I was scrolling through my Shazam tracks playlist and came across a song by Las Robertas. I needed something more to jog my memory so I clicked over to their artist page and was reminded that they are from Costa Rica. I listened to a couple of other songs from this album and have made a mental note to listen to the whole thing when I am next driving up to the office.
I was talking to my best friend this morning and she was telling me about this typewriter store in Philadelphia. They repair, restore, and sell typewriters, and have tons of typewriters of all ages. It sounded so cool. Against my wishes, my husband has started collecting typewriters. I am a fan of typewriters and I think some of them are so beautiful, but we don’t have space for three or four typewriters, let alone more. I wouldn’t mind going to check out this store though! I was looking at some of the pictures and smiling, remembering the spinning ball era of electric typewriters. Click on over to check out Philly Typewriter.
Thanksgiving break is over. I dropped my son off at his college and made my way into the office for the afternoon. That first day back from a holiday is always kind of a shock to the system but today was a little extra.
So it was nice to get home and have it be quiet. It was lovely having my son home and seeing my daughter over the break but it is not like they are far away or I haven’t seen them in months. I like talking with them and hearing about their jobs and classes, friends, etc., but I also like quiet.
I know people who really struggled to find their place once their kids went off to college. That empty nest hit them hard. I think partly because I was not home during after school hours for their whole lives, and as teenagers they would be busy in the evenings with friends, clubs, or homework, I didn’t feel like I was suddenly missing something. Also, after all of those years of working all day, driving for over an hour, then getting home and having to fix dinner and attend to whatever things the kids’ needed in those few remaining hours, I am glad that I no longer need to be constantly on. I can sit quietly and just read a book, or watch something, zone out, whatever I feel like doing. It’s not bad.
I feel like this fall has seen a lot of transitions for my family: son off to college, daughter starting a job, my husband also got a part time gig, so things were shifting around for all of us. I think the new year will be when it all starts to fall into place a bit, fingers crossed.
I am about half way through Patrick Stewart’s memoir. As someone who first became aware of him through watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I am learning a lot about his early life. I am also learning about life in Yorkshire in the mid-20th century and am really pleased to see his humble roots make him a proud union supporter and hater of Margaret Thatcher and the havoc she wrought on unions and the arts. That reminded me of the Gang of Four, hailing from Leeds, very near Patrick Stewart’s hometown.
Back when I was watching those reruns in the early 90s, it felt like a real guilty pleasure. Once I found out Patrick Stewart had already had a successful career as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, I felt a little less guilty about it. I’d had an interview for a job at the Folger Shakespeare Library and was imagining being able to meet all of these famous actors when they would come through DC for some reason. The job wasn’t going to pay me enough though so I didn’t end up living that dream. In truth there probably would have been very few of those kind of chance encounters.
But I was smitten. I got the CD of his one-man performance of A Christmas Carol, which gave me a whole new appreciation for the book. Then my real moment of glory, for Christmas one year my Brooklyn sister and her husband took me to see him play Prospero in The Tempest on Broadway. We were so close, the second row I think, and he was fabulous.
When I think about it, I really have not seen much of his work. I think I will probably start chipping away at that once I finish the book.
Somehow it is already Saturday. I wouldn’t say I’ve done nothing during the last two days but I didn’t do much. I’ve been mostly running errands for/with my son so that he has what he needs for the last couple of weeks of the semester. Tomorrow will be spent making sure he is packed up to go back.
Today also means it is just one month until Christmas. I have a lot going on that isn’t even holiday related, plus all of the shopping to do, and now there are only four weeks to go. Oof. Everything will get done, it is just a little daunting to think about.
I am not a list-maker. Many people I know are in love with to-do lists of various kinds. They derive great satisfaction out of having an ordered list and then checking things off. I might make a list to go to the grocery store but that’s about it. Sometimes I think maybe I should make a list of all the things I need to do, but I pretty easily talk myself out of it because the whole thing sounds more, instead of less, stressful. That kind of visual reminder is rarely something I want to see, and I don’t get any kind of joy or thrill from crossing things out so why take the time to write it down? If I’ve finished whatever task I had to do then it’s out of my hair and I don’t need to think about it anymore. That is good enough.
However, packing up might be a good time to make a list. I will admit that I forgot to take the meat thermometer with us up to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving and maybe if I’d had a list, I wouldn’t have forgotten it. We didn’t really need it though since I just got one of those turkey breasts that cooks in the bag and you kind of can’t screw it up. It was a low stakes situation. What I am eager to avoid is having to swing by my son’s college “on the way” home from work one day because he needs something he forgot. It is not on the way, and I sure don’t need that added to that list I won’t make of things I need to do.
Not sure what it is about this song that has me hitting the repeat button. It’s closing in on seven minutes long, when I usually find that to be much too long.
It’s been nice having my son home but it means I am staying up later than I want to and unlike him, I can no longer sleep all that late in the morning. So this is all you get today.
