Amsonia

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

T.S. Eliot (from Four Quartets)

My sister died last week.

It wasn’t a surprise; she had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer eight and a half years previously. But she had good medical care, and her decline was slow and mostly manageable. Until it wasn’t, and she had a sudden and precipitous decline. On Saturday, she was out at a local ballet performance. On Sunday, she was in the emergency room. Monday, hospice was called in, and she died on Thursday. Her wife and her kids and I were with her at the end; hospice provided exemplary care.

But oh, the ache.

A couple of days after she died, I opened the newspaper and a movie review jumped off the page at me. I’m not a huge movie-goer but Sarah was, and the last time I’d been in a movie theater was a couple of months ago, with her. [We saw Black Bag, and we were the ONLY people in the theater.] So – in part as a way to honor Sarah’s love for moviegoing – my daughter and I set off for a late afternoon showing of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. And it was perfect and Sarah would have loved it. It’s half in French, half in English. It’s set in Paris (with a lot at Shakespeare & Company) and also in an English country manor house turned writing retreat. It has a Mr. Darcy, it has spitting llamas, and who doesn’t love a movie in which *the* Frederick Wiseman has a cameo.

Somewhere along the line, one character quotes Wordsworth at another: “that best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”

In my head, I re-gendered the quote, thinking of the little acts of kindness and love carried out by my sister.

Go forth with love. See a movie, plant a perennial, bake some breadsticks, mail a postcard. Advocate for the voiceless, volunteer with a local organzation. All of these are the little acts that a good person does, day in and day out. And these little acts into the future honor the past.

Go forth with love.

A Typeface for Mrs. Pollifax

The Mrs. Pollifax books are delightful so when I found a copy of A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax in a little free library, I took it even though I'd read it six years ago and even though it was a cheap trade paperback from 1973. 

Imagine my delight at the typography! That chapter heading typeface looks just like the font I used in junior high school shop class to make personalized stationery. It's kind of awful and wonderful, and harkens back to old school handwriting: the capital F, the capital L. 

I think it's either Coronet or Ribbon, thanks to What The Font, a nifty site where you can upload an image and it'll identify the typeface. 

Also, I did rather enjoy the description of golf, even if "greensward" is one word (not two):

In Langley, Virginia, it was mid-afternoon. Carstairs inserted the key into the lock of his office door and entered with a sigh of deep relief. He felt he had been excessively well-behaved today. He had risen at dawn, driven bumper-to-bumper to the golf club, awaited his turn in a milling crowd and played eighteen holes of golf under a humid, 90-degree sun. His doctor had told him the fresh air and exercise would rejuvenate him but instead he felt hot, irritable, and betrayed. To a man accustomed to deploying live human beings around the world he could think of nothing more idiotic than mindlessly pushing an inanimate ball around a green sward in the sun.

In Which Lung Cancer Meets A Birthday

Today is my sister’s birthday. She's pretty cute, eh?

More than 8 years ago, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. For the past 8 years, she has worked tirelessly on behalf of lung cancer research and advocacy. Among other things, she served as a patient representative to panels run by the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP).

What is the CDMRP? From its website:

The CDMRP originated in 1992 via a Congressional appropriation to foster novel approaches to biomedical research in response to the expressed needs of its stakeholders-the American public, the military, and Congress.

One of the specific and unusual aspects of the program is that they involve consumer advocates throughout the program cycle – that’s what my sister did for several program cycles.

She was even profiled on the CDMRP’s website (and/but you'll notice I had to go to the Internet Archive to find "her" page). What she said about her association with the CDMRP is:

The work is hard, especially for someone like me who lacks a scientific background. The opportunity, however, to participate in something so important makes all the hours spent sweating over the applications thoroughly worthwhile. I feel tremendous hope for the future when I get to see what the researchers are working on, and I am always honored and humbled to share a conference table with the brilliant scientists who are superheroes to me and my fellow patients. To be able to provide the patient perspective on proposed research is a gift that I cherish, and I take great pride in the work I have been able to do for the LCRP.

Besides the fact that it’s her birthday, why am I writing about this?

Because the current year’s budget for the CDMRP is about 43% of what it was last year, and lung cancer has been cut out altogether.

What kind of cancer kllls more people than any other, by a lot? LUNG CANCER.

If you feel up to it, please complain to your congressional representative. And if you have a few spare nickels, please consider a donation to Lungevity. Thanks.

In which we put our heads in the sand

The other day, I was rummaging around on the intertubes, and I landed on a TimesMachine page for a 1952 copy of the New York Times. What really intrigued me wasn't the newsy stuff on that page, the stuff I'd been looking for - but that on the lower right hand corner appeared a crossword puzzle! An edited by Margaret Farrar puzzle, from 1952.

Being a person who *really* likes doing the NYT puzzle every single day in pen, I grabbed the puzzle image and printed it out for my train ride home.

And man, it is HARD. It is larded with things I had to look up - like "Creator of Mr. Tutt" and "Governor of Hawaii" and "Senator from Tacoma". And it's full of uncommon (archaic) words like the answers to "Assumes presumptuously" and "Roasted" and "Splinter". And then there was the blasé generic "Actress from Germany". I did get "White House initials-to-be" right off the bat because that answer still turns up in current puzzles - though clued way differently (i.e. W.W. II hero who retired from the mil. to run for president or H.S.T.'s successor or Onetime White House inits.)

All in all, it was an entertaining and engaging exercise but I hope to not encounter a "Relative of the civet" or a "Two-year-old sheep" anytime soon.

If you'd like to try, here you go:

And the 2025 classic read is ...

Middlemarch. Yes, I've read it before - I read it in college for English 272, which was a survey class on some 19th century Brit Lit classics. (I still have the asssigned copy, which is why I know what specific class it was ... I wrote it inside the cover.)

But Middlemarch slithered into my consciousness because of that column in the New York Times Book Review called "By The Book" - a weekly interview with some author who has just published something. I skim it every week, and often it's too twee for words, but what I started to notice was how many people mentioned Middlemarch in response to a question.

• What books are on your night stand?
• What books are you embarrassed to admit you’ve never read?
• What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
• What’s the last great book you read?
• Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

Because this had come up in conversation, on Sunday, my sister texted me a picture of the 12/29/2024 book review because yes, Elda Rotor named Middlemarch as something she was embarrassed not to have read.

In a fit of something or other, I sat down at my computer and I methodically searched the Times website for the entirety of 2024, and located 51 of the 52 "By The Book"columns. There may have been one on 9/1/24 - but I couldn't surface it. And 11 times in 51 weeks, someone answered Middlemarch. That's 20 or 22% of the time! (Math is complicated because Robert Kagan gave Middlemarch as the answer to two different questions in the same interview.)  If you would like to see the fruits of my labors, I made a spreadsheet - it's here. 

This is a long way around to explain why I'm cracking Middlemarch open later.