It was a long day at Bascom Palmer yesterday, the majority of the time spent sitting and waiting in crowded corridors. For the most part nobody talks, except to the person they came with, though yesterday a woman spoke to us in Spanish. I told her, in Spanish, they I don’t speak Spanish, and she switched to English.
By 5:30, she and everyone else except one middle-aged woman had disappeared, either home or into one of the examination rooms. We were finally called into one and when we emerged it was 6 pm. We had arrived at 2. This would have been less annoying if I could have spent the time reading but I refrained before my eye exam so I could see the chart better and after that it was difficult with dilated pupils. One elderly woman, obviously new to the procedure, moaned in panic to a passing doctor that since seeing the technician her vision had become blurry.
At checkout, we ran into the woman who had talked to us earlier. She was with her husband. I asked if they lived in Miami. No, she said, Guatemala. They fly up once a year to see her husband’s ophthalmologist. She pulled out her phone and showed us pictures of her garden in Guatemala City; large modernist sculptures stood on the grass. Then a picture of her daughter, standing with their granddaughter in Antigua. Another daughter, she said, is in Berlin, studying to be an ophthalmologist. Hania of course asked about the political situation in Guatemala, and the woman mentioned last year’s elections, saying, tentatively, “we hope for the better.” Then we exchanged business cards. I have never been to Guatemala.
Whether you found Golden Globes host Jo Koy funny or not, he did something that students at my comedy school would learn not to do on the first day of class: He laughed at his own jokes. It is the standup’s equivalent of a writer telling instead of showing.
It began last month when our local Whole Foods returned their delicious gingersnaps to their bakery. Then, a few days before Christmas, our neighbor knocked at our door, presenting me (Hania’s a celiac) with a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies. At Christmas Eve with our French neighbors, I received from the daughter a box of Girl Scout Tagalongs. Then Tuesday, our Alsatian friends handed us a gift bag containing a bottle of Gewurztraminer – made with grapes from the family vines – a box of French pralines, and a tin of homemade cookies.
A Christmas card that comes late is better than an email greeting that arrives on time.
I had lunch in Delray Beach the other day, at a restaurant near the FEC tracks. A Brightline train rushed past, its once lovely, two-tone cars covered completely in advertising. About twenty minutes later a freight train appeared, its lower reaches bright with graffiti. For the next few minutes I sat there musing on man’s irrepressible desire to deface things.
Trinity Cathedral looked different last night for the service of Lessons and Carols – the pews were gone, replaced by folding chairs – and it sounded different, the reduction in hard surfaces making the music, according to one choir member afterwards, sound “more alive.”
The service began traditionally, with the beautiful “Once in Royal David’s City,” and then threw in some surprises: a few of the lessons were read in Spanish, and one of the carols was Polish, with the first verse sung in Polish. (This constituted the first time I have sung better than the rest of the congregation.) One carol I had never heard before, by Judith Weir, carried the words of William Blake:
The Angel that presided o’er my birth said,
Little Creature form’d of Joy and Mirth,
Go Love without the help of anything on Earth.