Security
08/28/20 • 6 min
All of the state parks in Vermont were full last weekend because everybody and his dog is Vermonting this summer instead of going to Europe. We found a campsite on Airbnb. John contacted our host by email the day before we made the two-hour drive. “We’ve made some changes since we first put up the listing,” she wrote. “We now have a dish-washing station and a barrel to protect your food from bears and such.” John and I joked our whole drive down about the ‘and such’ part of her note wondering what qualifies. Dewey ignored our banter flaring his nostrils as his ears flapped in the wind out the car window.
All of the state parks in Vermont were full last weekend because everybody and his dog is Vermonting this summer instead of going to Europe. We found a campsite on Airbnb. John contacted our host by email the day before we made the two-hour drive. “We’ve made some changes since we first put up the listing,” she wrote. “We now have a dish-washing station and a barrel to protect your food from bears and such.” John and I joked our whole drive down about the ‘and such’ part of her note wondering what qualifies. Dewey ignored our banter flaring his nostrils as his ears flapped in the wind out the car window.
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Fear and Envy
Somewhere Over the Rainbow is stuck in my head today. I’m not thinking Judy Garland or the giant Hawaiian Israel Kamakawiwoʻole with the tiniest ukulele, but John’s mom, my mother-in-law. He’s with her now in Colorado Springs, not Israel, but John, though she and Israel may be together soon it seems, Barbara is in the later stages of dementia. She doesn’t know that her son is there with her for three weeks, making her meals, taking her for walks, bathing her, and wiping her ass. But she does know the piano. Show tunes. Her home is filled with bookcases full of sheet music. Irving Berlin. Cole Porter. George Gershwin. Harold Arlen’s name is not as famous s these, his tune is possibly more so.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow has been one of Barbara’s mainstays for decades. She plays it with all the flourishes of an extravagant French dessert a Gateau Basque or a Tarte Normande...
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Collected Wisdom
I took an Authentic Happiness Inventory online today which compared my relative happiness to that of 120,000 other respondents. It is a legit survey, put together by Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center. I got a 3.74 out of 5. Hmm. I think of myself as a 4.3, but I know that comparison is the thief of joy, so I take my 3.74 and make the most of it.
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