Big temperature shifts. Sun, amazingly enough. Cold in the mornings. Humidity at 74 percent in the evening. Finally spring showed up.
Patton Oswalt will guest star on Parks and Rec this week. The Yankee and I have been watching it recently. It is mindless, but the characters have charm. Ron Swanson being the best thing on network television, I’m pretty sure.
This performance won’t hurt anything, though:
I managed to read two things in The New Yorker today. So, you see, I have to look down upon a sitcom. This is an interesting read about the success of the Boston hospitals:
Something more significant occurred than professionals merely adhering to smart policies and procedures. What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore.
[…]
Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety. Where before we’d have been struck dumb with shock about such events, now we are almost calculating about them.
[…]
We’ve learned, and we’ve absorbed. This is not cause for either celebration or satisfaction. That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune.
Several hospitals are clustered nearby. The medical tent was doing triage quickly. Lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan are being put into use. Stellar work meant people lived.
Here’s another New Yorker piece, about the things we say over and over:
I was in Iceland, talking with Stein, the eleven-year-old son of some friends. His English was dauntingly good—and all the more so given that he’d never spent any real time off the island. I’d just flown over in a packed plane, and I said that tourism seemed to be exploding, and he, deliberating, looking older than his years, replied, “Yes, they come from the hot countries.”
[…]
My grandfather was fond of the phrase “Now, I’m not lecturing you.” It sent a sinking feeling into the chests of his children and grandchildren alike, for it reliably heralded a lengthy and dour disquisition on the hardships of life. He came by his lessons honestly. A powerful and athletic figure in young manhood, he was laid low by emphysema in early middle age. Though he was a smoker, I suspect his illness was largely brought on by chemical exposure as a construction rigger back in pre-OSHA days. In any case, pulmonary problems were a grim motif in his life; he lost his first wife to tuberculosis while she was still in her teens.
Of all the helpful lessons he imparted to me, I recall nothing in any detail. No, after all these years, I can retrieve verbatim only one thing he ever said, and this didn’t originate in his dutiful tutoring. It was a spontaneous remark.
[…]
Similar catchphrases, in which casual comments are promoted into a sort of immortality, doubtless exist in nearly every family, every close friendship. I find this notion deeply heartening—that people are everywhere being quoted for lines they themselves have long forgotten. And of course each of us is left to wonder whether, right at this moment, we’re being quoted in some remote and unreckonable context.
What a charming notion.
We need some charm after what happened in West, Texas tonight:
What a terrible scene, hundreds of police and fire and EMT rigs. Triage on the high school football field. Dozens of homes feared destroyed and a casualty rate so high no one will even dare talk about it. (Finally, some sensibility.) All of that in a town of 2,800 people.
This is terrible anywhere, but it strikes a different cord in a place where everyone knows everyone.
So we’ll end on something uplifting from Boston, where people can’t maintain a moment of silence, but they will stir your very core:
More venues should do it that way.
