Go Places To Buy Things

I need to print and sign an agreement. Someone’s waiting for it.  It’s only two pages.   The last time I tried to print another must-sign doc, it came out rather faded.  I turned on the printer this morning and tried to send the doc through.  Before I could print anything a series of perfectly good pages were successively fed to the turning bits and ruined, coming out on behalf of some long forgotten print job. I took at look at the faded green and yellow pages.  “Honey are these yours?”

Clearly they’re her affair, but she has not recollection of when it was sent, how many times it was sent or what it fact it was.  There is also, no easy way to kill the print job.  One paper and then another is gobbled up and rendered useless by the machine.  Surely this will be the last one.  It is not.  Nor is this one.  I look on line for how to make it stop.  Yes, I feel guilty about my pointless contribution to deforestation.

Off with the power, then.  I fear this print job will return zombie-like.  The web doesn’t seem to offer me much of any guidance on how to kill this job, on a Mac OS.  Clearly though, my ink cartridges are screwed.  Fortunately the store I bought the printer in isn’t far and I inform my wife that I’m heading over there right away to get some new ink. 

The store is open and I am quickly informed that they do not stock ink.  Yes, we sold you the printer.  Yes, we have that very printer right here. But No.  No ink.  Perplexed I ask: “I always thought the cartridges were how folks in the printer business made money.  And that may be true for HP, but the folks responsible for the customer interface have decided it isn’t worth it.  “Go to JD dot com’s” what he told me .  “Really?” 

I headed back home feeling old, I suppose.  I knew intellectually that ordering them on line would be easier.  They’d have them over at my door in no time.  But it felt more important as a memory to mark.    Bricks and mortar shopping will soon be yet another anachronism from that time when old people used to physically go places to buy things, transact things. 

By the time I was home I’d already arranged to have my nephew order me the cartridges.  “Is there a rush fee, so I can get them today?”

It's Like Rapeseed

The table has some enormous red and white lilies sitting at odd angles in a blue pitcher.  The smell is identifiable across the room, above the smell of fried garlic and crackling ginger.  Three red lilies are fully extended, their arch nearly complete.  Flush to aged in a few days.  The stamens reach out erect and in only a day or two’s worth of hours, the leaves will lose their purpose and fall one by one to the table.  There are two white lilies as well but they are not facing me.  They are also temporal.  Reaching at odd angles there are two red blossoms and a solitary white bulb that have yet to explode.  Tomorrow, perhaps, as these raging leaves recede the pods will stretch out in climax, demanding attention.

Calls in the early morning.  Calls in the early evening.  Every other day that sanctity of “time at home”, “family time”, “down time” is compromised.  The anxiety of work is nearly complete.  One can walk away from the computer and leave the phone charging in the other room, but its’ difficult to do so with conviction.  It is difficult not to go run and check if so and so has gotten back to your last text.  He might be insisting on a meeting right now.  He might be.  And if he did so and couldn’t find me, why, he’d think I was flaky and wonder if I was reliable.  So I should probably go check if he’s gotten back, even though that whole loop is pathological. 

And . . . he didn’t write back.  Someone else had.  It was a positive note.  I forwarded on the affirmation to the next person.  “Will this suffice?”  Now I’ve resumed my comfy chair.  I used to sit in this chair a lot.  I don’t so much any more.  It’s a lovely rest until you stay too long and then the position of the seat begins to put pressure on your under-thighs and before long you can’t walk so well.  In this new residence of ours it has wound up in the dining room.  It rests beneath a museum print of the famous “The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba”, by Claude Lorrain (1600‒1682), which hangs in the National Gallery in London.  Usually it is my wife or my daughters or the kitten, (who is also a gal) in this chair so it has become known as The Queen of Sheba chair.  Until, of course, I sit in it.  Perhaps the Solomonic perspective, watching her ship depart, is the more apt description for this piece of furniture.  

My younger one has an interesting project.  She needs to identify crops to plant were she to be part of a group of disaster survivors, that would give her the best chance of survival.  Assuming no meat, how will you get your fat, and your carbs and your vitamins?  We had a balanced selection of base products involving potatoes and avocados and soybeans.  But then we discovered the plants had to grow in Beijing. “Sorry dear, but avocados, though rich in fat, will have to go.”  Consulting the possible alternatives I ask my wife:  “Honey, does rapeseed grow in Shandong?  How do you say flaxseed in Chinese?  You know, it’s like rapeseed.” 

