My husband traveled to New Orleans this week, in time to celebrate Mardi Gras, although he was busy working the whole time he was there. Of course, while he was there, he suddenly remembered that he had a Twitter account and that his phone could be used as a camera and that those two things could work together.... just about the time I'd decided that, bless his heart, he was probably holed up in his hotel room wishing I were there with him.
UH HUH.
*****
Meanwhile, back at the office.....
No holiday goes unobserved at the office, and Fat Tuesday was no exception. The table on the Board room was covered with beads, and there was a box of these beautiful iced cookies from Ligers Bakery, and a King Cake. It was almost exactly like being in NOLA, less the opportunity to wake with a hangover on the first day of Lent.
*****
One hears lots of music when one is in New Orleans, but I'm betting you cannot find a 7 year old girl dressed as her favorite Pokemon character Pikachu practicing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture when you're there.
*****
... and if there is music there should always be dancing.
I have recently been in touch with my second cousin, Kitty. Our grandmothers were sisters. We've been exchanging old family photographs and filling in blanks for one another over the course of the last couple weeks, via email, so I decided to reopen an old valise that belonged to my grandmother, which contains a world of old letters, a scrapbook, and loads of pictures. Within the scrapbook I found this charming little bit of newsworthy gossip pertaining to my grandparents, Tom and Sarah McCord, and their behavior on the dance floor. Not only did this delight me to know, it delights me that my Nannaw carefully preserved it, and that it remained in this valise as a treasure for me to find.
*****
On Friday night, Henry and I began to work through our DVR queue and watched the episode of This Is Us in which Randall and his biological father William go on a road trip that becomes, quite literally, the journey of a lifetime. Let me just say this: I cry at the drop of a hat, so that's never a good gauge for anyone to use to judge what sort of emotional wallop a book, movie, TV show, or Coca-cola commercial might have on them. But honey? This particular episode threw me right into the sort of cathartic cry I haven't had in years, the kind that you're pretty sure -- if you went and got on the scales when it was finished-- would have meant you'd lost weight.
And, by the way, if you aren't watching This Is Us, I'm not sure how we can remain friends.
*****
It's been a long week for this girl, and a couple hours before I picked her up for the ballet, she and her Mama made it home from a road trip to Texas. Her great grandfather, Jack Hanifan,was laid to rest just a couple days ago. I only met him once, when he was in town to see his granddaughter marry my son a decade ago, but I will never forget the sparkle in his eye, and the way he looked at his granddaughter when he saw her in her wedding dress for the first time. He was 92, and he had lived well, and was loved even better.
The ballet, a series of vignettes featuring the Disney Princesses (Aurora, Jasmine, Pocahantas, and Belle), was an enchanting presentation by the wonderful dancers of the Alabama Dance Theatre. Rosemary enjoyed it, and loved meeting the dancers (in full costume) afterwards, but she was just pooped. She wanted to walk down to the Court Square to see the fountain afterwards, and we did, but by the time we'd perambulated the couple blocks between the theatre and Court Square, she was done, just like this week's edition.
*****
Books I Finished This Week:
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| Borrowed from public library |
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this one for a couple reasons: I have never been able to get his powerful novel, Midwives off my mind, and because one of my children was, for about an year-long period in his life, a sleepwalker. His were not benign midnight rambles: he suffered night terrors which, frankly, terrified me and my husband as well. They finally ended the way they'd begun: abruptly and with no explanation, even to this day. (Read the rest of my review by clicking HERE.)
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| Read on my Kindle |
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Look, I'm not going to spend tons of time reviewing this book. It's another of those that everybody read when it first came out, and it had been on my TBR list for a long, long time. So here's my review:
This is a lovely, lovely novel, and you should absolutely make time to read it.
Favorite passage: “Oh, it’s simple pragmatism, Dad. It’s called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable, the deal volume would drop in half and the good guys like us would end up poor. Then where would we all be?” “On a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground?” suggested the Major.
What I'm reading now:
Garnethill by Denise Mina (bound book)
Wonder by R.J. Palacio (Kindle)
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