Twice this week, I’ve had the kind of day where one nice thing gives way to another and another until the whole day has gone by and you’re still smiling the same smile you started out with. You mean to pause for a frown, or just to give your cheeks a rest, but there isn’t time before you’re into the next good thing. I know how this sounds, and if I were reading it instead of writing it, I’m not sure I’d go on for fear of adult onset diabetes. I promise not to chirp in the next blog, so bear with me if you’ve the stomach for it.
The wind and snow came Sunday night, and by morning, autumn had been completely kicked to the curb. The cover I had tied down over the furniture on the gazebo was ripped off, the chairs were knocked on their sides, and a huge tree had been uprooted on the Clifford’s lawn next door. The mountain range of leaves neatly piled at everyone’s curb for the year’s last pickup were buried in snow and smeared across our driveways. Scarcely a promising start, but then Lois showed up.
She had agreed to come with me to shop for a replacement for my ailing refrigerator. I’m not a shopper, neither was John. We were buyers. Still, it’s always fun to shop with Lois. This time, I think she wanted to make sure I didn’t mess up. We ran tape measures all over my fridge, wrote everything down, and then she took photos of it from every angle, inside and out. To my relief, she didn’t try to tip it over and snap it from the bottom. We went to Lowe’s, so I could get my military discount. After all, this was a major appliance. I found out all too soon just how major it was. I was expecting to see price tags of three figures. Silly me. Lois laughed as I gasped at what were supposed to be sale prices. One humdinger was going for $4500. You knock twice on the door to see inside without opening it. Everyone needs that.
I did get a real bargain at $1499 for the latest version of the Whirlpool I have. There’ve been surprisingly few changes, but I had to make sure the doors would still hold magnet photos. My current model is festooned with dozens of them, half of them of John. The harried sales clerk wasn’t sure, and didn’t have a magnet to test it. She was alone in the department, on a busy day, and her wrist was in a cast, having been slammed between two crated refrigerators in the stockroom. Nevertheless, she was the soul of pleasant patience as she roamed the aisles with us in search of a magnet. I won’t see the newbie until January. I suspect the steel tariffs have slowed things down.
Lois and I are often a trio with Tim, and so it was on Monday. He was home because his company car was in the shop. The drive to pick him up was a treat involving off roads and fields made quite Currier and Ives-y by the fresh snow. We had a long, succulent, Mexican lunch at Cessina: salsa with a bite, good guacamole, a superior margarita, milanesa, tres leche cake, and, in Tim’s case, an unfortunate lap full of cold water (a coat passing accident). Tim might have borne with strangers thinking he had wet himself, but he wasn’t about to freeze, so we drove him back to change . . everything. The glasses at Cessina are quite large.
I had raved so about The Green Book that they decided they had to see it. They were going to drop me off, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the fine and silly time I was having in their company, and I told them I wouldn’t mind seeing it a second time. It wouldn’t be on again for a while, so we spent the interim at Bed Bath and Beyond. Lois was loaded with coupons, and I found a rather wacky gift for a rather wacky person, neither of which I can discuss here.
The Green Book was every bit as enjoyable on repeated viewing. Viggo Mortensen has porked up to play a rough customer most endearingly, and Mahershala Ali proves his range with a character at polar extremes from his role in Moonlight. Here are two of the finest performances you’re going to see all year, and their chemistry provides a master class in the art of disappearing into a part. It’s funny and touching, with a knockout soundtrack. It also moved me in a very personal way because of a memory it brought back.
At twenty, I ran off to join the army. I was in a busload of new recruits of mixed races headed for Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. We were not only on the same bus, we were, except that they’d been drafted and I’d enlisted, in the same boat. We talked and got quiet and joked and got quiet again. Whatever awaited us, we were going to be in it together. But then we pulled up at a little gas station that had a lunch counter. All of us needed a pit stop. Then we saw signs over the washrooms like nothing we’d encountered before: WHITE, COLOREDS. Nobody said anything, we were all too embarrassed. Whatever we did, it was going to be very different when we got back on that bus. Then, one of the white recruits said, “This is bullshit,” and went into the “COLOREDS” washroom. We all did, despite some smoldering glares from the proprietors. They couldn’t object; there were too many of us, some rather burly. In The Green Book, and in real life, Don Shirley had to endure many such indignities, and far worse, without a bus load of support.
There was a lot to say when we came out of the movie. It’s always that way when they’re good.
Today was another good, larky day, though I didn’t stir from the house. But that’s enough for now.
Me Now 