Saturday Morning, 30 December -- Baking

1) Again this Christmas, my old upstairs neighbors sent me a lovely box of pears, and I knew I needed another recipe. Happily Laura has been going through Mother’s old cookbooks and other recipes, and shared this from our Auntie Mef, which looked like something I could achieve.

1a) In the past I’ve attempted a pear upside down cake in a skillet, which is just far to advanced for me — once you’ve poured the batter into the skillet there is no evening it out! and I am not enough of a showman to slice the pears so perfectly — and an absolutely wonderful chocolate pear cake that few people touched because they’re implacably opposed to combining fruit and chocolate. Ah well, Knowledge is Power, and . . . more cake for me!

2) So to the soundtrack to Kiss Me Kate preparations have gone splendidly (I am just about to start on stage two), but then . . . wait, what’s a tube pan? Where is a tube pan? Is there a tube pan? Not even a bit of one! A kitchen inventory reveals about four round cake pans (why so many?), one springform pan I may never have used, a shallow ring mold (wonderful for Russian cream, but not cake), and what I will end up having to use, an elaborate bundt pan I got at a thrift store for $3. It will just have to do!

3) I will have to put a cookie sheet on the bottom rack of the oven to catch any overflow. Wish me luck!

Tuesday Evening, 12 December -- Dark Days for Historic Houses

Three old houses — one in private hands, two museums — are facing Dismal and Surely Destructive Prospects.

1) First up, 84 Harbor Avenue in Mahblehead, beloved by the community almost since it was built, purchased by Exceedingly Wealthy People Who Already Live in Town — and of course they want to tear it down and build something else. I was made aware of this by an Instagram friend; read this November news article for the details. The clincher is here: “The owners propose the demolition of the existing home, and the construction of a new single family home, moved back on the lot and set within the setback requirements,” the Planning Board application reads. “The foundation of the existing home will partially remain, as it is integrated with the seawall. The project has been designed to respectfully address the neighborhood, town infrastructure and natural resources ….” My initial response: Wickedness!

1a) What is beautiful must be preserved, and this home is clearly not only beautiful, but beloved. That the new owners are not prepared to adjust their Design for Living into this existing home indicates to me an Absence of Imagination. My Instagram friend is kinder; he would be content for them to leave the seawall and seafront façade intact. I am not so merciful — which of course may count against me later.

2) Next up, the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, South Carolina, is set to be sold by the Historic Charleston Foundation. (Read more about that here.) Surely there are other ways for the foundation to achieve its mission without divesting itself of its first, and possibly chiefest, jewel.

3) But the worst story is yet to come. In 2022 Carl gave me a private tour of the Merchant’s House Museum in New York, with which he’d been affiliated for many years. Today, December 12, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to approve (!) a development next door to the museum, which would result in guaranteed irreversible damage to the house and especially to its intact early 19th-century plasterwork. The Commission voted to approve this, while “allowing no testimony from the Merchant’s House or [their] engineering team.” Again, I say: Wickedness! Small-minded people want to put up a hotel next door. There is plenty of room in Manhattan for a hotel — elsewhere!

3a) Like my beloved Gibson House here in Boston, the Merchant’s House is a unique and precious collection of an entire family’s possessions over a century or so. (Like my mother, they never threw anything away.) Carl also explained to me that the Merchant’s House was very much the basis for the sets of William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) starring Olivia de Haviland. And that was immediately apparent in the main staircase.

3b) PLEASE: read their Call to Arms and contribute to their legal fund if you are able. The crux of the matter: “Shockingly, landmark status does not guarantee protection from adjacent construction.” And in this particular case, adjacent construction would inevitably lead to irreparable damage at best, and collapse at worst.

3c) What the hell are these Preservation Commissioners thinking?!

Dining Room of the Merchant’s House, March, 2022.

Thursday Morning, 30 November -- Portents

1) This morning’s devotional brought me to Luke 12:2-3 in Mother’s Lamsa Bible: “For there is nothing that is covered that will not be uncovered; and hidden that will not be known. For whatever you have said in the darkness will be heard in the light; and what you have whispered in the ears in the inner chambers will be preached on the housetops.”

1a) I guess Kissinger learned that the hard way. One point made in his NYT obituary (which I read last night) was that he lived so very long that things he had written in confidence in Nixon’s day had become declassified.

1b) It is also a cautionary tale about how the internet is used, though that is surely not a new observation.

2) You may remember that a couple weeks back my order of Christmas cards had been stolen from my front porch when it was delivered in the middle of the night. Imagine my surprise finding it on the hall table yesterday afternoon — open and mangled! One of my neighbors found that way on the front porch yesterday. So the thieves, undoubtedly upset they hadn’t stolen technology, returned the box!

