Dwarf Planet in Purple

I mean, once a month, really?

Anyhow, the highlight of the last few weeks was Fall Coronation, held in southern Maryland. I decided to camp over the weekend because I would be performing with the Laydes Fayre singing group in the morning and I didn't want to worry about traffic. I also didn't have to worry about futzing with my tent, because my friend Nellie from the dance group let me stay in her tent. We even carpooled together. I had a grand time, especially playing in the band for the dancing, and I received two roses and a small ceramic cup from our new Queen for my efforts.

Of course, while I was blissfully playing with the SCA instead of hanging around online, I didn't notice until I got home that Hamas had attacked Israel. Why does the world blow up when I'm having fun with the SCA?

(Reprinted, with some editing, from the friends-locked entry at https://luscious-purple.livejournal.com/425258.html. I have eliminated the usernames of some people no longer on LJ/DW, so I might as well make this an unlocked post.)

Twenty-five years ago (NOW FORTY YEARS AGO) today ... I had finished college a semester and was out getting my first taste of the working world in Boston. During the day I worked for office temp agencies when they had work. (Two years of business typing had given me a semi-marketable skill outside journalism; I quite prided myself on being able to set up and type complex tables on the typewriter by backspacing from the center of the page.) Some evenings I worked from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Red Cross building near Kenmore Square; the job was to call past blood donors and ask them to roll up their sleeves again.

I remember starting one temp assignment in the New England Merchants National Bank building near Boston City Hall. (Don't ask me what that building is called today in the wake of all the bank mergers that have happened since.) I reported to the twelfth floor, I think, and was seated at one of two desks in the reception area. I typed up some letters on the IBM Selectric typewriter. At the other reception-area desk, one of the permanent secretaries was typing things into a Wang word-processing terminal. A second secretary would come in and out of another office to exchange papers with the first one, schmooze with her, and whatnot. I can't remember their names after all these years.

It was a very uneventful, boring day until sometime in the middle of the afternoon. While I was placidly typing away at some boring letter that didn't need to be entered into the Wang system, secretary #2 sauntered up to the desk of secretary #1.

"Did you hear what happened to Reagan and his press secretary?" secretary #2 asked casually, as if she was telling a story about a couple of co-workers.

"No," said secretary #1.

"They were shot," said secretary #2, as if she was reporting that somebody's kid had been accepted at college or something.

She went back to her own desk, and as the new temp, I was totally unacknowledged and ignored. But I heard every word of the brief exchange, and suddenly my hands were wet and clammy and shaking like a leaf. I had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom, where I sat on the toilet and tried to compose myself.

Now, I was not, am not, never was, never will be a fan of Reagan. Bleah. But during the 1980 primary season, my friends and I at my college newspaper had concluded that George H.W. Bush was even scarier than Reagan, because Bush (there was only one in public life then) had said (during a debate, I think) that "nuclear war is winnable." So the idea that the finger on the nuclear trigger might be connected to someone who thought he could win the game of mutual assured destruction was quite terrifying.

Not to mention the A-word (assassination). The earliest memory I have that I can date exactly is November 22, 1963, and as a kid growing up in Massachusetts, I'd read all I could about that tragic day. From all I'd ever read and heard, people stopped whatever they were doing when they heard the news -- people went home early from work and school -- it was a HUGE DEAL that John F. Kennedy had been slain.

I went back to my desk and was freaked out that everything was still normal. Secretary #1 was still typing away on her terminal. Down the hallway I could see other people at their desks. Nobody was running around or freaking out. I could hardly believe I was the only one who was scared shitless. For the millionth time I felt that adolescent angst against the corporate world.

I was twitchy all the way through the last couple of hours at the job, and once I established that they wanted me back for a second day (I ended up spending five or six weeks there), I practically vaulted out of the building. To burn off some energy I walked up Tremont Street toward Park Street station instead of getting on the T at Government Center. My mind was consumed with one question: "WHAT HAPPENED?" Somehow I wanted to hear the news ... but how. The year was nineteen-freaking-eighty-one. The Walkman was a brand-new product and not many people had them, or their Walkmen (Walkmans?) played only cassette tapes and didn't have a radio. Tremont Street didn't have any stores with TV sets in the windows, and I didn't have time to make a detour to Jordan Marsh and Filene's in Downtown Crossing, because I was supposed to be on my way to Kenmore Square for the Red Cross job. A guy was selling the Boston Globe in front of the Park Street entrance, but even the evening edition didn't say anything about the assassination attempt, and the guy who was selling the papers said he hadn't heard anything. Aack! My brain was demanding a 21st-century news cycle in a 20th-century world....