My husband, son, and I drove up to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving today. She is cat sitting and didn’t want to leave the cat overnight so it just made more sense for the three of us to go up there. We brought most of the food with us and cooked it there, which worked out fine. I did have a new appreciation for my mom during all those years when we would drive an hour and a half up to my grandma’s and then my mom would get busy cooking for the giant crowd. My grandma might peel and chop potatoes but she was not a great cook and I think it was just an unspoken arrangement that my mom took over when we got there.
We had a storm blow through on Tuesday night. The wind was so strong that the sound woke me up in the early hours on Wednesday. There are two pine trees in our neighbor’s yard that hang over our driveway and there were hundreds of pine cones (and the pine needles, a never-ending battle) littering the driveway and the street. The street sweeper even came by and made several passes to try and get them off the road. Before the storm there were still leaves on some of the trees but as we got on the road today it was clear that stick season is upon us. It’s just gray-brown barren branches, with some pine trees sprinkled here and there, as far as the eye can see.
My daughter is a huge Noah Kahan fan. I went with her to his concert back in September because she needed a ride. She had been playing his music in the car pretty much anytime we were driving together so I was already very familiar with it all. She had first described him to me as this guy who writes songs about living in New England, which is certainly true. But the more you listen, the more you come to learn that it’s also depressed, heartbroken guy who is suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder because he’s living in northern New England songs. My daughter used my phone to stream her playlists while driving and now Spotify suggests playlists to me with titles like, Sad Girl Indie. It’s not really my jam but I appreciate the scene he paints with this song. There’s another one called “Northern Attitude” (now with Hozier joining in to the delight of all the sad indie girls) where he sings about being raised out in the cold and on little light, and I find myself nodding along.
At the end of September, tickets for the two Noah Kahan shows at Fenway Park next July sold out as soon as they went on sale. My daughter had one in her cart but when she went to purchase it, it disappeared. She was crushed and was sure she had screwed up somehow but someone I know at work had the same thing happen to her. I think the Red Sox site was not really set up to handle the kind of demand it got that day. I felt sorry for her and did my usual thing of looking for other cities where he might not be as well known and where tickets might still be available. It basically came down to some places in Canada. She is only half joking when she talks about going to Quebec in April to see him. I would love to go to Quebec again but in April? That is still stick season for sure.
I almost forgot about posting tonight since my son wanted to watch TV with us. The show ended and I was just about to say, welp, I’m going to bed, then I remembered.
All day it has felt like Saturday since I had the day off. I’m so glad it is only Wednesday and, aside from tomorrow’s cooking, it will be a pretty low-key day. Then there will still be three more days before work comes knocking. I should probably try to accomplish some household task but I also might just read Patrick Stewart’s memoir, Making It So, which I borrowed from the library this afternoon.
While I was at work today, my husband went to pick up our son from college for Thanksgiving vacation. I got home expecting to see him but he was already out with a friend. Ah, the freshman home for the first long holiday weekend.
It is looking like it will be a pretty low-key visit. The friend he was out with earlier is working at a big box store and consequently has to work tomorrow and Black Friday, and I’m guessing Saturday too.
I am ready for Thanksgiving but I am not ready for it to be Christmas shopping season. Thanksgiving is early this year but it feels like it was just Halloween. There is so much that needs to be done before Christmas and it seems unlikely it will all happen.
For now, I am going to delight in not setting an alarm for the next few days and spending time with the kids.
You all know I don’t like winter. The cold, the dark, the ice, the dark, the lack of green, the dark. When it starts to get to me, I dream of getting away to somewhere warm and sunny, preferably by the ocean. This past winter was not a bad one when it comes to snow and freezing temperatures, a side effect of climate change I’m sure. The lack of light is persistent though and the only way to remedy that is to go somewhere farther south or west.
Back in January I was really fed up with everything. The amount of time and energy that people were needing from me was just too much, and coupled with the usual winter doldrums, I was desperate to go somewhere. I happened to be talking to one of my sisters on the phone and mentioned that I wanted a vacation, a mama vacation as I had started calling it, a vacation from being mama, where no one would bother me for a week. No phone calls, no asks to take care of something, no doing anything for anyone but me. My sister and her husband bought a summer place up in Maine and part of me was thinking about asking her if I could just use it for a week to be alone. But going to Maine in the winter is not my idea of a getaway. Then my sister said, hey, they had a week at a timeshare that they had to use or lose before March and they weren’t going to be able to use it, did I want to go?
Oh my god, did I want to go! Where could I go?!?! There were several different locations but in order to pull this off, I decided it needed to be somewhere I could drive to because I also was doing it pretty last minute and didn’t think I could swing a flight. So California and the Caribbean were out. Arizona held no appeal for me anyway, I wanted a beach. So we got on Zoom and she shared her screen with the timeshare website so we could check out the options. Virginia Beach was a maybe, but I really liked the look of one of the places in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. South Carolina was someplace I’d been through, but never to, and I liked the idea of being able to check off another state. Plus, there would be palm trees. Palm trees!! To a New Englander, a palm tree is a sure sign of vacation. You are far away. It will be warm. So she booked it, and I set about planning my mama vacation for mid-February.
