AUSTIN, Texas, August 12, 2005 — Yeah. Just keep celebrating. Becoming fifty-something or the other deserves more than one day. I stumble out of bed not so early and dress for a workout and make the bed. I am enjoying my coffee when Mr. EarlyRiser returns from his workout with a cheese croissant for me. Fortuantely, they were out of the Texas croissants or I would have had a belly full of jalapenos before my workout two days in a row. I read some of the Statesman and work the puzzles. Then I go to my computer and check email. News from a couple of friends. One has found out a grandchild in the making is a boy. One is fretting about moving now that she sold her house. I respond to those. I also do a little

idle online shopping. I don't buy anything. I do much more shopping than buying. (However, yesterday I ordered a Gore-Tex jacket, Gore-Tex pants and a bathing suit online. I will finally buy stuff, impulsively, after shopping for a while. The problem with shopping, online or otherwise, is you never really know how you are going to like something until you've had it for a while.)

FFP goes off to pick up the West Austin News copies with my story in it and to do an interview. He stops back by with the copies. I read over it. Immediately I see a mistake and clumsy constructions. The article is based on this essay on my site. (He will later see a mistake, too, and he's the official proofreader. I will go find that mistake in the original, too, although the newspaper one is much altered.) I immediately go there and correct the mistake (and later correct the one FFP found). I can't believe I overlooked these all this time through an abrigdement and revision and many readings.

I'd said I read a book by Marie Curie but, of course, it was by Eve Curie, her daughter. Marie (Madame) Curie was dead of radiation poisoning (leukemia specifically) before WWII which these books were allegedly about. I know that, I really do. I probably meant to say "Eve Curie, Madame Curie's daughter" or whatever. I even know that Monsieur Curie was killed by being run over by a carriage. I had to dig around to remember his name. Pierre. Yes, of course. I actually looked it up because these days when Wikipedia is at your fingertips, why expend all that energy remembering? Plus I kept trying to remember Eve's sister's name (Irène), the sister who won a Nobel Prize, too, with her husband.

The WEB is so much better for writing, in a way, in that you can change a mistake just that quickly. Not so in newsprint. Your mistake may be cached somewhere when you write online, but you have the satisfaction of seeing it corrected in one stream of pixels. I don't worry too much about the mistake, though. I'm more concerned that I've more or less accurately represented the stories of the two men in the piece. (I did get some fact-checking help from the daughter of one of them for the newspaper version, but still people are too complex to sum up in less than two thousand words.) Truth and facts, language and typos. Writing is such a struggle for the unattainable true thing, whether you write fact or fiction. If you think about it, representing anything real with twenty-six squiggles, spaces, punctuation and a few numbers and special characters is an amazingly stupid idea and one upon which we have built something called civilization. Still...Eve Curie wrote about WWII. That's a fact. Her newspaper dispatches were collected in a book called Journey Among Warriors. Before that she'd written a famous biography about her mother. Years ago I picked up the WWII book in a secondhand store while scouting for first-person accounts or the era. (Back when the WEB didn't spoil looking for stuff in a random way.) The book made it clear that Eve was famous for the biography of her mother so I picked up a copy of the biography, too. (In fact, I found a copy and a book in French that was an abridgement of the book used as French lessons on the same day in two different secondhand places in Buda, I think.)

In a way, I'm glad for the mistake because it set me off thinking about the Curies. While digging around I became curious about when Eve died. Irène succumbed to leukemia like her mother. And...concerning Eve. I couldn't find that she had died. She could still be alive...she would be one hundred years old but that's possible. Now if I open up The New York Times in a week or two and find an obit, that will be spooky. I've put the challenge out here in the journal before to tell me if or when some famous person died. Who was that? I remember my buddy Jerry answered the question. Ah, after only ten minutes of searching my journal here I say: "One of my readers writes that Graham Greene died in 1991. Somehow it's satisfying to know these things." Yeah. Graham Greene. Of course, that set me to wondering why I was puzzling over that. Well, it was back to an era when the journal had a quote every day. And I had used this:

"When we are not sure, we are alive."
Graham Greene (1904)

and written under (since the quote book I was using obviously had a birthdate and no death date as above)

I couldn't find out if he is dead...do you suppose he's still alive?

That little challenge resulted in my faithful reader answering the question. The puzzlement over death, given the quote, was amusing. And I also think the quote is very apropos for the movie I saw today.

The rest of my day is pretty well scheduled. Scheduled for fun. First I'm going to the gym. I'll shower and dress there and go to a 1:30 meeting where we will discuss the new menu for the club dining. And taste some of the food. Then I'll have time to go home and get to the five o'clock showing of Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch's new movie. Then we have an eight o'clock reservation for dinner at Jeffrey's. It's a good life if you don't weaken.

