8-14, Tuesday

HOT!

I can’t believe the temperatures this August so far. While we are not as hot as even Atlanta is and certainly not the 104 and 106 places like St. Louis and Memphis are seeing, it is almost intolerably hot here. According to the NWS we’ve been above 93 for 10 consecutive days and 95 or hotter for 9 of those days. Well, the hurricane should break the heat spell. Here is the latest projection based on NHC data for TS Dean.  NHC thinks it will become a hurricane on Friday.  We in Florida can only hope that it continues westbound.  “An ill wind for some is a favorable wind for others”, Washington Irving once observed whilst crossing the ocean by sail.

The 5-day projection looks better:

But NHC thinks Dean will turn into a nasty hurricane. The latest NHC discussion  thinks the ridge to the north of the storm will continue to strengthen and fill in, forcing Dean to continue on a westward track.

Robert Altman

Well, I should have known.  Our local non-chain cinema is running a Robert Altman retrospective on Sunday afternoons. The studios that own his films recently have released refurbished 35mm reels of several works. We went to see The Long Goodbye on Sunday.  His work has always been wildly uneven, good movies followed by awful movies.  We had dim  memories of the movie (we both saw it 35 years ago).

In this case a dim memory was a savior.  It is an awful movie.  Sterling Hayden was unfocused, producing a fuzzy character that looked more like just a drunk Hayden then a failed writer.  Maybe he was drunk.  Altman was a famously loose director who allowed his actors to pretty much do what they wanted.  Elliott Gould was consistent throughout but his character was just the film persona he had back in the drug-addled 70s.  Nina van Pallandt mostly was comatose.  You can see why she never succeeded in American films.  But we did enjoy Henry Gibson whose quirky screen characters were always entertaining.

August 11. I Have Returned.

Lost But Now Found

Obviously I have not updated my blog for nearly two months. What could a retired person be doing for so long that he did not have time to make his requisite blog entries?

Travel

We spent a lot of time up in the Blue Ridge mountains this summer — about 5 weeks altogether. It is lovely there but our Internet connection up there is sporadic and the frustration was too much after a while. You really can’t depend on sustained connectivity unless I travel down to one of the Internet cafes off the mountain. So there is one reason.

We spent a week in DC where I didn’t bother to take my computer. Although I was slightly disoriented at first I recovered and had a great time.

Tasks

Let’s see. We finished painting the place up in the mountains, installed new window coverings, replaced the screen door, replaced the refrigerator (we just bought it but didn’t replace), attended the annual homeowners’ meeting up there, replaced the roof down here in Florida, replaced the driveway down here, bought and framed a lot of new art, and visited several wineries in North Carolina, sampling the wildly varied qualities of North Carolina-produced wine.

Books

We both read a lot of books over the summer.

Movies

And we saw a lot of movies.

And now the summer is over for Marian. She heads back to work on Monday.

But What Did We Do, Exactly?

On the Mountain in early to middle June

First of all, we finished all our interior painting up on the mountain. Still a couple of odds and ends but mostly all done. While the weather was cool up there there was a lot of haze in the air. Here is an example:

The ridge beyond the fence is only about 200 yards away. The photo is not overexposed, it really was just this hazy. Here is the blue of the Blue Ridge. The view from our balcony was similarly obscured. On a clear day we can see mountains 80 miles away but this time we couldn’t see the small hills 5 miles away. More pollutants equals more haze.

Off to DC in Late June

We flew to DC and stayed in the Willard Hotel for a week. Temps were very hot — mid to high 90s, but we had a great time. The Willard Hotel is my favorite place to stay. The lobby is a grand meeting place of polished tile floors, sofas on a grand scale facilitating conversations with guests from everywhere, an odor that is slightly floral and welcoming, and service that is flawless. Here is what you see as you stroll up to the hotel:

An ornate canopy on a shaded street dotted with flower boxes. Just to the right of the picture is an outdoor eating area for the restaurant next door. I don’t have a photo of the lobby but here is a view out our window:

At dusk the lights of the surrounding buildings go on. In this case the lights of the Hotel Washington. Just beyond this building is the White House.

If the evening cools enough you can sit on the benches outside the hotel and get a sense of a big city’s tempo after business hours. Here is a picture of 14th Street at Pennsylvania Avenue:

Pedestrians, cars, car horns, street hawkers, Willard bellmen whistling for taxis. Quite a novel sight for a suburban dwellers such as Marian and I.

