Y’all know what joy I take in the many-colored leaves in this season. Every day I go out and think, oh—I’m not going to take any more pix because I already have a bucket ton of them. And every day I have to take just a few more shots, because today’s leaves are different from all the other days’.
So for our earworm today, I’m giving you Eva Cassidy singing “Autumn Leaves”. She left us far too soon, but her legacy of beauty enriches us, just like our surroundings do.
Well, here we are, the second Thanksgiving in the time of COVID. And a weird time it is, too. But still…
So grateful today for Anthony S. Fauci steadfastly standing up
over the past two years against not only the Kleptocrat, but all the rest of
the nutjobs who’ve threatened him with everything up to and including death.
Also for the healthcare providers who’ve been on the frontlines
for all this time—volunteering to vaccinate the public; tending to the
unvaccinated and seeing them out of life; treating all the rest of our injuries
and illnesses; putting up with nutjobs spewing hate and disease; and generally
carrying on.
Profound thanks to the judge and jury at the trial of Greg McMichael, Travis McMichael and William Bryan for meting out justice to the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery. May their example be an inspiration to other judges and juries in our broken country.
Thanks go out to everyone working in whatever capacity to mitigate
the effects centuries of folly on climate change, pollution and waste of
natural resources.
Kudos to the members of Congress sitting on the House Select
Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States
Capitol. What a ghastly job to be doing, made worse by almost every Republican
in the country. Remain steadfast in your search for the truth.
I’m deeply grateful for my friends, who enrich my life in
countless ways, all the time.
I give thanks for working for a company at the spear’s edge of the
fight against cyber crimes and skullduggery. And for working among smart
people, from I learn heaps every day.
I’m grateful for shelter, heat and electricity; clean, potable
water; working appliances; for public services like trash removal, road works
and firefighters. For the workers who harvested the food I’ll be eating later
on, and the ones who transported it to the grocery stores and stocked the
shelves.
And for the eternal beauty of this season. It heals my soul.
This appeared in my mailbox a few weeks ago.
I had no idea what it was. I mean, obvs a catalog, but no earthly
notion from where.
Turns out it’s Amazon. (Yes, I missed the little arrow smile.) Are people not spending enough in the
general course of their online lives that the world’s biggest digital retailer feels
the need to send out a dead-tree catalog?
Well, in my case it didn’t work.
Considering all the photos I’ve got of vanity plates, it normally probably would have taken me years to post this one, if ever. It’s really not that remarkable.
However, about a New York instant after the shutter clicked, the
blonde Karen behind the wheel of the SUV opened the door and screeched, “Can I help
you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why are you taking a picture of my license plate?”
“I take pictures of lots of license plates.”
“It’s fucking weird.”
“___”
“You took it with me in the car.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You should look.”
<laughter>
So, she moved to the front of the queue.
I will not lie: justice and decency took a hit last week, and it’s been a bit of a scramble to hawk up something to be grateful for today. So, I’m going small.
Temperatures have dropped to seasonal levels here in the District
They Call Columbia. That means it’s in the 30s mostly when I take my morning
walks. Saturday it was 28F. After an hour of that—even at a fairly brisk pace—it
is the most wonderful thing to walk into my centrally heated house.
I am fully aware that this is a luxury so many in this world do
not enjoy, even those in my own county. So, I am grateful for this every single
day.
Even though I keep thinking Thanksgiving is two weeks off (not to worry—I have the wherewithal to make the pumpkin pie and the cranberry relish), it’s in fact next Thursday. So today’s earworm is my favorite Thanksgiving hymn, “For the Beauty of the Earth”.
Although it’s been taken over by Americans (ish), the hymn was written by an English hymnodist, Folliott S. Pierpont, in 1864. Despite Pierpont’s Tractarian leanings, “For the Beauty” strikes me as very Low Church, somehow. The simple listing of all the natural wonders that enrich our lives actually makes me think of “Pied Beauty”, one of my all-time favorite poems, and written by a Roman Catholic priest, so maybe I have no notion of high or low church. Um.
These days, it’s hard to find an online rendition that hasn’t been polluted by John Rutter. For me, the only tune is “Dix”, and here’s one of those ubiquitous and frankly indistinguishable all-male a capella groups singing it.
You know my feelings about squirrels—come the Apocalypse, it’ll just be cockroaches and squirrels left to inherit the wasteland. And somehow they’ll make it work for them.
And you may recall that I have a permanent topic of conversation about squirrels with one of my colleagues.
Well, yesterday, we had an IM convo that even now is making me howl with laughter:
You’re welcome.
I’d just returned a bunch of books to the library when I came across a vanity plate in the parking lot. So of course I hauled out my mobile to take a photo.
The driver was just getting out of the car, so I pointed out the obvious: I was taking a pic of the plate because I liked it. She asked me what I thought it meant, and I said, “A happy dog.”
Well, no.
Seems barkhaa means “rainy season” in her language (she didn’t specify, but clearly one of those spoken in India), and she has a Tesla with a license plate that means “lightning” (or “electricity”) and a motorcycle with “storm”. Also, her Himalayan cat’s name means “cloud” and her calico cat is called “sound of rain”.
She showed me pix of all of
them. The Himalayan is fluffy, like a cloud.
I really got a kick out of the whole weather event theme in her life, and I’m glad I got the story. (I told her that I was a little concerned about a motorcycle invoking storm, tho.)
