“Bathroom Completion!”
I just watched the the craziest Cowboy’s game against the Atlanta Falcons. They fumbled 4 times in the first quarter and were losing by a large margin – a completely futile performance. I was watching while doing my elliptical workout, otherwise the hour would have been a total loss. Then, amazingly, they got it together and started making circus plays like this Amari Cooper catch:
A last minute touchdown, recovered onside kick, and successful field goal led to a 40-39 win. The Cowboys never win close games like this. Wow!
On an even more positive and important front, we received a picture of our Australian friend Stan’s new grandson on Monday – Henry Stanley. Stan used to work with us at AIG and moved back home several years ago. A couple of years ago they found several large tumors in his brain and he was diagnosed with 6 months to live. The doctors involved in that diagnosis clearly didn’t know Stan like we do. We had a FaceTime with Stan on Saturday night and weren’t sure what to expect. He popped right up and recognized me straight away. Full of his usual kindness, positive energy, and humour, he participated in a delightful conversation with us for over 30 minutes. What a treat to see him in such good spirits after a long battle that he appears to be winning. His short term memory is compromised but he still has all of his older memories. As we discussed the impact of COVID on schools and universities, Stan used the term “staccato learning” to describe the starts and stops of online versus in school learning – not a term you would hear from someone who’s brain isn’t alive and very active.
Diana completed her first official 5K running distance this morning – actually over-achieved at 3.25 miles. Even after that she still had a lot of pent up energy and decided to start consolidating all CDs, cassettes, and DVDs from their various locations in the house to the newly redesigned family room TV/stereo wall unit. I installed shelves that she couldn’t reach and dutifully retrieved mounds of CDs from my office closet.
Out in smoky California, Finn was out and about in downtown San Jose with his new girlfriend, Amanda, and sent me this picture with some Panda art. He’s a huge fan of pandas and also still too skinny for my liking.
This was the week that we lost Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Notorious RBG. What a huge loss that is for the nation at this trying time. There are a couple of great documentaries readily available on her contributions to the Supreme Court, and I enjoyed the interview with Bill Clinton on CBS this morning as he remembered the reasons that he nominated her:
The “Good Time Supper Club” with Band of Heathens on Tuesday evening included a video of them covering “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison, with special guest Raul Malo of The Mavericks. Ed was playing the slide intro part and I thought to myself, “Self, I might quite like to have a try at that.” So I purchased a Dunlop bottle top slide overnight from Amazon and started to give it a try. The Might Orq slide that I have doesn’t work well for getting way up high on the neck – 21st fret and beyond. I hope to have some video on the guitar to share next week.
Oopsy! I almost forgot to include some of the most exciting news from the week. After 9 weeks and 2 days, the bathroom remodel is essentially complete. We’re waiting on one last piece of glass to seal in the steam shower area – but can use the regular shower now. The master bedroom was reoccupied on Friday night and we’ve used the new shower, with fancy sound system and lighting, a couple of times now. It’s excellent! Here are the long awaited pictures:
We’re both exceptionally relieved that the project is complete and very pleased with the results.
I’ve had the sheet music for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” around for a while but for some reason have never given it a try. That was remedied this week as I worked on the first couple of sections. I’m going to need a break for a week or two to work on something else, and will try the remaining sections after that. Here’s my attempt. Do you like the new elevated camera angle?
I finished reading two books this week, and my reactions to them are almost polar opposites. The multi-week slog to complete Erik Larson’s “The Splendid and the Vile” left me tired and frustrated. On the other hand Phuc Tran’s “Sigh, Gone” (he’s a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Sai Gon in 1975) left me in awe of a beautifully crafted and written biography. Warning – now I’m going to go on a bit of an extended ramble about the two books with some quotes that I particularly enjoyed (or didn’t in Larson’s case).
My first big question on meeting Erik Larson would be, “Do you nae ken that Scotland and Glasgow are not part of England?”
“Over the next two nights the Luftwaffe struck Clydeside, the region encompassing Glasgow, killing 1,085.
Joseph Goebbels, writing in his diary on Saturday, March 15, exulted. “our fliers are talking of two new Coventrys. We shall see how long England can put up with this.””
Ok, you’re right, that’s a quote from Goebbels, but there are a number of other passages where Larson uses “England” when he means the “United Kingdom” or “Britain”. One wonders why he thinks much of what he is describing in this 500 page slog is called “The Battle of Britain” and not “The Battle of England”. In the over 50 pages dedicated to sources and references, Larson talks about many visits to the National archives and other sources but apparently didn’t have time to master the high level geography of the country he was visiting.
This is a typically disconnected paragraph. Larson apparently enjoyed this fact and quote, and was determined to include it in the book, whether or not it fit in with the progress of the plot or not.
