1. As the executor of Mom's estate, I have a couple of things I need to do to take care of her business. I wrote a short letter to our attorney asking if the time has come to close Mom's estate and confirm that no claims have been made on her estate and that my sisters and I have complied with her wishes in her will. I hope to hear back pretty soon so we can get this business taken care of.
My other task is to file Mom's tax returns. I've spent some time reading up on what filing for a deceased person requires and once I fired up TurboTax, I was happy to see that the software asked me all the questions about Mom's death that I was expecting. I finished her returns, printed them (they can't be e-filed), and, on Wednesday, I'll review my work, gather the appropriate documents, and mail them off.
2. The Deke and I exchanged some text messages today. Not only is she having a good visit with the Diaz family, she is getting out and about in the greater Greenbelt/Beltsville area. Last week, the Deke sent me a picture of her and one of our favorite servers at Old Line, Cameron, and today she sent me a picture of Quench's proprietor, Mike, looking happy at work behind the bar.
Sigh.
It thrills me that the Deke is enjoying herself. At the same time, I ache to be in Maryland, Washington, D. C., and, soon, New York. I love being back in Kellogg, but, in moving back here, I was not looking to get out of the D. C. area. I hadn't had enough of the vibrancy and motion and vitality of urban life. We had many good reasons for moving back to Kellogg, but not one of them had to do with having had enough of living back east. Far from it. I loved being in the midst of such a beehive of variety and energy and I miss those days when I drove down to Union Station, parked the Sube, and took stunning walks among the monuments and museums of Washington, D. C. I also loved the beers brewed back east.
But, then I look out the window here in our living room in Kellogg and gaze upon the snow-capped Kellogg Peak and Wardner Peak and I think of the grand views of the hills surrounding Kellogg when I walk north on Main Street uptown and think of how much I enjoy my sisters and my friends here in Kellogg and ponder how fortunate I am to be here and fortunate that the Deke and I seized a certain moment and lived in Maryland for three years.
3. Having said farewell to the world of Great Expectations, having said goodbye to Pip and Jaggers and Miss Havisham and Joe and Estella and rest of Dickens' unforgettable characters in this book, today I turned my attention to New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, back to the unforgettable men and women profiled in the writings of Joseph Mitchell. Today I dove into the lives of two Manhattan eccentrics: Joe Gould and Rev. James Jefferson Davis Hall.
Joe Gould was a homeless Greenwich Village street intellectual, a Harvard graduate, who interviewed countless people as he compiled what he called his Oral History of Our Time, a rambling, unstructured, mind-boggling, largely unreadable, opus of stories, interpretations, and opinions scribbled into innumerable little notebooks. Rev. James Jefferson Davis Hall was a loud and restless and tireless Episcopalian priest who preached on street corners, in tavern doorways, in flop houses, on the telephone, and anywhere else he could be heard. Less than trying to impose any analysis upon these men, Mitchell writes in stunning detail about each of them (and all his subjects) and lets this copious mass of details tell their own story. It's thrilling to read Joseph Mitchell, not only to become so deeply acquainted with his subjects, but with Manhattan of the middle of the 20th century.
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