I am in Phoenix, Arizona right now, in charge of three dogs and a mound of reading and writing. Russ and his parents went to go visit friends and lounge around their timeshare. My feet are propped up on a balance ball while Tanya has somehow managed to wedge herself into the crevice beside me. On the floor in front of me is a 17-year-old arthritic Irish Setter mix named Brittany, who can no longer feel when she has to poop. So there've been some accidents. Green, gelatinous accidents. To the left is Elka, a 70-pound German Shepherd who is sweet, yet has almost knocked me to the ground a few times and pawed a mole off Brittany's forehead today. The funny thing is, Elka idolizes 10-pound Tanya and follows her around everywhere. If Tanya jumps up on the bed, Elka follows. Elka will only drink out of Tanya's extra-small water dish and only eat out of Tanya's extra-small food bowl. I image that if she could, Elka would snuggle into Tanya like a puppy.
I like staying here. There's a great patio and lots of comfy study chairs. There's always the good creamer and the Wightman's make sure their orthopedic spa is fired up when I come to town. It's also nice to be in a temperature-regulated house, where you can walk barefoot without frostbite, unlike Oakfordshire (our Monrovian-British estate). Russ and I decided we needed to change Oakfordshire now that King Oak is gone and Queen Oak is sort of awkward and patchy. But Oakfordshire just might stick, like the name of Russ' car that he hates but will forever stick because I can never help laughing when I think of it, Brownie the Flying Turd.
I'm listening to the jazz station on the Wightman's cable cornucopia. My favorite jazz guy is Monk. Gene Kruppa just finished, and that was good, but a lot of the music sounds more like smooth jazz. I'm not a fan of smooth jazz. I wasn't a fan of jazz, nor knew anything about it, until I absorbed Ken Burns' jazz 11-disc series this past summer. I think this summer, time permitting, it will be KB's Civil War, which I used to watch at least once a year with my grandpa as a young nerd. I used to dream of marrying a southern man in the mold of Shelby Foote. And I always thought Mary Chestnut was annoying. But I'm thinking that this time around, I'll understand her more, a woman sitting around in her parlor, writing about the war going on around her. She'd totally be a blogger, had she lived in more digital times.
I just finished Thom Jones and enjoyed it. I'm pretty sure that he's from my old stomping grounds of Aurora, even though he's reclusive and there's nothing biographical about him to be found, on the internet or elsewhere. He not only mentioned Lake Street (sort of a hub), but Garfield Goose and the Fox Valley Shopping Center -- you have to be a real Auroran to remember Garfield Goose and shopping at Fox Valley. He won the National Book Award, but there's no mention of him on the “Welcome to Aurora, City of Lights” signs, no honorary street named after him downtown. Yet another reason that I no longer live in Aurora.
I am now reading the Selected Letters of John Fante, which is like permissible voyuerism. Fante was a bit of an egomaniac and kept carbon copies of all the letters he sent out, which is largely why this book exists. In classic egomanic fashion, he didn’t keep any of the letters that many others, including his wife, sent to him. That Fante.
Last night, we went to a pratice game between the Oakland A’s and the San Diego Padres. We tried to get tickets to the Giants vs. the Cubs (Russ=San Francisco, Sarah=Chicago, yet Dodgers trump both), but it was sold out. We sat in the fifth row, behind home plate and the giant net, which was comforting. I don’t like sitting anywhere there’s a fair-to-excellent chance that an errant foul or pop-up will come spinning. Like Drew Barrymore in Fever Pitch, I have also been a victim of ball-smack-in-the-middle-of-the-head action. Unlike her, I was standing in right field during gym class, daydreaming, and didn’t see the ball coming straight at me. By the time I did, I put my glove up and I completely missed. The ball hit me in the forehead-eye-nose bridge. That was the beginning of the end of my softball career.
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