One of the primary reasons for going to DC was to see the new American Impressionism exhibit at the Phillips Collection. This exhibit is an unusual collection of Impressionist painters Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, Theodore Robinson, Robert Spencer, Augustus Vincent Tack, John Henry Twachtman, and Julian Alden Weir, among others. It is a fine, fine exhibit. Not much of a crowd there that day and the exhibit was wonderful. An excellent collection of paintings not often seen together.

One of our favorite paintings in the exhibition is “On the Hudson at Newburgh” (1918) by Gifford Beal.

A very attractive painting. In person the painting almost exudes that purplish/blue light you see in the photo. A woman stands just off her porch, looking at the marching soldiers just beyond her green lawn. They presumably are marching off to the ship in the Hudson River. It is full of light and the subject is full of hope. She stands with her two children — the future — as she watches the men who will protect her present and guarantee the future of her children. Devoid of the cynicism we see in modern representations of the current war it is awash in innocent optimism and flooded with the light of an American morning. Lovely, lovely.

Marian had a funny thing happen. We ventured out of the American Impressionism exhibit to other parts of the collection. Marian was standing in front of an unusually candid portrait by Thomas Eakins of Miss Amelia Van Buren.

It is a fine portrait described much better by Duncan Phillips than by me:

This portrait…is characterized with the deepest reverence and respect but without so much as a trace of the desire to please the sitter…or the public… .Her humanity is offered to us in its outer physical manifestation with sincere patient exactitude… penetrat[ing] to the spiritual depths instead of glittering on the ornamental surface.

Marian is looking at the portrait as two other women approached it. The two newcomers began to talk about its frank characterization of the subject and looked at her serious expression and the sort of sheen on her face. “What is it about her that is so compelling,” one woman asks the other. Marian says, “menopause”. The other two women respond, “exactly!!”

We also visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Organized chronologically and full of objects designed to personalize the suffering of the targets of the Nazi’s murderous prejudice, the tour sweeps you into the years leading up to the holocaust and through the years of the concentration camps.

Organized The Tower of Faces from the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection is a powerful exhibit. Thousands of pictures of shtetl residents surround you. You don’t need to ask what happened to these many, many faces peering at you.

The exhibit takes you into the railcars and the camp dormitories where you can see for yourself the conditions in which camp residents lived.

This bunk easily could hold 15 to 18 people. All stuffed in together with no hygiene and the dangers of lice and other vermin spreading from one resident to the next.

Visitors see the clothes Germans were forced to cast off before annihilation, videos of German military actions against Jews, descriptions of all the other targeted groups. We spent hours there going through the 4 floors of exhibits and experiences.

Back to the Mountains

We then traveled back to the mountains where the haze had lifted a little.

This had changed to

this Taken from the same location but with a different lens the haze is less apparent now.

I also took walks up to the top of the mountain each day. About 4 miles round trip with an elevation change of about 750 feet, this path is not difficult but is a good aerobic workout. For me at least it is a good aerobic workout. I just love the setting of this walk.

It begins just below this point and snakes up the mountain. You can see that turn to the right at the top of the picture.

Just beyond that turn the road turns to gravel and arrows on trees replace road signs.

The gravel road takes me past several copses of trees. Shady and pleasant.

The road once again turns to a paved road and I approach the top of the mountain. You can see the ski lifts and the buildings protecting the motors and gears running the lifts. At this point we are above 5,500 feet elevation.

The path here is mostly solitary, quiet, and a model of pastoral beauty.

And more.

And one more.

Rewarded with lovely views at the top.

One Last Thing For This Entry

I’ll include just this one last thing and move on to movies and books in my next entry. Before my absence I had to go to my Internist who suggested in a direct and graphic way that I must modify my diet and lose weight. I have the disease of aging middle-class Westerners: high blood pressure and cholesterol problems.

In the three months since I received this diagnosis I have increased my weekly walking miles to about 25, reduced my lipids counts from dangerous to normal and my blood pressure from borderline hypertension to normal. I’ve also lost 16 pounds but still have a longish road to travel. Part of the depressing progression of age.

—-From The New Yorker, September 16, 2002