A Lost Summer

On this morning's news, a segment was about the reporter was calling this coming summer as "The Lost Summer". I heard that term in a movie I watched the other evening. It was called "The Big Chill", about several college friends who get together for a funeral of a mutual classmate. I may have also read it, but not sure. It doesn't matter. It was enough to get me thinking about what we are going through with COVID-19 and probably will when summer does show up. It's making me remember things of past summers, both recent and long ago.

Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, grade school summers were full of playing outside with my younger brother and our collie dog, Bambi. When we weren't playing two-person baseball, we were often going down into the backwoods making camps and generally exploring.

High school summers were filled with summer jobs and band practices for fall football games. I remember a few vacations where we would visit relatives in Maryland near Washington D.C., stopping at the Gettysburg battlefield along the way. I remember a vacation through Virginia (actually near here) to see the Endless Caverns. My first jobs were cutting grass and driving for a blind lady.

Summers during my college years was consumed with making money for college and living. I was staying at home so I saved a little. My jobs were varied: motel desk clerk, driving for that same blind lady, and finally janitor for the district Bell Telephone headquarters building one-half block from the college. I got that job during my freshman year and kept it straight through graduation, working during the school year as well.

After graduation, I went into the Army and summers disappeared. That is to say, the seasons ran together except for holidays. I took time off or vacations when my duties allowed.

I don't foresee an early end to this seclusion. There won't be any traveling to see daughters or grandchildren. No vacations with my wife. I have a couple of books by Bill Bryson that I think I will read. One, a re-read, is "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" and "One Summer: America 1927". The first is about the author growing up in the 1950s in Iowa in a town very similar to mine and doing things very much like I did. We're about nine years different in age so it was a fun read. The other is self-explanatory.

Maybe this is a good time to get serious about writing that novel.

Book Review: The Mirror & the Light

Well, I finally finished it. 754 pages. Over 7 weeks. What a slog of a read. But it was well worth it. Hilary Mantell's third novel in the trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII is the best of the three. It's been several years since I read the second, "Bringing Up the Bodies" and before that, "Wolf Hall", the first. All three were terribly long in pages, and all three took a while to read, though this last one took the longest.

The main reason it took me so long, besides being a slow reader in the first place, is the way the author writes. Not only does she use language that is similar, but not exactly the same, as that was used in dialogue in the 1500s in Tudor England, but she also has a distinctive way of writing dialogue. Whenever she was writing dialogue that involved Cromwell, his name was not used. In fact, his name was often omitted in the prose. She used the pronoun "he". I had to pay attention or I would find myself going back over sentences to see who was talking to whom. But after about 400 pages, I began to get the hang of it. 

Another thing that made it slow going was that most of the characters in the story had more than one name that would be used. Charles Brandon was the Duke of Suffolk, while Thomas Howard was the Duke of Norfolk. And many of the women were referred to similarly, but then also as the wife or daughter of some dual-named male. Fortunately, there was a six and a half page "cast of characters" at the beginning of the book that I found myself using repeatedly until about page 700.

The best part of the story was the last 50-60 pages when Cromwell was taken to the Tower of London and interrogated before he was beheaded in July 1540. The dialogue between Cromwell and his interrogators for the king was the best writing of the novel. Sometimes serious and threatening, sometimes sarcastic and even a little humorous, I found the give and take spell-binding.

I also took the time to look up some of my notes and read about a little more background about some of the characters and certain subjects and topics as well as some words I didn't know. 

 As you can see I didn't do too bad; just 3 sides of two 3x5 cards. Sometimes I use three or four cards for much smaller books. One thing I noted and went off to read more was after about two-thirds of the way through, I began to notice a similarity between Henry VIII and our current President. I was wondering if I was the only one to notice that. So I Googled it and found that...well, let's just say you might want to Google it yourself.

A final note: You don't have to read the first two to enjoy this third volume, but it is well worth it to read them if you have the time ( and who doesn't these days!).  

And You Thought a Drum Was Just For Keeping the Beat...

This morning I had my weekly Skype chat with my younger brother (by 3 years), Jerry, who lives in Colorado Springs. We bring each other up to date on things of the past week, as well as talk about things we remember from our past. One of the things we have in common is drumming. I don't drum anymore. I learned in 8th grade and played through high school. I was a pretty good drummer and finally went to State Band my senior year. I didn't play after that.

But my biggest accomplishment to my mind was to teach Jerry to play the drums. I taught him in his 8th grade and by the time he was in high school he was better than me. He went on the garner many honors with his skill and went to college to study music. When he finished his master's degree he volunteered for the Army so he could play in the NORAD Band in Colorado. This was during the Vietnam era. When he got out of the service, he and his wife, also a music major (flute), remained in the state. He began teaching in middle school for some years, retired from that and worked himself up to managing a bicycle shop, a hobby that proved useful. 

All along, he taught privately as well as played in local orchestras and bands. Today, he still teaches, though it's by Skype right now - and is a member of a local concert band which has suspended its playing for now.

All of this is leading up to my chat with him today. It began by him telling me that he had his first Skype lesson for about five of his current students. It was about replacing a drumhead on a snare drum. Then our conversation went from there to drumheads in general, then snares, then the drums, how to hold the sticks, and then back to drums, and the next thing we knew we were approaching noon (my time - we set a one-hour time limit generally) when both of us have other things to do; him more than me usually.

Anyway, I so enjoyed discussing some of the things I learned about drums I wanted to mention them here, but I am going to some mental organizing first and then post again. So actually, I never got to the title of today's blog. I will.

But it truly was a very interesting Skype call today. \

Stay home and Stay Safe!