2a) But I notice that they returned it without the packing slip/invoice, so they may be retaining my personal information for further skulduggery. 😬

2b) Happily ye Vystypryntte had already replaced my order, so . . .

3) Finalmente, I have finished Red Orchestra, a sad, terrifying, but courageous story.

Monday Night, 27 November -- Horoscopes, City Life, and Books

1) My Libra horoscope really smacked me in the face today: “An important person, someone who acted as your touchstone, no longer figures prominently in your life. This is a difficult adjustment for you. Make an extra effort not to turn inward as is your tendency in times of trouble. Force yourself to socialize and you may find a new friend.” It just underscores more my interest in forging more of an in-person community, as opposed to an online community.

2) Walking through the South End to the barber’s this morning, a rat ran across my path on Clarendon Street. A rat, in broad daylight! Faugh!

3) Now of course you want to know how I’m getting along with that enormous stack of books, aren’t you. Well . . . I just finished a book I added to the pile only last weekend, "Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait, which is really a brief biography with some stunning photographs. Beautifully done, and I had forgotten that her last stage role was a fictional version of my beloved Marchesa Casati.

3a) Finalmente, as of today I am within 50 pages of finishing Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, by Anne Nelson. I knew it would be heartbreaking, but when I read that one member, after imprisonment by the Gestapo, confided the names of other conspirators to an allegedly sympathetic woman in her cell — which of course led to their capture and eventual death — it was a twist of the knife.

3b) Really and truly, I had no intention of reading Barbra Streisand’s memoir. But when I saw it on the rack of new books at the Athenaeum last week, I picked it up on impulse — and I must say, it’s quite something! So far I’m up to the making of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (which I have never seen).

3b.i) But the one fact that only I, among all the people I know who are truly, madly, deeply Barbra fans (which I can’t really say I am), can geek out over is that . . . she read The Quintessence of Ibsenism in high school. Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking: Whaaaaaat?! But in college I did a lot of reading and research on Ibsen’s plays, including all the books by his British disciple William Archer, and The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw. I couldn’t tell you a thing about any of it now, but it was a serious course of study for me once, and I hadn’t even heard that title since about, oh, 1989. So, how lovely to have an uncommon common bond with Barbra!

3b.ii) The only other thing I’ll mention (and this doesn’t give anything away) is the atmosphere she creates writing about the New York years just before her discovery, years of excitement, discovery, learning, energy, enthusiasm. For a brief moment it made me wish I could be 20 again and immersed in what I remember (read: the good parts) of those years when every new fact and personality was exciting to discover.

4) Well, as that old rubber planter Tully Marshall said to Jean Harlow in Red Dust, “If it was the summer of eighteen hundred and ninety-four, I’d play games with you, sister. But life is simpler now.” At least the Christmas tree is up.

Friday Morning, 17 November -- Gallimaufry

Gallimaufry, a word recently introduced to me by a friend, can mean “a hodgepodge” (his intended meaning). But it can also mean “a hash or ragout of liver, heart, kidney, or the like, with edible parts of the head.” Thanks, I’ll have the oysters instead.

1) A Friend Younger Than I, beset by absorbing professional and personal obligations, apologized for not responding at better length to a recent message. My reply to him surprised me more than I expected: “As maddening as it feels, enjoy and celebrate this super-busy time. The comfortable afternoon nap stage will come for you sooner than you think (and while I love it, I accomplish less than I’d like.)” And it’s true!

2) My day started with a jolt, an email (delivered at 12:11 AM this morning) that my Christmas cards had been delivered. They were nowhere to be seen on either front or back porch, which launched an odyssey of automated contact with UPS. I should have gone directly to VistaPrint, as a) UPS ended up handing off my package to the local post office, and b) Arwen, the Actual Person I spoke to was calming and efficient. Long story short (too late!), VistaPrint is reprinting and resending my cards so, like Christina Crawford, “I’ll get the cards out on time, OK?”

3) You are of course interested in what I’m reading now. I’m afraid The Age of Decadence has been put aside again and I am ploughing through two books: Here Let Us Feast, M.F.K. Fisher’s collection of stories of banquets and feasting through literature, and Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, by Anne Nelson. The former I picked up in September at Montague Book Mill; the latter I bought at Brattle Books sometime during the pandemic and began over a year ago.

3a) I uncovered a stack of books I’d meant to sell or discard. When I shared the titles with a Prominent Used Bookstore, hoping at least for a trade, they courteously responded by email “Thank you but we are not interested in these. We see them all the time and they are hard for us to sell.” Oh well!

3b) And now, like the bombardiers, I should be yelling “Incommmmiiiing!” Wednesday I was given The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture, by Douglas Shand-Tucci. I vaguely remembered wanting to read it when it came out (it’s in the same category as Gay New York by George Chauncey, which I also haven’t read yet), but then Shand-Tucci’s Boston Bohemia was so dense I just could not get past Chapter Three — and that was about Ralph Adams Cram, one of MIT’s great architecture professors and the creator of the Masque of Power in 1916, a topic of great interest to me.