My workout consisted of reading a couple of sections of newspapers while doing fifty minutes on the bike and some static lunges, leg extensions, sit-ups and lower back stuff. Then I took a shower and groomed and dressed in the locker room. I finished up in time to put my bag in the car and get to the meeting exactly on time...although no one else was, of course. We discussed the menu which, I think, they were pretty well set on anyway. We made a couple of suggestions and comments. The food isn't Jeffrey's and I don't expect it to be. I think they overcook fish. (But you can ask for your salmon, say, to be cooked a little less.) I can't quite but my finger on why it isn't exciting. But some of the stuff seems better than the last menu. And just taking little tastes off the plated apps and entrees is not the best way to assess how a menu could work. I'll have to dine at the club and comment for them and hope to affect the next menu. (Of course, with food minimums we have to dine here anyway a bit each quarter.)

I get home around 3:30. FFP has decided when he wants to go to New York. Which is a few days while I'm gone to South Africa. He wants to get his airline ticket. I go online and use frequent flier miles to get him a ticket. The WEB is so wonderful in this way. You can do so much and find out so much without speaking to anyone. I love that. I hate doing things on the phone.

We head out to the movie. I'm somewhat of a Jim Jarmusch fan. And Broken Flowers opens today. It's at the Arbor. There is a bit of traffic but we expertly navigate it since we know all the different paths to the goal of the Arbor on Jollyville Road. We like the movie but it is sure to attract criticism from people who like a faster pace, more action, more resolution. What I like about it is that you get into this mode that is just like real life: where you are looking for clues about people and maybe looking at all the wrong places. You see things you think are meaningful, maybe. But they are random. Other things you see absolutely clearly from just one little moment. Other things are magnificent coincidences that you can't get out of your head. But sometimes this accumulation of stuff changes you. Change is what makes a movie. Don (Bill Murray) ends the movie changed. Even though he may still be the same guy, seemingly, maybe with his old girlfriend back and his fantastic neighbors still contributing the zing missing from his own life; he is changed. If you can't see that change, you aren't sensitive to nuance. And you might not have noticed that one of the old girlfriends has a woman lover now. Life is all about noticing. We look down a tunnel. Things are going on that we accidentally or willfully ignore. Even in a movie where the director directs our attention in a dark room there is much in the frame. Will we notice? Will we know what it means?

When the film is over, we say hello to some people who were watching the same movie and then to some others in the parking lot. This second group seems disappointed that Firebowl Cafe is not Brick Oven. I point out that Brick Oven is a bit north of here.

We go to Jeffrey's. We are greeted by one of the owners, Ron, and the new front desk people, Shane and Leslie, and by Johnny, our server. We have a cocktail and decide on the tasting menu with wines, subbing an extra cheese for the dessert course. Johnny seems nonplussed that I'm just now whatever age I am because he graduated from high school with me. August babies are the youngest in the class a lot of times. We are having our reunion next year and I ask Johnny if he's seen the WEB site. He says he just got a link to it today. I'm hoping other people put there 'since high school' bios on there. I'm not eager to send in mine though. Funny that. A few minutes on Google could probably lead someone to this site, especially if they knew anything else about me other than my name, but somehow I want them to make that effort if they are going to find it. I don't want to write down what my classmates are supposed to read about me. Let them find. Those who haven't already.

We enjoy the tasting meal. A glass of champagne with a single blini with caviar and creme fraiche. A small serving of seared foie gras with a sauterne-like Bonny Doon. A beautiful steak with a lovely glass of Cabernet. A cheese course, improved with a second cheese and garnishes and served with Port. Followed by a sweet wine that would have been served with the dessert we didn't have. I drank most of the wines. FFP left most of them since he's driving, just finishing the Cabernet and having a sip of the others.

At the table close to us there is a man and his wife (people talk loud enough and you know) and three young girls. All the women have dresses that show expanes of shoulder and back. Amid all the '"I was like" this and "I was like"' that they discussed Daddy giving one of the them a hundred grand and a trip another took.

"How many countries did you go to?" one gal was asked. She started naming cities like Munich. Then she stopped and said, "Lots of cities. Eight countries." There you go.

Nice birthday. We go home and flip on the TV and watch a bit of a couple of the movies I'm reviewing for AFF. No Jim Jarmusch in the making sadly in these two. Sleep comes quickly. I had a big day. Don't think my celebrating is over, however. Continues tomorrow.