon (that he has thawed and is going to cook). I say 'no.' I will eat it later when it's leftover. I'm full.
We decide to see a movie. About Schmidt has finally opened in lowly Austin. Adaptation is playing, too. We decide on the 2:15 show of the former. We go to the Gateway complex, FFP lets me out. Good thing we didn't want to see Adaptation. It was sold out on several screens. We went to Borders and looked around while we waited. I glanced through some life style, camera and design magazines and looked at the bargain books and marked down calendars but didn't buy anything. After the movie we went to Whole Foods and bought green tea, some shaving cream for FFP and some cheese, vegetarian barbeque and tofu 'no egg' salad. The place was packed. I had a taste of a couple of dips and some bread that were great. At home, we looked through the mail (ho hum) and I had that salmon and some cheese and some spinach. We watched some network TV. I read the paper and dozed. Hmmm...I had some good intentions on the mess control front.
About About Schmidt. Nothing really happens in this movie. A man retires, his wife dies suddenly, his daughter marries a loser. A sweet guy who is, however, too stupid to remember the five keys of a pyramid scheme even with the helper word POWER. Schmidt hits a few tourist stops and RV parks. He attends a wedding, looking just slightly better than everyone else in his tuxedo. (This when his suits and sport clothes were picked to be indifferent. But, left to his own devices at the rental store, we presume, he has better taste than his wife's new in-laws. Which would not be hard.) The conceit of writing to his new 'child reach' adopted six-year-old kid so that we could know his inner feelings worked and it didn't. We did know how he felt, quite explicitly. But it was unbelievable that he'd write these letters. Maybe he did it as a joke, knowing that some adult social worker would read them. Maybe not as a joke with that knowledge. Anyway, that didn't ring true. And I wouldn't have had him discover his neat file boxes in a gated trash place. Rather in the hall with a sign indicating trash in several languages...'trash, basura' whatever. [I'm sure there is an ethnic minority cleaning office buildings in Omaha.] As to things which were spot on...the retirement dinner with that gesture of his friend Ray's wife tugging at his sleeve as he wound up with his "don't mean a god damn thing" speech and the sad vegetables uneaten on plates; the tourist tribute to the pioneers (is that a real place?); the mother-in-law's house in Denver and the wedding (people who will never be anything spend money, usually not their own, on a wedding so that once in their life they will feel important); the performances of Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates; and to show his boredom and dissipation (even before his wife died) the working of the Jumble Puzzle in the paper. You will remember that another youngish retiree gave me the advice to skip directly to the solution to the cartoon pun and bypass the jumbled words. This was good advice. I wanted to counsel the man on the screen. It is an utter delight that a movie can be made where nothing more happens than a 60-something woman's death and a wedding and the destruction of a few Hummel figures. I didn't think such movies could be made. I worry that the fiction I want to write is devoid of real drama, lacking in fire arms and spies. Yet, this movie was made and it was based on a book that can't have had much more intrigue. There is hope for everyday life in art!
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173
JUST
TYPING