Three Beautiful Things 12-11-2025: Luxury, Brahms, The Rocket

1. My idea of luxury used to be to enjoy varieties of craft beer and to indulge from time to time in an anniversary ale or a bourbon aged ale, usually stout, and to try out breweries wherever I traveled or lived. 

I haven't drunk a beer now since May 10, 2024, the before I received a new kidney.  

Now my idea of luxury is to buy baked products at Beach Bum Bakery. 

Today I bought twelve everything bagels to freeze and I'll thaw them on Christmas Eve and they will be our breakfast treat on Christmas morning.

I also bought a loaf of dreamy French bread and a solid dense mini-loaf of rye bread. 

Rebekka had my bag all loaded up and I noticed she had one more molasses ginger cookie left. 

I couldn't resist. (Well, didn't want to!)

I ate it this afternoon with a fresh homemade latte. 

Luxury. 

2. In a relaxing way, I've been working on getting familiar with a wide range of classical music, not only to enjoy these pieces in the moment, but to develop the ability to identify compositions when they come on the radio. 

Today, I experienced a success that made me happy, made me feel like I'm making some progress. 

On one of the shows I was listening to, Brahm's 4th Symphony came on and I immediately recognized it. It was as if the Cars' great "My Best Friend's Girl" or AC/DC's" Thunderstruck" had come on. As I listened to Brahm's Fourth, I was able through much of the symphony to anticipate what was coming next, something I never could have done just two months ago. 

Recognizing and enjoying Brahm's 4th Symphony won't bring the price of beef down, but it sure brought me joy. 

3. As he does so often, Rich "Rocket" Brock, my Whitworth roommate and lifelong friend, humbled me today. I was feeling pretty sassy for having been writing this blog for just over sixteen years and having made 7000 posts, but then Rich's wife, Amy, posted a video of Rich being honored for having been a twenty-five-year employee at K=Love radio. He received a plaque on a huge stage in front of an SRO crowd. His name and picture were projected onto a huge screen. The audience went mad and someone had made a Go Rocket sign and waved it like it was the seventh game of the World Series. 

Congratulation Rich! 

I loved seeing and hearing in the audience's enthusiasm for you and in the laudatory comments made on Amy's post that you are a beloved long timer at K-Love, much appreciated and highly respected. 

YES! 

Three Beautiful Things 12-10-2025: Just Over Nineteen Years and 7000 Posts, Ed Has Labs, Good Yakkin' and Lousy Luck Today

 1. I haven't always stuck with things over the course of my life, but I can say with some pride that I have stuck with this blog. I almost gave it up about thirteen years ago, but I got back on track and never stopped. 

I've been posting here at kelloggbloggin' for just over nineteen years. 

You are reading my 7000th post. 

I don't have a lot to say in this milestone post, but, but that's how it goes some days on this blog. 

2. Today was another blood draw day, but not for me, for Ed. So we piled into Ed's Camry and whistled through the wind and the rain to his doctor's clinic where he completed his labs and I enjoyed the kick of a cup of black coffee. 

3. Blood draw. Winning Wednesday. Sound familiar? 

It was a coincidence that on this Wednesday when I didn't need labs, Ed did and the aftermath was the same. 

We headed to Winning Wednesday at the Coeur d' Alene Casino. 

As we always do, we got in some very solid yakkin' in the car and once we got spinning reels, things kind of fell apart, we had no luck and got out of there and didn't even treat ourselves to a lunch. 

It happens. 

It was kind of a hidden blessing that our lousy luck led us to go home early. 

I know I was happy to get settled in at home, stay in with the weather being so nasty, and enjoy a relaxing afternoon and evening. 

Three Beautiful Things 12-09-2025: Watching Movies with Others, Copper Has Labs Drawn, Bacon Bean Soup

 1. While I was waiting for the vet tech to take Copper back for a blood draw, in light of what I wrote yesterday about going to movies alone, I suddenly thought about all the movies I've gone to over the years with other people. I loved all of them. Christy, Carol, Mom, and I went to Mama Mia one summer and over the holidays several years ago we joined forces to watch Saving Mr. Banks. I saw many movies with Bill and Terri Trevaskis in Eugene, including one of my very favorites, Big Night. 

Sparky and I went to a lot of movies together, including earlier this year, Wicked. I still think a lot about the night Michael McDonald and I saw Ethan Hawke playing Hamlet in a 21st century Manhattan world. The Troxstar and I had a blast watching Midnight in Paris together and I thoroughly enjoyed going with Jeff Harrison to the Art House in Eugene to participate in the 2022 International Grateful Dead Meet Up at the Movies to watch the Grateful Dead's show on 04-17-1972 at the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen. 

Oh, there are many more. I can't list them all, but I've had many more wonderful movie going experiences with Scott Dalgarno, Craig Thomas, the Mauer family, Bill Davie, Diane Anderson, Kelly Doughty, Kathleen O'Fallon, Deb Akers, and many more friends over the last more than forty years. 

One thrill I'll always remember is the unexpected joy Debbie and I experienced watching Shakespeare in Love. 

So, yes, I told the truth when I said I've watched many more movies alone than I've watched with others. 

But I didn't want to leave the impression that I only enjoy movies when I see them alone and I'll just say that I can name many of the movies I've seen with all the people listed above as well as the theater we saw those movies at. 

They really stick with me. 

As you can tell, I've seen reels and reels of other movies with others -- and I didn't even mention all the movies I've watched with others starting over forty years ago in North Idaho and Spokane or the ones I watched with others  in living rooms and apartments, especially in Spokane and Eugene, nor the countless movies I've watched with students in countless classes I taught and team taught at Whitworth, the University of Oregon, and Lane Community College. 

2. Why did Copper have labs drawn today? Dr. Cook wants to test his blood a bit more often now that Copper is aging and has begun to shrink -- but only in physical size. 

His great heart, kind spirit, and gentle soul have not diminished a bit. 

3. I fried chopped bacon in the wok, added half a white onion sliced, chopped celery and carrot, and sliced mushroom. I added a can of kidney beans and some chicken broth and this turned out to be just the soup I was hungry for -- I'd been yearning for some kind of bacon and bean soup and this one absolutely worked. 

Three Beautiful Things 12-07-2025: Watching Movies By Myself, I'll Return to *Nebraska* on Tuesday, Nuts and Bolts

 1. Yesterday I wrote about two ways that Josh Brolin watches movies that made me feel like we were brothers at the soul level. 

I now realize there is another way. In addition to being primarily attuned to the impact the movies is having on him and that Brolin and I seek out movies that take us outside our selves and our limited experience, Brolin and I both almost always watch movies alone. 

Debbie and I occasionally watch movies together at home, but more often than not she's watching one selection from a streaming service on her computer and I am either not watching anything or watching something on another computer. We did have a time, however, when we watched old television episodes of Columbo and other programs together and that was a lot of fun. 

I've watched a ton of movies over the last five years or so at home alone, mainly because I've been home alone for significant stretches of time. 

Whether living alone or not, over the past forty years, the vast majority of movies I've gone to have been alone. Debbie and I had a stretch of time around twenty-five years ago when we went to movies at The Bijou together and a few at a cineplex, and I enjoyed those times, but I have also loved seeing movies alone. 

It's a freeing experience for me. Alone in a movie house, I enter a bubble and feel what I feel, think what I think, stay put for as long as I want after the credits roll, walk around when I leave the movie theater, and free of conversation and anyone else's wishes regarding what to do next, I let the whole experience sink in. Alone. 

I loved going to late morning or afternoon movies in Washington, D.C. and taking long walks around the city afterward. It was the same way in Eugene, whether I was on foot or riding a bicycle. Back in the early 90s, I sometimes drove to Portland on Friday nights or on Saturdays just to see movies in different theaters and relished the drive back to Eugene, usually at night (when night driving didn't bother me) and I could be in solitude with the movie I'd just seen. 

I sorely miss living where I'm close to multiple movie theaters. The closest ones are in Coeur d'Alene.

I miss living close to art houses, movie theaters that play the kinds of independent and international movies I enjoy most -- and sometimes vintage movies which are always a thrill to see in a movie theater. 

2. I am a different movie viewer now that I'm in my early seventies than I was when I was younger.

I used to have remarkable stamina. I would sometimes watch as many as four movies in a day, but I don't have the attention span or the emotional and mental capacity to do that now. 

I also used to be able to watch more than one darkly serious movie in a day. I had an almost insatiable appetite for exploring alienation, sadness, tragedy, and other forms of seriousness. 

Not any longer. 

For example, around 8:00 this evening, I decided to watch a movie from about a dozen years ago entitled Nebraska. It features Bruce Dern playing a cantankerous old man. He has entered into a delusion that a letter promoting a million dollar Clearing House styled sweepstakes is a letter telling he's won a million dollars. 

He believes that if he goes to Lincoln, Nebraska he can pick up his million dollars. 

I will finish this movie, but not until tomorrow. 

Bruce Dern's performance is brilliant. 

The black and white cinematography of landscapes and small towns between Billings, MT and Lincoln, NE captures the vast emptiness of this region and is an outward representation of the emptiness in the inner lives of the characters in this movie -- at least so far. 

After forty-five minutes of watching this movie about aging, dead end family life, and the possibility of this vulnerable old man being exploited, I decided I'd had enough for one viewing session and that I'd pick up the movie again tomorrow, preferably long before I go to bed. 