By the time I got off the T, I realized I had to make a detour on my way to the Red Cross building. I had to get myself to a place where I knew there was a functioning Associated Press teletype machine clacking out news stories at 64 words per minute. So I practically ran over to the old familiar building on Cummington Street and burst through the front door. Fortunately, since I had just graduated, I still knew most everyone on the staff. The news editor was standing at the reception desk.

"Christopher!" I shouted at him. (I sometimes called him that because, for a while, he had been dating a Christine.) "Who is the president of the United States?"

"It's still Reagan," that Christopher said. "He's in surgery. Don't worry, we're on top of things."

Well, I'd given so much sweat and tears and other bodily fluids to that newspaper over the years, how could I *not* care about how it was covering the story? I was just thankful to get an update on the situation. In this day and age where we get instant CNN alerts in our e-mail boxes, it seems downright quaint to recall how information-deprived I felt that day.

I went off to the Red Cross and distinctly remember that I was assigned to calling the B-negatives that night (past donors were classified according to their blood types). When I called one man, his wife answered the phone, and then I heard her say, "Honey, it's for you, they want you to give blood for Reagan!" And I just sat there, ever the good liberal, squirming and thinking, "I didn't say THAT! I don't even know what his blood type is!" (Or was. Still don't.)

Anyhow, the world has certainly changed. I've been to that Hilton where the shooting took place. I've attended scientific meetings and black-tie dinners there. And I work just a few blocks down the hill [or I did back in 2006]....

Over and out....

Don't even know where to begin....

Yes, the novel-coronavirus pandemic is still raging, the U.S. death toll is now in six figures, and the horrible excuse for a president thinks that businesses should rush to be open, virus-spread be damned. Then on Monday, white Minneapolis police officers lynched a black man who was being investigated for a non-violent offense. Yes, I said lynched. That's what they did. The cops killed a man while someone was taking a video of it, and now Minneapolis and other cities are burning. And the pathetic excuse for a president cannot tell the difference between actual leadership and egging on a race war. More and more cities are devolving into chaos and, even though I don't like violence, I can't say I blame the protesters. That lynching was beyond appalling.

Yes, I had a nice time during the Virtual Balticon sessions last weekend, plus a nice chat with Sonya/Patches on Wednesday night. I am plugging away with the church budget team, Toastmasters, and plans to teach a class through the Virtual University of Atlantia in two weeks. But my own concerns seem so damned petty. Pathetic, really.

Where to begin ... ?

I guess I should just start with the personal deets. I'm in good health. After nine and a half years of freelancing, I'm really used to spending a lot of time at home. One of my clients is taking a long time to pay me, though, and since the stock market is doing its ultra-roller-coaster thing, I am extremely nervous about the tiny little sliver that's left of my retirement fund.

I am getting very good at using Zoom for videoconferencing. Heck, it even enables me to attend two different meetings (barony meeting and Toastmasters club officers, or church budget team and Toastmasters club officers) in different towns on the same evening. In the "real world" or "meatspace," I'd have to choose between one or the other.

The boy toy and I are taking turns going out shopping (because that's a recommendation). Yesterday I went to the local food co-op (really, a small supermarket) to get a few things that were 5 percent cheaper on the monthly "patron appreciation day." I couldn't help noticing how bare the paper-products shelves looked.


Today was *supposed* to be Opening Day for Major League Baseball. Ha ha ha, COVID-19 had other ideas. So MLB came up with the idea of picking a classic game from each team's history -- a winning game, of course -- and streaming it. For the Nationals they picked Game 7 of last year's World Series (of course) and for the Red Sox they picked Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, which was a lengthy and hard-fought victory when our dear Sox were down 3 games to 0. So, yeah, I actually listened to large chunks of both games.

