Tony, Don and Ralph

I recently went to the theater to see two movies which, on the surface, seemed to have nothing in common. Except that they did, the most obvious being that both were stories about “big, strong men.”

The first film was Peter Farrelly’s Green Book, an (almost) true-to-life story about the relationship between Dr. Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga.

The story begins when Tony is temporarily laid off from his job as – well, as a big, strong man. That is, as a bouncer at the Copacabana in New York City. 

It is 1962 and Tony wants to stay away from the shadier side of his Italian American neighborhood so he accepts a job driving pianist Dr. Don Shirley on a concert tour through the American South. (Oh, did I forget to mention that Dr. Shirley is African American and that Vallelonga is a bona-fida [as I second generation Italian American, I stand by my spelling] bigot?)

Now I know that there is some controversy about the way Dr. Shirley is depicted in this movie and because Tony is the one portrayed as “the hero.” But that was not how I saw it. First of all, Dr. Shirley is not just any musician, he is a prodigy who started playing at the age of two. During his career, he was one of only three pianists who played at the La Scala Opera House in Milan. He also played with (among others) the Chicago Symphony, Boston Pops, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, and with Duke Ellington at Carnegie Hall. But for his concert tour, he played a kind of third stream jazz that his audiences (including Tony) loved.

At one point during this movie, both men land in a southern jail that looks remarkably like the one in Mayberry, except that their jailers were nothing like Andy, or even like Barney on his worst day. And it is not Tony who gets them out, but Dr. Shirley who demands his right to make a phone call, which he makes to – wait, I don’t want to spoil it for you!

At another point during this movie Dr. Shirley, who has three doctorate degrees and speaks eight languages, decries that he often feels as though he isn’t “black enough” for some, or “white enough” for others, and seems to be wondering where he fits in. (For me, if Dr. Shirley had a problem fitting in, it wasn’t because he wasn’t black enough or because he wasn’t white enough, but was because he was a genius and most of the rest of us are not.)

The other movie I saw (with my granddaughter Chloe) was Disney’s animated Ralph Breaks the Internet, the story about what happens when Wreck-It-Ralph gets tired of being the bad guy in a video game and wants to become "the hero." To accomplish this, Ralph offers to go to the Internet (Did you know it was a real place?) with his best friend, Vanellope, to help her find a replacement part for her racing game.

This movie is hilarious. My favorite scene occurs when Vanellope drops in on all the Disney princesses and tries to tell them that she’s a princess too:

Pocahontas: What kind of a princess are you?

Vanellope: What kind?

Rapunzel: Do you have magic hair?

Vanellope: No!

Elsa: Magic Hands?

Vanellope:  No!

Snow White: Were you poisoned?

Vanellope: No!

Cinderella: Do animals talk to you?

Vanellope: No!

Rapunzel: Do people assume that all your problems got solved because a big, strong man showed up?

Vanellope: Yes! What’s up with that?

All the Princesses: She is a princess!

I love it!

And I love that the two movies are similar in that they both recognize the giving, healing and loving nature of friendship, and because they recognize that sometimes even big, strong men have to be rescued!

So, I encourage you to go see these movies, especially Green Book, which is billed as (and is) a “feel good” movie - because there just aren’t enough of those around anymore! 

My memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Things, They are A-Changin’

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Or at least it’s beginning to feel like Christmas.

“It’s cold today,” a friend of mine said this afternoon as he held on to his car door before a gust of wind could slam it shut.

“It is and I love it!” I responded.

“Really? You like the cold?”

“No. Not the cold. I like when the seasons change. Like when summer becomes autumn, and autumn becomes winter.”

And it’s true. I do like it because everything changes and I like watching things evolve and grow. Like a grandchild becoming a young adult.

“Chloe, what do you want for Christmas?” I asked my ten-year-old granddaughter over the weekend.

“Books,” she answered.

“Really? 

She nodded.

What else?”

“Nothing else. Just books.”

