Gratitude Schmatitude

I sent the above photo to a friend this morning in a half-hearted attempt to feel gratitude. Gratitude schmatitude. I'm sad that I'm not in New York with my family, eating fried dough and melanzane. It's raining buckets here, and we had to dash into the valley to pick up our Christmas tree at Henry's school. Even though I had a sighting of the incredibly handsome Gilles Marini, the actor who sustained me during my Brothers and Sisters binge (a father at the school), and a passel of wonderful young men tied the Christmas tree to our roof in the pouring rain, and Oliver dressed in full Dodgers regalia (see above), I'm testy. Ms. Moon said it all, actually, over on her blog, particularly when she quoted a movie character's imprecation. I don't want to steal her thunder, though, so I won't type it here. Go visit her blog and you'll see what I mean.

When Oliver was a really little guy and the world got on his nerves, he'd say, I hate everyone and everything! That's a bit of what I'm feeling. Don't take it personally, though, and I won't take it seriously.

What are you doing?

Me? Oh.

I'm watching the entire five seasons of Brothers and Sisters, and while it's devolved into pure soap, it's been a great binge. I thank Carrie Link for the addiction.

I just saw the movie Still Mine with James Cromwell and Genevieve Bujold. I loved it.

I'm reading the last chapters of Transatlantic by my Irish love, Colum McCann. I've savored every word although less so than the ones in Let the Great World Spin. 

I'm also going to start Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings and read that along with Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

I ordered but have not yet received this poetry series. There's stuff in there by Lydia Davis, one of my favorite short story writers. She also translated the edition of Madame Bovary that I noted above.

I'm listening to this by Patty Griffin who also sings the song Heavenly Day, featured on our Extreme Parent Video Project that is almost a year old and has nearly 32,000 hits.

I'm also listening to this. We've been lonely. We've been lonely too long.

I like this poem -- it reminds me of my receding respite week in Canada:

Northwest Passage

That faint line in the dark
might be the shore
of some heretofore unknown
small hour.

This fir-scent on the wind
must be the forests
of the unheard of month
between July and August.

James Richardson

So, Reader. What are you doing?

The Mind of Summer

Chinatown, Victoria, British Columbia

Maybe it's the week of rest and relaxation, now a sort of distant thing but for the quiet within. Maybe it's the plunging back in, the laundry, the late mornings, sleeping in, the shouts of summer, the brooding, the heavy blanket of relationship. Or maybe it's the five thousand, six hundred and eighty-six episodes of Brothers and Sisters that I've watched on my Kindle Fire.  I'm reading The Middle Passage, a slim book written by a Swiss Jungian analyst. Maybe it's the subtitle of the book, From Misery to Meaning in Midlife. In any case, I'm hard put to write anything at all.