During disasters, people do things they don't normally do. The boy toy has been baking bread -- he made a very tasty loaf of rosemary bread -- and then he moved on to something non-edible. Since the last round of hair dye we used left our hair feeling drier than usual, he decided to make an all-natural "deep conditioner" out of pumpkin puree and honey. We have lots of frozen pumpkin puree and non-frozen honey. He blended some of each together and this morning we doused our hair with it. His hair, which is quite a bit thicker than mine, came out great, but mine came out ... gritty. I have *not* had a haircut in over a year and the little bits of orange pumpkin pulp got caught in the split ends. Or something. Bleah.

I have been giving the boy toy haircuts for several years now, and after today, he actually volunteered to give me a trim. At least a couple of inches. Another sign of the times. :-)

Finally, something that has not been covered as much as it should have been: Happy 80th Birthday, Nancy Patricia Pelosi! What a nice middle name you have. :-)

Soooo ... I'm trying, really trying, to write as much of my feature article (due August 15) as I can before my Pennsic trip (August 2 to 9). Wish me luck.

I know that many people (including Yves, based on our conversations of a few years ago) think that if I just write 10 percent of the article each day, the article will be done in 10 days. Er, it doesn't quite work that way, at least not with my thought processes. Usually I select one chunk and try to chew on it and organize it the best I can, and later tie all the chunks together with some smooth connecting words. At least the last feature I wrote had an obvious framework -- it was a retrospective on a speech given 60 years ago -- so I could start by describing the speech and then hanging comments from my interviewees on the framework, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. This one has a basic outline, but I still have to create everything from scratch.

Anyhow. This year I wrote up a Pennsic packing list as a Google Docs document and shared it with the boy toy. That way, he can help me a bit. Today he unearthed my stakes and air pump and he was just testing out my air mattress. I need more stakes and probably another air pump; he's going to shop for both tomorrow.

(Incidentally, my least favorite part of camping is inflating the air mattress. Just saying.)

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention ... I'm not going to Pennsic with T.V.P. after all. Last Thursday she told me she decided not to go to Pennsic this year because she wants/needs to spend more time with her new boyfriend, whose father is dying in Florida. So I said OK, because ... what else am I going to say? I don't think she is as emotionally invested in SCA-land as I am. Maybe she thought Pennsic was more like a Pagan festival. She's still my neighbor and friend, of course, and I reassured her that she's still welcome at Monday night dance practice.

I had hoped a little that I would be able to leave my car with the boy toy so he won't be so antsy to get out of the house after a week of no wheels. But we live on a bus line, so he'll just have to deal. And I won't have to worry that T.V.P. will want to leave before I'm ready to leave.

AAAnnnndddd... the news of the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival is breaking on CNN. Boy toy went to high school in Morgan Hill, maybe 10 miles north of Gilroy, so he's told me all about the Garlic Festival. Thank goodness he's not there now. And, yeah, I do NOT need extra worries whether the local chuckleheads are going to lob something more dangerous than water balloons over the Pennsic fence....

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart,
The secret anniversaries of the heart...
(from a poem by Longfellow)

Yesterday I had wanted to feel good, damn it. It was the 30th anniversary of my ending of a miserable relationship -- the day I started Life over again. As I wrote in LJ a decade ago, October 2, 1987, was the day that I had ended a particularly miserable relationship. A small group of friends helped me pick myself up, dust myself off, and move on with my life (which probably would *not* have lasted 58 years and counting if I'd stayed with that asshole).

Plus, the second of October is R.'s birthday -- he was born exactly the same month, day, and year as Gordon Sumner.

Like most Americans, I woke up yesterday morning to the awful news of the Las Vegas mass shooting. I am sad, of course, but also beyond angry with this country's inability to get a grip on its gun problem. I had CNN on in the background for most of the day while I noodled around on the interwebs. I exchanged emails with R. and wished him a good birthday, but it was nothing spectacular.

Ultimately, I guess I was trying to balance my gratitude for my last 30 years of living with the grief over so many other lives senselessly cut short.

Still trying to decide whether I can afford to go to my high school class reunion on Saturday (that involves a roughly 900-mile round trip of driving and a couple of nights in a cheap motel).

(Note: I don't know whether this will cross-post to LJ because I haven't accepted LJ's new TOS yet. We shall see what happens.)

