Paul Simon's Words on Seventy!

One of the best essays in the compilation 70 Things to Do When You Turn 70 is one by Marshall P. Duke, "Sometimes 70 Is Just 70," in which he brought up the "Sixty-four" song of the Beatles, which I'd forgotten about,  and Paul Simon's lyrics for "Old Friends,"  which I didn't remember at all.

Can you imagine us
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy

Old friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fear

Old Friends« see all songs

Lyrics:

Old friends
Old friends
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
On the high shoes
Of the old friends

Old friends
Winter companions
The old men
Lost in their overcoats
Waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city
Sifting through trees
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends

Can you imagine us
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy

Old friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fear

70 as Old Age in Vendela Vida's The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

Following up on yesterday's blog, I want to write a snail-mail letter to Djamila, the now-a-grandmother student I taught in Algeria when she was fifteen and whose brother--I found out yesterday-- died just three months after her mother.  Also, my wonderful octogenarian friend and YMCA co-worker-outer Fran is expecting me at 9:00 so we can take a walk to substitute for the exercise the Stonestown Y isn't offering this week, their second week of innovation.

But I have to share the passage from Vendela Vida's The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty that I first heard on Audible books, which prompted me to buy it in print.  It's on page 132:

...you will know.  you will have existed.  You will have proof that you were here.

You are picturing yourself at seventy, looking back on your youth. You will remember that you were young once, that you were thirty-three...

More (life and aging) later.

By the End of the Day

Tonight I'm going to a practice for a story telling jam, and that's how I hope to end the day.  I almost always take public transportation downtown, but I may try driving this time since the location is a bit south of Market.  By by then I hope to have

made Nigerian stew--mostly because (besides loving it) I have some cabbage that's a bit too old for a raw salad.

used up the not-quite-fresh softsilk tofu and mushrooms on a farfelle and mushroom salad with peas.

tried another recipe for vegan Spanish potato omelet

written and mailed a card and letter to Eileen Gertz.

written and mailed a card tp Katherine and Barry.

Worked a bit more on my narrated slide show "How South Pacific Changed My Life."

Added this to the park bench Jim and I sat on while we read A Separate Peace in January 1970  in Honolulu:  "And we would kiss between chapters.  Or pages. Or paragraphs.  Or sentences.  Or words."

Found the folder of photos from Tonga so I can use the one of Ron and me on his motorcycle for "How S.P. Changed My Life."

Subscribed to FlexPass at the SF Playhouse.

Read Djamila's message and responded.

Finished the collage on Oscar Night!

Finished the collage on Visit with Dana, late January  2016

Written to Dana.

Written to Suzy.

Gotten something together for Erik's 70th birthday?

Ordered The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida whose book contains a passage I heard just this morning after practicing telling about "An Important Date in Peace Corps History" from the perspective of a 70-year-old.  The thirty-year-old "You" in the book talks about being seventy someday and looking back at your youth!

Do What You Want to Have Done

Maybe it's true as Madonna once sang that girls just want to have fun.
But I say, "Don't do what you want to do.  Do what you want to have done."

I wrote those lines in my head on my way back from the Richmond Y, where I went this morning because the Stonestown Y has closed for renovation for two weeks.

Exercise is a really good example of what I'm talking about.  I don't want to do it, but I want to have done it.  I'm glad I've done it once I've finished.

There are so many things I enjoy doing at the moment, but exercise isn't one, and anything having to do with finances isn't either.

So here's a list of things I want to have done by the end of the day--some of which I actually want to do and some that I just want to have done:

Writing this blog (Want to!  I want to  put writing above everything else except picking up for people I love.  An example of this is my call from Eileen Gertz yesterday.  More on that another time.)

Straightening up according to my very low standard, which means making the bed and doing the dishes and moving piles of clutter to the next best spot.

Transferring the notes I took with Javier yesterday and creating a Spanish translation for some of the dialogue on the first two pages of  You Don't Say, the SuperBowl version of what now takes place on Oscar Night, And the Winner Is...

Getting Melissa Riley, the librarian at the West Portal Libray, on Next Door.com

Getting off the part of NextDoor.com that sends out warnings about suspicious people.

Adding the photo of the Dec. 1 car driving itself south in a north-bound lane on 19th Avenue and changing the subject.

Reading more about Mercury, the play given a Rough Reading at Custom-Made Theatre today at 2:00 PM.

Test out a vegan version of the Spanish potato omelet I've always loved.

Get  Han Kang's The Vegetarian plus the CCSF Enrollment Material I accidentally left at the West Portal Library

Going to the reading of Mercury at the Custom-Made Theatre at 2:00 PM.

Breakfast Buffet of Books Was a Lot to Digest This Morning!

