We were driving along listening to one of the Water Music suites when Hania the celiac looked down at the Sirius XM screen, which gave the composer’s name with the first two initials. Then she said, “Gluten Free Handel.”
Henry Morgan, the humorist who appeared on game shows in the 1960s, once said that he woke up every morning grateful that he didn’t have to go to school. He would have really hated going to school in August.
A recently discovered (by our downstairs neighbors) leak in our bathroom has prompted us to finally turn the bathtub into a shower, a much talked about and long delayed project. Yesterday we were visited by the second group of bathroom specialists, and when I offered them some water they remarked that very rarely do people ask if they’d like anything to drink. Later, going over the cost estimates, they said they’d give us a discount because of our kind offer of water.
I’ve always liked and admired Dr. Fauci, even after his ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals game. (The ball flailed weakly far from home plate.) But after reading excerpts of his diary in Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal, my glowing opinion of him has dimmed. It was not just the vanity – OK, doctors can crave fame as much as the rest of us – but the stupidity, putting his self-fan book on a government server.
Yesterday morning I woke up in room 260 at Holy Cross Hospital, having reported to the emergency room the previous afternoon with afib. The emergency room, at least on a Tuesday afternoon in July, was nothing like the one on The Pitt. (For starters, the waiting room was empty.) I asked my nurse if he watched the show and he said he did, and found it the most realistic of the medical shows. His only complaint was that none of the characters had a sense of humor. I thought of Santos, who is sometimes given a funny line, but it is often mean-spirited. It was nice to know there’s joking – probably even some gallows humor – in our local ER.
Sunday afternoon C-SPAN3 showed highlights from past White House Correspondents’ Dinners. I was struck by the congeniality, the way that, for one night, a shared sense of purpose, and humor, and humanity transcended politics. This of course is impossible with Trump, who has no sense of humor and whose humanity doesn't extend beyond himself.