Interminably Hard Ride

I hadn’t intended to.  But in much the same way when another controversial pugilist, Muhammad Ali, passed a few months back, I found myself obsessed with considering the life of Fidel Castro.  As I commented at the time, as I recall that this has something to do with being far from home.  Fidel wasn’t of the United States, but he was, as it has been said, the perfect David to our Goliath.  Indefatigable opposition to the United States characterized his life.  And considering the clips, of his early visit to New York, his unbuttoning his shirt to show he wasn’t wearing a bullet proof vest on the plane, his oration in Harlem, his roadside chats with farmers back home, he was like Michelangelo’s work, undeniably captivating.   His passing made me want to reckon with that time that is now, as I steep myself within it, so close as only a time one lived through can be, and at the same time gone, completely beyond reach.

As with Ali, one marvels at the audacity of Castro in his prime: fearless, righteous and victorious.   And we wince as he grows arrogant, and foolish and is knocked off course.  I found that once again I didn’t really have much of anyone to share this with, at least in person.  As before I made my girls sit down and consider this man who was so influential, aspirational and so clearly a vain dictator as well.  

I watched a full two-hour biography I found that was reasonably balanced, though it was certainly far too laudatory for anyone in Miami to sit through.  We traced his life and considered the arc of his narrative.  How elevated his prestige when he successfully thwarted the Americans at the Bay of Pigs!  How notably insane he was to rationalize the destruction of his island and the world to smite America during the missile crisis only a short while later.  And how chastened he must have felt when Russia treated him like just another third-world hot head, in much the same way the U.S. had done when the USSR blinked and told Fidel to scrap the missiles.   Later, he could have made peace with Kissinger, but he opted to send troops to Angola.  Choosing once again, the hard way, the lofty high road.  Auguring and aiding certainly the fall of Apartheid he also consistently demanded his citizenry join along with him for this interminably hard ride.

Ali evoked pity in his old age, stricken with disease, no longer able to float gracefully, spin off his boastful doggerels, or talk much at all in the end.  Everyone wondered I suppose if it might have been different if he just hadn’t fought that last fight or two, when he was pounded and pounded down.  There are the clips of Fidel tripping and falling, feinting at the podium and generally looking increasingly mortal in a manner so at odds with his indomitable youthful mien.   How remarkable to have escaped assassination so many times and to still live openly.  How sad that in continuing to live he personified and protected the revolution ad nauseam, anchoring his land to the gone-by glory, of having stared down and pushed off the U.S., once, successfully, inviolably. 

Materialised Before My Eyes

Coming back from the school play’s matinee this afternoon.  My daughter and what seemed like fifty other students were all wonderful.  It was a teacher-written production that blended Aesop and Qin Shi Huangdi, Elsa from ‘Frozen’ and a sabre swinging Lord Vader in a way that seemed to have everyone involved, energized and delighted.  They’d all worked so hard and this was their final performance. 

I came home and sent off a few emails and considered the day’s entry.  I’d finished a book the day before and was now beginning another.  But I’d already written about the prior and I’m not in deep enough in to say much about the latter.  I went to have a look at the Times on-line, which I’ve already considered two or three times already today.  I knew I wasn’t in the mood to discuss Trump’s cabinet or his daughter’s conflict’s of interest.  I wasn’t particularly motivated to explore the quixotic effort to have an electoral recount in three key states either.  The Times’ home page materialised before my eyes and I noticed immediately that Fidel Castro had died. 

Today we respond to death differently than we might have years ago.  Today, in a case like this my first impulse is to go to Youtube.  I’d like to see the man.  The Times references an anecdote about his inauguration speech when a dove settled somehow on his shoulder and I want to see this.  See him in his prime, before I dive into an obit.  Have I ever loaded up a clip of Fidel speaking?  I know that he waved his arms and was flamboyant and incessant when he spoke. I’m digging in now to consider him in Spanish and in broken English, on video.  He reigned longer than any other living ruler, save Queen Elizabeth. 

How does one explain the Cuban Revolution to a generation born in the naughts?  I will labor to say something balanced as there is good and bad in this tale.  I feel like I need to see the man speak, and speak again before I can really weigh-in.  And I soak up the clips.  One of the things I hadn't expected, is to confront how funny and undeniably charismatic he was, as he mocks the U.S. press in his broken English, with his wry smile.   

This has me thinking of the remarkable Russian Movie “I Am Cuba.”  I can remember watching Mikhail Kalatozov’s poignant 1964 movie in Manhattan, I believe in late 80's or early 90's.  I recall the audience applauding at the camera work during opening pool scene, which had camera’s moving with divers and swimmers in the pool, at impossible angles.  Later there is the unforgettable scene father who takes his last savings and gives it to his kids and tells them to go into town and have fun for the evening.  They are unaware and they are thrilled.  Yes.  Have fun this evening, as if it were your last. Then sets his cane farm alight rather than allow it be expropriated by the Yankee expropriators. 

I must consider how to explain the man, the country and that time.