Containing Multitudes

I took it as a compliment the other night when we were playing Spot the Intro, a fun but flawed game that challenges teams to identify a song from some decade between the 60s and the 10s within 15 seconds, and Emily said, "Wow, you can really tell Tracey is a writing and reading person. She knows a lot of the words to these songs." I also reacted with a moment of sonder when I realized that not everyone interacts with music that way.

But it was definitely that tendency that got me through the movie A Complete Unknown today. Clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, the film depicts the life of Bob Dylan from his 1961 arrival in NYC to his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. And that would have been a long time to spend with that asshole, except that the movie gave me the opportunity to revisit the lyrics of songs I have taken for granted all my life. 

Somehow, watching the creation of such songs as "Don't Think Twice," "Blowin in the Wind," and "The Times They Are a Changin" allowed me to really listen to the words, and I was dazzled (yes, dazzled) by the craftsmanship. Dylan's songs are genius: simple but profound, effectively using metaphor, repetition, and word choice to convey messages that are both timeless and timely. 

I totally get the Nobel Laureate thing now. (But I still think he's a jerk.)

Avoiding Labels

"This is a hot sauce I made," I announced as we sat down for New Year's dinner. 

"What's this?" my brother pointed to a nearly identical bottle.

"That is also hot sauce I made," I answered.

"What's the difference?" he asked. "Is it that this one is hot, and that one is too?" he continued dryly.

"I made them on different days?" I shrugged. "They do taste a little bit different."

In retrospect, of course, a label or two would have been handy, but when caught up in creating such condiments, it just seems impossible I'll ever forget what I put in them, even if I'm using whatever happened to be ripe and/or plentiful that day. 

With spice mixes, I'm a little better, and by that, I mean I put the name of whatever it is on the jar, and once last summer, I even listed the ingredients in a chili powder I made, but that was an anomaly. I guess I also just figure it will be me using, and then eating, these products, and I usually season by taste rather than measurement or recipe. In that case, if it tastes good, who cares what's in it?

On New Year's Day, people just tasted the sauces and then picked one or mixed them together, but it might have been nice to know what the comparison was. Tonight, though, I was annoyed at myself when I added a couple cubes of unidentified frozen pesto to my tomato sauce and discovered (by tasting) that in addition to basil, they also contained cilantro and mint. It wasn't exactly the flavor profile I planned for our tomato tart, and I was a little disappointed. 

Not enough to label the rest of though, because really? I'm sure I'll remember what it is next time.

Yes, And

How was your Christmas season?  a friend texted today.

I considered my reply a moment before typing, Christmas was good. I think being retired really allowed me to slow down and enjoy the season.

Later, I was still thinking about the exchange. "I really had a good Christmas this year," I told Heidi.

She raised an eyebrow. "You mean you're choosing to ignore all the bad parts?" she asked skeptically.

I knew what she was saying. The holiday was not perfect: we missed my sister's family, and Heidi's mom and brother are going through some tough times, too. 

"They were impossible to ignore," I answered, "but there was so much more."

Burning Up

"I only want to do 500-piece puzzles!" Heidi told me after we finished one in just a couple of hours. 

"They are fast and fun," I agreed and went to the bookshelf. "How about this one?" I held up a puzzle of Christmas cats.

"Where did that come from?" Heidi asked.

"We've had it over here for years," I shrugged. "I probably bought it on clearance or something."

As we emptied the bag and started turning over the pieces, Heidi sighed in dismay. "They are all the same!" she pointed to the box. 

I'd never noticed, but the puzzle had identical images of five different cats randomly scattered across it. Plus, there was a lot of white space. 

"I don't think I'm going to like this one," Heidi shook her head.

Even so, we persisted. It was a little challenging, but we put the second-to-last piece in just after midnight on the first day of the new year. "Where's the last piece?" I wondered out loud. 

We had somehow lost a piece of the puzzle in the eight hours it had been on the table, and despite searching thoroughly, it has not turned up. Added to that irritation is the fact that this is the second puzzle of the last three we have completed, where one of the pieces has gone inexplicably missing. The first was our advent puzzle, which we burned in the fireplace once we came to terms with the reality that it would NEVER be complete.

I'm afraid those cute cats may meet a similar fate because, as we are unfortunately well aware,  no one wants to do a puzzle with missing pieces. In fact, I'm kind of skeptical about doing any puzzles at all for a while.

Take that, Universe.

Pre-recorded from New York It's

We had just finished an episode of something or other when a promo for Saturday Night Live popped up. "Oh! This is the Christmas show for this year," I told Heidi. "Martin Short is the host, and he gets his Five Time Jacket, so they have a bunch of extra people." I paused. "Wanna watch it?"

