1. Back in 2014, in Laurel, MD, Dr. Cullen told me I should get out and walk about 20 minutes a day. When I lived in Maryland, I got good at this because I enjoyed driving to parks and hiking trails in the Washington, DC metropolitan areas and taking photo walks. I also enjoyed walking neighborhoods and the downtown area of Washington, DC.
I've never been very good at walking just for the sake of walking. I like to have something to do. I haven't been good at all about walking in Kellogg and today I changed that. I grabbed my backpack and walked to Yoke's and only bought enough groceries to fit in my pack. I like this idea. Make more frequent shopping trips. Walk to the store. Only buy enough to fit in my pack. It reminded me of all those years I lived in Spokane and Eugene in the 1980s and didn't own a car. The Deke and I also lived for about a year without a car in Eugene. l bought groceries on foot or rode my bicycle to the store. Except when the weather gets bad here in Kellogg and as long as I'm living alone and just shopping for myself, I think walking to Yoke's to buy a few things nearly every day is a great idea. Today I walked about a mile and a half -- a good start -- and I felt the benefits right away.
2. Every day, I think about what to do to enjoy myself without the Deke living here while she teaches in Eugene. I've been remembering the years I lived alone after the ends of both my marriages and how I made it fun for myself to shop and cook. Especially when I was in graduate school and my budget was tight, I used to figure out ways to eat really good meals without spending a lot of money. I made batches of tasty tomato sauce that I used for both burritos and pasta and seasoned the sauce according to the food. I cooked beans ahead of time and made different kinds of meals. Mostly, I ate vegetarian meals. In fact, in the two and a half years I lived in my little basement apartment on W. Broadway and in the year or so I lived in the Kincaid house, I never cooked meat. I ate meat elsewhere, but never cooked it. I'm not exactly strapped right now for money, but I am experimenting with eating less meat, especially at home, for the sake of my kidneys, and returning to the days of making meatless eating fun.
So, today was kind of a throw back Friday to my graduate school days. I acted like I didn't have a car and, as mentioned, walked to the store. I resurrected a recipe from the Eugene days out of the Goldbecks' American Wholefoods Cuisine, a vegetable barley cheese bake. The Portuguese stew I had made earlier in the week lasted for three days and I think this casserole will also last about three days. I'm not scrimping. I am, however, enjoying reliving the challenge I gave myself back in the early 1980s to eat well despite cooking only for myself. I had heard then, and I hear today, people who live alone say that they don't like cooking only for themselves, that it's easier to go out and eat, that cooking meals for one seems like a lot of trouble. I get all that. Nonetheless, once again, I'm making cooking for myself fun, integrating exercise into it, and preparing and eating my casserole tonight not only tasted good, it brought back memories from nearly thirty-five years ago that I enjoyed.
3. Again tonight, I rented a movie from Amazon that is old, that I've heard about for years, but never seen. I watched Klute, a 1971 crime story set mostly in New York City, featuring Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels, an expensive call girl, and Donald Sutherland as John Klute, a detective from an obscure Pennsylvania town who has come to Manhattan to search for a friend who has been missing for quite a while.
While on the face of it, Klute is a crime thriller, more significantly it's a deep study of Bree Daniel's loneliness, alienation, numbness, role playing, manipulative talents, and her awakening conscience. During the movie, I found myself naively wishing Jane Fonda didn't have such a controversial life off screen so, that when we think of Jane Fonda, the first thing that comes to mind is that she is one of the very best actors ever. Ever. Anywhere. Any time. Nothing about Jane Fonda's portrayal of Bree Daniels is stereotypical, nothing is predictable, and everything is complex and complete.
Fonda brings to life, in Bree Daniels, an aspiring actor and model who turns tricks to keep financially afloat, and, who simultaneously enjoys the control a trick gives her over the men she performs for, but psychologically and spiritually suffers from the way she numbs herself, distances herself from the sex acts she's party to, and from the way hooking fragments her personality. By turns, Jane Fonda shows us that Bree Daniels is acutely self-aware (we see this in her regular appointments with a therapist), capable of tenderness, especially for a seventy year old john with whom she has no physical contact, deeply frightened, vulnerable, at times cruel, and, deep down, morally grounded. Somehow, Jane Fonda portrays in Bree Daniels a constant and continuing longing for deeper satisfaction in life and a deep desire for acceptance and, at the same time, portrays her as undermining these desires. Played by Jane Fonda, Bree Daniels is confident, nervous, unfeeling, brave, awakened to moral action, snide, kind, harsh, naive, worldly, hungry for self-examination, and, at times, repulsed by what she discovers. She's fiercely independent while also fragile and very dependent.
The movie's title leads a viewer to believe that this is a movie about the detective John Klute. I thoroughly enjoyed Donald Sutherland's portrayal of the persistent, often low-key Detective Klute, who has a deep and quiet drive for justice to be served. We see much of the depravity he confronts in Manhattan through his small town Pennsylvania eyes. He's disturbed by what he witnesses, but he won't back down. When the movie ended and as I crawled into bed and reflected upon it, it wasn't John Klute who occupied my thoughts. It was Bree Daniels. It was Jane Fonda's compelling work. It was the movie's unnerving examination of misogyny and male abuse of power in the worlds of modeling, theater, business, sex trade, drugs, and elsewhere. The movie is not about misogyny only, but the world of this movie is shot through with different men's contempt for women and Bree Daniels is the story's touchstone for the impact of this contempt, for the ugliness and mortal consequences of living in a world where misogyny thrives.
In reflecting on Klute, I haven't discussed the plot much because I'd hate to spoil the experience of what you see happen in this movie should you ever decide to see it. I do not, however, mind gushing about how much I admired Jane Fonda's acting. It's thrilling to see her commit herself so completely to the role of Bree Daniels and to so fully, physically and psychologically, occupy the many dimensions of Bree Daniels' character.
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