Tim Curry Reads to Me

This week, I drove to Boston, a 4-hour trip. I stopped along the way to see and stay with my friend Sue in East Greenwich where I used to live. Marty had suggested I get a book on CD to listen to on the way. I chose Portobello by Ruth Rendell, read by Tim Curry.

Aside from some technical difficulties, such as repeating chapters and a scratched CD I had to skip half way through, it was a wonderful way to pass the trip. If I were reading the book to you, you'd fall asleep. But Tim Curry is a master, and he thoroughly held my attention. I've read some of Rendell's suspense novels and enjoyed them. She's a very witty writer. She uses Britishisms liberally, which are easy to figure out in context. Portobello is more of a psychological study of characters who range from petty thieves, fervent missionaries, murderers, a schizophrenic and a gentleman addicted to a sugarless candy. The book is rounded out by a handful of normal people living normal lives, except for their connections to the quirky ones.

I don't think I would've enjoyed reading this book as much as I did listening to it. We have a long trip coming up and I think I'll find a book on CD that Marty and I would both enjoy.

Florida Surprise

Bouviers Forever

Karen and Me

Jim, the Gnome

Us Escorted By Molly and Quincy

A Brace of Bouviers

Last weekend, we went to Longwood, Florida to surprise my good friend Karen on her birthday. We'd been very spoiled by international flights and weren't used to the relative crudeness of the domestic version. No food, no movies, no music and lots of jockeying to get your carry-on into a spot in the overhead. Nasty, brutish and short. We were also late, and the time added was seat time. Oh well.

Jim picked us up and we sat in Orlando traffic for an hour so he texted Karen every 10 minutes to update the ETA. She thought they were going out for dinner. Once we arrived, we sneaked up to the front door as Jim drove to the garage. We rang the bell, but Karen wouldn't answer the bell because she was loving a dog. More about dogs later.

It was truly a surprise. We walked across the room to greet her and she nearly fell over, crying with happiness. It's nice to be loved. Jim had planned a nice dinner and dessert and we had a great time talking about the good old days. The dog days in Brooklyn.

Jim and Karen were our neighbors in Fort Greene. They moved into their half-finished townhouse the same icy February day as we moved into our completely renovated one. We became fast friends. They had a bouvier de flandres called Jeep. We'd never heard of the breed before but became enamored of it as we got to know Jeep. Karen and Jim decided to breed Jeep the following year and we took one of the pups whom we named Esprit des Amis, Spree for short. It snowballed from there. We've had 5 bouvs since then, Jim and Karen, 4. They still have 2 rescue bouvs, which naturally made us want to go out and rescue or buy one. This will happen in time, in the summer when we can properly train a new dog up in the country.

This is turning into a dog post.

We didn't do much all weekend. We did a little grocery shopping, went for walks, sat around the pool. The weather was perfect. We caught an early flight Monday and were back in NYC by 10 am. Marty went to work and I came home to rest from my long weekend of doing nothing but rest.

Snippets from Booklandia

I went on another Walter Mosley tear and read his 2 newest books, All I Did Was Shoot My Man and The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. The first book is the usual Mosley detective story, with so many characters, plot twists and red herrings that your head spins. Mine does, anyway. The second book is a meditation by an elderly man who is approaching the end of his life. He gets special medication that allows him to remember the present, which he doesn't have a grip on. He has a strong lock on the past. The main characters in both books suffer from fevers, which ultimately give them more mental clarity than they had before.

At the recommendation of Patty Sidor, I read On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry. It's a beautifully written account of an Irish woman who travels to the US when she's 20 or so and lives in Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, D.C. and finally Bridgehampton, L.I. It's not a happy book, since her life is a string of grief, but the writing makes you feel at home in the sadness.

I'm currently reading Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, which is set in the 1600's in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. My problem with this book is that bad things happen but you don't have great writing to soften the blow. I hope that the book I just started, Changoe's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy, is a little more buoyant. It takes place in Havana in 1957 and has Hemingway in it. Bring me a daiquiri, please.

