Get busy living

Reading my mom's biography that's she's compiled over the years ... this stands out. She was recovering from the birth of my middle sis.

"Dad brought me 'The Guns of August' by Barbara Tuchman. I somehow managed to finish it in the five days I stayed in the hospital. Probably the last book I read for 20 years. Things got rather busy after that."

Five post-partum hospital days.

Wow.

And reading "The Guns of August" in 5 days.

After birth of kid 4 of 7. And my dad brought her such a weighty book.

Families are interesting, aren't they? (And things got busy!)

Also "Guns of August" is still on my to-read list.

I miss my dad. So many questions I would love to ask him. But he was a pretty private person; guess that's where I get it from. 

 

A summer night in 2019

Late summer is such a drowsy time. The season is cresting and heading downhill to autumn.

The back-to-school ads and commercials have started, but it's hard to take them seriously. All of August lies before us, a last blast of (hopefully) sun and lazy days of kids playing hoops in the street or zooming along the sidewalks on scooters. The fireflies stuck around 'til early July, kind of a rarity these years.

In my neck of Pittsburgh, the last day of July 2019 is hot, with towering clouds and a sky that looks ready to unload, yet again, cosmic buckets of rain. But so far, no showers. The bizarre weather manifests in a rainbow over thunder gray skies as I head home from meeting a friend on the North Shore.

(Photo by Katy Buchanan)

Home is drowsy, too. Filled with the murmuring hum of fridge and dehumidifier, the quiet tick-tock of a battery-powered clock. And, even though the windows are closed, I can still hear the steady burr of legions of crickets.

The dining room has a good view of the back yard and while I'm watching in the early evening, a hummingbird stops twice to fill up from the feeder.

I really love summer.

The photo is from June 21, the  summer solstice, at Randyland in Pittsburgh. A happy place.

Late July

(Photo by Katy Buchanan)

It's late Thursday, the third of three cool, dry days after a bucket-drenching rain on Monday in Pittsburgh. (I'm keeping track on my 2019 desk calendar, and 'bucket-drenching rain' is showing up a lot.)

A hummingbird just skimmed in front of my living room window and front screen door ... I'm puzzled because the lobelia is on one side of the house and the hummer feeder is on the back side, so not sure what that little guy was looking for. Except, now that I have seen this, my front porch pots next year definitely will not be papyrus.

I love June; it is so full of promise and goes by so fast. One phenomenon I've enjoyed this year, really late into the summer season is fireflies. They appeared in the back yard in mid- to late June and kept flashing into mid-July. We don't treat our lawns for anything, so maybe that's why. The back yard has a deep, dark slope and it is really magical seeing those golden firefly flickers late into the midsummer night.

Anyway, we are now almost at the end of July, when the season starts to end. I hate that I can already see September, and that back-to-school ads are popping up online and in print circulars.

One thing I've noticed over the years: Early summer is so quiet. By late July the crickets and katydids are doing their buzz and hum. That's how you know the season is changing.

The photo is of Stargazer lilies, at my mom's house. I think the vase is as pretty as the flowers.

A short future of long days

Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh's North Side,
Summer Solstice, 2019. (Photo by Katy Buchanan)

Late dusk on the evening after June solstice. We sat outside, reading and enjoying the long, slanting rays of the young summer sun.

After a bit, we finished dinner and caught the last 20 minutes of "Wedding Crashers." (Why we are watching an at least 15-year-old film is a subject for another night.)

Anyway. Owen Wilson's character is spiraling into despair, and, for some reason, his handsome-ugly face, framed by a dyed blond choppy do, reminds me of rocker Rod Stewart. Then, about 8 to 10 minutes later, the movie is done and the song laid over the final scene is Stewart's "Stay With Me." Not going into what the lyrics of that song mean for the movie, but we started talking about the music of our lives, which included the output of Stewart in his heyday.

We agreed that, as young people, we listened mostly for the music, not the words. And I still love the music — its shape, its beats, its structure —but holy cow, the words for "Stay With Me" are awful.  How much kicking of a woman can you do, while still asking her to stick around?

Which also puts me in mind of "Oklahoma," on stage this weekend in Pittsburgh (the Rodgers & Hammerstein version, not the current-day revival in New York). A good friend is reviewing, we had a chat about that and other things during a nice walk on this rare sunshine-y June Saturday in southwestern Pennsylvania. The music, and especially, the dancing, are gorgeous, but the lyrics to some of the songs ("Everything's Up To Date In Kansas City") and ("I'm Just A Girl Who Cain't Say No") to name two, definitely serve up some suggestions for reflection.