I never would have turned off this movie in my younger days. I would have found its truths exciting, would have contemplated the realities of aging from the safety of being a young man, and I would have been excited by the movie's gray and bleak aesthetics. 

I'm not that guy any longer. 

I needed a break. I needed to pretend like this was a two part, Monday/Tuesday television program and that I had part one under my belt and I'd enter into part two tomorrow. 

But not close to bedtime.

3. Starting about sixty years ago, our Grandma Woolum made a snack at Christmas time called Nuts and Bolts. At some point, later on, this snack came to be known as Chex Mix. Grandma's recipe was buttery, rich, perfectly salty, laced with subtle garlic flavor, and included mixed nuts, all the Chex cereals, pretzels, Cheez Its and other treats from the snack aisle. 

Mom took up the job of making Nuts and Bolts at some point and now I think Zoe is our Nuts and Bolts cook. 

Back in New York, Debbie has been fixing Nuts and Bolts. She sent a picture of her work today and I thought how wonderful that this little tradition in our family has grown beyond the Woolums and Roberts. 

Three Beautiful Things 12-07-2025: Prospector Pizza in Pinehurst, Beethoven Brings a Movie Alive, My Soul Brother Josh Brolin

1. Today it was my turn to host our weekly family dinner.

I couldn't seem to muster up the energy to come up with a menu or to get the house ready for guests. 

So, I put out a message wondering if Paul/Carol and Christy would enjoy trying out Prospector's Pizzeria in Pinehurst, a local family's recently opened business. 

To my relief, everyone was on board with my idea.

We decided to meet at 1:00 this afternoon at the pizza joint, located in what used to house Real Life Ministries in Pinehurst -- and, if I'm not mistaken, this was also where Hammock's Hardware and Baskett's Saw and Cycle was located. 

Christy and I both really enjoy Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza and Carol and Paul ordered an eight topping pizza featuring meats and vegetables. 

I do my best to enjoy pizza that isn't my preferred style. I enjoy thin crust pizza and these pizzas had a fairly thick crust. So, once I dropped my desires and willingly surrendered myself to the pizza in front of me, I enjoyed these pies. 

I also enjoyed, even I was a pain in the neck, the planning we worked on for the month of December. 

2. Two things. 

First, I don't remember the last time I watched a movie.

Second, I've been listening for several hours a day to classical music. 

So, I thought, wouldn't this be a good time to rewatch a movie about a string quartet preparing to perform Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 131, also known as his 14th String Quartet?

My answer today was a resounding YES. 

So this evening I watched A Late Quartet, a movie I had seen on my 59th birthday in 2012 in Eugene at the now shuttered cozy David Minor Theater.

Just getting Vizio warmed up again and finding the movie got my adrenaline pumping and I began to tear up as the movie got started, feeling myself back at the David Minor and knowing I was about to watch a movie that had touched me thirteen years ago.  (You can read my 2012 response to A Late Quartet, here.)

Here's a briefer summation of my experience with the movie thirteen years later.

The movie features a music professor, Peter, played by Christopher Walken, who had recruited three of his students twenty-five years earlier to join him in a string quartet they named Fugue. 

The other three musicians are Katherine Keener (Juliette), Mark Ivanir (Daniel), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Robert). 

We learn two salient things as the movie opens. 

First of all, Peter, learns he has become afflicted with the early stages of Parkinson's disease and he tells the other three quartet members that with the help of medication he will try to play in their upcoming 25th anniversary performance, but it will be his last. 

We also learn about Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131 which Fugue will perform at this concert. 

Beethoven composed three late quartets and No. 14 was his last and favorite. Unlike the traditional string quartet written in four movements, No.14 has seven movements and Beethoven insisted that the seven movements be played without a break.

We learn that this creates disorder among the musicians. They have no pause to tune their instruments and so as the quartet grows and their instruments inevitably go out of tune, they must adjust to one another's progress and try to maintain order under performance conditions that militate against orderliness. 

Not only is this disorder what happens in performing the Beethoven piece, it's what happens between Daniel, Juliette, and Robert upon having Peter tell them that the quartet that's been together for twenty-five years can no longer be what is has been. 

Major tensions, having to do with their lives as musicians and in their personal lives, develop. 

It made me wonder: if I knew String Quartet No. 14 expertly, would I see this movie as having seven unbroken movements? Does Beethoven's composition move through times of upheaval and conflict in the same these characters do? Is there any parallel between how String Quartet No. 14 resolves and how the movie's story resolves. 

That I don't know.

But I do know that the movie explores the necessity of the players in a string quartet to put the good of the quartet above the desires of each individual. It means the individual players must make sacrifices of their individual ambitions for the good of the collective. 

I also know that this movie is about the relationship between technical mastery and something like perfection in relationship to expressing passion, that is, playing music with passion. 

Three key words in this movie are "unleash your passion" which, as it turns out, can be risky, disruptive, and magical, whether in the realm of performance or in personal relationships. 

In the end, I experienced this as a movie about love, about the complicated ways men and women moving into different stages of middle age experience love, how they want others to express their love to them, the place of passion in love, the interaction of love and grief, and the place of suppressing passion, possibly for the sake of the collective, however exciting that passion might be for the individual.   

Were these Beethoven's questions, too, as he completed this composition about a year before his death? 

As of now, I don't know. 

I'd like to dig into this question more, though. 

3. A Late Quartet concluded and I was disappointed that Amazon Prime cut off the movie before the credits had run, which meant Amazon Prime cut off the completion of String Quartet No. 14. 

Most movie viewers don't know that the music accompanying the credits after a movie is a postlude. It gives viewers a chance to sit and let the movie soak in and music can enhance this reflection, it can help review the movie, and it can add more dimension to what we've seen. 

In the case of A Late Quartet, the music playing during the credits was a continuation of the movie and brought the movie to its conclusion. 

I kept my calm, didn't go all movie nerd bitchy, and wondered if this movie was on YouTube. 

It is. 

I uttered a short prayer to the cinema gods that YouTube's broadcast showed the entire movie, including the credits. 

It did. 

So I rewatched the final touching five minutes of A Last Quartet and then reveled in the credits, not so much for what I could have read on the screen, but to hear this landmark Beethoven string quartet come to its completion. 

I stared for a while.

It was getting late, but I was stimulated and not ready to hit the hay. 

My favorite ongoing series of short films on the Criterion Channel is Adventures in Moviegoing.

(If you are still reading this rambling blog post, I thank you.)

Different women and men in the world of movies sit for an interview and tell us, in essence, their movie going autobiography. 

Tonight I watched the president of Criterion Collection, Peter Becker, interview Josh Brolin -- and then I listened to Brolin talk about around six movies from the Criterion Collection that were important movies for him. 

I discovered that the level of the soul, I have a brother in Josh Brolin. 

Our surface lives have next to nothing in common. 

But at a deeper level, we have at least these two things in common. 

First of all, we watch movies primarily to experience their impact, to be moved, stimulated, astonished, saddened, frightened (I don't watch horror movies though!), inspired, enlightened, invigorated, vitalized, crushed, devastated, and so on. 

For both of us, for movies to have impact, they do not have to take us into worlds we already know or are familiar with. 

In fact, both of us seek out movies that take us into worlds way different than our own -- it might be the world of another country or culture. I loved teaching World Literature because when that course covered the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries, I could show my students a Mongolian movie (The Story of the Weeping Camel), a New Zealand story about Maori people (Whale Rider), and movies made in Iran, Palestine, Israel, and other parts of the world. 

To feel the joy and relief of a mother camel finally accepting the calf she has rejected, one does not have to be Mongolian; when Pai mounts a whale and leads a pod of beached whales back into the sea, one does not have to be Maori to feel and admire Pai's courage and the exhilaration of seeing these whales rescued; one does not have to be Iranian to enter into the very human stories of Iranians, whether in Tehran or in rural villages -- but, these movies did more than unfold the humanity of these different countries and cultures, they invite us into the details of daily life in these places, help acquaint us with worlds different (and in some cases similar) to our own. 

Josh Brolin feels enriched and enlarged by entering into stories and details of places and worlds not his own. I know I have been and continue to be. I wanted my students to experience that, too. 

I tried to encourage, maybe even persuade, my students to seek out movies, books, music, art, and other things that did not deal with what they already believed or already knew -- in short, what they said they could relate to. 

I thought going to school was largely about learning to get outside of oneself and one's limited experience. 

It was about trying on different perspectives, points of view, ways of seeing the world. 

I enjoyed listening to Josh Brolin talk, not as a teacher, but as a lover of movies, about these very same things: impact and seeking the unfamiliar (and feeling the impact of doing so). 

Three Beautiful Things 12-06-2025: Color Me Astonished, Being JJ Cale, Restocked

 1. The phrase "color me" seemed more common when I was much younger than it is now. 

The phrase is a way of expressing some degree of amazement and to intensify the expression of a person's response to something. For example, in the 1971 Major League Baseball game in Detroit, Reggie Jackson smashed a towering home run off of Dock Ellis that struck the transformer on the roof of Tiger Stadium. 

I might have said at the time: "Wow! Color me astounded!"