This is a grandchild after a grandmother’s heart!

On the way home from work I saw a sign that read: Be a Santa to a Senior this Year” and I laughed. On the way home, I listened to Christmas songs - to the Carpenters singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and to Gene Autry’s Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Talk about things changing! I can’t believe I was just a child when that song first came out! 

But there’s nothing like music to put me in the mood. Maybe I will be a Santa to a senior this year! ( Just kidding!!)

So, I am looking forward to Christmas - to these last few days of November as they make way for December, and to December as it rolls toward Christmas. This is the time of year that’s all about anticipation, and anticipation isn’t just for kids. So, I hope you’re moving toward a merry little Christmas (or Kwanzaa or Chanukah or whatever holiday you celebrate), and more importantly, I hope you enjoy every little step along the way.

Godspeed, everyone!

My second memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Reindeer Fly, Don't They?

I left work at my usual time on Thursday but decided to stop first to do a little shopping and to get that bowl of cabbage beet borscht I’d been craving. So it was dark by the time I got back on the road.

I was driving along Route 73, behind the usual line of cars, just a mile or two before reaching Skippack Village when, from the corner of my eye, I saw a deer lying on the grass. Another deer was hovering above him, moving from one side of him to the other, touching his nose to the fallen deer as though he were encouraging him to get up. I wondered later if either deer ever recovered, which didn’t seem entirely impossible. Not after what I saw in November, a year ago.

I was in my school bus that time. It was early afternoon and I was driving down Valley Road when I saw a deer run out of the woods and get hit by a car two vehicles in front of me. I watched as the deer dropped to his knees and slid all the way across the highway where he stood up and ran away.  

Anyway, it’s November and, I’m told, mating season for deer who aren’t thinking about anything else so I try to be more careful than usual. But as I drove home that night, I couldn’t help wondering why Santa’s deer can fly but ours can’t. Maybe my son-in-law will know. He’s a magician, you know, and he just might know what secret Santa uses to make reindeer fly!   

My memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Butterfly

In order to write my last post, http://www.tonimccloe.com/2018/10/the-love-u-keep.html, I had to revisit the opera scene from the movie Philadelphia, and I’m so glad I did because it brought back memories from my childhood, memories of growing up in an Italian American household where opera flowed as freely as wine and where my sisters and I used to run through the house singing “Figaro, Figaro” at the top of our lungs.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love opera. If you think you don’t, I dare you to listen to Nessum Dorma or Pie Jesu or Summertime and then tell me you don’t!

But before you begin listening, let me warn you - opera can be addictive! I should know because for the past week I have been listening to my favorite aria, again and again, hoping to absorb it into my consciousness even as it remains just beyond my reach. The aria, Un bel di Vedremo, is from Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” which tells a story about an American naval officer, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, who marries a beautiful, 15-year-old Geisha girl and then abandons her.    

In this aria, Madame Butterfly declares that one fine day (un bel di), Pinkerton will return (vedremo) and she will die of happiness, which of course is not exactly what happens. In the recording I listened to, Maria Callas foretells Madame Butterfly’s death with a note so high it screams Butterfly’s pain as she plunges the samurai sword into her abdomen. And even after the last note is sung, the music continues so exquisitely, I must listen to it again because the first three notes (un bel di) are as beautiful as the last. 

Now, if you are waiting for me to come up with some moral to this story, I don’t have one - except  to tell you that, despite Butterfly’s dilemma, life is good especially when we surround ourselves with the people and things we love, even those that seem to exist just beyond our reach.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

                              

The Love U Keep

It begins with strings:

Andrew: “Do you mind this music? Do you like opera?”

Joe: “I am not that familiar with opera, Andrew.”

Andrew: “This is my favorite aria.”

A female voice begins to sing “La Mamma Morta” as Andrew tells Joe the name of the singer, the opera, the composer:  

“It’s Maria Callus.

