Friday,
January 10, 2003
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senior social, dead man walking I actually get up pretty early, but not as early as I thought I would.
I'm riding the exercise bicycle before eight. It's my day for leg machines.
I skip the abs and calves today so it goes fast. Only three machines after
my 45 minutes or so on the bicycle. I'm home and showered in plenty of
time to do a couple of things and get to my dad's at the promised time. He is already coming out of the house when I get there. He has some a twelve-pack of Coke to take with him to donate to the food cause at his church's Senior Social. There is coffee made and he makes a contribution and gets me a cup and one for himself. I greet people I know and meet a couple of new ones. A lot of these people visited my mother often enough that I got to know them pretty well. Even to knowing their backgrounds and history and what puzzle they liked to attempt in the newspaper. I'm recruited to play a word game with three ladies. It's called Upwords and it's sort of like Scrabble but you can stack letters and change words and rarer letters don't count more. One woman (named Dixie like my mother) has peripheral neuropathy and has trouble getting the tiles on the board occasionally. But the others are used to it and help her. I have never played this game and it has a very different strategy than Scrabble. I kind of catch up on the rules as we go. I end up in second place. I realize later that they cheated me out of part of a score accidentally. (I made the word scar into scare and played off the e and then they said I didn't do the scare but later I realized I had. Given these extra points, I might have won. Yes, I might have beaten some little old ladies at their own game! Nah. Wouldn't be cool. So, I was kind of glad they slipped up on that and I didn't have to fudge the score so as to let one of them win.) We have to leave for our lunch date before the activities are officially over so I get Dad to break out of a domino game called 'chicken foot' played with double twelve dominoes. We are about five minutes late getting to the restaurant. My friends Rose, Pam, LG and SuRu are already there at The Brick Oven. We order and chat about puns, travels, finances and stuff. I wish I could visit more with Rose. Maybe I'll go see her in Eugene (Oregon) some time. After all I'm retired. I could do that.
LG gives me a 'puzzle a day' calendar and my dad a six pack of Christmas beer as we leave. I take him home and he says he thinks he'll go visit some friends. I notice, leaving his house, that there is a big 'X' in the sky.
At home, I go through the first nine days of puzzles in the calendar LG gave me. I give myself twenty minutes to work on the journal which stretches into an hour. Of course, I'm interrupted by the mail which must, of course, be opened and sorted through as soon as it comes. (When I worked, FFP did this, usually, some time before I got home. Then he just put stuff I really, really needed to look at on my chair. Just as he usually put out the garbage and recycling and retrieved the emptied containers. It's amazing how you can fill your time with this stuff.)
And then, yes, I continue the 'clean up the guest room' project. I actually succeed in looking at every object in this room. Dusting stuff, discarding moving into different piles. Lots of those objects are books. Lots and lots of books. Even though there are more books in the house. Books in the hall, the living room, THE ROOM, the bonus room, Forrest's office, my office, the cars, the bedroom (no shelves there...just piles by the bedside). There are probably books in the bathroom, too. There usually are. Magazines for sure. I discover books I haven't seen in a while, books I didn't know we had. Some have a bookmark or a receipt which might have been serving as one. Some of these are from cool secondhand stores I've forgotten about given the bookmarks or receipts. Some of the receipts list other books and I have no idea where some of these are either. Many are remaindered bargain books. Books we like tend to fall into remaindered piles, actually. It's a great variety this pile of books. Business books, lots of biography and history, letters and memoirs, books on sex, books on etiquette, true crime and conspiracy books (a niche FFP likes), computer books, philosophy books. Fiction, of course. Not much science fiction, lots of literary fiction, classic fiction, whatever. Lots of short stories. A bundle of WWII first person accounts, a lot of them published during or just after the war and picked up in secondhand stores for a few bucks a couple of decades ago. Art books. Books on collecting things like toys and deco barware and pinball machines. (I long ago decided collecting the books about collecting was easier and took less space than actual collecting. Which is not to say that there isn't some clutter of old toys in here and the clutter of other collections elsewhere.) I have banished things, though. Not enough surely. But the room could accommodate a guest. Move out the coffee table, unfold the couch into what I've been told is a reasonably comfortable bed. There's a TV (no cable, sorry), a clock, room to hang some clothes, a couple of empty drawers (that probably won't last). And, gods know, books to read. Many, many books. There is even room now in there to sit and write a letter. Assuming, of course, anyone did that anymore.
