Yesterday I drove up to buy some kabanosy – garlic sausage that doesn’t need refrigeration – at the Old World Polish Deli in Pompano Beach. The woman behind the counter, here four years from Bialystok, seemed quite cheerful about the advancing hurricane. I also added a few Prince Polo bars (Polish KitKats) to cover my need for comfort food. Down the street I stopped at Big Apple Books and bought, fittingly, Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples. The people there were also quite sanguine about the storm but, then, they have a lot to read.
At Publix I bought arugula, carrots, lemons, grapefruits, peanuts and the largest red cabbage I had ever seen in the store. Then I drove to Bob’s News on Andrews Avenue to pick up The Spectator. Because it’s $8, I don’t often buy the jaunty, irreverent British weekly – which employs a High Life columnist and a Low Life columnist – but this is not a time to deprive oneself. Here’s hoping sausage, salads, and sparkling prose will see us through this thing.
A friend from Nashville wrote yesterday: "I felt like the whole town was in that classic Life magazine photo of people in a theater wearing 3D glasses." While a friend on Facebook asked: "Now that the sun has seen its shadow, how many more weeks do we have of Donald Trump?"
This weekend a friend noted that people will make plans years, sometimes decades, in advance because of scientists' predictions of an eclipse, but they'll ignore scientists' warnings about climate change and rising seas.
During my two-week-long illness I have not received a single rejection.
There is a saying in France that one should never get sick in August, as that's the month when the entire country - including the medical profession - is off on vacation. I thought of that Friday, when I called my ear-nose-and-throat doctor and was told that he doesn't see patients on Friday. Next I called my general practitioner and learned that she was away until the 23rd. The American medical system, it seemed, was copying the French one in its least appealing aspect: inactivity.