This is riped off from Slate, but lots of fun if you like movies.
If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl
Spring has sprung….or, at least, is springing
A couple of days ago, I saw a satellite photo of the US covered in snow. Except when I was in the Army, I have never lived in an area that got really cold in the winter. Snow is a drive to the mountains for the weekend sort of thing. Or a drive across Nevada to get to southern Utah sort of thing.
Here it is spring with the fruit trees in full blossom.
In another couple of weeks, if the weather forecast is right, the almond trees in the Central Valley will be so full of flowers that even the ground will be covered. It will look like snow.
The power and joy of a book
One of the nice things about being in the hospital is having time to read. Several weeks ago, Richard Taylor sent me a list of books – he had run into – on the Civil War and that started me reading A Stillness at Appomattox.
Reading this book has been painful at times, but – mostly – a joy. It is painful because it is paragraph after paragraph and page after page of General U. S. Grant sending men into the meat grinder of battle and a joy because it shows the slow change – with so many acts of grace and horror – of Grant’s Army transforming into a winner.
But the book is primarily a joy because of the power and beauty of the words. It is almost 400 pages of poetry. Here is a paragraph from page 213:
…There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickery cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed some day and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or atleast some people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves.
Home, home at last
This whole hospital thing was a bigger deal than I expected. I kept thinking I would be leaving the hospital in a couple of hours, then in the morning, then tomorrow. But, now I am home and will be sleeping in my own beddie-bye tonight. After a nice home made – very soft – dinner and a relaxing watch of Jon Stewart.
Field Notes from Sequoia Hospital
Being in the hospital is strange because every day is the same – while so different from my real life – in pace and flavor. The lights in the hall, outside my room, are on – at the same level – all all day and all night. There are a variety of beeping sounds at all times; there are a variety of nurses, a surprisingly high number of whom are Filipino, walking quickly to and fro; and a variety of old people, with and without walkers, slowly shuffling along.
I am in the Cardiac Surveillance Unit because my hemoglobin count is low which is a potential heart problem. But then – with a cow valve – everything is a potential heart problem. Outside, it is bright and clear: in the low 60s during the day and in the low 40s at night; inside the weather is just the gentle A/C flow. Outside, Egypt is falling apart, or falling together, or – hopefully not – just convulsing to, once again, fall back into what passes for normalcy in the dictatorships we call our Arab friends.
Inside there seems to be no Superbowl. Inside, there seems to be no live TV although every room has one. Inside Becky – from Uganda – comes by to cheerfully wake me to check my blood. Outside the world goes its Darwinian way while – inside – I am in a bubble of privilege.