My Back Yard

If you’d like to stay at a French champagne address on a biere address, then consider Hotel Quai Voltaire just across the Seine from the Louve art museum.

It’s on the same block as the new apartment of former French president Jacques Chirac, the building where French philosopher Voltaire died, and tucked in among the shops of the Carre’ Rive Gauche selling high-end antiques and art.

The hotel has hosted luminaries such as Baudelaire, Wagner and Sibelius, but its glory days are behind it. The lobby is painted hospital green, hallway paint has big gaps, and room decor was roses on blue-green paper with red wall-to-wall carpeting. The only "luxury" in the room was a wall-mounted telephone. No A/C or shower, aside from a hand-held spray. 

But the room was clean, the mattress firm, and the location convenient to Metro and many Paris attractions. 

My body breaks into pieces

rearranged by Picasso.

Too much sightseeing. 

It’s house and garden tour time, so I enjoyed this entertaining article about the Framingham house tour.

"Weed-ho." That’s the name of the geriatric-friendly gadget I used to roust dandelions and other unwanted vegetation from my lawn yesterday.

Weed-ho is long, so I needn’t bend over to use it. Its long wand ends in a point tip to dig under tenacious dandelions, a sawtoothed edge for shallowly rooted plants, and a smooth edge for surface dwellers.

Violet clashes

Blade scrapes soil,

gouges, its sharp edge 

beheading modest violets

that man has named "weeds."

In another world,

their blooms would be cherished as

early sprouts of spring.

But here, they die. 

The last daffodils have bloomed. Bleeding hearts open fully. Sweet autumn clematis sending out new green shoots at the foot of the trellis.

I’ve ordered some hostas and other perennials for my back yard.

Need to pot my dahlias and hold them inside until frost risk passes. Iggy made a special trip to Home Depot last night to buy potting soil and ant traps. 

Iggy is a softy — even for ants. He recently conveyed an ant on a scrap of paper from our kitchen counter to the great outdoors. 

Yikes! I need another speech topic for June — one that will show off my vocal variety.

My only off the top of my head idea is to write a speech about poetry and to read varied examples. Another idea is to practice reading whatever I want to read at my public reading in June, assuming that comes through.

Can you give me any other ideas? 

Remember that one of my New Year’s resolutions was to reduce the clutter in my house, so I could achieve serenity?

I had an early success. I donated a bunch of books to a university library. But I’ve followed each little surge of cleaning with a relapse. My house doesn’t look any better than on January 1.

I try not to do any writing work on Saturdays. So it comes as a relief to do some house cleaning and run an errand or two.

During the week I’m pretty good about loading and emptying the dishwasher. I use watchthatpage.com to track Kelly’s Missions on Flylady.net. I like the idea of spending 15 minutes a day on clean-up. But sometimes I can’t even muster that.

In bicyclese, a century is a 100-mile ride completed in one day.

No way I’ll achieve that this year. But how about making a half-century my goal for September?

Yesterday we rode 27 miles along the East Bay Bike Trail. If I could make 35 miles by the end of June, 42 by the end of July, and 49 by the end of August, I’d just be tacking on 7 miles per month.

Doesn’t sound too bad. But today’s 27 miles were flat. I don’t know of any flat half-centuries. So hitting half a century wouldn’t be that easy. I struggle with what bike clubs and books call "gently rolling" terrain. But it wouldn’t hurt to try.

What might motivate me is going on some "group" bike rides, so we get a tip sheet that directs us on a ride of a specified length.

I put "group" in quotes because whenever Iggy and I have gone on group rides, we fall behind the pack within the first two miles.

If, at the end, we roll into the parking lost the same time as other folks it’s only because they didn the 45-mile version of our 22-mile ride. 

We visited Pu’uhonua o Honaunau on the big island of Hawaii during our March vacation.

This Seattle newspaper article gives a nice overview of its charms. 

I’ve added some material to the ending of "Don’t Play with Matches." Only the part about Penny will be new to my Niblets friends.

Maybe I learned the lesson too well. Sensitive about my own feelings, I had a hard time imagining the feelings of those around me. Just like Dad.

“But you’re still fat,” I said when my friend Jan came home from weight-loss camp the summer before high school.

She winced. “It’s not nice to say that.”

“But it’s true,” I said, puzzled by her response. Then I was surprised when we drifted apart over the next year.

I was still saying the same kind of thing as a corporate employee. For example, to a co-worker: “I can’t believe how much time you spend smoking cigarettes and gossiping with your harem.”  

Another time, someone pointed out an error on a survey that a colleague and I had pointed out. “Penny made a mistake,” I wrote to the surveyor, cc’ing Penny. To me that was not blame, but just a simple, unloaded statement of fact. It never occurred to me that Penny might get upset.

That came back to haunt me. I learned the bad news, not from Penny, but from the company’s owner. When we spoke in his office, he said, “I know you’re sensitive, but….” His voice trailed off.

Now I imagine he wanted to say, “I know you’re sensitive to how others feel toward you. Why can’t you show the same sensitivity to others?

In a sense, I was lucky because as an adult I got punished for my true, yet insensitive statements. Harem man shunned me. Penny’s boss probably laid me off more quickly than if I hadn’t caused that ruckus.

My experience was very different from that of my surgeon father. In surgery, arrogance is tolerated. Maybe even encouraged. Nobody ever slapped back at my father. But they whacked me. And I’m glad they did. I’m a nicer person for it.

A friend just asked me that question.

I’m momentarily drawing a blank. But I’d love to learn your answers to this question.

Iggy named a couple of Tom Clancy novels.

When I was in high school, I loved the classics. Like Henry James. But I don’t read very much serious stuff these days. 

… I finally came up with some titles:

• My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
• Exodus by Leon Uris
• Scary mysteries by Jonathan Kellerman and less scary ones by his wife, Faye Kellerman