Andrea Chenier

Umberto Giodano”

Callas sings, Joe looks at his watch, and Andrew continues:

“This is Maddalena saying how
during the French Revolution 
a mob set fire to her house 
and her mother died 
– saving her.” 
The music slows. 
“Do you hear the heartache in her voice? Can you feel it, Joe?”

The music reaches a crescendo and Andrew bends from the middle as though wounded by the single cello that echoes Maddalena’s grief. 

The camera moves back and shoots from above Andrew’s head and we see the IV pole he is holding. Andrew is dying. He is emaciated. “I was alone,” Andrew continues, explaining it to Joe (as though he were a two-year-old).

“Surrounded by nothingness.

Hunger and misery.

Until love found me and said

‘Live!

You must live.

Heaven is in my eyes.

You are not alone.’”

There is a fireplace in the room casting light and shadow across Joe’s face until, as we watch, Joe not only feels it, he becomes one with it.

The above is, of course, a scene from the movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, and until last week, it was my all-time favorite movie scene (especially because it is followed by a scene in which Joe goes home, and sees his infant daughter and his wife with new eyes).

I say “until last week” because that was when I saw a scene that rivals the one above as my favorite. The movie is George Tillman Jr’s The Hate U Give, a story about an African American teenager who moves back and forth between her wealthy, white prep school, and her poor black neighborhood and family. Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) is the daughter of a strong mother (Regina Hall) and a loving father (Russell Hornsby) who teaches his children both black pride and how to behave in case they are stopped by a policeman.

But Starr’s childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith) has had no such training and Starr is forced to watch as Khalil, who reaches for a hairbrush, is fatally shot by a policeman. At first Starr is traumatized, then enraged, and finally, she is forced to act.  

In the scene I loved, Starr faces her white, prep-school boyfriend, Chris (KJ Apa), who tells her, “I don’t see color. I see people.” 

And Starr, angry now, replies, “If you don’t see my blackness, you don’t see me.”

“I see you,” Chris says gently as he touches his hand to her face.

And with that Tillman tells us that it is not enough to just see "blackness." We must also isolate and recognize its beauty and applaud its courage.  


My memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE   

It’s a Matter of Time

In the post, I called Oscar and Felix, http://www.tonimccloe.com/2018/09/oscar-and-felix.html

I told you why I was offered a $50 dollar gift certificate to a bookstore. Well, the gift card finally arrived and I wasted no time taking it to the Barnes & Noble in Willow Grove where I looked for the books I most wanted to read.

 The first was a book called The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli who, according to the back cover, is “the physicist known for making complex science intelligible.” (God, I hope so.) If you know me, or if you have read my memoir, Rude Awakening, you know that I have long been fascinated by the concept of time.

In that book, I wrote that one of the things I learned during my rude awakening was that “there is no such thing as linear time, and that all things happen simultaneously. I suppose that another way of saying it is that we don’t exist in time, but rather, we exist, and time is superimposed onto us” (in other words, it’s wired into our brains) “to give us a sense of structure and order much the same way the lines of latitude and longitude are placed onto a map to give us a sense of place.”

“The secrets of the universe,” I wrote, “aren’t really secrets. We all know them all the time. We simply don’t know how to access them.” Or – I am smart enough to know that the answers to all the questions lie somewhere inside of me (and you), but I am not smart enough to find them. However, according to the NPR critique quoted on the book’s back cover, Carlo Rovelli is an Italian physicist-poet who sees “the world or, more adequately, physical reality, as a lyrical narrative written in some hidden code that the human mind can decipher.” (Emphasis mine.) Wish me luck! I’m about to find out.

Of the other two books I selected, one is called The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which was recommended by my son who bought a copy of it this past summer while he was here visiting from Germany where he lives. The third book is James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, a love story he wrote back in 1974 which, I was intrigued to discover, has just been made into a movie that will be released later this year.

So with these three books and the two I have yet to read for my Literature/Discussion class, I should be able to meet my Goodreads reading challenge (of 50 books) well before the end of the year.

