Some days

Some days, it seems like the best you can say of them is that you "woke up on the right side of the dirt." This might be one of those days. Like Christmas, this year, except without all the wrapping paper and the fa-la-la and the errant offspring that you'd like to choke.

Oh wait, we did have one of those this morning. Our son, who moved himself and our grandson out to Bumf*ck, Egypt a month or so ago, had a "problem with his alarm" this morning and was sitting down to a leisurely breakfast when my wife finally got through to the girlfriend to be assured that they hadn't crashed on snowy roads on the way in.

When they finally did get into town, I had to meet my son at his place of employment to take my grandson to school almost an hour late. Which I'm pretty sure ruins his perfect attendance record for the year. Not to mention the work he will undoubtedly have missed during that first hour.

So all right, I'm a mean, cantankerous son-of-a-bitch who thinks that things ought to be done just so. But I've worked awfully hard to instill some values in my grandson that I hope will carry him toward success and happiness in life after I'm gone. And I'm thoroughly pissed that my son doesn't get that I've had to make this effort because he has not.

But I guess what angers me most about this is that it's started to color my relationship with my grandson, whom I love and care about more than anything else in this world...

LPK
LiveJournal
1.3.2012

My final take

OK, so here it is, my final take on Paula McLain's fictional account of Hadley Richardson's life with Ernest Hemingway in her book The Paris Wife vs. Gioia Diliberto's biography on the same subject titled Paris Without End.

McLain's Paris Wife is tasty and filling. Much like cotton candy would be if you'd never eaten a steak. Or a Boca Burger, I guess, for you vegetarians.

And Paris Without End? That's the steak. Or the Boca Burger.

Bon appetit...

LPK
LiveJournal
1.3.2012

Ironic

I'm seriously thinking about rejoining the writers' group that I belonged to several years ago at the Liverpool Public Library. I left it when several friends and fellow writers decided to break away and form our own group. After that came apart, a few months later, I didn't go back to Liverpool because my son was by then working such unpredictable hours and needed someone to be at home with his little boy.

Our main complaint with the group had been that it met only once a month, for a couple of hours, and you had to know a Congressman, or be willing to perform a lewd act on one, to even get on the reading list. And there was a fair number of earnest wannabe writers who were painful to listen to and difficult to critique without saying things like, "Well, that just f*cking sucks. I'll never get THAT ten minutes of my life back." You get the picture.

But the plus side of it was that we had the use of a very nice community room, with a small kitchen for refreshments, and a meeting format that allowed for something very close to performance art, if you cared to take it to that level. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is what good writing is really about, conspiring with others to make life rise up, off the printed page, to make words ring with that same intensity of feeling that drives us to capture them in the first place.

I'm also thinking that the opportunity to do this may be the only upside, if there truly is one, to this latest mis-alignment of life circumstances and heart's desires which has resulted in the absence of my grandson. Ironic, then, that so much of it will inevitably be about him...

LPK
LiveJournal
1.3.2012 (b)