Last night we watched the eighth and final episode of Between Us, the series about two young couples in Copenhagen. Before that, we had watched both seasons of Love Me, about the grown members of a Swedish family. I am working my way around the world trying to find shows that, like the Israeli series Shtisel, are about "love, loss, and the doldrums of daily life." Every country should make at least one, though the predilection everywhere seems to be for crime dramas.
I watched Bill Maher receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a man who – whatever your feelings about him – adheres closer to the spirit of Twain, in his biting social commentary, than most of the previous recipients. Though he is, like all of them – with the exception of Neil Simon – primarily an entertainer. Looking over the list – Billy Crystal, Carol Burnett, Kevin Hart, Tina Fey – you wonder why there are no writers like Nora Ephron, Garrison Keillor, Roy Blount Jr., Dave Barry, David Sedaris, or even Fran Lebowitz who, like Twain, now makes a living as a public speaker.
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.
The Catcher in the Rye graced the cover of Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. The Salinger classic – 75 years old this year – was one of three works I read in high school that altered the way I saw the world and, without exaggeration, changed my life. The other two were Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. The first two are still taught in schools, but I’m not sure about the last one.
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.
A little before 11 Saturday morning, Hania called her friend Kasia in Warsaw and a few minutes later we listened on speaker phone as air raid sirens went off all over the city, marking the 82nd anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. We were in Warsaw two years ago, for the 80th anniversary, which I found to be an impressive commemoration, and each year it seems to get bigger than the last, as the new generation remembers the (mostly) young men and women who rose up against their Nazi occupiers. It was a failed revolt, in part because the Soviet army, sitting on the other side of the Vistula river, failed to come to the aid of the Poles. They knew that a destroyed city, with a depleted population, would be easier to occupy.
Later on social media I saw footage of crowds, not just on Plac Zamkowy, where I had stood two years ago, but downtown, where smoke from flares momentarily clouded their numbers. Many cities have events that define them: Boston has its marathon; New Orleans its Mardi Gras. Warsaw has its Uprising commemoration, and every time I see it, even from afar, my love and admiration for the city and its people is rekindled.