Before I'm quite through with the final cleanup and move around and such, it's time to get dressed for the opera. FFP isn't wearing a tux, just a nice suit with a lovely yellow tie. I 'dress down' as well with a black blazer and pants and a black blouse with subtle colored squares. We get to the PAC early enough that we take books inside. My back has been having spasms. Some inappropriate move at my workout? A cold starting (the pain moves around like it's not really a muscle you know)? I 'treat' it with a Crown Royal and water. It works actually and quickly. I read the program. We see people we know and strike up conversations. FFP wanders off for a long time and comes back with Dale Rice and his friend and we talk about food. We never get around to reading our books. The opera starts. I've had whiskey. But I never doze. Dead Man Walking has beautiful music and a very believable villain and a convincing saint. This guy John Packard is so believable that, redemption or not, I'm not sorry to see him die. Or pretend to die. People hope this opera will make people see that we shouldn't have the death penalty. But I wonder. I'm ambivalent about the death penalty. Shit happens. People get murdered. Sometimes innocent people are executed. A lot of times guilty people are executed. When I was almost on one of the yogurt shop juries (I escaped by pleading that my mother was dying which, of course, she was), I wanted to say that I couldn't vote for the death penalty during the group voir dire. (I didn't get a chance to try to escape on personal grounds until after about six hours of this group thing. I found out way too much about the case in that time, too.) But, it was a lie. I think, given the right case, I could vote that someone should die. Thankfully, my real problem with the case (that I would have to leave my poor dad and mom at that time) won the day. I didn't have to lie. Which is, after all, a crime, too. But perhaps a lesser one than murder. Anyway, the thing is that this opera happens to be based on the nun's book about a guilty man. The dramatic force is redemption. "The truth shall make you free." Supposedly that's from the Bible. Yes, here it is. John 8:32. Those Jews who would kill Jesus argue that they don't need to be set free because they have not been in bondage. But Jesus says sin is the bondage. Then he says the devil is really their father and stuff. The Bible is very interesting reading quite apart from basing elaborate faiths on it. Remind me to read the thing now that I'm retired. The truth is the problem really. The only problem. Because there isn't really truth, only close approximations. Yes, maybe it is proven and admitted that some act took place. There are still subtleties of intent and motive. That are unknowable. Life is chaos. The truth is also my
problem with writing. If I write fiction, I want it to be true (it could
have happened) but not so true as to be too close to telling secrets.
Mine or other people's secrets. Is it OK to make up a town as well as
a person? A place that doesn't exist in a city that does? What if something
is an anachronism? A gadget, person, word or airline that didn't exist
at the alleged moment of the story? And what time is the setting of the
story, anyway? How precise need you be? If I write fact (this journal even), I want it to be 100% accurate. And yet I know. It's impossible. Still, I will change almost anything, editing for silly accuracy. I actually didn't have broccoli, it was zucchini. Is zucchini spelled correctly? I will worry, on our budget, whether the lunch was 23.54 or 23.45. (FFP and I actually had this conversation on Thursday after lunch. "It was $23.45, I think," he said. "Actually, $23.54." "OK, yeah." As if it were important.) I know that truth needs to be kept in its place so that you can see what's, um, true. But I forget sometimes. Just like I forget what I had for dinner. Or where I left my car keys.
In other news, I have decided that I don't want anything. In the first couple of months of my retirement, I found myself buying things. I had time to shop, I felt I needed this and that. Maybe it's the cleaning task (when did I acquire all this stuff?!), maybe it's living closer to my stuff for more hours, maybe I've just got everything I need for the moment. Even stuff I thought that I might buy has been kind of put off. I do need new hiking boots because, after a certain number of miles, they break down and don't support as well. But I'm putting it off. I do want some computer stuff and software. And extra memory and batteries for my digital camera. But I feel these can wait. I want a lot of books, but look at all these I want to read! (Honestly, cleaning the guest room was like going into the best secondhand bookstore I've every found and finding a section labelled 'LB and FFP will find these intriguing.') So, yeah, I'm not feeling like buying stuff right now. Which is good, isn't it? I might get things straight. I might save money.
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X marks the spot in the sky
It is not enough to be h |
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174
JUST
TYPING