I began my breakfast buffet of books a bit later than usual today--at 5:10 am--starting with the often trite 70 Things to Do When You Turn 70.  This time the essay was "The Thank You Prayer" by Lewis Richmond, who may have dumbed it down for us 70-year-olds.  I understand that his How-To book was a best seller.  Anyway, I'm already grateful, and I agree with Anne Lamott that there are basically two prayers:  Please, please, please!  and Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Then I went to Let's Talk about Love and an essay by James Franco--as fascinating as the other was trite.  I really had no idea who he was, but now I must know more about him than most people do!  Besides his several university degrees and his PhD, he managed to get on General Hospital as an insane artist, and lots of projects came from that stunt!  I'm curious about how he messed up the Oscars when he was co-host in 2008.

But before going to YouTube to check it all out, I read more of Camus' Algerian Chronicles, which are describing the starvation and near-slavery (when they could find work at all) of the Kabylie in 1939.  I had no idea!

Then I read in French for just a few minutes--Tonvoisin, which is harder than most French books for me to understand.    I do get the idea that "les cons de table sont des etres qui viennent d'ailleurs."  Of course it could never be me!

Breakfast Buffet of Books Extended to Audible and Even Real Life

What could be more real life than reading?  Still, I've given this post the title "Breakfast Buffet of Books Extended to Audible and Even Real Life."

I tried devoting the second hour of my morning reading to my own writing, but I think I really need two hours of Other.  Having had a small post-Oscar, post-reading of David Hathwell's poems, I got behind two newspaper days, so it was only this morning that I caught up with Elizabeth McKenzie and read Leah Garchik on Scalia's hunting partner C. Allen Foster, who shoots at anything that moves.  Apparently he's a member of the International Order of St. Hubertus, founded in Austria in the 1600s but founded ii the US right here in SF in 1966--at the Bohemian Club.

Leah Garchik also wrote about John Goldman's sadness at the death of Berta Caceres, one of the winners of the Goldman Environment Prize.

I want to send a Miss Manners item to my meque Javier, whose otherwise sterling doctor said, in response to his expressed fear that his sister wasn't going to be alive much longer at 89, "Well, it's about time."  I can be blunt too.  I'm sort of bothered by people who hang on to someone who's suffering and needs to die because I think of  the Golden Rule and I don't want people to make my death long and painful out of "love."

But I felt a little ashamed when I saw Miss Manners' reference to "the Cold Comfort Squad" and its members who specialize in telling people how relieved they must be.

I also read Nancy Reagan's obituary ("the gaze" I imagined giving Charles Poston, the wife who made marriage feel like "coming into a warm room from out of the cold"--"I'm afraid I'm going to die"  Just say no), about the ongoing debate on James Comey's FBI vs. Apple for Sayed Rizwan Farook (which got me writing another exchange of dialogue for my play-in-the-works And the Oscar Goes To....), the homeless and the Mission St. Navigation Center, the 2014 disappearance of the Malaysian airlines, Deadpool and real bodily functions and fluids that go splat (by Marsha K. Guess, who takes care of people with that problem), the Democratic Debate between Clinton and Sanders including differences on trade, Wall Street influence, and the auto industry, a derailing train, and  Juanita the Duck at a retirement home, where the feds won't let the cook pet her.  (Maybe they're right; she ate Juanita's eggs!)

Then I went to "Let's Talk about Diana Ross" by Daphne A. Brooks in Memory of Trayvon Martin and  in 70 Things "The Journey Continues" by Sandy Warshaw.

I listened to Carl Wilson's closing chapter of Let's Talk about Love:  A Journey to the End of Taste and then to a few minutes more of A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins.

Vegetables Take Center Stage at Al's Place in San Francisco

Via, the Triple A magazine, has a page saying "Vegetables take center stage" in their Spring 2016 issue.  

http://www.viamagazine.com/food-wine/vegetable-revolution

In the opening paragraph, they say "Even at nonvegetarian restaurants, these are heady days for vegetables.  Al's Place in San Francisco, named the country's Best New Restaurant of 2015 by Bon Appétit magazine, is emblematic of this trend:  On its menu, meat is a side dish."  They say that restaurants across the West have joined in the pro-veggie craze, and they give specific examples in Portland, St. Helena (Napa Valley), Salt Lake City, Ketchum, Idaho, Big Sky, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Bashing the Envelope On Oscar Night at the Roxie Theater

San Francisco Weekly had an item they titled "Bashing the Envelope," a clever play on "Pushing the envelope"  (excuse me for explaining) about what the Roxie offered for Oscar Night.

 There was a small photo of Chis Rock looking black.  Then it says "Up the Awards Benefit Bash is a way to watch Hollywood's big night while simultaneously protesting it."

They suggest that we don't boycott the awards but instead give it a piece of our mind.

The Roxie's annual awards bash...allows film lovers to comment colorfully on everything from Hollywood's diversity problem to the show's overlong, overblown nature to the voting body's infuriating (and occasionally satisfying) decisions.

http://www.roxie.com/ai1ec_event/up-the-awards-benefit-bash/