Up early as always, but not for phone calls. About to drive down to Kennedy Airport and pick up the older one who is returning this morning. Outside something or a gang of things were howling. There must be a pack of wild dogs that meet up and frolic out in the woods some place. But there is no one around when I flip on the flood lights. There isn’t a thing to see.
I rarely watch films. A friend sent a provocative clip of an older woman cursing aloud on the funeral day of Maggie Thatcher. The slightly astonished centrist reporter asks if that might not be a bit strong, on the day of her death and this lady gives no ground, whatsoever. In the next chat my friend asked: “Do you know the British filmmaker, Ken Loach?” Hadn’t heard of him and a quick search on Youtube provided a range of selections. I wound up streaming “The Price of Coal” from 1977.
Drawn initially by the disturbingly intimate mid-seventies verisimilitude and the nearly indecipherable accents that I predictably and immediately craved to imitate, I was sucked in with the Storey family, the visit of the royal family, what passes as ‘privilege’ with Mr. Forbes and other managers there in Barnsley and before long has spent the evening with them all, not falling asleep as one would have expected having just eaten lots of pizza after a three day fast. And as you watch you think about seventies haircuts and “How Green Was My Valley” and consider American caste and British class systems and find yourself practicing the illusive Yorkshire accent, unsuccessfully. I flipped through a few other film trailers of his. A strange, unanticipated detour last night.
This morning I lost WFMU down near the Palisades Parkway, oddly. Shouldn’t it get stronger in New Jersey? I’d set off at 5:45AM to pick up my older one who was arriving on a Jet Blue flight in on a redeye from Portland at 7:15AM. WKCR was spinning a samba program and soon I was considering the attractive evocation of Portuguese. Real people using saudade and felicidade in sentences, as I drove over the George Washington and blew a kiss downriver to Manhattan and another upriver to the Bronx and Westchester.
Covid gets a bad rap, but I swung into JFK and swung out with my daughter without a bit of traffic this morning. Man, we had a good talk. Intellectually she’s on fire at school. She loves all her classes and we spent the ride up just talking about all that she’d done and all that she’s planning to do and I allowed myself to just swell and swell with pride. It’s a fine thing to see one’s children striding along.
We had one more visit to the lizard doc today. The lizard is sick again and might not make it. We talked about friends of hers at school who had religious faith and she was intrigued. Faith was something she hadn’t really considered before. Death, even a lizard death being essentially unimaginable. Not long after and on the way back home we were considering words like euthanasia and the costs around death. The prognosis from the vet, hadn't been good.
Saturday, 04/10/21
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