“In Bloomsbury, flares began to fall, flooding the streets with brilliant light. Author Graham Green, whose novel “The Power and the Glory” had been published the previous year, was just finishing dinner with his mistress, writer Dorothy Glover. Both were about to go on duty, he as an air-raid warden, she as a fire watcher. Greene accompanied her to her assigned lookout. “Standing on the roof of a garage we saw the flares come slowly floating down, dribbling their flames,” Greene wrote in his journal. “They drift like great yellow peonies.”
Here’s a quote that my brother in law, David, would appreciate (the Bond aficionado):
“Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attache in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond.”
One of the more interesting things I learned was about Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s number two, flying a solo trip to Scotland to visit the Duke of Hamilton. He was spotted by folks in West Kilbride and Eaglesham – both short drives from Stewarton, where I grew up from the age of 6. In typical disconnected fashion, Larson talks about his capture and initial imprisonment, and then leaves the entire topic there.
“As they spoke, Donald studied the prisoner. Something about his face struck a chord. A few beats later, Donald realized who the man was, though his conclusion seemed too incredible to be true. “I am not expecting to be believed immediately, that our prisoner is actually No. 3 in the Nazi hierarchy.”
I do not recommend this book at all. 500 pages of loose history, chock full of incongruous anecdotes and gossip. People magazine of the 1940s meets a lightweight biography of Churchill and his family meets an even lighter weight chronicle of the Battle of Britain.
On the other hand, “Sigh, Gone” by Phuc Tran was a delightful read and I highly recommend it. Tran’s family escaped Vietnam in 1975, just as Saigon was falling. They ended up as refugees in Carlisle, a small town in Pennsylvania. The book tracks his life from arrival until graduation from high school.
Let’s begin at the end with his description of the typical high school make up:
“Carlisle High School stocked its seats and bleachers with a familiar cast form the eighties: the athletes who towered above the rest of us; the cheerleaders who lay supine beneath them; the geeks with their physics books under their arms; the preps with their Tretorns, Swatches, and impeccable Benetton sweaters; a handful of black kids with MC Hammer pants and tall, square Afros, tightly faded; punks and skaters with their leather jackets and black Converse; a few swirly hippies; the rednecks with their oily palms and cigarettes and trucks. Carlisle High School was another cultural cul-de-sac built with the craftsman blueprint of John Hughes, the Frank Lloyd Wright of teen malaise.”
“From what I gleaned from television, Carlisle seemed like a slice of American apple pie a la mode. We bottled lightning bugs on summer nights. Trucks flew Confederate flags. We loitered at 7-Elevens and truck stops. We shopped at flea markets and shot pellet guns. My high school provided a day care for girls who had gotten pregnant but were still attending classes. We stirred up marching band pride and fomented football rivalries. The auto shop kids rattled by in muscle cars and smoked in ashen cabals before the first-period bell. We were rural royalty: Dairy Queens and Burger Kings.
This was small-town PA. Poorly read. Very white. Collar blue.”
Tran discovers the advantages of reading in middle school – way ahead of 99% of the population:
“Then I hit the jackpot. Triple cherries. Working at my town’s public library as a library page, I bought a discarded copy of Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan.”
There are so many paragraphs with perfect descriptions:
“Our apartment’s kitchen, my ersatz O.K. Corral, was a twelve-by-nine rectangular combo eat-in kitchen – the apogee of postwar efficiency and the nadir of seventies style – a kitchen into which my parents had shoved a secondhand white-and-gold-flecked Formica kitchen table and four matching chrome seats with squeaky patched vinyl upholstery.”
As Tran struggles with whether to be offended by the racial insults hurled his way on a regular basis:
“if we want to loose whatever words fly into our minds- then we render words powerless, ineffectual, and meaningless, like the playground bromide of “sticks and stones.” That childhood logic leads you to believe that suffering corporal trauma is worse than verbal trauma.
Nathaniel Hawthorne would beg to differ.”
“But if I allowed myself to be harmed by words, I was showing them that I belonged at least by virtue of understanding their language. And all I wanted was to belong.”
Here’s one of my favourite descriptions – “like angry origami” – perfect:
“After mass, we piled into our red Ford LTD (which had replaced the green Pontiac), Lou and I anticipating some repercussions of our misbehavior in mass. My father’s brow was creased, symmetrically folded and ruddy, like angry origami. His chin, flecked with the weekend’s stubble, bent an unmoving frown. Trouble was up ahead. Lou and I were relieved when, in the car ride home, my father announced, “I’m not going to spank you.””
An interesting perspective from a young Vietnamese immigrant taken by his father to watch “Chariots of Fire”:
“An eternity passed. Still more running on the beach and through town. There were long close-ups of faces and even more running. The time period was not a mythical era with Medusas or Krakens. It was twentieth-century England. There were no swords, sandals, or togas. It was just supercilious Englishmen, talking and running against the synthetic willing ch-ch-ch-ch-ch of Vangelis’s theme song. At least that sounded cool.”
