Going to the dogs

I was in New Hampshire too long ago, communing with the Concordians and getting in my B snuggles.

I spent some time one evening at Hot Hole Pond, with B in her little Farmer John wet suit and Jasper the Wonderdog in his natural swim togs, paddling about in the shallows while A and H swam their workout, a triangular course into the far distance, across the pond, and back. On Saturday morning, they both did very well indeed in their second triathlon of the year.

On Friday evening I joined B and her parents at an elementary school fair, at which she was transformed into... a Dalmatian. Which was quite fun. Until bath time.

This weekend, they’ll all be here for the Fourth, and a birthday celebration. High times.

I’ve often asked myself the same thing

I’ve been watching Gandhi on Turner Classic Movies, and it inevitably reminded me of something I read somewhere long ago.

“Why did the sahibs ever go to India,” a fastidious Maharajah once asked Lord Curzon, “when they could stay at home on their English lawns playing flutes and watching the rabbits.”

The Kindle’s only problem

When frustration with what you’re reading feeds anger feeds a naturally bad temper (I’m not talking about all you even-keeled people out there), you can’t soothe your savage beast by firing the pulsating lump of pustulating rubbish against the wall. I’ve been known to leap up and add a few kicks as well. The S.O.B. deserved it. Needless to say that’s out, too. At least until Amazon brings the price way down.

An arrow from the current book quiver

One of the books I’ve got going right now is Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s fifth and final volume of her diaries and letters, War Within and Without, first published in 1980, and concerning the late 1930s and early ’40s. Her books, highly personal and internal even when describing public events, are favorites of many women I know.

At one point very early in this volume, she travels to New York City from Long Island to collect Antoine Saint-Exupéry, and on the train back to Long Island, talks to him about their common craft. “He talks about the rhythm in writing,” she notes, “which he thinks is almost the most important thing in a book—as I understand it. That only the conscious gets across in words, the unconscious in the rhythm.”

Yowza. If it ain’t got that swing....

She also tells us that “[t]alking in French about ideas that are so deeply rooted in me in English, ideas that are barely communicable in your own language, to say them in a foreign language you are not the master of, was really a kind of anguish.”

I do think it’s endearing that she makes conversations between Saint-Exupéry and her husband, the two best-known male aviators of the era, sound extraordinarily...what? I hesitate to say ladylike. Artistic? Aesthetic? Something like that, anyway.

Then again, maybe they were.

On the roads

Sweet running weather this morning. Cool, with a lovely mist gentling down. I’m still staggering unsmoothly along, but I’m out there, and beginning to feel a little more comfortable. Mornings like this really help.

I’ve been asked by a friend involved with the admirable local scholarship fund to supply a photo of myself running to be used on a poster or in a mailer—I’m not sure which—to encourage others to participate this fall in a fund-raising road race. I can’t imagine that either my anti-matter personal magnetism or the image of me pudgily rumbling along will be of much help, but, yes, of course they can use one of these if they like. Naturally, they chose one in which I am, as my friend described it, “sucking wind.” Guaranteed, I think, to have opposite the desired effect. The universal natural reaction will be roughly, “Oh, Yuk!” I may have to increase my donation this year.

Maybe it’s the carburator

I’ve been reading a lot (what’s new?), writing a lot (some of it actually hasn’t been binned), running a lot (if oh so short and daintily), and seeing almost enough of the Concordians. What I can’t seem to bring myself to do is blog. There is no shortage of topics—things I would normally pass on to both you loyal readers—but I just can’t get the blogomotor to turn over. So no proclamations, no attempts at funny stories or theoretically interesting memories, no rants occasioned by ongoing outrages, no trip reports. Not even an urge to commit book review.

Instead, here are the inevitable but nonetheless irresistible pix of sweet B in her last couple of months of twoness. First, from, I think, her father’s birthday.

 

Then a couple from Easter.

 

And one from last weekend, with her dad, Jasper the Wonderdog, and my feet, just before bedtime.

Okay, one short story: Over the weekend, B told an adult who was asking her to do something that “it isn’t convenient right now.” She got points for vocabularistic precositude, but no relief.