1. I was out of bed at 5:30 this morning to watch the championship match of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. It promised to be a fascinating match between the great Novak Djokovic, the three-time defending champion and top-seeded player, and Nick Kyrigos, a volatile, athletic trickster of a player who reached the final as an unseeded entrant.
In the first set, Kyrigos relied largely on his howitzer serves, a service break, and his athletic prowess to win it, 6-4.
I thought to myself, hmmm, I've seen Djokovic in this situation, it seems, 1,000 times. He often starts matches a bit shaky and, it seems, always has to face his opponents' best stuff in the first set.
Sure enough, Djokovic settled in. He returned more and more of Kyrigos's blistering serves and simply didn't make mistakes. His composure and steadiness slowly wore Kyrigos down and he swept the next three sets, 6-3,6-4,7-6 (7-3). After the match, Kyrigos, who often wows spectators with spectacular shots between his legs and in other improbable ways, commented that Djokovic hadn't done anything amazing to win the match. At first, I wondered what he meant, but then I realized that he was complimenting Djokovic's composure, his largely error free play, and his vast experience, his know how when it comes to winning major tennis championships.
2. After the match, I drove to Coeur d'Alene to do a little shopping. First, though, I grabbed a seat at the counter at Giorgi's for breakfast. A man plopped into the seat next to me, a self-described yakker ("As you've probably noticed, I'm a real talker!"). It wasn't long before we discovered we both at roots in Kellogg. His name is John Nelson (KHS, Class of 65). He went to Pinehurst Elementary, but by the time he was in junior high, his family moved to Elizabeth Park.
We found out people we knew in common, most notably, Jerry Turnbow (John spoke briefly at Jerry's funeral), and talked about having worked in the cell room. John worked in other areas of the Bunker Hill, too.
I worked my way through my Eggs Benedict and John Nelson and I wrapped up our conversation.
I headed over to Fred Meyer and while I was shopping and after a trip to the men's room, I was feeling weak, a bit faint. The store felt warm to me and I realized that my bathroom trip combined with having drunk too much coffee all morning long, the sodium level of my breakfast, and the temperature in the store had dehydrated me. I went to Starbuck's and purchased a bottle of water and just sat for a while, drinking water, and started to feel better.
I finished my shopping at Fred Meyer and found relief in the Sube with more water and the air conditioning. I gassed up at Costco and went inside to purchase a few things. I still wasn't feeling 100 per cent, but at least I knew I felt well enough to drive back to Kellogg. I had a few moments in Fred Meyer when I wondered if it would be safe for me to drive home.
But, I did fine, arrived home, brought in my purchases, filled a water bottle, and joined our 2:00 ZOOM meeting about twenty minutes or so late.
3. The ZOOM conversation with Val, Bill, Bridgit, and Diane was really fun. I enjoyed learning that Diane is loving her new life as a retiree. I also very much enjoyed our discussion of what each of us values about our having completed liberal arts degrees, but how we also have come see that much of our coursework was rushed -- we completed courses that crammed too much reading into the several weeks that comprised a semester (or quarter) and have, in the decades since college, come to value savoring books, taking our time with them, enjoying them more slowly. I confessed, and I think about this often, that, as an instructor, I was often guilty of assigning too much reading, of moving students too quickly through the plays of Shakespeare or a syllabus of World Literature, primarily because I felt the institutional pressure of "coverage", of exposing students to as many different titles as possible in an academic quarter or semester.
Bill can hardly play his guitar any longer and has, instead, immersed himself in poetry. He told us how much he's enjoying this experience and how he's having the invigorating experience of coming to enjoy and being enthralled by poets and poems that, in previous years, had not affected him much. His experience with poems is growing larger and more enjoyable by the day.
We also talked about movies. Bill and Diane had recently watched Five Easy Pieces and it set us off on a wide ranging discussion of independent movies from the 1970s, the troubling misogyny portrayed in Carnal Knowledge, our sympathy for Beth in Ordinary People -- many viewers find her totally unsympathetic --, and the kinds of movies we tend to seek out now that we are in our sixties. It was a delight to learn that for the first time in many years, Bridgit's mother had gone to a theater to watch Elvis. We discussed how the demands of life and the sorry state of the world around us often moves us to seek out lighter fare. Bridgit, in particular, told us how much she's looking forward to the upcoming movie, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris.
I love conversations about movies, especially movies made in the 1970s and on into the 1980s. I love the independent movies from those two decades, but also quite a few major studio made movies. I enjoy returning to them, talking about them, and remembering what was happening in my life when I first saw them. I saw many of these movies in small art houses in Spokane and Eugene, others in classrooms and lecture halls at the University of Oregon when different organizations showed movies on campus on Friday and Saturday nights, and others I watched (and often made tapes of) when I first subscribed to cable tv and purchased a Betamax machine back in 1982. One weekend, in the spring of 1983, I hosted a film festival in my little apartment on Colfax Road in North Spokane and Whitworthians streamed in and out of my apartment all through the day and into the evening watching movies I wanted to share with others.
While I love having access to so many movies in an instant at home in 2022, I miss the ways I used to watch movies. I miss the going out, the seeing movies with other people, and the conversations that often followed. I miss the great times I had showing movies to students and friends in my Spokane apartments in 1982-84. Yes, those days are long gone, but I'm sure glad they happened and will live with me forever.
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