Hania and I were the only ones in the gym Saturday morning, so we turned on the TV to watch “Lucky Dog.” Halfway through the show a large, middle-aged man walked in and, without a word, picked up the remote and changed the channel.
I guessed – because I sometimes find it when turning on the TV, and by the man’s obliviousness to the people around him – that he would choose FOX News.
And he did.
Photos of people going to see Hamilton far outnumber those of people reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton.
When he eventually leaves office, as he must – “Everything passes,” say the Poles, who know something about misfortune, “even the longest snake.” – his departure could set off celebrations around the country, perhaps the world, like those seen at the ends of wars and centuries.
I have read numerous stories about smartphone addiction but only Mary Wakefield – in The Spectator – wrote of plopping on the sofa with the device and assuming the “otter iPhone pose.”
The best books of blah, blah, blah. Surely, many of them are very good books. But most of them have big publicity machines churning behind them. There is so much fine writing that doesn’t get that push and goes unheralded. I just picked up again Howard Norman’s I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place (2013) and, turning to the next to last chapter, read of a summer in Vermont – fevers, owls, a new well, calls from a wayward brother, viewings of Ken Burns’ Civil War – and was riveted. No fireworks, no hype, just an intelligent man (who appreciates the absurd) trying to make sense of this life through the everyday.
As you know, I like small-world coincidences. The one I wrote about recently, which occurred at the Miami Book Fair, had a self-selecting aspect: the fact that I was talking to a fellow writer who also made his home in Florida.
But in Washington, eating lunch at Clyde’s on M Street, I experienced a pure moment of happenstance. Our waitress was a young woman who had recently moved to the city. “From where?” we asked.
“Ft. Myers,” she said. We told her we were from Ft. Lauderdale, on the other coast. She said she’d recently graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University. I asked what she’d majored in.
“Journalism,” she said.
I asked if she had had Lyn Millner as a professor; Lyn is a dear friend and former freelancer of mine.
“Lyn is my favorite human being in the whole world!” the waitress we stumbled upon in Georgetown exclaimed.