I thought of that "color me" phrase this evening. I've been listening almost exclusively to classical music over the last few months and I decided this evening to play a Spotify playlist called "This is Mendelssohn". Every time a composition of his has popped up on Symphony Hall or on WUOL, it's grabbed my attention and so I thought I'd give his music some focus. 

I am especially partial to his concert overture written for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Hearing it again, seeing scenes from the play come alive in my imagination, and thinking about other Mendelssohn pieces I love, like his Violin Concerto in E Minor, somehow brought to mind that I'd heard one of the radio hosts talk about Mendelssohn having died at a relatively young age. 

So I looked it up and, yes, Felix Mendelssohn died at age 38. 

Then I had a vague memory that he was a prodigy, composing great pieces when very young. 

So, I wondered at what age he composed the mighty overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

He was 17.  (Well, I could strip zinc at 17.)

Sir George Grove, the 19th century music critic and founder of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians called Mendelssohn's achievement "the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music." 

This is straight talk: Color me astonished. 

2. I would have thought by the time I was nearly seventy-two years old, I would have outgrown having fantasies of being certain music performers. I mean it seems like a perfectly normal thing, as a teenager, to imagine being David Clayton-Thomas singing "You've Made Me So Very Happy" or to imagine myself being a woman in the early 1980s and seeing myself as Joan Armatrading singing, "Drop the Pilot". 

But, no, those fantasies have not faded with age. 

This evening, I took a break from Felix Mendelssohn and indulged on of my favorite fantasies in which I'm JJ Cale, laid back, unhurried, unimpressed with myself, and generously stepping aide to let other players in the band solo while we play, "Call Me the Breeze." 

3. Even though I am leading a fairly simple life here in Kellogg, I guess I'm always looking for ways to make things even simpler. 

Today, I needed another mixed pack of different pate cat foods for Copper and my salad/stir fry supply of vegetables needed replenishing, and I was nearly out of canned beans and other groceries, so I put in an order at Wal Mart and then all I had to do was drive to Smelterville and a polite and eager to do his job well guy loaded my groceries in the trunk and I returned home with almost everything I needed. 

Three Beautiful Things 12-05-2025: Figuring Out the Wollaston Name, Registration Arrives, The Lounge and Tomato Eggplant Pasta Sauce

1. I knew a few things about Johnny (or John) Wollaston before I found out back in early October that he'd died. I knew he played basketball at Kellogg High (he graduated in 1962) and at North Idaho Junior College. I knew, because a newspaper story about it was displayed at the restaurant, that he had eaten at Wah Hing for hundreds of days in a row. I knew he hung out a lot at the Yoke's deli. I knew he tried to sell things he accumulated over the years out of a store front on McKinley Avenue. I knew that every basketball game I attended at the high school, John was there. 

When I first started going to the Inland Lounge when I'd come to Kellogg from Maryland to help out with Mom, Cas, for reasons I don't remember, told me about John and when he said his last name it rang bells in my head, but I couldn't figure out why. 

Well today, Christy messaged me wondering if I'd heard Johnny died. She'd just learned about his death yesterday. I'd also sent a picture out to some fellow Wildcats of the junior varsity team John was on in high school and that had Stu and me messaging back and forth about him. 

No one ever wrote a full obit about John, but today I found the obit for his brother, Robert, who died in Texas about fourteen years ago. 

In it, I learned at least one reason why the name Wollaston rang a bell when Cas mentioned him to me around ten years ago. 

Dad tended bar at the Sunshine Inn on Friday and Saturday nights. 

His bartending partner was Paul Riep. 

Paul was married to Marcella and BINGO Marcella's first husband was John and Robert Wollaston's father, also named John. 

Dad's bartending partner and good friend, Paul, was Johnny Wollaston's step-father and I must have heard the family name mentioned around the house in my youth. 

I'm not convinced that's it. 

Slowly, surely, I plan to poke around, ask around, and see if there are other reasons why the Wollaston name sounded so familiar to me when I heard it about ten years ago at The Lounge. 

2. No need for details and I'm not sure I could recite them anyway, but the process of Debbie getting Idaho plates and registration for the Corolla she bought, what?, five months ago in New Jersey has been a fiasco. But, something in this ongoing logjam broke loose and today the Idaho registration for her car came in the mail. I called Debbie with the good news and sent the registration and license plate stickers to her in New York this afternoon. 

Now I'm waiting for her plates to arrive in the mail in Kellogg so I can send them on to her. 

3. Ed and I met up at The Lounge today and I enjoyed a couple refreshing non-alcohol Bud Zeros and had a lot of fun talking with Doug Y. and Ed. 

Ed and I were there for about an hour. 

When I arrived back home I made a tomato and eggplant pasta sauce and enjoyed it very much poured over a bowl and a half of penne pasta. 

I have leftovers and so another bowl or so of this delicious dish will be in my near future.

Three Beautiful Things 12-04-2025: Shoveling Just in Case, Gibbs and Copper and My Lap, Pizza Soon

1. The wet snow on Christy's and our sidewalks didn't concern me. It was shallow and easy to walk on. But I shoveled anyway late this afternoon out of concern that if that shallow wet snow and slush froze, it could be a bit dangerous. It didn't take, but I got my heart pumping and I got a little winded and my mind felt freer for having cleared our walks.

2. Gibbs and I have spent many weeks together in 2025 without Debbie. Without a doubt, Debbie is Gibbs' primary person. Today, though, I swear, Gibbs entered the Guiness Book of World Records for the amount of time he spent on my lap, sometimes awake, sometimes sleeping. Gibbs craves human contact and for quite a while he had held out, but Debbie hasn't returned home and Gibbs' response has been to give being on a living room chair along side me a try and now he's dialed things up to not just being beside me, but lying across my legs and not for just ten or fifteen minutes but for over an hour at a time. 

Ever since Copper moved into our house in February 2021, I've hoped he would become a lap or a chest cat, but it's not his way. He likes me to pet him or rest my hand on his back or stomach. He also likes to press himself against my lower legs if I'm on my back in bed. 

But that's it. 

No resting on my lap. No resting on my chest. 

Luna, however, was a total velcro cat. 

3. The last time I remember Beating pizza was at The Lounge when I joined other guys to watch the Major League Baseball All-Star game in July. 

Well, a pizza place in Pinehurst has just opened (or reopened under new ownership, I think) and I'm the host for Sunday's family dinner. I checked with Christy and Carol to see if going out for pizza would work for them and they replied in the affirmative. 

So Sunday around 1 o'clock, we'll blast out to Prospector's Pizzeria and give their pizza a try. 

I was way more relieved that we agreed to do this than I should have been. 

I am happy there's pizza in my future and I was really stuck regarding what to have for dinner if we had it at our house with me as host. 

Three Beautiful Things 12-03-2025: This Month's Labs Look Good, Winning Wednesday with Ed, Catching Up on Sleep

 1. I woke up this morning to discover, happily, that we were between storms in North Idaho. I piled into the Camry and felt gratitude as I hurtled on I-90 to Kingston to pick up Ed and then on to Coeur d'Alene that the roads were wet, but clear of snow and ice. 

First stop: Kootenai Health Laboratory Services. Once again, KHS grad and Moon Gulch resident Jayden took charge of drawing my blood and when I asked her, she told me how nerve wracking it had been on Tuesday to drive over the 4th of July Pass with fist-sized snowflakes falling in the dark. Today, we agreed, was much easier. 

So far, the only problem I see in my blood work is a low level of magnesium in my blood. My guess is that I'll get instructions this week to bump my dosage of magnesium supplements up a pill or two. 

Otherwise, I thought my blood work looked stable and encouraging. 

More results still to come. 🤞🤞🤞

2. Ed joined me today, not so much so he could wait for me to have my blood drawn, but because it was, as always, in the middle of the week, Winning Wednesday at the CdA Casino. 

We played with mixed luck until lunch time and I redeemed my birthday gift from the casino along with my monthly food voucher. That covered most of our lunch and I covered the rest. 

We enjoyed our food a lot. I ate five Buffalo wings with an order of fries and Ed raved about how good the beef stew, garden salad, and garlic bread tasted. 

That was it. 

We blasted back to the Silver Valley on roads that remained clear and safe in afternoon daylight. 

3. I hardly slept at all Tuesday night and into the morning and, thank goodness, I didn't have anything pressing to do when I returned home. 

So I sat in a living room chair with Gibbs on my lap and slept. 

I recovered enough to go to Yoke's for some cat food and few essentials and returned home. 

By 9:30 it was time once again for the sandman. 

Copper and I had a restful and peaceful night. 

Three Beautiful Things 12-02-2025: Shoveling Snow, Talking with Debbie, Tomaso Albinoni Takes Me Back to Mid-1990s Eugene

 1. Boots on the ground! Well New Balance shoes on the snow! Enough snow fell overnight that I sprang into action and cleared the sidewalks at our house and at Christy's. 

2. I had a very good talk with Debbie this afternoon, and a little bit with Eloise. It was most enjoyable hearing how well the Thanksgiving dinner went and the air frying the dry brined turkey resulted in a masterpiece and a dinner that featured superb food. I learned that everyone who came in from out of town returned safely. Debbie is helping Jack with his French studies. John knocked out some house projects and he put new strings on Olivia's guitar. 