I know these works are products of their times. And I'm not really sure what I want to say about them. In retrospect, I enjoyed the art of these artists, in part, not in whole.

Circling back, there is a short future of long days ahead of us. I'm hoping for a modicum of sunshine.

The following link goes to the scene from the 1955 film, scene of the Kansas City song. Choreography is awesome.
Everything's Up To Date in Kansas City

Thunder and fireflies (and, for a change, rain)

It has been a very wet and gloomy week here in Pittsburgh. The dreary details have to do with something called the northern oscillation, and, I guess, warm Gulf of Mexico air meeting slightly cooler air coming from the north.

Last night, (June 18) after a day of frowning skies and occasional showers, the clouds parted briefly around 6 or so and the blue sky appeared. That was nice. Even nicer was the firefly show.
I stood out on the front porch, mostly just to see the evening blue and guess what, the summer lightning bugs made their appearance in the dusk. There are so few of them these days; I remember catching them in mayonnaise jars when I was a kid. Now, I feel fortunate to see three or four flickering around my yard on a late June night. (Of course, maybe they are drowning.)

A few weeks ago, a sales kid came knocking on the door, pitching a lawn pesticide service, including the admonition "a lot of your neighbors have signed up!" Why is that a selling point? I guess it probably isn't ... just something the door-to-door kids are told to say. But my own idea is that I would rather see fireflies in June than a weed-free lawn all summer.

Here is a front yard in my hilly neighborhood. No grass, lots of plants, shrubs and trees and hopefully no need for lawn poison. Really pretty.

(Photo by Katy Buchanan)

P.S. Flash flood watch this afternoon at 3 p.m. til 5:30 p.m. Clear from 6-ish on to about 8. But thunder and downpours have returned as we roll towards midnight. More of the same expected Thursday. Ray Bradbury's "Long Rain" was extraordinarily prescient.

Up early and what a racket!

Sunday morning. (Photo by Katy Buchanan)

One of the ways life changes with age is the diminishing capacity for sleep. (Note: I am not saying need for sleep, just capacity. Big difference.) That diminishing capacity means wakefulness during hours, that, in youth, I would have been thoughtlessly enjoying sleep. That diminishing capacity also means that, that same wakefulness blesses me with the gradual noise of early mornings.

The 3 a.m. quiet, with cat sitting at an open window. Me at my laptop, checking email and newspapers. Then an increasing racketing of bird song, so that by 5 a.m.-ish the world outside is a symphony of chirps and calls. (Cat has abandoned window by this point and is snoozing in his basket.)

It's prime bird time and I would not be alive to it were it not for the fact that I can't sleep. I think there is some irony involved here. Birds are wide awake, but that's because it's their job.

Anyway, I love the before-dawn chorus. It really is a racket, and I can hear layers of songs, some close, others a bit farther away.

As an aside, one night last week I watched swallows dipping and diving in the 5 p.m.-ish sky, near my Mom's house, chasing after bugs for their evening meal. They are pretty birds. Glad I noticed, but could not help but wonder what a small number of them were flitting about.

Pretty sky in Pittsburgh this morning, too.

Limits of toleration and a discussion of copy editors

As we say en Français: Plus ça change... 

Photos by Katy Buchanan

From page A-2 of Aug. 28, 1981 Boston Herald American, saved from my honeymoon. (Not saved for the news, but for the Red Sox score, since we went to Fenway. These photos show the reverse of the HA's front page mast with the Sox-A's score, which, to forestall any questions, I do not remember and I'm not turning over the page to find out. (So there 😀)  I just saved because I was young, in love and keeping every scrap of paper from our week in Boston and Cape Cod.

Looking at these also made me feel: a) Nostalgic for UPI (one of my former employers) and for the many U.S. daily, weekly and community newspapers that have gone to their graves since then, and 2) Grateful for the training I received from them as a young journalist.

As an aside, I believe journalism needs more well-read, intellectually adventurous copy editors. I know the trend is to centralized desks where the editors are far from the reporters and the stories they are filing, but that shouldn't preclude good editing (excepting, perhaps, in stories involving local geography). A copy editor's best friend, as far as I'm concerned, is the phone. Confused? Unsure? Call the reporter. I know reporters who have already gone a few rounds with their direct editors can get cranky when copy editors call, and I don't blame them, but the whole point is to be correct and factual. One of my worst memories from my copy editor days was the time an assistant city editor suggested I didn't have enough to do when I questioned an education writer's math in a story at the Pittsburgh Press. The reporter's math was wrong. And math is not my best subject. (And do not get me started on dangling modifiers.)

Getting back to the first sentence in the previous paragraph, please see this delightful piece from the New Yorker's 'Comma Queen.' Greek To Me