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Watching the Tonys the other night I saw commercials for some new TV show---a reality-TV-ish "Desperate Housewives," they're spinning it---called something like "The Tuesday Night Book Club." That reminded me, as had a bocce ball game I came upon the other night in an unusual place, of a poem I never finished, years ago. It was aiming to be about the pleasantly "duh" surprise I experienced, week after week, when coming around a bend in the curvy part of 39th St in Baltimore, as I drove home from a Tues/Thurs night class I was teaching, and spotting the same motley little group of croquet players in the funny little bit of median there, knocking the balls around lazily, dressed all kinda shabby and improper, the way I like to see croquet played. I came to think of them as the Tuesday Night Croquet Club, and I can't tell you the delight they gave me.
I never did get the feeling in question into the poem, or make its phrases interesting enough to merit calling it a poem anyway (I was pickier back then that way, too), but attempting it & revisiting it a few times did serve to fix the crux of it in my head: something about how surprise can be particularly good when it's a repeated pleasant surprise in the face of notable predictability. Kinda like the goldfish and the castle meets the way I can read the same favorite mystery novel three or four times and rarely retain a clue about who done it.
Some BBC people earlier tonight were interviewing a memory specialist who was talking of training the memory as one does a muscle. But there are occasionally advantages to having a lousy one. And I'm not counting the business of entirely ditching/denying your past---that's not at all the happy lousy memory business I mean to call up here.
Back to bed, I guess. Had a nap earlier, to get through another headache. I'm vaguely attributing that headache & th e one last week to (a) heavy use of bug spray and/or (b) a malaligned jaw, as it's been a while since I had such yuck, so I'm out to attribute it to something & then fix it. (Easier with the bug spray, I suppose.)
Strange, these nights when one sleeps the evening away and then arises for the middle of the night. I like 'em. But then I like the middle of the night a lot. Earlier my across-the-way neighbor was outside on the phone (she does that sometimes) in the cool, clear midnight, where her voice carried enough that I could hear her discussing internet connectivity options.
End of this week the heat comes back. Might well be a while before it gets a little chilly at night like this again. I love love love this weather. Let us remember this beautiful spring next time someone suggests that the seasons change on a dime up here. They don't, generally. We get nice long transitional seasons here, at least most of the time in my five-year sample so far, compared to everywhere else I've lived. And it doesn't get much better than this fantabulous rising into the 70s during the day, all kitty-cats-in-windows, and cooling right the heck off at night, smelling six kinds of good, with crickets chirping, or just one stalwart chilly one, as is outside now, and that little nip in the air for lovin' that well which thou must, at least temporar'ly, leave ere long.
I never did get the feeling in question into the poem, or make its phrases interesting enough to merit calling it a poem anyway (I was pickier back then that way, too), but attempting it & revisiting it a few times did serve to fix the crux of it in my head: something about how surprise can be particularly good when it's a repeated pleasant surprise in the face of notable predictability. Kinda like the goldfish and the castle meets the way I can read the same favorite mystery novel three or four times and rarely retain a clue about who done it.
Some BBC people earlier tonight were interviewing a memory specialist who was talking of training the memory as one does a muscle. But there are occasionally advantages to having a lousy one. And I'm not counting the business of entirely ditching/denying your past---that's not at all the happy lousy memory business I mean to call up here.
Back to bed, I guess. Had a nap earlier, to get through another headache. I'm vaguely attributing that headache & th e one last week to (a) heavy use of bug spray and/or (b) a malaligned jaw, as it's been a while since I had such yuck, so I'm out to attribute it to something & then fix it. (Easier with the bug spray, I suppose.)
Strange, these nights when one sleeps the evening away and then arises for the middle of the night. I like 'em. But then I like the middle of the night a lot. Earlier my across-the-way neighbor was outside on the phone (she does that sometimes) in the cool, clear midnight, where her voice carried enough that I could hear her discussing internet connectivity options.
End of this week the heat comes back. Might well be a while before it gets a little chilly at night like this again. I love love love this weather. Let us remember this beautiful spring next time someone suggests that the seasons change on a dime up here. They don't, generally. We get nice long transitional seasons here, at least most of the time in my five-year sample so far, compared to everywhere else I've lived. And it doesn't get much better than this fantabulous rising into the 70s during the day, all kitty-cats-in-windows, and cooling right the heck off at night, smelling six kinds of good, with crickets chirping, or just one stalwart chilly one, as is outside now, and that little nip in the air for lovin' that well which thou must, at least temporar'ly, leave ere long.
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