October surprise

Trump's October surprise was Covid-19; Biden's, I guess, was the fake laptop story?; ours was a busted water heater. Rocket Boy had to spend the last three days of his visit working frantically all day long to get the old one out and the new one in. We were quoted around $2000 by two different plumbers to replace it for us, so we decided to save a little money by doing it ourselves. Bad, bad idea. We did end up saving about $500, but that doesn't count wear & tear on my husband. It was really a horrible experience.

I don't know if the medical team at Walter Reed could have helped us with our problem, but to ensure that they won't be helping the Trumpster much longer, I have already voted. My ballot arrived on October 10th, I puzzled over it for an hour or so, reading articles online about the various amendments and whatnot, then filled it out and drove to our closest drop-off box, where I dropped it off. I've been notified by BallotTrax both that my ballot has been received and that it has been accepted, so I've done the most important thing I can do. Well, that, and giving Joe Biden $100, in four $25 payments. Nine days until the election.

I studied the "Presidential Electors" section very carefully. Sometimes I reach for something (on a shelf in a store, for instance) and end up with something different in my hand than I had intended. I wanted to be sure I had not aimed for one circle and filled in the one below it by accident.

I'm glad that deaths from covid seem to be going down, but cases are going up up up. The Midwest is bad, and so is the Mountain West. Utah is in terrible shape and Colorado is doing worse than before. On October 4th, the last time I did a normal blog post, the New York Times reported 209,448 deaths; today, three weeks later it's 224,999 -- 15,551 more, which works out to about 740 per day during that period. That still seems like an awful lot, but it's a smaller percentage of the cases, which are skyrocketing. Trump has declared the virus over, under control, we've turned the corner, etc. Hmm, don't think so. 

The kids and I are doing OK since Rocket Boy went back. We miss him, but he calls every night and expectations are lower when he's not here. I did manage to take the boys to a pumpkin patch last Sunday -- see photo -- pumpkin hunting in the Covid-19 era, geez. I also found a white one at Trader Joe's. The pumpkins are on the front porch, where a squirrel has discovered them and has begun eating one. We decided not to worry about it -- we can cut around the squirrel mess if it leaves us enough pumpkin to carve.

In some ways it's easier for me to have Rocket Boy be in St. Louis because I'm having so much trouble with depression and anxiety, have been for some time now. I worry about the election, I worry about the fires (Colorado's taking its turn, after the misery in California all summer), I worry about Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, I worry about things I have trouble doing, like calling repairmen. I have good days, but I mostly have bad days. I have to do a lot of gentle coaxing to get myself to do things like clean the kitchen (which, I'd like to note, is clean at the moment), and it's easier to do that coaxing when RB isn't around to have an opinion.

I do think having an animal in the house would help my mood. I can't tell you how many times (dozens? hundreds?) I've paused to speak to the animal in the house, only to realize that there isn't an animal in the house, and I'm about to speak to the air. We need to find a new cat or dog. I'm really almost at the point where I'm ready to do that. Almost. Not quite, though. But soon. 

I think a lot about how having a dog would get me to go on walks, something I almost never do anymore. I just keep getting fatter and more out of shape, and a dog would undoubtedly help with that. I remember when the twins were babies, I felt so confident pushing that stroller. It gave me an excuse for being out on the street -- I know I didn't need an excuse, but I felt as though I did. When we finally gave up the stroller, I stopped feeling comfortable going for walks. A dog would bring that comfort back. 

On a day like today, though, I'm just as glad we don't have a dog. Our second October surprise: a gigantic snowstorm! It was in the teens earlier, but now it's in the single digits on our porch (which tends to be a very cold spot, I should note). The snow is much deeper than this now (I think this was around noon), but it's so cold that I don't want to go out and take another picture! The last time I checked, it was 5 degrees. The prediction is that we'll get down to 2 tonight, but I think on our porch it will be below zero. Oh, and up to 14 inches of snow total. On October 25th, for crying out loud! It is too early for this kind of thing. It feels like January, not October. Granted, I am wearing thin capri pants, a long-sleeved t-shirt, and bedroom slippers. With a coat, socks, boots, gloves, all of that, I'd probably feel better. What did I read about how Scandinavians think about winter? -- there is no bad weather, only bad clothes? I am definitely wearing bad clothes. The twins are in shorts and short-sleeved t-shirts. The thermometer is set to 68 degrees. I've been keeping it at 65, but last night I decided we needed a few more degrees. Some years we don't even turn the furnace on until Halloween! (OK, it's almost always needed sooner than that, but this is ridiculous.)

