1. I know I'm repeating myself. The fact is, though, that reading Bleak House is the foremost fact of my life right now. Staying indoors has afforded me luxury reading time, afforded me time to rather slowly lope my way through this novel and stop, at times, to feel the pleasure of another eccentric character coming into the story or characters going on little journeys, whether joining Inspector Bucket and Mr. Snagsby as they plunge into the fictional London slum of Tom-All-Alone's in search of Little Jo or joining Esther, Ada, and others out in the country for a stay at Mr. Boythorn's. Time indoors flies. I'm stimulated and challenged by looking at life in the USA in 2020 from the perspective of life in London and England in the middle of the 19th century.
2. Debbie and I seem to have, without talking about it, fallen into a fun pattern in the kitchen. I'll make something -- like Thursday night's vegetarian Portuguese stew -- and, on the next day, Debbie will transform the leftovers into a different meal. This afternoon, from the kitchen, I heard the sounds of chopping and the whoosh of a gas burner coming on and, before long, by adding cooked cabbage and chicken broth to Thursday's stew, Debbie made a very delicious soup.
3. After dinner, I read more Bleak House until around 8:30 or so and then we put the first episode of the fourth season of Foyle's War on. For me, one thing this series does is dismantle any idea we might have that people were more united in the 1940s or that people were more noble during WWII than we are today in the face of difficulties. Tonight's episode focused on Americans coming to the Hastings area to install an air field on a man's family farm. It explored not only the divisions and resentments between the allied Americans and the British, but also the divisions in the USA itself about whether the USA should be involved in the war. The criminal investigations in this episode, for me, were almost secondary to these other matters of division and distrust. Foyle's War, in its low key, matter of fact way, underscores that, in so many ways, periods of time in history are very different from one another. I don't think history repeats itself. To me, the way humans think, feel, and behave continues. Generations come and go, but we humans carry what came before us forward.
Stu messaged me this morning with the good news that he wrote a limerick this week that he'd like to post here. Here it is:
There are people who're sick all around.
'Cause of that, jobs are lost; folks homebound.
So, for the vulnerable's sake,
We hope the guidelines they make.
Help business get up off the ground.
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