3b.i) And Saturday I am being taken back to the Montague Book Mill on a western excursion, so who knows what might come back with me! Like the Collyer brothers, one day I will be crushed to death by all the books waiting for me to read them.

Thursday Evening, 16 November -- George Platt Lynes

1) Last Saturday I caught a screening of Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes at the MFA, part of the Wicked Queer Film Festival which I found out about thanks to the History Project (thanks, History Project, for that email!). It made quite an impression, and you should see it.

2) First, I thought GPL was better known than he actually is. I don’t know why I feel like I’ve always known about him and his work; am I part of some disparate unaware community of cognoscenti? Long story short (too late!) he was one of the greatest (if not the greatest) American photographer of the midcentury, known publicly in his lifetime for his work in fashion and portraiture (everyone from Gertrude Stein to Yul Brynner), but under the radar for his male nudes. He also did lots of fabulous ballet photographs for what became New York City Ballet. I knew he was connected to Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute, but I hadn’t realized that the largest surviving chunk of his legacy resides with the Kinsey, or that the second largest chunk resides with the estate of Frederick Koch.

2a) This is alarming - I choose that word carefully — because the state of Indiana (where the Kinsey is part of Indiana University) has just defunded the Kinsey Institute this month. Doesn’t that just underscore how fragile non-homophobic history is in America? GPL is too great an artist to have his legacy put at risk by a homophobic, conservative state legislature. There, I’ve said it.

3) The other thing — totally unexpected — was that GPL was known in New York for his splendid cocktail parties. All the beautiful men would be there, along with celebrities from the fashion world like Diana Vreeland. This being the the 1930s-1940s, you know they’d all be beautifully and properly dressed in suits and ties and little black dresses with Lily Daché hats, camping it up with martinis and impressions of Bea Lillie. In the documentary they had home movie film footage (not of one of George’s actual parties) of exactly what I describe. This heavily underlined for me the need we have in the gay community to create in-person community. Online community is fragile and may be snuffed out in a minute. Ever hear of ghosting, or of Instagram censorship that leads to the disappearing of accounts? And during this era (it’s much longer than a period or an aberration, it’s a damn era) of political anxiety, we need community. Dinners, coffees, meetups - hell, breakfasts — but especially cocktail parties from 5:00-7:00 PM (read: 5:30 - 8:30). I am tired of the excuses. Community takes work! And sometimes that means committing to mix up an extra pitcher of aviations for a thirsty crowd. You can do this!

4) The documentary is beautifully, lovingly created. Over the last 13 (!) years they interviewed surviving friends, employees, models (especially Jensen Yow), his nephew, and lovers, including Bernard Perlin, the artist to whom GPL bequeathed the lion’s share of his work (which is the collection that Frederick Koch’s collection now owns). I would have missed it entirely if it weren’t for that email from the History Project, and now I only regret that the house was less than half full when I saw it — and that very few people in the house were younger than I. This film, and George’s legacy, are enormously important. I need you to see it, and to have a damn party! (And invite me . . .)

Saturday Night, 4 November -- Mostly Books

1) Remember a month ago I reported having gathered 52 unread or partially read books into one place from every cranny in my house? So of course it’s more like 54, but here’s an update:

1a) This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward, by Susan Braudy. Provenance: Montague Book Mill, purchase in September, 2023. Status: Finished! A poignant, sympathetic, but unsparing look at the accidental 1955 killing of Society scion Billy Woodward by his other-side-of-the-tracks wife Ann, and the icy vengeance of her mother-in-law, backed by all of Society with a capital S. Difficult to put down, but I was so glad when it was over. Bonus mention of Cleveland Amory, who actually mentions the killing in his Who Killed Society? Now shelved in the High Society section of my library.

1b) The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss. Provenance: Montague Book Mill, purchase in September, 2023. Status: Finished! Genuinely absorbing biography of Essad Bey, a popular “Eastern” author in Fascist Europe, born Lev Nussimbaum in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1905, son of a Jewish oil tycoon. Lev spent a lot of his life refugeeing and reinventing himself, writing prodigiously, including a couple best-sellers. It didn’t stop him from dying of a rare form of gangrene in Positano during World War II (spoiler alert: you will never read this book, so I have no qualms sharing the end.) I admire the audacity of anyone who can pass off a steamship ticket as an American passport.

1c) The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain 1880-1914, by Simon Heffer. Provenance: Used bookstore purchase sometime during the pandemic (Time no longer has any meaning). Status: Still plugging away. Finally up to page 303 of 826 after reading bits here and there over the last year. I first got interested in this since Heffer also edited the diaries of Chips Channon (the first two volumes are fabulous). I am learning a lot of Not Very Nice Things about Imperial Britain, particularly around the second Boer War, and now Ireland and Parnell.