Well, I called out Erik Larson for lumping Scotland in as part of England, and so can’t let Tran away with a free pass on this paragraph either. Much of “Chariots of Fire” was filmed in Scotland and at least one of the runners was Scottish. A more forgivable error from a Vietnamese kid than from a biographer who has conducted deep research in England.
Here’s an excellent paragraph on the mindset of elementary school students moving up to middle school, though I’m quite sure none of them are thinking of it in these eloquent terms:
“My small worries about changing schools were eclipsed by my opportunism: I had hopes for my new school. At Wilson Middle School, I could break free from the chains of nerditude. Eighth grade in 1986 was the middle arc of adolescent Darwinism. We were amoebae in elementary school, gradually growing some spines when we entered middle school. But now it was going to be eighth grade. Everyone’s genus and species in the natural pecking order was ossifying, evolving for high school’s law of the jungle. Jocks. Preps. Freaks. Geeks. Rednecks. I was determined to make an evolutionary jump – if not into a cool kingdom, at least our from the nerd phylum.”
A father and son’s shared love for the library:
“My father loved the library because it was a safe haven for him – no missed cultural clues, no bigoted insults from his coworkers, no glaring reminders of what was lost. All patrons of the library were pilgrims to the oracle, all seeking the same thing: knowledge. And in their pursuit of the same thing, they were all equals.”
An awakening that you could be a cool skate/punk kid and also a good student:
“Could you love reading and still love punk? I had assumed that you couldn’t be a skate punk and geek out on books, but Philip had changed that perspective. I had wanted to ensure that I would fit in, and suppressed my nerdiness as an anathema to punk rock. But Philip had obliterated that premise in an instant with a copy of The Stranger.”
Here’s a transformation that happened to Tran in high school, not to me until much later in life:
“I savored the academic clout that reading a book gave me in school, and beyond that, I discovered that I actually liked the books my teachers recommended to me. My perceived need to read changed, slowly and surprisingly, into a desire to read – a desire that I didn’t fight.”
A sad reflection on Tran’s home life, after attending “The Importance of Being Earnest” with a high school English teacher:
“Mrs. Krebs listened to what I had to say, and she replied with thoughtfulness and care as if she were speaking to an equal. In her tone and engagement with me, I was uplifted from the lowly caste of teenagers and felt for a moment like a valued, adult counterpart. I wasn’t relegated to the back seat, as I often was in my parents’ car.”
On receiving his ideal college acceptance:
“But then I got a large white envelope from NYU the next week. It was after school, and I tore it open, and I saw the words: Congratulations, I had gotten into NYU. I called everyone, did a crazy dance – that whole celebratory montage that you see on TV when someone hits the jackpot.”
“Sigh, Gone” has been added to the section of my library that contains the books that I enjoyed reading the very most:
These days Tran is a high school Latin teacher – has been for 20 years. Interestingly, he also owns and operates a tattoo parlor in Portland and is apparently highly sought after. Here’s some of his work:
Some music that I’ve enjoyed while working this week:
The excellent gentle touch of Bill Evans:
An interesting cover of Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today”. I haven’t had a chance to investigate these artists. Swedish perhaps?
And finally for this week, a sad tribute to his father, that I heard Tommy Malone of the Subdudes play on Anders Osborne’s Friday livestream:
Have I told you my Tommy Malone stories? No… well let’s see:
Story #1: We were attending an oyster bake at Macon’s baturre (a house on stilts on the wrong side of the New Orleans Mississippi river levee). I was underneath the house watching Denny very dangerously shucking a huge sack of oysters without a glove. Macon was telling a story about his friend, saxophone player Derek Houston, who was attending the Grammy awards in Los Angeles. On checking into the Beverly Hills hotel, he noticed that the font for “Coat Check” looked remarkably like “Goat Check” and called to report this to Macon, who keeps a couple of goats out in front of the batture. I asked Macon what kind of music the Grammy nominated band (Roddy Romero) played. He said something about swamp rock and I asked if that was like Tommy Malone’s band (I couldn’t remember the Subdudes – old age). He thought I was kidding because Tommy was standing right behind him. I hadn’t registered that was him. I know – a rambling story and you kinda had to be there, but I like it.
Story #2: Not as much a story as a fond memory. We attended a Subdudes concert at Poor David’s Pub in south Dallas – a great place to see them play acoustically with the amazing sound in that venue. At the end of the show, Tommy said they wanted to get closer to the audience and so they formed a circle and asked everyone to gather round and join in as they performed a few more songs. A real treat.
Stay kind and patient amid the craziness of these times!