The apple tree is abloom. You would be forgiven for thinking that we are in spring. But, alas, I know better. I know better because, now in my seventh April here, I know better. And, also, I can read the forecast. It might break 45 degrees on Saturday.
Spring will not begin here until next weekend, the running of the Little 500 bike races mark the official recognition of the seasons changing here. Our first year it happened during the actual race — a soft, subtle, two hour transition that you could actually feel if you were sitting there attentively, desperate.
Even as I note that spring does not begin until the third week of April, I should note that this has been a mild winter. But! There’s still a week-and-a-half to go …
I had a nice, brisk ride this evening. My lovely bride was sitting in the backyard, enjoying the weather and reading, I was sweating, going up a virtual hill on Zwift. But I had, on this stage, three of my favorite visuals on the game. The windmill, the mountain which creates its own weather system and an empty road.
At times, this route was fast, at times it was slow. So like every other ride, really. But I got in 33 miles, and that’s not bad for a Thursday, even if, just at the end, right about at 90 minutes, I started getting bored. I think it has something to do with being indoors on a nice weather day.
That repeal was just three weeks before the American occupation ended. Despite some advocates, daylight saving time has never been restored in that nation. If the author puts a half-paragraph into something like that, you’re going to get a lot in the coming pages. And there are a lot of pages, a lot to cover, socially, politically, economically, culturally. But, at least, we know how they felt about springing the clocks forward.
Today was the first of four, no, perhaps, five late days in a row. It’ll be a long week. But it won’t feel like it, until it does, which will probably be … Wednesday.
I walked outside twice today. Once, in the middle of the day for a reason I’ve already forgotten. And then, in the evening at about 7:45. (As I said, long week.) This was the first day of the year I’ve been surprised by how warm it was when I took that step across the threshold. And then I wondered why I couldn’t conduct today’s meetings, and emails and all of the rest, outdoors, under a tree.
Tomorrow it will be a mind-boggling sunny and 82 degrees. Wednesday, rainy and 72. Then the 50s and 60s into next week.
Spring officially begins in 16 days.
Time to return to the most popular feature on the site, the weekly check with the kitties.
Phoebe has re-discovered the guest room, and a great place to hide from me before I head out in the morning.
What doesn’t make so much sense is how habitual she is. This is the time of morning when she should be sunning herself in a window — she will wait in our bedroom until we open the heavy curtains, because she knows where the sun is — but this room, the guest room, faces the west.
Poseidon was cold this weekend. And shy.
He also was able to wriggle his way into forcing me out of that chair, which was an impressive feat for a 10-pound cat.
I finished the Willie Morris memoir this weekend. He took a plane from New York back to Texas, to speak at his alma mater, and then drove over to his home in Mississippi. His little boy in tow, seeing the old places with his mother and grandmother, and then, the next morning, he caught a plane back to New York. An altogether unsatisfying ending, but that’s a memoir at 31, for you.
Still, some 36 pages before the end, this is the part that has stuck with me.
So I started, yesterday, a journal by the poet May Sarton. A local author I know quoted her last summer on the anniversary of her death. “Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.” I did a little research and bought four of her books, her journals, just on the basis of that quote. I’m now on the second of those four books, a year of dear diary of a woman trying to figure out life, herself, her poetry and her gardening. But around all of that she will make you sit up and re-read a passage now and again, like this one.
I figure I should read a month at a time, and in two weeks I’ll need another book.
Another book to go with Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which I also started this weekend. This is a 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner, and I am reading it on my Kindle, where I have a collection of dozens of books waiting for me.
I need to read more books, and so I will.
Believe it or not, we are still playing catch up on the Re-Listening project. I am playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car, and I am woefully behind in writing about them here. These aren’t reviews, just for fun and, sometimes, memories. And, at this point in 1997, we are entering a jazz phase.
And there’s some really good jazz in here. Up first, is a 1993 record from Jay Thomas, a multi-instrumentalist, with, now, 50 years of music on the books. Even back then, he’d been at it for a long time. You can hear him playing trumpet or flugelhorn or alto, tenor, or soprano, or flutes on more than 100 records. He’s fronted almost two dozen of his own. And you may not know his work, if you, like me, aren’t deep into jazz, but you’ve heard it. He shows up in commercials and movie scores quite a bit, too.
That’s the title track Blues for McVoughty. I wish I could say I had a good ear for jazz as a young guy, but I picked this up by chance off the giveaway table.
Somehow, sadly, most of this record hasn’t been uploaded to YouTube, but if you need an entry point to jazz, or easy atmosphere, or need to know what all the cool jazz aficionados were listening to in the 1990s, this is a fine place to start.