Which reminds me, next year I am going to promise to read less than a dozen books because the ones I most want to read are some of the longest ever written, including Les Miserables, Doctor Zhivago, and War and Peace. I have, for years, been telling myself that I was saving those books for when I reach 80 which, no doubt, will arrive while I’m reading them.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Oscar and Felix

A friend of mine tapped the window of my school bus one morning earlier this week, (scaring me half to death so engrossed was I in the book I was reading) and said,

“My son came to visit last night.”

“That was nice,” I replied.

“No, it wasn’t," he said. “He had a cold and I got angry. ‘Don’t you know that at our age your mother and I are susceptible to colds?’”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he wanted some soup.”

I laughed.

“So I made him some soup and told him not to touch anything.”

By this time I felt as though I were playing Oscar to his Felix, and I wanted to move back a step or two, but I was sitting inside my bus and he was standing outside it.

“Fred,” I said, “does it ever surprise you when you hear about someone’s death? Someone who’s younger than you?” At 76, Fred is a year younger than me.

“I think about it all the time,” he said.

I do too.

All of which brings me back to a memory from this past July when I got a call from my health insurance rep who said they wanted to send a nurse to the house to visit me. “The nurse will report their findings to your doctor,” she said.

Too late, I thought as I had just gotten over four bouts of bronchitis in as many weeks, and had even spent a night in the emergency room. I didn’t want to submit to another examination, but she promised to give me a $50 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble if I did, so I agreed.

When the nurse got there he started asking a lot of questions: How old are you? Do you smoke? What medicines do you take? Blah, Blah, Blah. I answered all his questions, but when he asked how much I weighed, I didn’t want to tell him.  Unlike my age, my weight is my secret - and my business. But I wanted that gift certificate so I finally conceded.

When he heard the number, he looked as though he were surprised and said, “You carry your weight well.” And then, as though he thought I was the Pillsbury dough boy, he poked me in the stomach and said, “Except for right there.” (Unlike the Pillsbury dough boy, I did not giggle.)

But to get back to what I was saying earlier, I do often think about my mortality. But, and here’s my real secret, I am - despite my thoughts, despite my age, and despite the fact that I am (apparently) overweight - happy, and happier than I’ve ever been before.

My book, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

What's Going On

Summer has ended and I have been back at work as a school bus driver for almost a month now and loving it, loving that it takes me away from myself and my worries, and that between my morning and afternoon runs, between taking my students to school and bringing them home again, I have four hours to myself to do anything I want to do. 

And what I have been doing a lot of during my free time is walking and listening to music while I walk. What I enjoy is listening to classics like Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On, which is my all-time favorite album and the only album I can listen to from beginning to end over and over again. It is also the album that showed how prescient he was about global health and global warming. I also like to listen to modern classics, to everything from Sam Smith’s Lay Me Down to Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up. I listen to music because, for me, it acts like a propeller and makes me believe I can spread my arms and fly, although every once in a while I hear a song that has the exact opposite effect on me. Like Groban’s Bring Him Home, a song which, when I heard it for the first time, stopped me dead in my tracks and threatened to bring me to my knees.

Sometimes while on my afternoon run I drive past a shopping center that was once a part of my childhood and of my growing up years. When we were young, my four sisters and I used to watch it being built. That shopping center is also where I met my best friend back in 1961 when we were both working as waitresses at the Horn and Hardart restaurant. She was 16 and I was 19 and we remained friends until the early 2000’s when she died unexpectedly. But before that, she had a habit that I loved. Whenever I wanted to talk to her about something serious, I would begin with her name. “Bernice,” I would say, and she would always respond with the single word, “Listening.” I guess passing that mall brought that memory back to me because last night when I sat down to meditate I imagined God calling my name and I responded the way Bernice always responded to me, with the single word, “Listening.”