3. I have Classical Music streaming many hours during the day. My music listening life is focused on Classical Music in a way it hasn't been since back in the mid-1990s. I had season tickets to hear the Mozart Players. I was a member of the Columbia House Classical Music Club and purchased many CDs through them and at Bradford's Stereo in downtown Eugene. That shop had a small, high quality selection of classical CDs. 

It's thrilling for me now, in 2025, thirty years later, when one of the programs I'm listening to on Symphony Hall or on KUOL plays one of my favorite compositions from my 1990s classical music heyday. 

This evening, out of the blue (for me at least) Peter Van de Graaf played Adagio in G minor popularly attributed to Tomaso Albinoni. 

I'm not really sure what hearing this masterpiece took me back to. When I grew flowers? Swimming at the YMCA? Listening to KWAX in the car? That CD I had that was a collection of movements all in Adagio? Movies at the Bijou? Dad dying in 1996? 

I can't pinpoint anything exactly, only the jolt I felt as this Adagio reached its thrilling climax, a climax I hadn't heard, it seemed, in ages, but has retained its power to stop everything around me when I hear it. 

Three Beautiful Things 12-01-2025: Michael Made Me Happy, Boots on the Ground, Popcorn and *Father Knows Best*

1. Hearing from Michael today uplifted me. Margaret had put him in touch with some of the things I've written here on this blog and Michael wrote me some of this thinking about mortality and brokenness and the Divine, all of which I deeply appreciated, all of which brought back to mind conversations he and I used to have in one another's offices over the years we were both teaching English at LCC. 

I need a day or two to organize what will be a most positive response to what he wrote me. I look forward to writing back. 

2. Life isn't all about thinking about loss and mortality and the Divine. 

There are property taxes to pay. 

There are winter tires to be put on the Camry. 

There are bills to tend to. 

My head might be in the sky, but my boots are on the ground. 

I take care of stuff that keeps our household running. 

I don't just ruminate.

3. And I like popcorn, popped with oil, in a pot, over a burner. 

I ate a bowl at dinner time tonight and kept it simple, adding only salt and Parmesan cheese. 

Back in grad school, I often worked on my studies at the library until nearly eleven o'clock.

I didn't have a car then and I traveled between my downtown apartment and the Univ of Oregon on my bicycle. 

I had a television with basic cable. A local Eugene cable station (KOZY) ran reruns of Father Knows Best late at night. 

So, I'd come home, pop myself a bowl of popcorn and take a break from Stuart period poetry or the essayists of the English Renaissance and put the popcorn bowl in my lap, pop open a Coke, and watch the Andersons, Jim and Margaret, and their children Princess, Bud, and Kitten negotiate the thorny challenges they faced on 607 Maple Avenue, and then always went to bed secure in the satisfaction that they got everything figured out. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-30-2025: Remembering Everett, Farewell to *Deadish*, All Good Things Must End Some Day

1. Today, Sunday, is the five year anniversary of the death of Christy's husband, Everett. When Christy reminded Carol and me that Everett had passed away shortly after midnight on November 30, 2020, I went to my blog, trusting that I had posted some details about Everett's last full day of life and what transpired that early morning of November 30th and later on that day. 

My blog post reminded me that on Sunday, November 29th, Everett was quietly surrendering his life to having it end. I wonder if Christy, Carol, Paul, and I were all thinking, as we witnessed his fragility, about how strong physically, mentally, and spiritually Everett had been for so many of his ninety years. 

Today, I once again marveled at Everett's durability when I remembered back to July of 2015 when Carol, Paul, Molly, and I helped on day one of Everett and Christy's move from near Kettle Falls to Kellogg. 

It was blisteringly hot out, for sure in the high 90s and maybe even the 100s. 

Everett was eighty-five -- that's 85 years old -- and under this thick wool blanket of suffocating heat, he worked steadily, most productively, and uncomplainingly with the rest of us to get the U-Haul truck loaded. 

Then he drove the truck to Kellogg. 

Paul, Everett, Christy, and I returned to Kettle Falls the next day for the last load of the move and, once again, Everett was mighty. indomitable. 

But, on November 29th, five and a half years later, all of that physical strength was gone, but not Everett's spiritual strength as he quietly and peacefully gave himself over to leaving this life and moving on to the glory he so strongly believed was in the next.

2. As I mentioned in my Saturday, November 29th post, Jeff Harrison sent me an email on Saturday urging me to listen to his Deadish show that aired on Thanksgiving night. Normally, Jeff doesn't ask me to be sure to listen to any one of his programs, so I wondered what music he played on this show that he thought I might be especially interested in. 

So I went to the KEPW archives, found the November 27th show, clicked the play button, and listened as Jeff opened his show by announcing this would be his last Deadish program. He simply said that after six and a half years, he decided the show had run its course. 

Jeff retired this show without fanfare. 

He had recorded this show for Nov. 20th, but because the station had a power outage on the 20th, it played on the 27th, on Thanksgiving Day. 

Jeff's music selections came from different November 20th shows over the years, beginning with Quicksilver Messenger Service and Hot Tuna and then moving to the Grateful Dead with special emphasis on the Dead's 11-20-1973 show in Denver. 

I haven't been to Eugene very often since Jeff started broadcasting Deadish six and a half years ago.

But on, what? two? three? more? occasions, Jeff and I listened to his show, which he'd recorded the previous Sunday, on Thursday evenings at his house. 

Those evenings, relaxing at Jeff's, listening to his impeccable selections, talking about the Grateful Dead, Zero, Billy Strings, and many other musicians in the Deadish universe made me uniquely happy, brought me into an experience I do not have with anyone else. 

On those evenings, I was an absorber, not a contributor. 

Jeff's encyclopedic knowledge of the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Zero, and numerous other bands and musicians over the last 60 years who fit Jeff's understanding of Deadish is inspiring, fascinating, and, above all, fun. 

Going back to yesterday's post, one aspect of what I enjoyed so much about having coffee over the last few decades with Jeff, Margaret, and Michael is that they all can speak so freely and easily about the great stores of knowledge they have about teaching, movies, critical theory, jazz, books, other genres of music, gardening, essays, current events, history, and so much more. 

I'm wondering if on Saturday Michael, Margaret, and Jeff talked at all about Jeff's decision to end Deadish. 

I sure have been. 

Inside myself. 

3. I was going to write remembrances of unforgettable experiences I've had at Sam Bond's Garage, one of my very favorite bars and music venues in Eugene. 

Two of my Facebook friends have   posted thoughtful and sad pieces as they report Sam Bond's Garage has closed (although it looks like they'll have one more Bingo night on Dec 1). 

I'm going to publish my stuff about Sam Bond's Garage here at a later time. I want to think more, remember more, find some old pictures, and I want to see what gets posted on Sam Bond's website and Facebook account about the closing. 

So far those two sites make it seem like it's still in business, but my guess is that whoever minds these accounts simply hasn't updated them yet. 

I know a huge part of growing old is saying goodbye to places and institutions that have their own kind of mortality. 

I mean Deadish wasn't going to last forever. 

I was sad to say goodbye to one of my spiritual centers in Eugene, Sixteen Tons on 13th and High. But it wasn't immortal. 

The mighty Rogue Ales is gone. Bankrupt. Whatever others think of Rogue, for me it brewed one of the beers that I have the most happy memories of: Shakespeare Stout. On the other end of the beer spectrum, I also very much enjoyed their Honey Kolsch and I enjoyed Rogue's short-lived pub in downtown Eugene. But Rogue was not too big to fail. 

Debbie and I loved the Old Line Bistro in Beltsville, MD. It's gone. 

So is another favorite taproom of ours in Colesville, MD: Quench. 

The beat goes on. 

After all, "They say that all good things must end some day."

Chad and Jeremy were right, but I don't always like it. 

Even as I accept it. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-29-2025: Grandsons' Birthdays, Longtime Friends Get Together in Eugene, I Prepare a Panang Curry Dish

1. Back in Valley Cottage, NY, our grandson, Jack, turned 15 years old today. His cousin, David, turned 14 (I think I got that right) at the beginning of the month. So on Friday, while David's family was still in Valley Cottage, Debbie, Jack, Adrienne, Eloise, Patrick, Meagan, David's family, and the kids' dad, John, had a birthday dinner for Jack and David (as I understand it).  

Today, David's family (the Diazes) and John headed to the Diaz home in Woodbridge, VA. 

Debbie sent pictures today of the remaining family members wearing little ice cream cone-shaped hats and enjoying Jack's birthday cake together. 

Debbie  sent Christy, Carol, and me pictures of Debbie with her three kids and a second picture of Debbie with her kids and grandchildren. 

The pictures, their Thanksgiving Day, the birthday celebrations combined to make me very happy that the family was all together, loving and enjoying each other. 

2. My happiness grew when Jeff emailed me today from Eugene, not only to encourage me to listen to a couple of his Deadish radio programs, but to tell me Margaret and Michael would be coming to his house this afternoon, thus continuing a long tradition of getting together for coffee that began around forty years ago. I was a part of that tradition for much of the time it's gone on and it's had other people come and go over the years. 

The history of these get togethers is rich, varied, and, without fail, always fascinating as we've talked about our lives, our families, our studies, our work, and discussed many books, recordings, concerts, movies, and other art forms, including Margaret's drawing and painting and Michael's making of music. We've also talked about government over the years, whether the way the schools we attended and the ones we worked at were governed or about our city, state, or country and how they've been governed by the many governmental officers we've seen come and go over the past forty years.