I am sure I picked this up to add something more sophisticated and mature to my collection. Can’t imagine why, though. And we’ll have two more jazz records back-to-back in our next installment(s) of the Re-Listening project.
For now, enjoy some of this nice weather, before it grows stormy again mid-week.
I have been twice informed that we are way overdue for a check in on the kitties. This is, of course, the most popular weekly feature on the site, woefully neglected these last few weeks, and how dare I? “Oh. big cats, oooooh. Not the point, friend.”
Twice I have been thusly informed.
Mainly by Phoebe, sitting on the stairs, as if to say “What gives?”
And also by Poseidon, who can’t even cast his gaze upon me in disbelief.
The cats are doing great, even if they have been thusly neglected. Oh, so tragically neglected, just ask them.
I am sadly nearing the end of North Toward Home. I want to continue, but I want it to continue, you see. It’s an odd sensation, even as I have a small stack of other Willie Morris books in the To Read collection. I don’t pretend to understand the phenomenon, not wanting to finish things I enjoy. Is this a vein of anti-completism? An unwillingness to part beloved things? There are TV shows I’ve never finished for the same reason. If I don’t watch the finale or read the last chapters, it is all still out there and we never have to part.
I haven’t read this memoir before, but it isn’t my first time around with Willie Morris. I know the broadest strokes of his life and have a comfortable understanding of the style he’s using in this book. In the last 40 pages of so, which I read tonight, he’s written about the changes coming to the upstate community in New York where he’s bought a farm to escape the harsh realities of the city. He wanted to give his son and family a life, while he took the train 70 miles into town. He detailed seeing accidents on the train, the shifting attitudes of people as they got closer to the city, or closer to their homes. He wrote about how he learned about the sniper shooting at his alma mater, the University of Texas, while on the train. He wrote painfully, rawly, about how aghast he was, while his fellow passengers noted the news, and moved on. Suburbia is creeping in on that farm, which is too close to the big city, and too far away from the idyllic small town world he grew up in. He wrote about that too, watching the developers drive out, point this way, look at maps, buy that plot, cut those trees.
“It was impossible,” he wrote, “not to become deeply attached to this old country of the Indians and the Dutch and the Yankees, to the quiet hills and farms of western Connecticut, to the great sweep and flow of the Hudson Valley.”
He quotes the passage from Sleepy Hollow, about “A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.” Morris tells us that reading Washington Irving to his son on a windy November night, writing that he was glad, for the sake of the child, that a real writer had lived in the neighborhood years before.
By then, before then, it had grown obvious where he was going, but it was breathtaking all the same.
The thunderclap of rightness, which he says came upon “not apocalyptically but slow as can be, slow as good sourmash gets its mellowing or as a young man matures and finds balance” is, somehow, why I don’t want to finish the last pages of the book.
I had a fast little ride this morning, getting in a quick 19 miles before work. I set PRs on four Strava segments, including on two climbs.
It felt like I could have done a lot more, but for time.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 87 routes down, 42 to go.
Finally, we continue to catch up on the Re-Listening project. Each CD, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a thing to do in the car, and to write about here. Mostly it’s music and memories and a bit of whimsy, which is what music should be about.
The memory I have with this CD is that I picked it up off a giveaway table because the cover art was great. Otherwise, I have discovered, over and over, try as I might, that Michael Hedges just isn’t for me.
But if you like technically proficient guitar work, new age lyrics and a classically trained flute, the posthumously released “Torched” might be for you.
books / IU / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Turn around, don’t mow down (pedestrians) 23 Mar 23
Still under the weather, today’s good news is that it feels like any cough could be the big, final cough that signals the end of a cold, and my return to health, which means in June, I’ll finally shake the rattly thing.
It rained a lot today. Here, the soil sits over limestone, which does not play well with water. That means, that if more than three or four people on campus spit at one time in Spanker’s Branch* outside our building, it’s going to flood. And today, it rained a lot.
That flooded the creek, overwhelmed the nearby drainage, which happens a few times a year, and gets into the meadow and the bordering road. I have a view of this from my office. One of these people narrowly avoided being brought up on charges.
I’m slow walking Willie Morris’ North Toward Home, because I never like it when great books end. I am in the third act of this memoir now. He’s moved to New York, to become, at 31, the youngest editor ofHarper’s Magazine. It’s 1967 here, and he’s taking the temperature of the middle of the country.
The more things change … the more we find that things aren’t that much different at all, half a century later.
We just don’t enjoy 1960s branding. (Thank goodness.)
I wonder how much longer I can drag out this book. I know where it’s going, I just want to enjoy the process of the writing and Morris’ storytelling for … quite a lot longer, actually.