My memoir, Dear Elvis, can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

For Better or Worse

I often sign up for a literature/discussion group given at Temple University’s Ambler campus where each semester the instructor assigns us five books that are somehow related. The topic this time is “Marriage - better, worse or not at all.”

It’s funny that that is the topic because I have been thinking a lot about marriage lately, and I guess these thoughts started in May as I watched the royal couple exchange their wedding vows. Looking back, what stayed with me was the way Prince Charles stepped up to the plate to walk the bride down the aisle, the unforgettable sermon by Bishop Curry, the way the Kingdom Gospel Choir sang Stand by Me, and the sight of Doria Ragland, Meghan's mother, looking alone, serene, beautiful, and regal.

A week after that wedding, my granddaughter, who wrote the post A Teacher Speaks, Arm Us in this blog, got married in Harrisburg in a wedding as elegant and as beautiful as that of the royals.

During that ceremony, the bride and groom exchanged vows, not just to one another, but also to my granddaughter’s five-year-old child from a previous marriage. As the bride and groom each took one of her hands, they promised to love, protect and guide her through the years. And as he spoke, the bridegroom became so overwhelmed with emotion he fought back tears, as did almost everyone in attendance, including I who had never cried at a wedding before.

Of course, after a wedding comes the marriage. But what I know about marriage could fit in a thimble with plenty of room to spare. And what I believe is that a marriage is supposed to be happy. Looking over the the five books assigned for this class - Mrs. Bridge by Ethan Connell, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, Days of Abandonment by Elana Ferrante and An American Marriage by Tayari Jones – from what I’ve read and gleaned so far, although beautifully written, there isn’t a happy marriage among them.

 But all this musing about marriage reminds me suddenly of something that happened long ago after I met a man I have written about often in this blog, and in my books. It happened not long after I met him which was five years after he became a widower, losing his wife of forty years. 

We were sitting together in the living room when I got up and went into his kitchen for a bottle of water. In the dining room, I passed a picture of him and his wife. Enchanted by the way they looked together I picked it up and returned to where I’d been sitting with him earlier. “I love this picture,” I told him, “The two of you look so happy. You look so per-.“ 

“No. Don’t say it,” he spoke, interrupting me. “It was a marriage. It was sometimes great. But it was never perfect.”

Good enough, I think now. Quite good enough. 

My second book, Dear Elvis, a memoir about grief and loss, can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

BlacKkKlansman, A Review

Imagine that you are sitting at home relaxing. There is a television set turned on in front of you and you are idly watching it when what you see on the screen is an airplane striking the side of a building. You are bewildered. Upset. Confused. There is a commentator in the background talking, explaining, interpreting. But none of it makes sense. Imagine that you have been sitting there for a while when what you see next is a second plane slamming itself into another building. Now you are beside yourself feeling frightened, terrified, terrorized. If you can imagine all of that, multiply it by two and you will know what I felt last week watching the credits roll at the end of the movie on the screen in front of me.

The movie is Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and yes, it is that powerful. A true story, it is based on a memoir written by Ron Stallworth, a Black Colorado Springs police detective who infiltrated the Klan in the mid-1970’s. Stallworth, played by John David Washington (Denzel Washington’s son), initiated contact with the Klan when he responded to an ad in the local newspaper which said the group was looking for new recruits.

Contacted days later by the head of the local chapter of the Klan (and then by David Duke who was the national leader of “the organization” as its members liked to call it), Stallworth managed to convince the Klansmen that he was a diehard racist. When he asked his supervisor for a white officer to play his counterpart in face-to-face meetings while he maintained contact over the phone, the chief innocently asked, “Can you do that?” and Stallworth answered, “Chief, with the right white man we can do anything.”

Movie critic A. O. Scott of the New York Times calls this movie “a furious, funny, blunt, and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It is an alarm clock in the midst of a historical nightmare.” It is also a movie that depicts and reflects white terrorism and racial hatred in today’s America with impassioned honesty, intense drama, and at times, hilarious accuracy. BlacKkKlansman is a movie not to be missed. 