1d) I Heard the Owl Call My Name, by Margaret Craven. Provenance: My parent’s house. Status: Just past halfway through. Last night I needed a book small enough to fit in a pocket to read on the T (The Age of Decadence is about two inches thick), and I had wanted to pick this up for awhile. Which bookcase was this on in Mother and Daddy’s house? Or was it on Mother’s table with her devotional books? The story of a young priest sent to remote coast British Columbia by his bishop (who has concealed the knowledge that the young priest has a fatal disease that will kill him in two years), it’s an interesting meditation on life and death, and a beautiful evocation of a remote part of the world and its people. Given that it was first published in 1967, part of me wonders how life there has changed since then.

1e) Our Last Best Act: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love, by Mallory McDuff. Provenance: Papercuts JP, purchase this year. Status: Not quite 1/4 through. One of the books I forgot in the initial roundup, as it was with my devotional books. I ordered a copy after reading about it in The New York Times. A personal and sometimes moving account of how to prepare for The End in an environmentally friendly way. I’ll admit there’s a whiff of Stuff White People Like: The Unique Taste of Millions about it, but its wisdom and (for me) fresh perspective, provide a lot of helpful information. And having just crossed to a new decade, that’s important to have.

1f) In the last couple days I have been sidetracked by Robert Massie’s Catherine the Great (to reread her coup d’état against her insane husband) and Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of that Famous Star of Stage, Screen and Television, Belle Poitrine, as told to Patrick Dennis (with 150 Photographs by Cris Alexander), because of course — but I’m getting back on track now.

2) Seven weeks left of the year, and three Great Feasts (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s) plus Repeal Day December 1. Sweet mercy goodness!

3) Birthday Week seems to have derailed my diet, which is Not At All Good.

Saturday, 28 October -- Frankly Forty, the Expression

1) If there’s one thing I love it’s an offbeat theme. This is why the Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest party was my annual affair in days gone by, why I refer to my kitchen as Howard Johnson’s at Versailles, and why Repeal Day (still at the Gibson House, this year December 1) has appealed to me so much. And the cognoscenti will remember the Margo Channing Memorial three months after my 40th birthday.

2) So now here I am at 60 — 60!* — which meant of course the theme had to be Frankly Forty. And to my mild surprise, no one seems to have heard of this expression. So, allow me to attempt.

3) For me, the expression “frankly forty” means that there is no use pretending to cling to the vain illusion of Dewy Youthfulness and that one frankly, and hopefully gracefully as well, accepts middle age. With luck, Franky Forty can be continued through to the Very End.

3a) I first heard it in college, reading about Edith Head’s costumes for Olivia de Haviland in a movie in which she aged more than 20 years. (I just had to look it up; it’s To Each His Own, which I have not seen.) For the later scenes in which her character was a successful older businesswoman, Head gave de Haviland “a frankly forty foundation.” No, that doesn’t mean makeup, it meant a padded girdle or foundation garment to fill out her figure.

3b) There is almost nothing about this expression online. What I did find was a 1925 newspaper article “Dress for the Frankly Forties.” and a 1921 plea for a less youth-oriented social life, “The Fraternity of the Frankly Forty.” “Let the younger generation solve their own problems. They are quite capable of doing it. What I want to know is why we of the older generation should accept the same social code as the youngsters use?” It’s actually a very good article.

3c) But most enduringly, “Frankly Forty” is the last chapter of Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of that Famous Star of Stage, Screen and Television, Belle Poitrine, as told to Patrick Dennis with 150 photographs by Cris Alexander. Each chapter begins with the year and a précis of the contents. So while Chapter One, “I Am Born,” begins “1900, . . . ” the last chapter, “Frankly Forty,” begins “1960 . . . ” “A grandmother . . . and at my age!”

3c.i) Craig gave me Little Me years ago for either my birthday or Christmas, so this whole thing is entirely his fault. 😉❤️ It is certainly the gift that has kept on giving, as I love it to pieces.

4) So . . . it’s my birthday! I am still in bed, enjoying chicory coffee and chocolate birthday cake for breakfast. It’s so warm today that later I will pretend to wash the windows (it’s been years), and I will take a brisk, vigorous walk through my beloved Forest Hills Cemetery. And then after a NAP I will get into my black tie and go down to Davio’s for a small dinner in a private room with some dear friends.

5) One final note. Back in August at my annual physical, my doctor gently but firmly explained that it would be easier to take care of me if there was less of me to take care of — and proved it. I took him seriously, looked at the calendar, and realized it would be 20 weeks until New Year’s Eve. This led to yet another offbeat theme, Thirty Pounds in Twenty Weeks, and I am pleased to announce that as of today I have lost 15 pounds and am on track to make it back to 198 by the end of the year. Wish me luck!