Well, it's six pm, the day is coming to an end. Time to make dinner -- French toast, I think I can handle that. Tomorrow is a school day, but they call it Monday Launch Day, when the teachers leave homework assignments but don't interact with the kids, so it won't matter that there's a foot of snow on the ground and it's freezing. Later in the week, Thursday and Friday, the kids go back to the actual building for actual in-person classes. We'll see how that goes. What a trip this year continues to be.

Reading post: Absalom, Absalom!

I haven't written an ordinary blog post in a few weeks, but I'll try to do that on Sunday, while it's snowing. Here, instead, is another reading post. I have completed my 11th book for the Classics Challenge (out of 12), and this also fulfills challenge #11, "An abandoned classic." In other words, read something that you tried and failed to read at some point, failed for probably very good reasons, like maybe because the book is impossible. 

The book I finally managed to finish early this morning is Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. I'm quite sure I tried to read it when I was in college, because according to my old list book, during the spring quarter (1980) of my sophomore year I read Light in August and The Sound and the Fury. Although my record-keeping wasn't as detailed back then as it is now, I appear to have read them right after Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics, apparently for my own amusement. That seems funny to me now. Tired of Aristotle? Why not relax with a little Faulkner? After the two Faulkner novels, I read My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, so hmm, my choices were as eclectic then as now.

I chose to go back to Faulkner now because he was a white man who wrote about race and the South and the Civil War. Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936, a year before Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I thought there might exist some sort of dialogue between the two books, even if only within my own head. But if there is, I couldn't hear it. I felt rudely jerked out of the colorful, jazzy world of the Harlem Renaissance into the misery of the Old South, the South that can't let go of the old ways, for whom the War Between the States is forever raging, with victory just around the corner, the South where having just one great-grandparent of African ancestry dooms you to being referred to as "the octoroon" in a novel by a white man who was actually sympathetic toward your cause. 

OK, this is supposed to be a review, so I'll summarize -- but of course this is a famous novel, taught in universities. I could easily grab a summary from Wikipedia or from many other blogs, and so I'm not sure what the point is for me to write my own. Having said that, here goes (with no concern for "spoilers," since every detail of the plot is all over the internet). Absalom, Absalom! is the story of a man, Thomas Sutpen, raised in the mountains of West Virginia before there was a West Virginia, who is so horrified by the Black slave of a rich white man who tells him to go to the back door that he decides to go to the West Indies and make a lot of money and start a dynasty of people who will never be told to go to the back door by a Black person. His plan goes awry, of course -- in Haiti, he accidentally marries a woman with some African ancestry and has a son by her, and despite his attempt to start over in Mississippi, the son ends up following him there, befriending his second son (by a woman without African ancestry) and becoming engaged to his second daughter (he also has a daughter by one of his slaves, so that daughter, his first, also is his slave (until 1865) and serves in his house), and his second son ends up killing his first son and running away, and later his first son's son (by an "octoroon") comes to live at the Sutpen mansion and ends up having a son (Sutpen's great-grandson) with a woman who has only African ancestry, and his first daughter (the former slave) ends up raising both the grandson and later the great-grandson (who is intellectually disabled), and in the end she burns down the house, killing herself and the second son, due to a misapprehension caused by an old woman who is the younger sister of Sutpen's second wife. Also, in the middle of all that, Sutpen and his two sons fight in the Civil War.

Got that? In addition, the novel is an allegory about the South and is related to the Bible story of Absalom, King David's son. 

Sutpen's intellectually disabled great-grandson, Jim Bond, survives the fire, and on the last page of the book, the Canadian roommate of the grandson of a friend of Sutpen's who tells us most of the story says, 

I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it won't quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they won't show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.

In a way, this rather nasty comment is quite prescient of Faulkner, since in 1936 people didn't yet know that we all come from Africa. Of course, his character doesn't say that, he says that eventually everyone in the western hemisphere will have African ancestry, that the "white race," not that there is one, will fall. Which, to men like Sutpen and the current batch of white supremacists, his true descendants, would seem rather a threat. But I'm unhappy that Faulkner makes this part-African man who is "going to conquer the western hemisphere" intellectually disabled. I don't know what that means, what it symbolizes or allegorizes. Probably it's significant, or maybe it isn't, but in either case I'm missing the point.