 

My second book, Dear Elvis, a memoir about grief and loss, can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Today is August 28!

Today is August 28! Summer is almost over and I am getting ready to go back to work next Wednesday. And although I didn’t travel much further than Atlantic City this summer, I did, as anticipated, read a lot of books.

One of my favorites was Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing, a story about a young African American woman who is traveling with her two children across rural Mississippi to pick up their white father who has just been released from prison. Ward’s story is beautiful and haunting and as current as today’s headlines.

Another book I read was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which is a story about a gay author, Arthur Less, who decides to go on a trip around the world in an attempt to escape both the wedding of his ex-lover and his next birthday – his 50th!

Speaking of birthdays today is August 28 and the fifty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington. I know that because of another book I read, Behind the Dream, which is a look at the events leading up to that March as experienced by Clarence B. Jones, friend, lawyer, and confidante to Dr. King who, if many of us have a way of turning into a god, Jones has a way of making human. Jones is also the man who smuggled MLK's "Letter" from the Birmingham jail in April of 1963.

Anyway, today is August 28 and the reason I keep mentioning the date is that in two days I will be celebrating a milestone birthday of my own, which reminds me of a conversation I had earlier this year.

“Mom-mom,” my oldest grandson asked, “how old are you?”

“Seventy-four.”

Michael was silent for a second or two, and then, “Mom-mom, I just did the math. You’re 76.”

“I am?” I said. And then, “Oh, my God you’re right! How did that happen?”

Which leads me to wonder how Greer could write an entire book about turning 50 when the double digits looming ahead of me seem like two knighted sentinels daring me to approach.

But after thinking about it, I have decided that I will approach 77, and I will conquer it, and then – OMG after 77 comes 78! 

My second book, Dear Elvis, a memoir about grief and loss, can be found at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Once Upon a Dream

I don't know how many of you frequent the Goodreads website, but I do and I decided that this year I would take their reading challenge and commit myself to reading fifty books, and I am happy to report that I am two books ahead of schedule, which amazes me because I am not a fast reader. I am also still re-reading my journals and although I am almost finished I still have the four or five I wrote this past year to complete. While reading, I found this rather strange entry under the date November 2, 2017 (which just happens to be All Souls Day).  

"I woke up this morning and, with my eyes still closed, my first thought was of God and my second was about Don (a friend of mine who died three years earlier). 

"When I think of Don I think of him as being in God's protective care. Not that I'm not, the difference being that I believe he can feel God's presence and that, even though I want to feel it, there is something between us, God and I, something resembling a  thick, heavy fog. 

"Last night I dreamt that Cindi (my daughter) and I were going someplace. I was driving but I took a wrong turn and we wound up on an unfamiliar freeway. The dream changed and I was driving through the city I grew up in, Philadelphia. I thought I recognized where I was, but I wasn't sure. The place was crowded. 

"Then the dream changed again. This time I was on a bus so crowded I decided to get off. Again I thought I knew where I was but then I wasn't sure because this place, too, was crowded with pedestrians the way New York City is. I started walking until I finally stopped to ask someone which section of the city we were in.  

"She said she didn't know. Then, pointing ahead of her, she said, 'All I know is that North is this way.' I was happy then because I lived north of the city and I thought that if I just kept walking I would get home. 

"And that's when I woke up and thought about God, and then about Don, and about another dream I once had, a dream I never forgot because that night I dreamt that I died and went to heaven. When I got there I looked around and said, 'So this is where heaven is. I've passed this place a million times and never even noticed it.'

"So maybe that's where heaven is. Someplace near. Someplace just north of here."

And as a postscript:

I started writing this post yesterday and finished working on it this morning. I remember looking at the time when I finished. It was 8:23 a.m. An hour later I learned that my mother-in-law, who taught me tenacity - even if I did learn it late - died this morning at 8:23.

