One of the many differences between adulthood and childhood is that now I enjoy going to the dentist. Especially around Halloween, as mine puts out candy. Friday, as I was deliberating over which to choose, my dentist said, “Take one with lots of nuts.”
I'm off on a little Florida road trip - will be back here on Thursday.
We skipped the Taylor Swift concert last night to attend evensong at Trinity Cathedral, where the Anglican Chorale of Southeast Florida and the Miami Collegium Musicum sang the works of, among others, William Boyd, Herbert Howells, and Anton Bruckner. Evensong is not only a beautiful service, held once a month at the cathedral, but also, in my mind, the most beautiful word in the English language.
September 1, 1939 – December 7, 1941 – September 11, 2001 – February 24, 2022 – October 7, 2023.
Monday I had an MRI and yesterday I got a text thanking me for choosing the facility and asking for a review.
Really, I thought, a review? Then I remembered that I had asked for classical music and they had given me easy listening.
I have begun calling my cough ‘Etna’. It lies dormant for long periods and then suddenly erupts.
Sunday in Chicago was a beautiful day and I headed over to the Printers Row Lit Fest, where I had spoken the day before. Once there, I heard a man talking in passing with the vendor of posters, in that easy, familiar intercourse of people connected by place – and for a moment I wished I lived in a city like Chicago - or Chicago, for that matter. But then I realized that that connection, that deep-seated social cohesiveness, while it still exists, is not as strong as it once was when there were metropolitan newspapers that everybody read and other institutions – like department stores – that everybody frequented. About all that’s left now to unite a city’s residents are its sports teams, which explains why sports are so popular today and why, at games, even grown men and women now wear the caps and jerseys of their home teams.
At one of the tents I found a book about Mike Royko. The great newspaper columnist was a man whom Chicagoans read and quoted and followed with a devotion that cut across ethnic and economic spheres and created a feeling of belonging among the population. That was Royko’s genius, and it doesn’t show up in every generation. But if it did today, it would be drowned out by a thousand podcasts.