There was a time when I rarely missed Saturday Night Live. Starting in 1979, when I returned to the States for college, the show was must-see TV for a long time. Back then, there was no recording it for watching later, but it didn't matter because who wasn't up til at least 1 on the weekend?

But now, it's been many years since I've watched an entire episode of SNL and many more since I stayed up to see it live from New York. These days, I mostly skim the recap in the NYTimes and watch any segment that captures my attention on YouTube. Even though Lorne Michaels is still the driving force behind the show after fifty years on the air, I often sense that the target audience is considerably younger than I am, mostly because I find the humor raunchy or dumb. (Okay, I'll also cop to not getting some of the jokes, but not too many, because, see my post a few days ago about how plugged in I am to pop culture, despite my advanced age! Teaching so long has to have a few benefits.)

But last night, the clock was only at 9:30, so I hit play on the December 21, 2024, episode of Saturday Night Live. And we laughed the next hour and a half away. Tom Hanks, Paul Rudd, Melissa McCarthy, Kristin Wiig, Jimmy Fallon, Scarlett Johansen, Alec Baldwin, and Dana Carvey appeared. The regular cast was hilarious, too, and we recognized a couple of those crazy kids from Shrinking and Wicked. As often happens when a former cast member hosts, the show was full of self-referential bits, and they were old enough that we felt in on the joke. Martin Short is still as ridiculous as ever, and? 

There was spitting.

We enjoyed the show so much that I remembered that old sad feeling I used to get when the musical guest performed their second number. It meant that there was only one sketch left, and it probably wasn't funny, and then we would have to wait a whole week, or two, or all summer until Saturday Night was live again.

In Memory

"I just finished The Women by Kristin Hannah," my friend Amy mentioned at dinner a few weeks ago when she was visiting from Arizona. "It was amazing."

It just so happened that I was looking for an audiobook for our road trip to Mountain Lake that weekend, and the premise of the novel, the story of a young woman who enlists as an Army nurse in Vietnam and her experiences there and upon her return to the States, seemed like something Heidi and I would like. The fact that it was narrated by Jill Whelan was a plus-- I have enjoyed her work on several other recordings.

We were rolling through the Piedmont of Virginia as the novel started in 1967, Coronado Beach, CA, and we followed the saga of Frankie McGrath all the way to the southern Blue Ridge Mountains and home again, with more than half of the book to go. "This is brutal," I said after her first week in Vietnam. "She's gotta get a win soon." And she did, becoming an extremely competent OR nurse at an evac hospital, despite or maybe because of the brutal conditions she was thrown into. Over her time in the country, she made lifelong friends and lost some, too, and we were as relieved as she was when she headed back to California.

We continued listening a couple weeks later all the way to Buffalo as Frankie faced a rocky adjustment to life at home, her ups and downs propelling the trip forward. And we heard the end of the book a little more than an hour into our trip home, shaking our heads to emerge from the late 70s into present-day Pennsylvania. 

And, although I found the book flawed in many ways, heavy-handed, overwrought, and predictable in places, I was profoundly moved by the real-life experiences written there, particularly the invisibility and subsequent struggle of the over a quarter million women who served in Vietnam. So today, when we loaded Lucy in the car and headed downtown for a walk on the National Mall, we hadn't gone far when I suggested we visit the Vietnam Memorial, a place I usually pass by without a second glance as I round the reflecting pool.

We paused more than a moment at the Vietnam Women's Memorial, erected in 1993, more than 20 years after the war ended. Three women are shown in it, one holding a bandaged soldier, another shading her eyes looking skyward, and a third on her knees in perhaps grief, but more likely, exhaustion. Eight trees are planted around its cobblestone circle, one for each woman killed there. 

I don't think I'll ignore it again.

Weather Machine

Despite the news article I read yesterday predicting substantial snow for the mid-Atlantic region in early January, our late December weather has turned unseasonably mild today. We've had the sliding glass door open since noon, a light breeze wafting its way past the Christmas tree and freshening the house. 

Outside, the temperate weather reminded me of winter holidays spent nearly 50 years ago in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. There was something about the slant of the sun and the soft air on my bare arms that took me back to those December days spent on the salt flats along the shore of the Arabian Gulf. Our family collected driftwood for a beach fire and steamed the little neck clams we pulled from the sandy bottom of the shallow sea. We had the beach to ourselves, and my dad taught us how to drive in our '75 Plymouth Fury sedan.

Is it possible that this weather is that weather? I asked myself and consulted the weather app on my phone. In Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, the temperature will be in the mid-60s tomorrow, just as it is here today. 

I doubt they'll get that January snow, though.