*As Sally Field so memorably said in Soapdish, “How in the name of God is it possible?!”

Wednesday, 11 October -- National Coming Out Day

“Your comfort is my silence.” — Barbara Kruger

Last month a friend from long ago reached out with a suggestion that I explore the videos of a Prominent Ex-Gay (PXG) who had experienced a conversion to Christ which led him to renounce his homosexuality. This was a surprise for a few reasons: I’d never heard of PXG, the last time my friend communicated with me was perhaps in 2020, and I have been living out and proud almost 35 years — and my friend knows it.

My response to her included this:

“While thanking you for your concern, PXG’s spiritual journey is leading in the opposite direction from mine. I’m now at a place where I can live openly and proudly as a gay man and behave and treat others decently as a Christian living in a democracy*. I’ve been treated more lovingly and compassionately in the life I’ve lived since I came out in 1989 than I ever [was growing up in the church]. And by the grace of God, I came out into a community of gay men, mostly Catholics, who want to have a relationship with their church, and have. I feel very much that God is looking out for me. The evidence greets me daily.”

*And I hope I do. As a miserable sinner beset by the tempest of human emotions, I do not always act or speak with compassion. And I am more aware of it than you might think.

What I did not say, but will express now, is that I am mighty tired of radical conservatives trying to “cure” homosexuals by scripture or any other means when they have so many of their own problems, also identified in scripture, that require their attention first. See Matthew 7:5. It’s so much easier to fix someone else’s “problems” especially when it’s something you don’t experience yourself, isn’t it? How would it be if I started sending my friend materials about turning away from Trump, who has led millions of Americans astray? Would my friend receive that as an expression of my love for her? I haven’t done that -- but I've been tempted.

Religion needs to be a guide for one’s own behavior, not a goad for the behavior of others. And this is especially true in a democracy that guarantees both freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Radical conservatives try to use freedom of religion as an excuse to deny the existence of homosexuals and to erase them from public life. Just look at what’s been going on in Florida and in some other states. Living in a democracy means having to live equally with people you disapprove of. No, it’s not easy. Democracy is messy.

I need to be accepted as I am, as an out gay man on his own religious journey that doesn’t require renouncing any aspect of me for approval. Suggestions to the contrary are not welcome.

Tuesday Morning, 10 October -- Blood and Coffee

1) Up and out early for a blood test at Medical. Autumn is unmistakably in the air and, seeing my old fleece from ye Instytytte in the closet, I impulsively dressed in school colors for this return to campus: red hat, belt, and shoes; gray pants and fleece. Ordering those fleeces for the staff, with the Association logo, may have been the wisest decision that particular director made. Most colleagues kept them at the office, but I loved wearing mine around the house — and still do.

1a) The nice technician instructed me to keep my arm straight after I’d rolled up my sleeve. “Comme ça,” I replied, without thinking. “Oh, you speak French?” she asked. This led to quite a discussion (not in French), and it turns out I visited her hometown in Haiti when I was there with the Methodist Youth Fellowship in 1980. What a friendly conversation to start the day!

2) The nice young man at the counter of the nearby new coffee shop got bewildered when I handed him a twenty instead of “tapping and going” with a card. Cash is not yet obsolete, dahling! But my goodness, that was excellent coffee, and an excellent breakfast sandwich.

3) I did not have devotional this morning, but yesterday Proverbs 15 offered many currants in the cake, particularly verse 2, “The tongue of the wise uses knowledge aright; but the mouth of the fools pours out curses.”

Friday Afternoon, 6 October -- Old Society and Banned Books

1) I went into the Athenaeum late this morning, thinking I could hunker down over a couple different ideas. But no such luck. I had only 50ish pages to go to finish This Crazy Thing Called Love, about Ann Woodward’s accidental killing of her husband Billy in 1955, and I was compelled to sweep through it. (Spoiler alert: eventually they all die, just as we all will, but it’s really all Truman Capote’s fault.)

1a) That led me back to a book I’d read some years ago, Cleveland Amory’s Who Killed Society? He had editorialized about the Woodwards at the time, considering them “Publi-ciety,” and much of that editorial ends up at the very end of Who Killed Society? Amory’s book, unjustly overshadowed by his The Proper Bostonians, examines the state of perpetual descent of American Society (with a capital S) — first by looking at America’s First Families region by region.

1a.i) The more colorful part of the book is his thorough indictment of several entities for the Killing of Society. Amory accuses almost everyone, from Murder in the First Degree (with deliberation, premeditation and malice aforethought): The Servant Problem, FDR, Hollywood, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (among others), through Manslaughter in the Second Degree (by any culpable negligence . . . ): The Newport Jazz Festival, the April in Paris Ball, and Gamble Benedict (whoever that is, among others). At least he explicitly spares John Roosevelt and Magda Gabor!