That grandson of Sutpen's friend has a name: Quentin Compson. The year is 1910 and he is 18 or 19 at the time he tells the story to his Canadian roommate, Shreve McCannon, one long cold January night in Cambridge, Massachusetts (they are students at Harvard). Of course, Quentin has heard most of the story secondhand (thirdhand, fourthhand), from his father and that younger sister of Sutpen's second wife, and both of them heard the story from other people, so it isn't clear whether the story we hear is completely accurate. Different people tell it differently, adding to the unremitting joy of the novel. Oh, and Quentin is going to kill himself in a few months, according to an earlier book (The Sound and the Fury). I remembered that, and kept looking for some mention of his impending death in this book, but it isn't there. He's deeply troubled, but no mention is made of where that's going to lead.

I found it hard to believe that these two young men (Quentin and Shreve) could be so completely enthralled by the story. But when I was 19, and tried to read Absalom, Absalom!, 70 years after Quentin is supposed to have told the story to Shreve, I thought it was enthralling too. I got bogged down and couldn't finish it, but I was enthralled. And maybe it's really a story for young people, maybe only young people can find the story enthralling instead of absurd. I'm no longer young and I didn't enjoy the book, on any level. I'm glad I finally finished it, and it does fit into this year's reading theme. Maybe it helps me understand the white South better. I don't know. Glad it's over.

Reading post: Their Eyes Were Watching God

My reading pace has slowed down considerably since Chester died -- I've only read a couple of mysteries and of all things a Chicken Soup for the Soul book about cats. And today I finally finished this month's book for my book group, which was also my choice for the Classics Challenge #3: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1937. (Regular readers may note that I haven't yet posted about what was going to be my next challenge book, a Faulkner novel, and that's because I haven't read it yet. I'm just not up to Faulkner right now.) I did enjoy it, but I found it rough going, with the dialect writing and all, even though I've been reading books written in dialect for several months now. What can I say? Grief drags you down.

And what can I say about Hurston's masterpiece that hasn't been said before? Their Eyes Were Watching God (I still don't understand the title) is the story of Janie, a young Black girl growing up in western Florida at some point after the Civil War, whose grandmother marries her off to an old farmer just as she is coming into bloom as a young woman. Tiring of this man, who she never learns to care for, she runs off with another older man and lives as his bored, unfulfilled wife for 20 years in Eatonville, Florida, an all-Black town in central Florida, near Orlando. Finally he dies, leaving her a rich widow, and she takes up with Tea Cake, a handsome man much younger than herself and of a lower class. They marry and live very happily in the Everglades of southern Florida until tragedy strikes. The book is about a woman growing into herself, finding joy, choosing her own path in life. That the woman, Janie, is Black is important to the book and at the same time unimportant, because in part this can be seen as any woman's story. But I'd say it's especially amazing to read it as a Black woman's story, a Black woman in the 1930s yet. I'm trying to fit Hurston's work into that of the Harlem Renaissance writers I've already read, and let's just say it stands out. As did Hurston herself.

Hurston was an unusual woman, an unusual person. Born in 1891, the 5th of 8 children, she moved to Eatonville when she was three. Her father served as the mayor of the town (in Their Eyes, Janie's 2nd husband becomes the mayor). Hurston was unable to get much of an education early on, finally going back to high school at age 26 (she lied and said she was 16). She earned an AA at Howard University and later a BA at Barnard, at the age of 37 (27 to the world). At Barnard she did anthropological fieldwork for Franz Boas (who was also Margaret Mead's mentor) that led to two books of folklore. She also wrote essays, short stories, and novels. She started a PhD in anthropology at Columbia but after an unhappy love affair with the inspiration for Tea Cake she dropped out (and wrote Their Eyes). She married and divorced three times, but never had children. She was part of the Harlem Renaissance, but gradually fell out with friends such as Langston Hughes. She was utterly repudiated by Richard Wright (she didn't like him either), who became the new voice of Black America in the 1940s, which led to her being quickly forgotten in the literary world. She later worked as a maid in Florida and died there, penniless, in 1960 -- the year I was born.

