I'm Baaack!

 I'm finally back to writing. I've had several weeks' worth of reading to do for my two book clubs as well as just some personal reading that I felt I owed myself. Consequently, my blog has suffered. Additionally, we were finally able to take a few days earlier this month to travel to New Jersey to see my oldest daughter and her family. And we finished it off by seeing our youngest daughter on our way back through PA and taking her to dinner one night.

Reading-wise, as I said, it was busy. Six books in June from my last post on the 10th of June, and nine more this month - finished the ninth one just yesterday. Of those fifteen, nine were nonfiction, and six were fiction.

It wasn't always comfortable reading. We have had very hot weather - 90 degrees plus for over two weeks - and again our air conditioner has been broken for most of that time. Oh, and did I say I got no reading done on our 4-day trip north?

But I have been diligent in writing reviews on my Goodreads account. They are getting better. Not great yet, but a few readers do respond by hitting the thumbs-up icon. 

And I watched most of the 2021 Tour de France and am still watching a fair amount of the Tokyo Olympics. Remember, I carried the 1984 torch on its way to Los Angeles. And I watched the U.S. Open and the (British) Open in the last two months. So I have had a few things other than blogging to do I guess.

Notable nonfiction during this period: Nuremburg: Infamy on Trial (Joseph Persico); The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert); Season to Taste (Molly Birnbaum); Essays After Eighty (Donald Hall); Gallopoli (Alan Moorehead)

Best fiction: Before the Poison (Peter Robinson); The Last Bookshop in London (Madeline Martin); Angels in the Gloom (Anne Perry); Flashman (George MacDonald Frazer)

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.