2) Last month I discovered that it costs as much for a club sandwich and a cup of coffee in the Parker House dining room as it does for a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee at the faux-Irish pub closer to the Athenaeum — and the tone is far more genteel. Indeed, since the True Ritz-Carlton (now known as the Newbury) seems to have eradicated any ghost of the original décor, this dining room might be Old Boston’s Last Stand.

2a) You know I love the Copley Plaza Bar, but after its transmogrification into the Oak Long Bar and Kitchen, it really cannot be called Old Boston.

2a.i) Of course there was a day when the Plaza was nouveau. When I was working at the Vendome in college, my friend Ken told me that in Days Gone By, his aunt, an antiques dealer, would come down for big antiques fairs at the Plaza — but she would stay at the Vendome.

3) Banned Books Week is coming to an end, which means it’s once again time to quote from Maurice Parmalee’s Nudism in Modern Life, the ban of which was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1940: “It has taken almost eight years of litigation finally to obtain from a high court the full and complete vindication of this book against every charge of obscenity. The publishers of America know only too well that freedom of the press can only be secured by constant vigilance against every attempt in any wise to delimit or circumvent that freedom. It is the hope of the publishers that in this struggle for a basic American principle they have made a real and genuine contribution.”

Monday Afternoon, 2 October -- Texting, Unread Books, and the Seasonal Gourd Some Love to Hate

1) A text exchange this morning:

• Me: “I’m going for a walk.”

• Friend: “Ah, good time for a walk as the smoke comes back this afternoon.”

• Me: “Smoke?! Have they elected a new Speaker of the House?!”

2) In my dogged flurry to clean house before yesterday’s houseguest arrived, I ended up congregating all the unread or partially read books in the house from their various stacks, corners, and cubbies on the dining room sideboard. To no one’s surprise, but to my mild shock at seeing them en masse, there are 51. Fifty-one. That’s including the eight (!) I bought weekend before last in Brattleboro and at the Montague Book Mill.

2a) I’m trying to think of this as pemmican for the winter, but oof — that’s a lot of books.

2b) I should really say 52, as my current read, This Crazy Thing Called Love, also came from the Montague Book Mill weekend before last. Just over half through, when I’m finished I don’t know if I’ll shelve it under Murder or High Society.

3) Spooky season started a day late at Maison Robaire this year. But no sooner did Weeping Baby Pumpkin Head make his annual appearance than the haters came surgin’ outta the cane break hollering “Eeyew!” Well, go ‘long with you! Haters gonna hate, and it only adds an extra-demonic glow to my smile until Hallowe’en.

3a) And let’s face it, at my age — nearly forty! — I need all the tricks of beauty I can manage.

Friday Morning, 29 September

1) In case you missed it, I was quoted in a Boston Globe article this week about how climate change is disrupting tourism.

1a) An unexpected outcome was email messages from an old volunteer from ye Instytytte (someone who had been particularly kind to me when Mother died) and an old volunteer from ye Ballyt who I still remember with pleasure. And it was lovely to reconnect with both of them!

1a.1) And those contacts have richer meaning in that it was 20 years ago this month that I boomeranged back to ye Instytytte from ye Ballyt.

1b) Travel suggestions for 2024 and 2025 welcome.

2) In this morning’s devotional, Proverbs 29:22 stood out: “An angry man stirs up strife, and a furious man abounds in transgressions.”

3) October is filling up — meetings, doctor’s appointments, museum exhibitions — and I couldn’t be more pleased. As much as August is my favorite month, I love the autumn, too.

Sunday Morning, 3 September -- Recounting a Tapas Brunch

1) My English friends are champing at the bit for a review of yesterday’s tapas brunch at Barcelona in Brookline. Overall I must say it was perfectly delightful, not least because we got to sit outside on a cool and sunny day.

2) The thing about tapas is that they arrive at random, whenever they’re ready. More often than not they’re like edible jewels. That certainly described my veggie Benedict, a perfectly cooked egg atop thickly sliced cucumber and English muffin, with just enough hollandaise not to be too much. It definitely looked good enough to eat, and I definitely did.

3) Once we established that the truffled bikini was a sandwich, I chose instead the next item on the menu, the jamon and manchego croquetas, practically my go-to tapas in Spain a year ago. The four of them were like jewels in their bed of garlic aioli — an exquisite enjoyment.

4) The main event was the vegetarian paella, which the three of us split. To me it tasted like summer: fresh, light, full of sunshine, substantial.

5) Surprise bonus: near the end of the meal, a former colleague we hadn’t seen in over 15 years walked by, recognized me, and stopped for a pleasant chat.

