Sunday Sundries, 8

1. I continue to enjoy my mornings (and Sunday afternoons) at the newly opened Open Door Coffee Co. in Hudson. A wonderful place to wake up, to see the unparalleled view of Main and Aurora Streets, to get my morning's reading done (and, okay, to catch up on Facebook), and--now and then--to have a surprise visitor, as I did yesterday when former WRA colleague Dana Cunningham dropped by for a while. We talked about books, teaching, politics, families--just like the Good Old Days.

2. I pretty much sucked at science in public school (a dire combination of bad teachers and a bad student). So by the time I got to Hiram College and had some really good teachers, it was almost too late: I was so far behind I didn't even realize there'd been a race. But for the last few decades a popular science title has always been on my reading pile. As I posted on FB last week, I just finished Your Inner Fish, a wonderful book about the evolution of the body--and how all living creatures (and extinct ones, for that matter) resemble one another. And now I'm reading a book about Time (can't remember the title--too lazy to go up to the bedroom to look).

3. Not long after we married in 1969, Joyce and I acquired ... a trash compactor. From Sears. I'm not sure why--perhaps the dawn of an ecological sense? It stood in our kitchen (not the built-in type) where we tossed and smashed stuff for more than a few years. (It looked vaguely like the one in the photograph--but it was gold (in color, in price), a popular kitchen-appliance color during the early 70s. We had a gold fridge!) When you pulled out the compactor's compartment (as you see), you could see (you can't see here) a little can of deodorant that sneezed off some mist. A good thing. Kind of. The garbage, most of which was organic, did ... spoil ... over the course of a week, and the deodorant was supposed to help. But really? What we got was the smell of rotting garbage trying to disguise itself with perfume. Like an athlete who works up a full, foul sweat, shuns a shower, splashes on the Old Spice instead.

When the unit finally died, we did not replace it.

4. Are we parrots or people? So many conversations I've overheard in coffee shops and the health-club locker room in recent weeks (Johnny Football, LeBron, Obama, immigration, etc.) sound like readings from transcripts of TV and radio talk shows: I hear the identical phrases and sentences coming from different mouths in different venues. Coincidence? Or evidence of our psittacine proclivities?

5. We've been streaming the first two seasons of Longmire (A&E show), about a contemporary Wyoming sheriff with issues; it's grown on us--to the extent that I'm now reading the Longmire novels, too (there are about a half-dozen of them, I think).

6. On Friday night, Joyce and I saw a film we both liked a lot--Begin Again (link to scenes), a story about a young singer/songwriter (Keira Knightly) and an older music producer (Mark Ruffalo) who connect (and don't). Written and directed by John Carney (Once and Zonad), the film shows us two damaged people--Knightly's BF has betrayed her with another woman; Ruffalo's marriage has fractured (he has a teen daughter, too). The performances were so good, and the music so appealing, and the cinematography so creative (very much so in some places) that we both chose to ignore the improbabilities and other issues we would have complained about in a more inferior film. (Knightly recently appeared on The Daily Show and talked a bit about the film--and its demands on her: link.)