*Spanker’s Branch was an early name the little body of water on campus had. Then they named it after a former college president. That deceased man’s views on eugenics have lately led to the things named in his honor being renamed. These days, it is officially known as Campus River. Spanker’s Branch it is, then.
Happy Monday. And to make your Monday just a bit more tolerable, we’ll begin with the site’s most popular weekly feature, the weekly check in with the kitties. This weekend they have been quite the cuddle cats. That could be because the heater was, for some reason, turned off on Friday and it was midday Saturday, when it never got warm inside, before I noticed.
They’re also loving and needy little things, that’s a part of it, too. Last night, I wasn’t sure if they would let me go to sleep, for all of their “Pet me. Pet me. PETME,” demands.
In our house, there is a mid-grade residential carpet pad. And on that carpet pad sits a nice, low shag carpet. And on that carpet there’s a throw pillow. And on that pillow there’s a folded pair of jeans.
And that’s where Phoebe is choosing to nap.
What I love about this picture is that it demonstrates Poseidon’s ability to anticipate, and his understanding of the sun’s direction of travel. He’s not half in the shade, he’s waiting for the sun to come around.
That’s a smart cat move.
This was the weekend of going uphill. That’s not a metaphor. I was actually going uphill. Virtually uphill, anyway. It’s a silly thing, but there was a series on Zwift this weekend, a three stage showdown of some of the more demanding climbing routes. And since I am trying to ride all of the routes anyway, I figured, why not?
Friday evening I rode the first of the three stages, climbing 2,500 feet. Knowing what was to come, I was determined to take it easy on Friday. And I was largely successful with that, but I felt too good late and so I pushed a bit on that last climb. I have no idea how to preserve my energy over time. Most people don’t, I think, so that’s OK. I set two Strava PRs on Friday, celebrated by putting on the compression boots and got ready for Saturday.
Saturday, there was the Alpe du Zwift, the game’s (apparently realistic) take on the legendary Alpe d’Huez. This stage was harder, and it has 3,900 feet of climbing. I decided I was going to pace myself up that beyond category climb because Sunday’s route was even more demanding. So on the alpe I set seven Strava PRs, including taking more than seven minutes off my best time up the climb.
I’m no climber. Really, I’m not, but the progress is progressive. But my avatar looks great descending!
At least the switchbacks on the alpe actually provide a little relief on the ascent. No such help on Sunday, on the hardest route of the weekend, punctuated by a slow climb up the vaunted Ventoux.
Ventoux or d’Huez, which is harder? They’re both a big challenge. Ventoux has a bit more of a gradient, and it’s almost continual. Eight percent is the norm, and there’s a lot of 11 and 12 percent, and there’s no accelerating up that. Plus, leg fatigue is, of course, cumulative. The only thing Ventoux has going for it on this particular route was that the finish line came about two miles before the summit. Even abbreviated, the route had 3,953 of ascent, and Strava considers it another beyond category climb. I was pleased with the earlier finish, though. Long before that, I was hoping to just finish well.
It started out great. If you look to the right of this graphic, you can see where I am in the field. For a brief, brilliant, shining moment, I was at the front of the field, pushing on at 30 miles per hour.
When the climbing started, I fell away pretty quickly. I am not a climber.
But I was happy to finish in the top 50.
I was happy to finish 50th.
I was happy to finish.
After finishing all three stages of Rapha Rising, I believe 249th overall, I had another 10,400 feet of elevation gain in my legs over the last three days. (That’s a lot for me!) I earned a day off. My Zwift avatar earned some Rapha kit. The only time I will ever afford Rapha is when it’s free.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 76 routes down, 48 to go.
This is where I stopped reading last night. Willie Morris has spent four pages talking about riding around Texas with W. Lee O’Daniel. He’d been the governor of Texas from 1939 to 1941, running and governing in the all-too-familiar populist demagog style. He went to the U.S. Senate, beating LBJ in a special election, for the rest of the 1940s. Then he returned to private life, running a ranch in Fort Worth, and making money in real estate and insurance in Dallas. In the second half of the 1950s, he ran for governor again.
It’s a poignant, bittersweet thing, Morris’ detailing of three days canvassing Texas in an air conditioned Cadillac. O’Daniel was aging, and he knew it. Morris saw him as an old man “trying to retrieve the past.” His constituency was aging, and he knew that too. Or they were dying off, and he could see it, in the dusty, small towns he visited. Not that he was the same draw as he’d been as a famous radio host back in ’38, but also, the makeup of the state had changed underfoot. Not because of him or in spite of him, just around him, a colorful character with much of the color washed away by time.
I say this every time I return to his work, but I love the way Morris writes.
