1. On Facebook today, I posted a note of thanks for all the good wishes friends and family sent me on my birthday and I then received a glorious avalanche of belated birthday greetings. As a result, memories and warm feelings filled my day. I experienced my entire life passing before my eyes as I heard from family, and friends from childhood, high school, North Idaho College, Whitworth, LCC, the Writing Project, St. Mary's Episcopal Church, former students, former theater mates, in short, people from so many of the favorite parts of my life. Another name would appear as a reaction or in the comments and I'd think about times in the Sunnyside neighborhood, the many classrooms I taught in, life in the dorms, being in plays, family reunions and other get togethers, worshipping at St. Mary's and all that I enjoyed doing with parishioners there, and many more of the experiences I'm so grateful for.
So, as it turns out, on the day of my birthday I contemplated what might lie ahead (and I don't know), but on the day after my birthday, I looked back and remembered countless people I've enjoyed knowing over the last 67 years and the things we've done that I've enjoyed so much, a source of great joy all day long.
2. I had some fun tonight making a slightly different curry dish. I braised a half an onion, sliced, in a deep puddle of yellow curry paste, coconut milk, fish sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar, and lime kaffir leaves. I added a handful of shrimps to the sauce. Once the onions were tender, I poured a handful or two of Amish Wedding wide egg noodles into a pot of boiling water. Once the noodles were cooked and drained, I poured the curry sauce over them. Until today, almost every time I'd made a curry sauce, I served it over rice. But, I love the wide noodle dishes in Thai restaurants. I didn't have any wide Thai noodles on hand, but I figured the Amish noodles would be a tasty stand in.
They were.
While now I'm ready to pour curry sauce over any kind of noodle (or pasta), I hope, one day, to travel to an Asian market in Spokane or Missoula and buy some Thai noodles for this dish. (Or maybe I'll order some online.)
3. Recently, my copy of Donald Hall's book, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, arrived in my mailbox. When I don't put myself to sleep working an acrostic puzzle, I read selections from this book of short essays (or notes). I don't know if this book's contents were arranged in a purposeful order, but, if they were, I'm missing out because I'm skipping around. Hall's notes are flashes of memory. In one series of short pieces, he remembers, one by one, poets he's known or encountered over the decades, including Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, Robert Creely, and other men. He recalls, in another part of the book, interviewing T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore, reflecting briefly on these experiences as a prelude to when, in high school, he interviewed Boris Karloff following his performance in Arsenic and Old Lace. Hall explores the changes, and some of the indignities, of advancing toward the age of ninety. For example, when his handyman installs an electronic garage door, Hall repeatedly forgets to open it and demolishes it several times by backing his car into it. In time, on a local road, Hall totals his car. His days of driving screeched to a halt.
This is one of a handful of books of short essays I've recently purchased. Soon, once I've read some more Donald Hall, his place at the table beside my bed will be taken by Carolyn Bly, Brenda Peterson, and Aimee Nezhukumtahil.
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