I don't know what Jeff, Margaret, and Jeff discussed today, but I thought a lot about the many experiences we've had over these many years -- we've shared in one another's successes, our many losses, our frustrations, disappointments, and our joys; we've been there for each other through danger, happiness, stimulation, laughter, illness, mourning, and any number of other occurrences that have constituted our navigating the different stages of our lives.  

I wasn't with Michael, Jeff, and Margaret today, but they were certainly with me, bringing me deep gratitude and profound satisfaction for these decades of friendship, coffee, great conversations, and unfailing support.  

3. They didn't know it, but Michael, Margaret, and Jeff joined me in the kitchen today while I mixed Panang curry paste with brown sugar, fish sauce, soy sauce, coconut milk, and dried lime kaffir leaves and made a curry sauce. 

They were with me while I chopped half a white onion, two russet potatoes, a couple of carrots and two stalks of celery and while I got out a handful of frozen broccoli stalks and half a package of sliced mushrooms. I put the potato chunks in the curry sauce as it heated up and I stir fried the vegetables and later added a handful of shrimp and the curry sauce to the vegetables in the wok. 

My mind was in two places: the kitchen and being with Michael, Jeff, and Margaret in Eugene, Oregon over the years. 

My friends didn't distract me. I remembered to make a small pot of jasmine rice and after the sauce and the vegetables and shrimp cooked for a while in the curry sauce, coinciding nicely with the rice being cooked, I very much enjoyed my Thai curry dinner and continued to be thankful for all those coffee times with Jeff, Michael, and Margaret. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-28-2025: Checking on Bunz and Leo and Clark, Checking on the Elks Pantry, Combining Beach Bum Bakery with Laundry

 1. While Carol and Paul are enjoying a week away in and around Meridian, Idaho, I check on their pets in the morning and Christy checks on them and brings in mail in afternoon/evening. 

My jobs are to feed their rabbit, Bunz, some lettuce and to see where one of their cats wants to be. If he's been in, does he want out? If he's out, does he want in? Their other cat, Leo, prefers staying outside almost all the time. If they are out, they both have a sheltered and comfortable place to be. 

Nothing dramatic happened today -- nor has anything dramatic happened all week. 

Clark was content not to come inside at around eight this morning and I went back around eleven to see if he might like to come in at that time, but, no, he was content to be out. 

2. Not always daily, but I've been regularly checking on the food pantry the Kellogg Elks have put up in front of their building to see what food and non-food products have been taken and what things I might go get at the store to purchase and help replenish the pantry. 

Many items that were in the pantry on Wednesday were gone on Thursday when I looked in after Christy and I had dinner at The Lounge. 

A bit more was gone this morning, and so I picked up a variety of things at Yoke's and I'll check back tomorrow after I go to Carol and Paul's. I have one collection of goods to leave off and I'll see if I think some additional items would be a good idea. 

3. I also dropped in at the Beach Bum Bakery and purchased a fresh, not loaf of French bread and a delicious cinnamon knot. 

Over the afternoon I enjoyed both and decided today would be a good day to take care of laundry and tonight I'll enjoy the comfort of clean sheets and I'm about 90% caught up on having clean clothes. I'll put towels in the wash before I go to bed. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-27-2025: My Thanksgiving Celebrations Over the Decades, Christy and I Are on Our Own Today, Thanksgiving at The Lounge

1. I can't remember all the various ways I've celebrated Thanksgiving over the past decades. I have participated in several traditional Woolum family Thanksgiving dinners, whether in our home or as part of the extended Turnbow family Thanksgivings many years ago. I've had at least three vegetarian Thanksgiving Days, one of them at a Hare Krishna vegan restaurant in Eugene (followed by going to the movie Dazed and Confused). I've enjoyed Thanksgiving with family in Kettle Falls, the Tri-Cities, as well as in Kellogg. One year a student invited me to her family's Thanksgiving. 

Another year I joined a table of others without family in Eugene at Sparky's house. A couple from St. Mary's Episcopal Church invited me to dinner with their family another year. I've fixed myself dinner to eat alone, spent one Thanksgiving Day in our Eugene home with Molly and Olivia, and another year I drove to the Three Rivers Casino for a Thanksgiving buffet. One year Debbie was sick on Thanksgiving Day so Molly, Patrick, and I went to a movie and we had a turkey dinner a day or two later. When I was spending a lot of time in the house alone during the pandemic, Carol and Paul delivered a dinner to me at home. 

My point is that I can't really say that I've ever settled into a particular Thanksgiving tradition for having dinner. 

I've been flexible and I've enjoyed all of these various ways of celebrating the holiday a lot. (I've left some of the variety out of this post for no good reason.)

2. So, I've known for quite a while that this year Carol and Paul would be celebrating Thanksgiving with their kids and Paul's family in Meridian. 

Some time in the past month, Debbie decided very wisely to extend her visit to Adrienne's home and so she celebrated Thanksgiving today with Patrick and Meagan, Molly and her family, Adrienne and her two children, and Adrienne, Patrick, and Molly's father, John at Adrienne's home. 

That left Christy and me to decide how we wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving on our own.

Well, in my mind, only one option existed! 

3. We went to The Lounge. 

Every year, Cas and Tracy host a Thanksgiving buffet at The Lounge, open to all comers.  Tracy cooks up a storm and so we had available to us (I can't list everything) turkey, ham, gravy, mashed potatoes, a vegetable bake, green beens, salads, pies and other desserts, and more. 

Christy and I plopped ourselves at the bar, each ordered a drink, yakked with each other, with Harley and Candy, a couple who just randomly dropped in from Superior, MT, with Cas and Tracy, and others.

It was all very mellow, relaxed. People arrived individually and in groups. As some people arrived, others left. The buffet room was never crowded and I enjoyed how conversations created a murmur throughout The Lounge, meaning it wasn't noisy. 

The buffet was generous, and the food was delicious. 

It was a superb way to celebrate Thanksgiving with other people around town, to do so with Christy, and to add to the variety of Thanksgiving celebrations I've enjoyed so much over the years. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-26-2025: *Moby Dick* and Winning Wednesday, Bad Luck Can't Diminish a Good Time, Thanksgiving in Valley Cottage, New York

 1. Like Ishmael, in the opening chapter of Moby Dick, whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then I account it high time to jump into the Camry, roar out to Kingston, pick up Ed, and head to Winning Wednesday at the Coeur d'Alene Casino. 

2. As far as spinning reels, it was not a Winning Wednesday for me.

Luckily, these trips are about more than winning or losing some money.

Ed and I got in some seriously fine yakking going down and coming back. 

Even as my luck was lousy, I enjoyed escaping into the machines' fun and often funny animation and sounds. I bounced between old classic machines that have been around for years and newer games that have recently come out, but it was just one of those days when things just didn't spin my way. 

We ended our visit with a delicious lunch at the casino's Red Tail Bar and Grill. I totally enjoyed eating Buffalo Hot Wings with a half a Caesar salad and washing it all down with a non-alcoholic Heineken beer. 

3. Back in Valley Cottage, New York, Debbie is with Patrick and Meagan, Adrienne and her children, Molly's family, and the adult kids' dad.  Debbie has been very good about texting me and Christy and Carol pictures of everyone and updates on things going on as everyone prepares for two dinners: a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving and a steak dinner on Friday to celebrate the birthdays of Jack and David. It's fun to vicariously join in by reading Debbie's updates and enjoying the pictures she's sent. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-25-2025: Liberal Arts, Football and Piano Practice, Building Chicken Soup

 1.  That Zoom discussion that Bill, Diane, Val, Bridgit, Colette, and I had on Sunday has had my head buzzing all week about the value of a liberal arts education. As I write this blog post right now, I don't have the oomph to get into plentiful detail about what, to me, the ideal liberal arts education is, but I do have the energy to say that because the word "liberal" originates from the Latin word  "liberalis", meaning free, that when it comes to education, the broader (the more liberal) the better.  Acquaintanceship with philosophy, music, rhetoric, different languages, mathematics, history, literature, the manual arts, theology, the fine arts, and so on is a source of freedom, of a free mind, a mind able to move flexibly among many different ways of seeing, thinking about, and writing about the world as well  as a way to take part in a variety of experiences. 

Of course, I continue to fall far short of such an education (but I try, Lord knows I try). I encouraged my students (did I preach?) to consider the merits of taking courses across many disciplines and, in this spirit, supported the efforts of our faculty to offer the widest variety of courses possible. 

I'll leave it at that for now. 

2. Here I go again. 

Again, I'm writing about Colleen Wheelahan, host of two classical music programs a day, the first on SiriusXM's Symphony Hall and second on KUOL. I listen to as much of these programs as possible, as often a I can. 

I subscribe to Wheelahan's Substack. She posts an essay about once a week and talk about a free mind. She makes connections to classical music with subjects such as Halloween, Peanuts, and, today, I read her essay connecting classical music to men's college football. 

Her essay began by reporting how on November 15th, Texas A&M stormed back in the second half of their tilt against the University of South Carolina to erase a 30-3 halftime deficit and triumph, 31-30. 

Colleen Wheelahan loved what A&M coach, Mike Elko, said after the game about how their team made such an unlikely and remarkable comeback. 

He answered, "We won that game six months ago with what we did in the winter."

