Vanishing Authors
I happened to remember an author whose books I enjoyed perhaps ten or fifteen years ago. I wondered if she’d published anything recently. I went on Amazon to check: nothing at all. Then I tried Googling her. Absolutely nothing. She has disappeared from history, it seems. I had read at least two of her novels and liked them very much. It’s a lesson in humility and lowering expectations. If someone whose work I enjoyed has vanished from literary memory, how long will I last?
Continuing the gloom, I had a two-hour dental appointment Tuesday. It took me two whole days to recover and my back and neck are still sore. I swear these long appointments take a month or two off my life expectancy every time I endure them. My lousy teeth strike again. I remember chewing aspirin in high school because my teeth hurt me. All my life, I pay for what my childhood did to me. Suffered then, suffer now. Poverty has lasting consequences even if you’ve made yourself a comfortable later adult life. I swore I’d support myself as I saw how my mother was stuck in a bad marriage and couldn’t make any money. I flew off to perform my work for 50 years, two to three times a month. It was grueling but means I should be okay and make it through old age.
We’ve been having enough rain this fall – I’m almost afraid to write that. Drought could return any day, although it’s not as important now with the tender crops winding down or done. Soon we can start on fall crops for supper – leeks, Brussels sprouts, parsnips, Swiss chard, salad greens, radishes, Chinese cabbage, bok choi.
I took off time from writing last week in order to start getting the house together. During the harvesting season, the outdoors grabs all the attention, as it does in spring planting. It’s also begun to be cooler, so I need to start shuffling clothes around. Today I plan to stow tank tops, shorts and some sundresses and summer shawls, if I can figure out which old suitcases sweaters are in. My list disappeared from the computer so I have to guess what’s in each container. As the programs get fancier and fanciers, they work less and less well for anyone not a programmer.
My friend and member of our poetry group, Elaine Cohen, cut my hair yesterday. I don’t feel comfortable getting it cut professionally at this point in Covid. I cut the front but couldn’t cut the back. I gave her beans. She also brought me a book she wrote on jazz. Woody has already taken it to read, as these days, he is much more into Jazz than I am. My most intense Jazz period was while I still smoked and went to clubs to hear music in Chicago and then later on, in NYC.
Roku has gone dead and our efforts to revive it have failed. We’re not quite sure what to do. We can get Netflix on Infinity so far but not half the things we get on Roku including Britbox, which Dale and Stephen gave us for my birthday. This is a quiet stay at home weekend as we have so much catching up to do and bulbs have been arriving. I’ll plant what I can in my raised beds, 20 tulips today and 10 crocuses. Woody will have to dig the 6 hyacinths. When I write that word, I always think of how an archeologist told me words that words end in ‘inth’ are from Minoan. Makes me remember my time in Crete, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.