Pretty much everything about this year’s French Open has been a surprise, including the weather, which was oppressively hot the first week (the reason for Jannik Sinner’s demise) and cool and blustery today (part of the reason for Aryna Sabalenka’s). Among the other players sent home early were grand slam champions Djokovic, Rybakina, Gauff, and Świątek (who won this tournament four times in the past). The women’s semifinals do include a Pole, Maja Chwalinska, who is 5’5’’ but plays with a steadiness Świątek can only dream of. She will play the Russian who beat Sabalenka, Diana Shnaider, while in the other matchup, the Ukrainian who beat Świątek, Marta Kostyuk, will play the Russian Mirra Andreeva. It will be neighbor against aggressive neighbor on the red clay of Roland Garros.
Recently we had lunch with a friend in Boca. A former high school English teacher, Don enjoys listening to music, reading books, swimming in the ocean, taking life-long learning courses at FAU, treating himself to the occasional expensive dinner. “I don’t want to be rich,” he explained to us. “I just want to live like I’m rich.”
I spend the first week of a tennis tournament cheering for upsets and the second week bemoaning the lack of marquee matches.
The show we’re addicted to, on Amazon Prime, is the Australian series “The Time of Our Lives.” There are no detectives, no murders, no ridiculous premises, no exaggerated characters. There is just one large, extended Melbourne family dealing with the minutiae of everyday life. Most of the “action” centers around Luce and Bernadette and their three daughters, the oldest of whom is from Luce’s first marriage. His brother is leaving his wife, after meeting a younger woman, and his sister, a thirtysomething adopted as a baby from Vietnam, is searching for love as well as a sense of identity. Another character, who was taken in by Luce’s parents when they were all kids, opens a comedy club, which adds to the frequent humor of the show. Most of the characters are likable; all of them are believable. It is a joy spending time with them every evening, a joy made even greater by the fact that no one I know has ever mentioned the show.
Posts are going to be short this week as every morning I wake up and turn on the French Open. Matches go sometimes till early evening, after which the Tennis Channel, which relinquishes daytime coverage to TNT, does its nightly roundup. It is Grand Slam tennis from 5 am to bedtime. But I take time out to watch Jeopardy! – and a show I’ll write about tomorrow.
I was going through my photos yesterday, looking for one that would be good to post on Memorial Day. And I came across one I took a few years ago inside Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. It showed the towering bronze statue at the east end of the great concourse that depicts the Archangel Michael lifting a fallen soldier. Installed in 1952, it commemorates the over 1,000 Pennsylvania Railroad workers who perished in World War II.