Thursday Night in the Village

My brother Charlie got tickets to see Theresa Andersson at Joe's Pub lasr night. The four of us--Charlie, Marty, Victor and I had great seats near the stage. The crowd was mixed, from middle-agers like us to much younger folk. Just want to remind my son Mark that we don't stay home every night and go to bed at 9 pm.

The concert was incredible. The woman plays numerous instruments, which she records and then plays back as she moves onto something else. Eventually, she's singing with the accompaniment of drums, violin, tambourine, guitar and back-up singers. Her energy was incredible. A NOLA native, she introduced Alain Toussaint, mentor and famous on his own. The audience was invited to sing a few bars, which Anderssen recorded, and played back in her next song, but we sounded pretty awful.

We subwayed home and went for ice cream. I'm looking forward to a New York City weekend.

A Very Bloody Book

Alice Hoffman 's latest novel, The Dovekeepers, combines history, religion and witchcraft. The history part is the short period where the Romans threw the Jews out of Jerusalem, cornered them at Masada where they'd lived for several years before making a suicide pact to kill themselves rather than be enslaved by the Romans. The Jewish religion, with all its commandments, is revealed from the woman's point of view. It's The Red Tent in dire circumstances. I call the genre Historic Chick Lit.

The story is told by four characters, tied to each other by religion, blood and witchcraft. One character is raised as a boy and learns the manly art of weaponry, horseback riding and hand-to-hand combat. He's especially good with a bow and arrow, a la the goddess Artemis.
The four women each give their perspectives on love, childbirth and potion-making. I found the story of the Essenes especially interesting. They lived in Masada alongside Jews from other regions of Israel and embraced an ascetic lifestyle that decried bloodshed and focused on scholarship, mainly recording history. They buried these writings at the Masada site just before willingly going to their deaths. These writings were eventually unearthed and are known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Masada sitting on the Dead Sea. Also exhumed was an early copy of the Hebrew Bible. Some scholars doubt this version to be true.

About two thirds through the book I was tired of all the killing. The romances also began to bore me. The witchcraft thread was ho-hum. I started to drift away from who was whom and what was what. No matter. It was a great read and I highly recommend it, if you're a woman. I know that's sexist of me but there's no man I know who'd be able to stomach this book.

Hoffman's The Red Garden was a better book, less hysterical. I plan to read more of her work.

In PA with Sandy, Dianne and Sadie

We left Manhattan Friday afternoon and had the usual traffic through New York and part of New Jersey. We were meeting Sandy and Dianne at an Indian restaurant on the way to their house in the Poconos. There was a delicious buffet, all vegetarian. I think I liked the soup best, having 3 portions of it.

Their house is on a lake. It's big and comfortable and we've been going there since they bought the place. We used to visit them at their first house in the area when we drove up with the my daughter and young son and their oldest son 20 years ago. We brought our first Bouvier, Spree, with us. The Caedmon Playgroup in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn was where we met. We'd all lived in Fort Greene, where we enjoyed an extension of college days, with new people and now kids.

This weekend we did nothing . I love doing nothing. We drove over to their new property close by which sits on a large beautiful lot with several buildings clustered on one part of the property. They've planted a fruit orchard and are renovating the main house which was once a barn. They don't need this space or the work, but it's a project Sandy wanted to do. Dianne says it's a mid-life crisis sort of thing.

They walked and and I read. Our friends love good cheese, so we had 4 really nice cheeses with cocktails before our dinner of rib-eye steak on the grill, accompanied by fingerling potatoes
and dandelion salad, which was very bitter but I'd made tomatoes in a balsamic vinaigrette so that sweetened it up somewhat. We washed it all down with red wine and had a melange of desserts brought from NY.

Sunday was more of the same. We took a long walk with Sadie, their beautiful Bouvier. I gave her an eye trim which she really needed. I drove to Jeffersonville where I write this. Marty is going home with Sandy and Dianne. They'll drop him off in Manhattan where he'll have dinner with Harry, our son, who's in town for the week. They'll got to an all-you-can-eat sushi bar near our apartment. I don't like sushi, so this is a good thing. I'm not sure what I'm having yet. Something from the freezer.

Tomorrow is yoga and meetings with the DEC and energy company to resolve the blasted boiler issue. I'll let you know how that goes.