I asked my best friend if she wanted in on this free vacation and she immediately said yes. Escape the frozen north? Done. We decided to rendezvous at a different sister’s house outside Philadelphia and leave my car there for the week, then drive as far as we felt up for on that first day. We made it halfway between DC and Richmond and picked a hotel from the car. The next day we headed to Richmond, another place I’d never been, and marveled at the things already blooming in the Fan District. We had some lunch and then hit the road for the long haul on I-95 through North Carolina, into South Carolina before hanging a left and heading for the coast. It started to get dark, then rain, so we had no idea what anything looked like until the next morning.
It looked green. The rain had left and the sun was breaking out. I was eager to get outside so we got ready and went to survey the resort. Resorts are not usually my thing but I am not one to look a gift condo in the mouth so I was perfectly happy to make note of the several pools, hot tubs, shuffleboard court, etc. And the palm trees. Oh, the palm trees! We then ventured off to the beach, just a short drive away. Wow. Seemingly endless miles of white sand beach.
My family was on notice; you may only call me if someone is in the hospital. We did arrange for a family group call on Valentine’s Day but otherwise I was to be left alone. My best friend and I made excursions from our timeshare but we did also make regular use of the pool and hot tubs. We walked on the beach every day. We went to Brookgreen Gardens, courtesy of an online friend (hi, Paul!) who graciously told us so much about the region and put up with our multiple stops to take pictures of things in bloom. Each day it got a little warmer and on the day we decided to go to Charleston it was approaching 80°. In February. We put our feet in the ocean in February. I was so happy.
Alas a week is never quite long enough when you’re on vacation and we had to head back north. We chose a different route on the way home, through Wilmington, NC where we had lunch at this draft house where you get a wrist band and pour your own beers from some crazy number of taps. We drove through Mt. Olive, pickle capital of the world, then the slog through every major city back to my sister’s.
We talked about making this a regular thing, and where else and what else might we do? My best friend really felt the drive down and back was not great so maybe next time, with advance planning, a cheap flight would be better. Then maybe a city, so we wouldn’t need a car. Charleston? Savannah?
I am not sure I will have the luxury of taking a week off this coming February or March with a big project at work needing to wrap up around then. But maybe a long weekend. Just to see and smell the flowers, the beach, and the palm trees. Feel the sun on my face. Go without a jacket. Put my feet in the ocean. It might be time to start thinking about it.
Sophomore year of college, 1986, I lived in a brand new dorm with a roommate that was just unluck of the draw. We had nothing in common, hadn’t known each other before, and I mostly tried to avoid being in the room at the same time as her. She had a group of friends that also lived on our hallway so at first she spent a lot of time in their rooms. But somewhere midway through the fall semester she had a falling out with them all so she was in our room more. She transferred after the first semester and I got a new roommate who was placed with me because she was on academic probation and they felt she needed to be away from the distraction of her boyfriend, Vinny, back in South Philly.
Most of the girls on our hallway were the stereotypical big, teased, permed hair, tons of baby blue eyeshadow kind of girls you see in 80s movies. There were two other girls who were more like me though. One of them really seemed cool. She had a Room With a View poster on the wall, instead of the ubiquitous Top Gun, and she even knew the Feelies. She was from New Jersey (along with half of the campus it felt like) and she’d had a summer job at some newspaper or something, where someone in the band worked. I can’t remember the details, lo these 37 years later, but it was like three degrees of separation from my heroes. Even if she was totally nonchalant about it, that was enough to make me a little nervous around her. She also had a boyfriend who was pretty cool which made her seem way more successful than I saw myself as being.
Since I never achieved true friend status with her, I kind of lost track of the two of them once that year was over. I saw the boyfriend now and then at the campus radio station but that was more like across a room full of people sightings and let’s be honest, I would probably have avoided talking to him anyway for fear of saying something stupid.
I got thinking about them today though because I read that Rosalynn Carter died. I was reading her obituary and remembered that a few years ago, after watching a documentary called, Jimmy Carter, Rock & Roll President, I got curious about what Amy Carter was doing. When I Googled her I saw that she had married a guy who had the same name as the boyfriend of the girl down the hall my sophomore year. I thought that seemed like a weird coincidence. But today I fell down the rabbit hole and I can now confirm, it is the same guy. They got divorced but they have a kid together, and it is just crazy to think about. I am 1000% sure this guy would never remember me, but I can still picture him in his girlfriend’s dorm room with the Room With a View poster and this album playing on the stereo.
(You should check out that documentary if you haven't before.)
Noisy Cats 