Saturday evening we went to hear Seraphic Fire at St. Nicholas Church in Pompano Beach. Walking in from the back I saw something I had never seen before: a church food truck. The white lettering on the blue side identified it as “The Holy Grill of St. Nicholas” and included the slogan “Our COD is an Awesome COD.”
In his address to the audience before the concert, the priest said that the truck has served over 68,000 meals to the homeless in Broward County. Afterwards, he told me that it also appears at festivals, where it serves Scotch eggs and Guinness-battered fish and chips. Hence the awesome cod.
It’s said that writers never really finish a story or a poem or a book – they just send it off, finally, to an editor. This is probably truer with fiction and poetry, but I recently wrote an essay about travel books and, thinking it was done, sent it to a couple of magazines. Then Saturday night, driving home from a Seraphic Fire concert and listening to the BBC, I heard a report about the earthquake in Myanmar. I was actually about to change the channel and listen to something more cheerful, like bluegrass, but Hania asked to keep it on. As the reporter spoke, my mind turned to George Orwell, who spent time in the country as an imperial policeman, an experience captured in his novel Burmese Days. Remembering that book led me to think of a nonfiction book with a similar title, Italian Days, by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, which I had forgotten to mention in my essay. Sunday morning I called up the essay and added Italian Days to the paragraph that lists excellent travel books of the 1980s, marveling at how, through the mysterious process of association, listening to a news report about the earthquake in Myanmar had provided me with a missing item from an essay on a completely different subject. This morning I will resend the amended essay to the original recipients, hoping that they were too busy to read the first version.
Speaking with Bill Maher last Friday, Dana Carvey told of how he got a call in late 1992 from President Bush – the man he had mercilessly imitated on Saturday Night Live – asking him to come down to Washington to “cheer up the troops,” meaning, as Carvey explained, the White House staff (Bush had recently lost his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton). Carvey said that he immediately thought of booking a hotel; he stayed, of course, at the White House. It was the beginning of a 26-year friendship.
Then this week, reading Jan Morris’s diary Thinking Again, I came across her thoughts on hearing of Bush’s death in 2018:
“I shall be sneered at for saying it, but the values I respected in him were the traditional values of the American Gentleman, and alas they no longer govern his nation and so set some standard for the Western world. He was, everyone seems to agree, straight, frank, brave, kind and friendly – in short, gentlemanly American, and I wish to God he was with us still. Don’t you?”
I can eat everything but, since my surgery, some things (like pistachios, which I love) are easier to swallow than other things (like almonds, which I’m ambivalent about). And I wonder: Do certain foods go down easier because I like them, or do I like them because they go down easier?
I met a Ukrainian couple over the weekend, visiting from Boston. They came from western Ukraine, near Lviv, the part of the country that before the war was part of Poland. (The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem was born in Lviv.) They said that in their former town, schoolchildren are now taught Polish instead of Russian.
One of the shocks of this year’s Miami Open came yesterday afternoon when Magda Linette of Poland knocked off hometown favorite Coco Gauff in straight sets. I was sad to see Gauff wipe away tears as she exited the court, but I was happy for Linette, who is twelve years older than the American and entering the winter of her career.
She is the quiet, thoughtful, empathetic Polish woman on the tour. Last year she posted a long message on social media about the plight of Ukraine, and the players from that country who can’t go home. (Her missive was prompted by people asking her if she got tired of constantly traveling.) I had rooted for her before, but after that display of sympathy and understanding, she became my favorite player.