6) I shall certainly have to go back!

Friday Morning, 1 September - Random

1) A brief timetable through the Arnold Arboretum; viewing the map may help:

• 9:25 AM: Depart home.

• 9:49 AM: Summit Bussey Hill.

• 10:03 AM: Enter Peters Hill.

• 10:09 AM: Summit Peters Hill.

• 10:10 AM: Continue circumnavigation of Peters Hill.

• 10:21 AM: Depart Peters Hill.

• 10:37 AM: Depart arboretum.

• 10:51 AM: Arrive home.

• Total: 86 minutes.

1a) The only thing I can’t control is how long I have to wait at stoplights. For out-of-shape Little Me, rippling in the wind, this feels mighty good.

2) Having dispensed with Bogie and Bacall and the script of Dinner at Eight, I’ve returned to Don Shewey’s Daddy Lover God, which is a good book for my current moment.

3) Sweet mercy goodness, in a month it will be time to bring out the glass pumpkins again, and Weeping Baby Pumpkin Head . . . and then barely a month after that I turn 40!

Wednesday Night, 30 August - Super Blue Moon

While you read this you must of course listen of The Song of the Moon from Rusalka.

1) Did you step out to see this evening’s super blue moon? Do it! In spite of the clouds, the perfection of the moon’s circle seemed specially emphasized. In the words of the late Addison DeWitt, “A dull cliché.” But there it is. I can only report what I see.

1a) Unsurprisingly, all my photos turned out badly.

2) We had The Arrow Book of Ghost Stories when I was a boy, and I’ve never forgotten “The Wonderful Cat of Cobbie Bean:” “Cobbie Bean, Cobbie Bean! When there is a ring around the moon, go to the hobblebush, and there wilt thee find happiness.”

2a) So there would be a ring around the moon tonight — but what the hell is a hobblebush, and why didn’t I plant one?

3) Luna is a fickle mistress, always changing. But when she is beautiful — round, gleaming, full of icy promise — she is a mysterious comfort.

Tuesday Evening, 29 August -- Reading

1) I’ve sort of put aside everything I’ve been reading to devour Bogie and Bacall, William J. Mann’s new double biography (which he himself signed for me at East End Books in Provincetown about a month ago). In five sections — Humphrey, Bogie, Betty, Bogie and Baby, and finally Lauren — all the myths and legends are cleared away to present the facts, which are not always very nice.

1a) I had seen Bogie in Petrified Forest with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, but I had no idea it was his breakout film and his breakout Broadway show (also with Leslie Howard).

2) But this afternoon, on impulse, I put Betty Bacall aside for the script of Dinner at Eight, heaven knows why. If I was ever to go back on stage I’d love to do Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler is perfection in the movie) . . . but whaddya know, all but one of her good scenes, and a couple of her best lines, are not in the Broadway script! In fact the whole play is much darker. Almost nothing gets resolved as it does in the film.

2a) The script included the original cast, so you can imagine my joy learning that Carlotta Vance had been created by my beloved Constance Collier. Other surprise casting include Cesar Romero as the evil chauffeur Ricci, Sam Levene as Max Kane, the theatrical agent (I learned a lot about him from Harold Kennedy’s memoir No Pickle, No Performance; Levene is famous for playing the producer in Moss Hart’s Light Up the Sky), and Gregory Gaye as Gustave the butler. He turns up in Casablanca as the German banker Rick won’t let in the back room, and also pops up in Ninotchka, I Wake Up Screaming, and as the murdered two-timing baritone in Charlie Chan at the Opera.

3) A couple weeks ago I woke up with the surprising revelation that, if I knew I was going to die in a couple weeks, I’d start throwing out all the unread books in this house. And it was a relief to consider it! But then . . . what would I prop my laptop on for Zoom calls?

Tuesday Morning, 29 August -- Random Stimuli

1) Conventional wisdom decrees that, when there is leftover broccoli, it goes into soup. I’ve always managed to ignore that, but yesterday there was too much leftover broccoli to ignore. Happily for me, the NYT Cookbook my friend Maria gave me in 1996 had a cream of broccoli soup recipe in it that was simple enough even for me. By leaving out the ingredients not on the South Beach (carrots, macaroni) and doubling the garlic, I ended up with a superb cold and savory soup.

1a) The success of something like this involves having a meaningful relationship with your food processor or blender — which I don’t really. But at least I kept the soup from turning my kitchen into a Jackson Pollock canvas.

2) Twice in the last four days on my brisk, vigorous walks through the cemetery I’ve come across the large tail feather of a hawk — or perhaps of one of the cemeturkeys, but I’m not getting close enough to either to judge. Naturally I brought them home, where they live in the vase of pencils atop the piano. Who knows, perhaps I’ll collect enough to create a fan like the eagle feather fan Countess Olenska carries to the opera in The Age of Innocence.