Wheelahan riffs for a bit then about how "excellence in any venture comes from a long history of dedicated, hard work."

It comes from practice. 

And here is where Colleen Wheelahan connects A&M's miraculous win to performing classical music. 

Practice. 

After quoting musicians from Pablo Casals to Hillary Hahn and composers from Bach to Brahms about practice, she tells a story about herself: 

I remember a particularly valuable private lesson my freshman year of college, where I said something about how I felt confident on my notes in the piece I was playing. I had put in the hours, and was consistently accurate, so I thought I was ready to move on. My teacher pointed out that the solidity I had developed on it was just the beginning. You don't start making music until your technique is second nature. Until you're able to adapt. Until you're fluent in that piece. Expression isn't possible until "hitting the notes" comes naturally. 

 That only happens with practice. On the piano. On the cello. In an orchestra. On the football field. 

On our sibling outing this past Saturday, Carol and I talked about this exact principle of performance in the theater. Colleen Wheelahan's teacher said it better than we did. Indeed, expression on the stage isn't possible until delivering the lines, hearing fellow actors' lines, and moving on the stage comes naturally because of long hours, whether alone or with the cast, of practice. 

3. Lately, when it comes to cooking dinner for myself, I turn daily to two sources of comfort: stir fries and soup. 

Tonight, I stir fried onion, celery, carrots, and red pepper in the wok and later added sliced mushrooms. In a skillet I'd fried bacon in earlier, I fried chicken pieces in a light coat of bacon grease. When the vegetables softened and the chicken was cooked through, I put the chicken pieces in the wok, added a couple of chopped russet potatoes, and added a container of chicken broth. 

I had elbow macaroni left over from the Cincinnati chili I ate the night before and added it to my soup. 

I brought this mixture to a boil and then let it simmer for ten minutes or so and added oregano and Trader Joe's 21 Spice Salute. 

I ladled the soup into a bowl and added my favorite means of enlivening a soup: soy sauce. 

It was warming. 

It was comforting. 

It was delicious. 

It worked. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-24-2025: I Further Develop Yesterday's Reflections on Mortality, Compassion, and the Divine

 1. My blog post yesterday about mortality, compassion, and the Divine elicited a handful of thoughtful and positive responses that buoyed and uplifted me. One email, in particular, from Westminster Basement member Diane's brother, was especially insightful and very encouraging. 

I got to thinking today that my ruminations about mortality, compassion, and the Divine began over fifty years ago, long before I became an old man. 

I confronted these realities almost immediately after I survived a serious accident at the Zinc Plant in 1973. 

In fact, it was the way that my literature courses at NIC helped me think about nearly being killed that led me to major in English and study fiction, poetry, and drama for the entirety of my adult life. 

I never really thought about being an English major in terms of job prospects -- although that worked out.  I became an English major because I wanted to wrestle with these big questions, with the meaning of life (especially in light of a random event that nearly cost me mine). Studying literature turned out to be the best avenue for me to do that. 

2. It was in 1974, during my junior year of college, my first semester at Whitworth, that I experienced two profound thunderclaps of awakening to the relationship between mortality, compassion, and the Divine. 

These two thunderclaps struck in close proximity to each other. I'm not at all sure which came first. 

An English professor from Wheaton College was the featured speaker for a lecture series at Whitworth that fall and she had an AC/DC impact on me. 

I was thunderstruck. 

Most prominent in my memory was listening to her discuss the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. 

O'Connor's stories often climax in a moment of violence that awakens the victim's better self, the victim's compassion, kindness, and sense of oneness with all things. 

They are moments of grace, what O'Connor referred to as the violent intrusion of grace. 

The idea is that these characters were so asleep, so dead to kindness and decency, so entrenched in habits of being judgmental, petty, narrow-minded, self-centered, and rigid that only a sudden and shocking moment of violence could awaken them. 

I began to realize, listening to Beatrice Batson when I was twenty years old, that what O'Connor compressed into a moment of storytelling gave me a clear picture of the grace of mortality. 

I began to ponder the idea (and the reality) of how refusing to deny that we will die is a powerful source of seeing what binds us to all mortals. We are fragile. We need each other. We are going to die. 

When this violent grace intrudes upon characters in O'Connor's stories, the characters suddenly see light. To my way of thinking, they see the light of the Divine and how the Divine calls us to see our inseparability from others, whether we like them or not. 

In O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", just before the Misfit shoots the grandmother, the grace that has finally broken through to this bigoted, narrow-minded, superficial character moves her to say to the Misfit, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." Then she touches him on the shoulder. 

The grandmother's confrontation with mortality as she's about to be shot, fills her with grace, clears her head, reveals to her the light of the Divine, and she responds with kindness to the Misfit. 

For nearly all of us, being awakened to the connection between mortality, compassion, and the Divine is a longer, slower process. It doesn't happen in a moment. 

But it's not reserved for the aged.

I began to see this connection,  thanks to Flannery O'Connor and Beatrice Batson, when I was twenty years old. 

3. When I heard Beatrice Batson at Whitworth College, I was, at that time, taking my first Shakespeare class from Professor Dean Ebner who had been a student of Professor Batson's at Wheaton. 

In Professor Ebner's class we read King Lear. 

It's the story of a self-centered and authoritative king who decides, at the age of eighty, to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. To secure their share, all the daughters have to do is flatter King Lear. He commands each to tell him why she loves King Lear the most. 

Two of the sisters comply, but the third, Cordelia, won't play along and King Lear banishes her. The two flattering daughters later turn on their father and they banish him, at eighty year old man, to homelessness and when he is turned out, it's onto a bare heath in the midst of a tempest. 

The suffering King Lear experiences on this heath in this storm transforms him. 

Confronted with his mortality, the hard-hearted and self-centered egoism, his disregard for those who have suffered under his rule, and his sense of himself as above feeling what the wretches do begins to be washed away by the driving wind and rain of the tempest. 

Lear confronts the tempest, as if he is confronting the Divine itself, challenging it to bring on all the power and pain it's got and that's what happens. He experiences grace through exposing himself to the suffering that accompanies being mortal. 

King Lear awakens after the storm a transformed man. The long repressed kindness, compassion, and capacity to ask for and to extend forgiveness awakens in him and leads to one the most heart-breaking conclusions in all the world's story telling. 

The story of this old king's suffering and transformation, of his softened heart when he reunites with Cordelia, and his mortal suffering at the end of the play left me thunderstruck. 

Those claps of thunder have never left me and for over fifty years now I have been trying, with very mixed success, to live in the grace of the Divine as I came to understand it from Flannery O'Connor, Shakespeare, and Beatrice Batson. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-23-2025: Mortality and Compassion, Supreme Being, Christy's Cincinnati Chili

 1. Today, after a several months hiatus, Bill, Val, Diane, Bridgit, Colette, and I beamed ourselves onto one another's computer screens via Zoom and yakked away for a couple of hours. 

Together, we are reaching a time in our lives when we are becoming more keenly aware of our mortality.

In part it's because of illness and injury we've experienced. We've all had at least one parent die and the two (I think) surviving parents among us are experiencing declines. We are losing contemporaries to death. All of us seem to realize we either are unable to do things we might like to do or at one time wished we would be able to do (like travel) and Val, in particular, who just returned from a trip to Europe, has more travel planned, aware that she wants to travel as much as she can before the time comes when she might not be able to. 

It's sobering, but I thought our conversations about mortality laid a foundation for another discussion we had about compassion and forgiveness. No one ever said this is in so many words, but I wondered if our keener awareness of the inevitability of our lives ending also makes us more keenly aware of wanting to spend the time we have left caring for others, forgiving others, turning away from anger and toward kindness, of realizing more sharply than ever that we'd rather spend whatever time we have left extending compassion, not so much judgment and pettiness. 

Maybe what I just wrote wasn't happening for us collectively, but it was for me individually.

2. We all have also moved toward more complicated, complex, and skeptical understandings of the Divine, of Supreme Being in the world. None of us is satisfied with nor is able to live according to the formulas, bromides, and simplistic ways of being in the presence of the Divine that we had been taught when younger or that we observe being experienced by people around us. 

And, I thought, don't these questions about the Divine become more pressing to us as we age and become more aware of our mortality? 

Not once (that I remember) did our conversation move toward whether there is life after death. 

No. All of the discussion about Supreme Being, the Divine, prayer, how we conduct ourselves, what has proven to be impossible to live by spiritually and what we want to align with spiritually had to do with the remaining time we have left in our lives in the here and now. 

Every thought articulated today wats fresh, thought out; not one thought was received, recited, or an echoing of an institution or a leader. 

I admit. 

I didn't say anything. 

But I absorbed a lot. 

3. On Friday afternoon, Christy joined nearly two dozen of her mates from the KHS Class of 1973 for a chili and soup feed. Seven different members of the class brought a soup or chili (the others brought other kinds of food) and the group voted on whose chili or soup was best. 

Christy made Cincinnati chili and served what is often a sauce as chili to eat from a bowl. 

Christy didn't win, 

She had leftover chili and gave me a container of it and tonight I ate her Cincinnati chili over elbow macaroni. 

It was awesome.

Cincinnati chili is much more Greek or Mediterranean in its seasoning than the chili we eat usually and it's not tomato based. 