I would like to honor her here with this picture my daughter Cindi drew of her on Wednesday and finished on Thursday:

     

                                                
                      Willee  Hill   
             Born February 8, 1926
                Died July 28, 2018
                   Rest well, Mom 
                We will meet again. 

Whitney

Usually, when I go to a movie I am one of the first ones up and out of my seat as the movie ends. But after the last movie I saw, Kevin Macdonald's Whitney, I just sat there as though glued to my seat, stunned and unable to move and intent on listening to every note of the song that was playing as the credits rolled -  her 1992 hit I Have Nothing. 

During the two-hour documentary, which reminds us (as if we needed reminding) of her mind-blowing voice, her incredible range and her silk-like tones, we see Whitney in every possible way - sweet, sensual, angry, wasted, weird, witty, wild and wonderful; and as we sit there we can't help wondering: Whitney what happened? until, about three-quarters into the movie, when Macdonald drops a bombshell that goes a long way into explaining why Whitney was the way she was. 

If you loved Whitney Houston's voice, I encourage you to go see this new film which not only sheds light on what drove her to excess but gives us yet another chance to listen to that incredible and unforgettable voice and to remind us of why we will always love her.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, a story about grief and loss, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

Et Tu Augustus

“The fool doth think he is wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool,” are the words of William Shakespeare and as I read them I wonder which condition more accurately describes my own words in the post I called "Am I Crazy?"

In that post, I was worried about how after parking my school bus on the last day of the school year, I would fill all my "idle" time this summer. Now, however, I am wondering what it was I was so worried about for I have found plenty to do, like right now, which is sitting on the back deck reading and intermittently closing my eyes and feeling as though I am in heaven - in absolute heaven where even the names of the days of the week have become meaningless. I have fallen in love with this schedule, which is no schedule at all, and with not knowing the time, and even avoiding the news – avoiding the news most of all. 

A moment ago I returned to the book I am reading, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and read the next paragraph, which has just become my favorite paragraph in the ten chapters I have read so far, a paragraph spoken by seventeen-year-old Augustus to sixteen-year-old Hazel, who has terminal cancer:

I am in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout in the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.

And although I don’t believe any modern-day teenager talks that way, nor do I believe that love is just a shout in the void, and that in his The Theory of Everything, Stephen Hawkins wrote that the sun will not swallow the earth for at least another 5000 million years (more or less), I do find Augustus' words to be touching and tender (and kind of Shakespearean) because I know that falling in love, even falling in love with “idle” time, is some kind of ecstasy from which not time, nor place, nor even the news of the day can deter us. 

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE

This Side of Paradise

Last week as I backed my school bus into its parking spot, I promised myself a trip to the Jersey shore for making it safely through the school year, especially during those arduous days in March when we had three - or was it four - Nor'easters.

A view from the rear of the hotel

So here I am sitting in a beach chair with the entire Atlantic Ocean at my feet!

It is hot today, hotter than it was yesterday or the day before, but oh so incredibly beautiful, I think as I relax and listen to the cry of a child as he plunges into an icy cold wave.

I sit back and close my eyes and listen, too, to the roar of the ocean as it lulls me into a state of deep relaxation, a state from which my mind will inevitably drift to some memory from the past or to some hope for the future until the call of a seagull or the voice of a child brings me back again to this moment of bliss.

Yesterday, after spending almost nine hours on the beach, I "walked the boards" intent on getting those decadent fried Oreo cookies that are dipped in batter, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and served with a side of chocolate sauce. (It was the first time I got to eat all five of them by myself!)

It really is hot today, I think again as I move my chair closer to the water's edge and watch the remnants of a wave inching its way toward my toes, making me squeal with delight.

Later as I fold up my chair and walk back across the sand to my car, I slowly become aware of the "imaginary" song playing in my head, a song with lyrics that wish every winter day could be just like Christmas, and every summer day just one more day at the beach.

My memoir, Dear Elvis, is available at amzn.to/2uPSFtE