Today makes the 100th anniversary of America's entry into World War I. Of course, the war has fallen out of living memory -- the only people who were alive back then and still exist were tiny children then. Of course we don't go around reenacting it much, because it wasn't full of "exciting" maneuvers, just a long, static, disgustingly miserable slog that was only peripherally relevant to our continued existence as a nation. (One could argue that we as a species did not learn a damned thing from that war because people are STILL using chemical weapons in Syria -- HORRIBLE.)

I honestly don't know whether I have any relatives who served in World War I. Once I found an online listing of WWI soldiers from my mother's hometown and it included a man with the same name as my grandfather. However, I have a hard time believing that my grandfather served. His first two kids were born in 1914 and 1915, then my Uncle Rene was born in September 1917, and my mother was born in September 1919. Do the math. IMHO, my mother looked more like her father than any of her siblings. So if he had served in any capacity, he probably remained on the home front.

Since my hometown's city hall was built in the 1930s, probably with New Deal funding, the community's memorial to World War I got pride of place in front of the main entrance. It's a granite obelisk with four statues, one on each side, one each representing the Army, the Navy, the Marines ... and the nurses. Yes. A woman with a calf-length skirt on a military memorial. I wonder why this is not more famous nationally.

Not much accomplished today, it seems. Ran a couple of errands, waited for the exterminator to come to do the bimonthly bug spraying. The boy toy did three loads of laundry. I started to read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I've read a lot of nonfiction lately, because of my freelance work, and so I thought I'd read something a big classic yet suspenseful.

Late in the afternoon I first read some Facebook mentions of the bombings in Paris, so I flipped on CNN and the BBC. So sad. I really, really hope that there are no more attacks. And I really, really hope we on this side of the pond don't end up ramping up the security theater as a result. Yes, I want to be safe, but can you imagine going through TSA-style rigmarole to enter a shopping center or subway station?

I've never been to France, but I identify with it in a distant sort of way because of my French Canadian heritage. Also, until I was 6 or so, our neighbors across the street were an older couple from Marseille. I called them Auntie Ray and Uncle Leo, even though they were no kin to us. ("Ray" was short for Raymonde.) They had two kids who were almost grown by the time I was born, as well as a yappy little Pomeranian named Frou-Frou, the first dog I ever met. Auntie Ray and Uncle Leo moved back to Marseille, but they came back for a visit some years later -- I think I was in college by then. I'm sure they are long gone now.

While I was out enjoying myself yesterday, and thus not sitting in front of a computer or TV screen, the shooting at the Mall of Columbia (Maryland) happened. As you probably have heard by now, a young man with no prior criminal record shot two people dead before turning the gun on himself. This all went down about 20 miles from where I live (although I wasn't even in Maryland at the time).

For a pretty accurate summary of the way I feel about this crime, read this. So far, law enforcement officials have yet to figure out why this person killed two others and himself, other than the mere fact that he could.

... when I was reminded why the windows in the future educational center in the Very Prestigious Institution (the project that I am working on for the V.P.I.) are blast-proof. Something about high-value targets across the street and all that. Especially high-value on April 15 every year.

Seriously, I am still heartbroken over yesterday's Boston Marathon bombings. Despite 20 years in the Maryland suburbs of DC, I still consider myself a Massachusetts person who happens to be living down here. If you know me in person, you have probably noticed that I tend to get prickly when somebody disses the Bay State in my presence.

So, even though the cynic in me wants to say "gee, every night in American cities at least three people die in drive-by shootings and that does NOT make huge banner headlines," I grieve for the dead and injured and have nothing but disgust for the coward(s) who planted the bombs and (presumably) took off before they exploded.

I still lack Internet at home, so I have to get out of here for the evening, but here are links to a couple of wonderful essays about the deep affection for Marathon Mondays: Dan Kennedy and E.J. Dionne. I too remember standing in Kenmore Square or along Brookline Avenue to cheer on the runners -- first the elite, then the average Joes and Janes who flocked (or staggered) by a couple of hours later. (One summer I also sublet a room in an apartment about a block from the second blast site. Crappy building back then, but tony location.)

Last night after dance/music practice I had mixed feelings while watching CNN: I was proud to see photos from my favorite college newspaper shared on the news network, but saddened at the occasion that brought it about.