2a) I always see something new when I go to the cemetery, and on another of these walks it was a tiny child’s gravestone, topped by a star with the child’s name underneath, Stella. “Stella for star!” cries Blanche DuBois when she sees her sister again in A Streetcar Named Desire! You see how my mind works — always looking for symbolism and Golden Age Hollywood references.

3) An IG reader and friend asked what my favorite hymns were, which reminded me of John Wesley’s Directions for Singing, which include the deathless and exuberant instruction “Sing lustily and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sung the songs of Satan.” [Emphases mine.]

Three of the cemeturkeys, making a rare appearance in the section of the cemetery I call the Diaspora.

Saturday Morning, 26 August -- Devotionals

Trying to reestablish a morning devotional as an unswerving part of my routine, these were the readings that came to me from the two dozen or so books on that shelf. Several of them really hit home today, but for different reasons:

1. Psalm 88, which begins “O Lord god of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee;” and includes the verse “Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the shadow of death.”

2. A Year with C.S. Lewis, a daily devotional Mother gave me (and which she used herself every day). Today’s reading was from the Screwtape Letters (which was one of Daddy’s favorites), in which “Screwtape offers more advice on the value of daily annoyances in trapping a Patient.”

3. The Calamus Poems by Walt Whitman, stanzas 22 and 23, which include “I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone. . . I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again . . .”

4. The Art of Worldly Wisdom, by Baltasar Gracian, number 3, “Keep matters in suspense,” which includes “Once declared, resolutions are never esteemed, and they lie open to criticism. If they turn out badly, you will be twice unfortunate. If you want people to watch and wait on you, imitate the divinity.”

5. “Training Your Mind to be Ready for Insight,” by Scott McDowell, in Manage Your Day-to-Day, which ends “. . . preparing for insight is all about being persistent, throwing a wrench into the works from time to time, and always working to stay one step ahead of complacency.”

6. And I always conclude with Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey. Today’s entry was Umberto Eco.

Sunday Evening, 13 August: Twenty Years Ago Today

1) Twenty years ago today I became a homeowner. From the closing I remember a stare-down between the attorneys (mine won), and the momentous feeling of being given a manila envelope with all the keys. I stayed there that night on an inflatable mattress reading a new biography of Edith Head.

1a) Happily I had two weeks to move from my South End apartment to Maison Robaire, during which time I was able to have a No More Beige party to celebrate leaving behind the beige walls of rentals forever. A friend had to diaper her baby girl on the floor (because all the furniture was gone at that point) — a baby girl who has now graduated from high school.

1b) The most terrifying moment of the move, possibly of my entire time here, was when the movers arrived with Gramma’s piano. I swear they nearly dropped it three times getting it up the front stairs!

2) In the intervening years I’ve had four roommates (the last one moved out in 2017) and a succession of upstairs neighbors, including a period when there were five children under the age of six living upstairs. In general we have all gotten along very well, for which I am very grateful.

2a) Crises, we’ve had a few. Just about every hot water heater in the building has burst once. A middle-of-the-night leak into one of my bedroom closets led to the the discovery that we had the last tar and gravel roof on the block — and a new roof. An exterior paint job displaced chocolate-brown and white with sage green and cream accented with Caliente Red. We’ve had adventures with falling tree limbs during wind storms. When we discovered that squirrels (!) were getting inside the walls, my determined third-floor neighbor set up cameras to figure out how they were doing it. The answer: leaping from a nearby tree and getting in through a poorly-secured chimney or something on the roof. With the tree cut down and the access point sealed, we found out that two of them were still inside when they gnawed their way out via the third-floor cornice!

2b) What’s absolutely wonderful now is that my third-floor neighbor’s mother, recently retired, has adopted our garden as a project, and it looks fantastic. Never have we looked so clipped and spruce! Happily my large plot of pink lily-of-the-valley remains. Started from half a dozen that my friend Olive gave me in 2005, it’s now something like six to nine square feet.

2c) I renovated the bathroom about ten years ago (an adventure), and of course the kitchen was completely done over during the pandemic. (Start reading about that adventure here.)

3) My guest book is full of signatures (and a few drawings) from parties, dinners, drop-ins, road race open houses, and Poverty Pastas. Like my Granny Dimmick, I love having people around.

3a) Two friends were here for dinner last week, and one said to me “I was worried about you during the pandemic being cut off from people.” The simple fact is that I love to be in my house, and during the pandemic I was completely content starting the Dress Dinner Challenge and keeping up with people via technology.

4) Twenty years ago this was the first of three momentous life events that came within three months: buying a home, changing jobs, and turning 40. I hope I’ll still be here 20 years from now, when I turn 60.