I thought Christy's chili was a perfect blend of the spices that make Cincinnati chili unique and it had a pleasant amount of heat which I enjoyed. I didn't have onion on hand or grated cheese or oyster crackers, so my Cincinnati chili was a beef and beans sauce and I decided to garnish it with Parmesan cheese. 

I didn't eat all the chili Christy gave and I'm very happy about that! I look forward to another helping of Christy's chili. 

It didn't win the contest at Friday's party, but it is definitely a winner to me! 

Three Beautiful Things 11-22-2025: Our Sibling Outing Going from Kellogg to Murray and Back Via Prichard

 1. If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that Carol, Christy, and I go out for a once a month outing somewhere in the general Silver Valley, Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, Sandpoint area. We each take turns being in charge month to month and today Christy was our leader and she guided us on a trip up the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River. 

We started out with a stop in Kingston at Base Camp Coffee for delicious hot drinks.

Christy then drove us to the Old River Road and we stopped at her book club friend Debbie's property which sits very close to the North Fork and we enjoyed terrific views of the river. 

Afterward, we took a detour off of the Old River Road and briefly visited the Bumblebee Campground near the Little North Fork of the Cd'A River. It was kind of a humorous stop in that none of us had clear memories of this place and nothing about this stop was particularly memorable! (No problem.)

2. We yakked and yakked about a variety of subjects as we made our way to Murray and a visit to the Sprag Pole Inn. The Sprag Pole is a bar and grill in front of the house and features a museum in the back. 

We beelined straight to the museum and gawked at and yakked about the countless shelves of everything from miniature wood carvings to numerous local free drink tokens to a display of cigarette packages and tons of things in between. 

The museum also features displays of mining, logging, and fire history and has displays of all kinds of other historical items, including my favorite, about a half a dozen or so poker machines and other games of chance. 

The museum displays an overwhelming number of items and I kept thinking that it definitely merits return visits with the hope that each repeated visit would be less overwhelming.

3. Before we headed back to Kingston, we enjoyed a terrific lunch at the Prichard Tavern. My Swiss cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms and onions and a side of fries completely satisfied me and, as it turned out, this was my last meal of the day. 

Back home, I worked on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in between naps. 

It was a relaxing way to finish out a fun sibling outing day and to let years of memories of good times and a wild time or two up the river bubble up inside me. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-21-2025: Base Camp Coffee and the Transplant, Robert Schumann, The Lounge on Saturday -- Maybe

1. On Saturday, Carol, Christy, and I will head up the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River on a sibling outing. All I really know that we'll do is stop at Base Camp Coffee for caffeinated drinks to rev us up for our odyssey. 

I told Stu our plan and he asked me where the coffee stand is located and when I told him it's just off the freeway on the road heading up the river, it reminded me of Friday, May 10, 2024.  

When Ed, Diane, Stu, Joni, and I piled into Diane's rig (Ed drove) to journey to Trout Creek, MT that day to check out a vacation rental we were considering, we stopped at Base Camp Coffee, well, at my request. I was jonesing for a latte. 

May 10, 2024. A milestone day as it turned out. 

I'd received a call on May 9th that a kidney might come available, and I knew when I joined my friends to go to Montana that the pros wouldn't know until Saturday if it would be my transplant day. 

So, I could go to Montana with a mind free of concern that I might get called to go to Spokane on Friday, May 10th. 

I had a great day in Montana and, as it turned out, the transplant happened on May 11 and the procedure snuck into the first half hour of May 12th.

I looked at my blog posts from those days and, still, it gob smacks me how smoothly everything went, how I went into the ICU very early Sunday morning and by Tuesday, I'd been out of ICU a day and the pros discharged me, permitted me to stay in Kellogg, and the process of frequent blood work and appointments at Sacred Heart got underway, soon slowed down a bit, and, I never had single serious problem from May 11th forward. 

2. I am not familiar at all with the 19th century composer Robert Schumman, but he was the focus of today's "Exploring Music" program (following three hours of Colleen Wheelahan's program on WUOL). I enjoyed Bill McGlaughlin's hour-long introduction to some of Schumman's symphonies and I enjoyed learning some tidbits about Schumman's life. 

Tonight's episode of "Exploring Music" brought this five-day focus on symphonies to an end. More such past episodes focused on other composers await my attention in the program's archives. 

3. For a few unremarkable reasons that need no elaboration, Ed and I decided not to go to The Lounge this afternoon like we usually do on Friday afternoons. If all works out with each of us getting back to the Silver Valley tomorrow at a time that works, our plan is to plop down at The Lounge's premier plank and enjoy a couple cold ones and yak for a while about what's happening in the world, both near and far. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-20-2025: Crapped Out App, Felix Mendelssohn, Eggplant Green Curry

1.  I start my weekdays off listening to Colleen Wheelahan's classical music program on SiriusXM on the Symphony Hall channel. I have the channel on all through the night at a low volume. Wheelahan comes on the air at 3 a.m. PST, and I usually wake up enough to turn the volume up a bit around five or so and by seven or eight o'clock, her show has my full attention. 

Today, my peaceful morning of symphonies, concerti, sonatas, choral music, fantasias, and more got interrupted. 

My SiriusXM app crapped out. 

I marshalled all my patience and went to work. Was this a problem larger than my app on my phone? What steps might I take to get the app functioning again? I checked things out at downfinder.com. No nationwide outage.  I watched a video about this particular app going down and what to do. I followed the instructions the video laid out. Still on the blink. 

My last attempt involved uninstalling the app and installing it again. 

It didn't work at first, but eventually -- and I don't remember what I did that might have helped it -- the app kicked in. 

It was worth the time and effort and I maintained my patient cool. 

Sidenote: I had a weird mental blooper happen before the app crapped out. 

I was working the Wordle puzzle and made a guess that left me with   _AGER. The letters AGER were all yellow/gold, meaning the letters were correct, but not in the right place. 

Somehow, in a moment of confusion which I experienced as perfect clarity, I treated the letters as being green. Correct letters. Correct places. So, I thought, all I needed to do was come up the right consonant to go in the first slot -- WAGER, CAGER, GAGER -- I couldn't figure out why not one of them solved the puzzle -- and then I figured it out -- I was treating yellow/gold letters as green ones. 

I didn't solve the puzzle, needless to say. 

I laughed. Shook my head. Confessed my embarrassment to Carol and Christy. 

And I moved on, unruffled, even when my SiriusXM app wouldn't work. 

2. Later in the day, using my fully functional Louisville Public Media app, I listened to much of the afternoon show Colleen Wheelahan hosts on KUOL and then listened to today's installment of "Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin". 

It's symphony week on McGlaughlin's program this week and this evening's episode focused on the gorgeous work of Felix Mendelssohn. 

I'm thinking that I might have a three dimensional deep dive in progress, adding Mendelssohn to Beethoven and Brahms. 

3. I added to the deep pleasure all this music gave me by fixing a green curry for dinner. 

After a long and not deliberate hiatus, I returned tonight to an old favorite: EGGPLANT! 

If any of you happen to be longtime readers of this blog, you might remember that I cooked frequently with eggplant when we lived in Greenbelt, MD.

But, here in Kellogg, I didn't continue that delightful Maryland preoccupation.

Tonight, though, I stir fried eggplant, yams, tofu, and Thai wheat noodles in the wok, made a green curry sauce, and poured the sauce over what I cooked in the wok. 

I ate this curry in a bowl like a soup or a stew and I'm determined to check the produce section reguarly for eggplant and get it back into my rotation of meals.  

I am very happy I have some of this curry left over and I'll be wanting even more of it in the future. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-18-2025: (No Winning Wednesday) Learning About Our Nation, Learning About Symphonies, Improving My Soup

 It's Wednesday. 

Also known as Winning Wednesday at the Coeur d'Alene Casino.

Just like a week ago, I didn't go to Winning Wednesday today.

That raises a salient question.

Why not?

Let's pull the curtain back and examine why I didn't play for double points on my player card, redeem my November food voucher, or try my luck on the Invaders from Planet Moomah machine or spin the reels and try to win cash on the Mo' Mummy machine or try my luck with Hoot Loot. 

1. Partly, I exchanged spinning reels for learning. I spent quite a bit of time reading different analyses and listening to different thinkers reflect on what's happening in our nation. 

2. I also continued my efforts to understand better the musical genre of symphony. Whenever I'm at home in the afternoon, I use my Louisville Public Media app to listen to WUOL, the classical music station from the Univ of Louisville. Collen Wheelahan, my favorite classical radio host and, in addition, brilliant Substack writer, has a three hour show at 3:00 PST. 

Following her show is a show distributed by WFMT in Chicago called "Exporing Music with Bill McGlaughlin". 

This week, McGlaughlin is focusing on symphonies, starting with Beethoven's Eroica Symphony and then exploring works by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Schubert, and wrapping up the week with Schumann's Rhenish Symphony.  

I admit, I don't soak in everything McGlaughlin says in these one hour shows, but I enjoy his teaching all the same and I can always return to past programs in the show's archives. 

So, this evening, while I wasn't trying to get into the bonus game on the Monty Python and the Holy Grail slot machine, Bill McGlaughlin introduced me to innovative symphonic compositions written by the mid-19th century French composer Hector Berlioz and I learned more about Berlioz's work and more about the symphonic form. 

I know so little. 

My older and slower mind is absorbing all it can. 