If I were feeling up to snuff, I would have read some of her anthropological work, and either a biography or her autobiography. I might also have read some of Richard Wright, to help me think about the differences between them. Instead I read a few articles about her online. That's all. I bought a copy of Mules and Men (her first folklore collection) but ended up lending it to a member of my book group tonight. Someday I'll get it back and maybe then I'll read it. For now I'll just say that I enjoyed the book, it's worth reading, but according to my book group it's especially worth listening to. The audible version is read by Ruby Dee, who does a masterful job.

Missing my kitty

Well, it's been two weeks and one day since Mr. Fluffy Underpants died. My sweetheart. Yesterday I attended a virtual Pet Loss support group. That was helpful, I think. On the downside, it made me start thinking about Chester a lot more, and that made me depressed, grouchy, and sad. So that's hard on the fam. But I think I need to "process" my grief, so probably all these icky emotions just need to happen. Sorry, family. It'll pass.

The photo is awful, it's right after he died. But I need to look at it, otherwise I forget he's dead, or get confused about it. This is so obviously a photo of a dead cat -- the mouth is open. Cats don't normally have their mouths open unless they're eating or yawning.

This morning I got angry with Rocket Boy about something that wasn't important. I said I was going OUT, and I stomped out of the house and drove off in my car. I decided I would take 75th/76th out to Gunbarrel, because the farms out there would look pretty. Maybe three minutes into the drive I'd forgotten all about my fight with RB and was thinking about Chester. And crying. 

It's been a while since I did a normal blog post, so I have to remember how to do it. First, a coronavirus death count. 209,448 as of this afternoon, according to the Times. The last time I posted about this was 9/15, so a little less than 3 weeks ago, and at that time it was 194,235. That means 15,213 deaths in 19 days, or almost exactly 800 deaths every day. And of course, President Trump is in the hospital with Covid-19, after intentionally ignoring all the recommendations about masks and social distancing. It's impossible, simply impossible, to feel sorry for him. I've tried. The best I can manage is "Get well soon," but I don't even feel that very strongly.

Trying to think what we've done in the last couple of weeks that I could report on. We had another picnic out at Heil Ranch, last week I guess it was. Oh, yes, it was Tuesday, I remember because we got home a few minutes late for the dreadful first Presidential Debate. I wonder if Trump was already feeling the virus that night, and that's why he went so crazy. Anyway, it was a nice picnic. I wasn't feeling up to par, so Rocket Boy put the whole thing together, made hardboiled eggs, etc., and it was nice to get out in the woods for a bit. It was fairly late when we got there, maybe 5:30 or so, so there were very few people around, just a few hikers and bikers and runners, but mostly people coming down off the trail and going home. We didn't see any interesting wildlife, just a Steller's Jay, I think. Oh, and some deer as we drove out of the park.

Another thing we did last weekend was stage a Barbie wedding. Although I originally treated all the dolls as teenagers, this summer I started to think that some of them looked older. That led to the creation of families, as I acquired Skipper and Stacie dolls to be the children. Each family has its own bookshelf in our bedroom, though in my head they all live in our neighborhood, modified to Barbie size. I lie on the bed and look at them and imagine their lives. 

Anyway, two of the dolls wanted to get married, but I didn't have a jacket for the Ken doll. I finally ordered a handmade one from an Etsy seamstress in Newfoundland, and it arrived last weekend, so we had the wedding. The bride's old girlfriend officiated (she's a Universal Life minister). The bride's attendants were her daughter (via a sperm donor) and the groom's daughter from his first marriage (his crazy ex-wife, who I also own, wasn't invited). Surfer Dude Ken, who is the stepfather in a family of his own, was the best man. The vegetable at their feet is meant to represent fertility, and indeed, the bride and groom have already had two more children (I had bought the babies previously, but didn't want to open them until the bride and groom got married).

What else? We're having nice weather, with occasional smoke to remind me of the terrible fires in California. But our skies are mostly blue, and the nighttime temps are in the 40s, and it's cold and lovely when we wake up in the morning. Everyone's sleeping better as a result. The trees are starting to turn, even though many of them were messed up by that snow we had a few weeks ago. We wished we could have gone to look at fall color in the mountains this weekend, but the kids had a lot of homework and I'm so low energy. Rocket Boy managed to take Kid B to the Botanic Garden this afternoon. Here he is, wearing his mask.

Rocket Boy is probably headed back to St. Louis next weekend. That'll be hard on the kids. We'll try to bring him back again soon.