Today I packed up some nice antiquarian volumes for an elderly couple to send off to auction, and it turns out the female half is a published author of books on horticulture (and I just have to repeat Dorothy Parker's infamous quip, when challenged to use that word in a sentence, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think"). What makes this wild is, I recognized one of her books! It's about olives in California and Hennessey & Ingalls carried it when I was working there. I even remembered the cover. That pleased her no end. I got a grilled cheese sandwich and cup of hot tea out of it (which is overstating things, a bit; she'd already asked me if I'd like them and I'd agreed...and it was a lovely lunch served up by a fascinating lady).
Of course, they both had fascinating lives. He was the navigator in a bomber during WW2 and was shot down over Germany, then he spent a couple years in a POW camp. She lived through the Blitz, and her school was even bombed out due to its close proximity to a hospital, just like in "Hope and Glory", a movie about a boy living through the Blitz and having the time of his life. And they both still work. I can only hope I'm as agile and aware as them when I'm their age...which really isn't all that far off.
The book packing at the fair was a success...so much so I'm damn near exhausted. Three days nonstop, on my feet and dealing with quirky people. I was barely able to do the job, today, and had the surroundings not been so pleasant, I don't think I'd have made it. We're going to see about doing it in New York, the beginning of April, and (hopefully) London in June.
Didn't get much writing done but that's cool. Gives me a chance to formulate new bits to make the opening third even more interesting. By the time I get done with LD, it's either going to be a classic or a catastrophe, I haven't decided which, yet.
Let's see what the fates bring forth.
Of course, they both had fascinating lives. He was the navigator in a bomber during WW2 and was shot down over Germany, then he spent a couple years in a POW camp. She lived through the Blitz, and her school was even bombed out due to its close proximity to a hospital, just like in "Hope and Glory", a movie about a boy living through the Blitz and having the time of his life. And they both still work. I can only hope I'm as agile and aware as them when I'm their age...which really isn't all that far off.
The book packing at the fair was a success...so much so I'm damn near exhausted. Three days nonstop, on my feet and dealing with quirky people. I was barely able to do the job, today, and had the surroundings not been so pleasant, I don't think I'd have made it. We're going to see about doing it in New York, the beginning of April, and (hopefully) London in June.
Didn't get much writing done but that's cool. Gives me a chance to formulate new bits to make the opening third even more interesting. By the time I get done with LD, it's either going to be a classic or a catastrophe, I haven't decided which, yet.
Let's see what the fates bring forth.
2 comments:
Olives in California and there are a lot of olive groves here. And the olive oil here is really good. We picnic once at Rutherford Hill winery in Napa and it was under olive trees on a hill. It was a warm day and as we ate in the shade of the grove of olive trees we watched air balloons ascend.
I've been reading, A Widow's Story, by Joyce Carol Oates. Someone who has never met a comma she didn't like. She too is amazing and in this journal of sorts, of the death and her life after as a widow, exposes herself to be a very interesting person. I think. But I'm absorbed by it and the emotional state I went through with the death of an ex and my father, especially the pools of memory at the hospital she writes about. I never went back there, to that hospital where both of them died a year apart. To afraid to run into a memory pool.
I understand. Sometimes the still waters of a gentle pool are lovely to watch but hold undercurrents that are too dangerous even to wade into.
I hope you're still writing, dude. It's a wonderful way of building a breakwater to hold back those currents.
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