3. Instead of redeeming my food voucher at the CdA Casino's Red Tail Bar and Grill, I took out the leftover container of Chicken and Yam soup I made last night and added the ingredients I forgot on Tuesday: fresh lemon juice and fresh spinach leaves. I had a small container of leftover Trader Joe's Greek Chickpeas in the fridge and added them to my soup as well. 

Ah! My soup tasted complete. 

It was so delicious and so comforting that I hardly thought at all of not being on a Karma Kat machine or not dining on a Red Tail shrimp taco and continued to enjoy my day of learning, cooking, eating, and trying to keep the kitchen clean. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-18-2025: Kidneys and Eyesight, Plans Confirmed, Comforting Chicken Soup

 1. How about this! 

At my one year transplant anniversary appointment back in May in Spokane, when the pro assigned to me that day, Natasha Barauskas, PA-C, asked if I'd seen an optometrist lately, I told her I hadn't, but that I thought my eyesight had improved after the transplant. 

Today, Dr. Miller, the optometrist I've been seeing since we moved to Kellogg, confirmed that it made sense that my eyesight had improved because my transplanted kidney is filtering my blood better, improving the flow of blood in my system and enhancing the amount of oxygen being carried to my eyes (the eyes thrive on oxygen). 

We really do have a complex and miraculous interconnected system at work inside our skin. 

2. I confirmed today with Debbie that she will be in New York for Thanksgiving Day. 

I thought that was the case, but I wanted to make sure because if she was flying back to Spokane before Thanksgiving, it could affect the plans Christy, Carol, and I have for a sibling outing on Saturday when we'll do some knocking around up the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River. 

Debbie will be in New York. 

The sibling outing plans are intact. 

3. I forgot to add the fresh spinach I took out of the fridge and forgot to give the soup the squeezes of lemon juice I'd planned. 

But otherwise, I cooked up chicken pieces, white onion, celery, carrots, yam pieces, and broccoli, seasoned it all with some salt and fresh tarragon, and added chicken broth. 

Once I ladled this comforting soup into a bowl, I suddenly desired soy sauce and added a few dashes and then the soup tasted just like I'd wanted it to. 

I still have a quart left. 

I will add spinach and lemon juice to it. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-17-2025: Rice Pudding and Bach, I Was Somnolent, Swiss Steak Stew

 1. Rice pudding. 

It might have been the culprit. 

An 18th century Russian diplomat named Count Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk suffered from insomnia. 

Since Kris Kristofferson had not yet gotten around to writing "Help Me Make It Through the Night", 
J. S. Bach's first biographer wrote that Count von Keyserlingk commissioned Bach to compose pieces that would be soothing and lively enough to help the Count, well, make it through the night. 

And, so, Bach composed The Goldberg Variations. 

I wondered today if possibly rice pudding was what kept the Count awake. 

You see, when Copper and I hit the hay Sunday night after I'd enjoyed our family dinner, I couldn't sleep. 

I didn't toss and turn, in deference to Copper's insistence that I stay still through the night. 

I did read some. I did put the Classical for Sleep channel on Sirius/XM. 

Eventually, by about 2:30 or 3:00, I slept off and on until I arose. 

Looking back, I'm wondering if rice pudding kept me awake. 

Sunday night's rice pudding wasn't super sweet, but it did have sugar in it and I'm wondering if that sugar revved up my system and kept me awake. 

I'll never know, but I'm curious now if historians of Russian diplomacy dug into the culinary life of the good Count Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk, would they find that he had an insatiable desire for and could not resist eating bowls of 

RICE PUDDING?

2. Sleep deprivation shaped my day. Luckily, I wasn't crabby, so Copper and Gibbs didn't suffer any ill consequences of my lack of sleep, but for most of the day I was in a somnolent state. 

I completed Wordle, Quordle, Waffle, Connections, and Strands. 

I blogged. 

I slept. 

An afternoon nap helped lift me mostly out of my lethargy. 

I took a day off from exercising. 

3. Christy sent me home Sunday evening with some leftover Swiss steak (no rice pudding) and in my wide-eyed and bushy tailed state after my nap, I played with it. 

I sliced a half a white onion and peeled and chopped up a yam. 

I fired up some oil in the wok and cooked the onion and yam and then added in some frozen corn kernels.

I cubed the Swiss steak and added it, along with the Swiss steak sauce into the wok and thoroughly enjoyed the stew I had almost accidentally made. 

I had some leftover rice in the fridge but decided not to use it tonight in case I decide later on to make some rice pudding. 

And do an insomnia test. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-16-2025: Sunday Journeys, Swiss Steak Family Dinner, Paul Simon Seminar

 1. I left the house today! 

I went on a road trip all the way uptown to Beach Bum Bakery where I bought a delicious apple fritter and three Everything bagels. My odyssey continued when I survived the grueling drive to Smelterville for a 20 oz latte to enjoy with the fritter I bought. 

I returned home, enjoyed my sweet breakfast, and then girded my loins and went on another journey all the way to Yoke's and bought a few staples and managed to complete the circle of my journey by returning home again. 

2. Christy planned and hosted a superb dinner tonight. Paul, Carol, and I arrived at Christy's around 5:30. The family members not taking immunosuppressive drugs enjoyed a great cocktail, the Dark and Stormy. I, too, enjoyed my potable, a bottle of ginger beer. 

We snacked on vegetables and with two dips, Original Bitchin' Sauce and a spinach artichoke dip. 

Before long, it was time for the main event -- one of my favorite meals ever since I stopped eating jars of Gerber's. 

Christy fixed Swiss Steak using a sirloin tip and fixed mashed potatoes. Carol baked and toasted really satisfying homemade buttermilk bread, and I brought a mess of green beans seasoned with crispy bacon, roasted almond slivers, Everything But the Bagel seasoning, and a light coat of bacon grease. 

For dessert, Christy fixed a wonderful rice pudding. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy it, I've been thinking that with all the rice I prepare during any given week, I ought to start making rice pudding. Mostly, I tend to use leftover rice to make a rice and egg scramble. I am kind of crazy about dried fruit, though, and the prospect of fixing rice pudding with raisins or dried apricots or other dried fruits has me kind of excited. 

3. Once Carol mentioned that she had just watched a documentary movie about Paul Simon, our dinner conversation became focused on Simon's long music career, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, my confusion about Natalie Merchant and the 10,000 Maniacs, Mumford and Son and Jerry Douglas, the making of "We Are the World", the movie The Graduate, ABA/NBA legend Connie Hawkins, Graceland, the thorny question of cultural appropriation,  and any number of other topics inspired by the mere mention of Paul Simon. 

We did not, however, talk about any ways to leave your lover nor did we discuss how we are always slip sliding away. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-15-2025: Listening to Interviews, Gibbs is Boss, Scrounging Up a Salad

 1. I spent a couple of hours over at The Bulwark today listening to Tim Miller interview David Frum and to Sarah Longwell converse with Robert Draper. I enjoy listening to journalists, writers, and thinkers who have what I'd call flexible points of view, who have been and are still willing to adjust their outlook as warranted. I thought both Frum and Draper looked at what's been happening in the world over the last several months with an aerial view, able to see shifts (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene), conflicts (e.g. in the leadership space left by the assassination of Charlie Kirk and in the tensions that have arisen since Tucker Carlson's interview of Nick Fuentes), and what we might see in the future with a wide lens, with a mostly dispassionate tone and a keen sense of how complex and complicated things in our world always are and always have been. 

2. As I've written before, sometimes I think it's best for our neighborhood to bring Gibbs in the house when he goes on a barking jag in the back yard. 

For months now, he's been very good about coming to the back porch when I say his name in a quiet voice. I never yell at Gibbs. 

I lure him into the house and reward his obedience with shredded sharp cheddar cheese. 

Well, Gibbs got wise to this obey/reward strategy of mine and has created one of his own. 

Now, from time to time, he'll ask to go outside, not because he needs to, but because he wants cheese.

Within a minute or so of going out, he'll bark at the back door. I open it to let him in and he looks at me, his eyes saying:

"Uh, cheese?"

I laugh, give him some cheese, and surrender to the reality of how both of us have a degree of control over the other -- and, I have to admit, I think Gibbs might have the upper paw! 

3. Writing, listening to interviews, racking up 3000 steps, solving puzzles, including the Sunday NYTimes crossword puzzle, being bossed around by Gibbs -- well, I just didn't feel like leaving the house today (not unusual for me). I knew I needed some groceries, but I figured I could make due with what I had on hand to fix a satisfying dinner. 

I was right. 

I drained the water out of a block of tofu. I popped open a can of Trader Joe's Greek Chickpeas, and pulled vegetables out of the fridge. I sorted out the last of my garden salad mix and put it in a bowl with carrots, red pepper, celery, yellow squash, some Greek chickpeas, and a handful of tofu cubes. 

It worked. 

I enjoyed the salad and I left room inside myself for a nice bowl of popcorn about ninety minutes later. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-14-2025: I Listen to More of Leah Sottile's Podcast, Kellogg Elks Burger Night, Quick Visit to The Lounge

 1. It's a terrible situation. 

On March, 13, 2019, eighteen year old Sarah Zuber left her home in Rainier, OR to take a walk around 11 p.m. Her sister found her dead in a ditch along the road about 400 feet from their home the next morning. 

It's an unsolved death.

In season 2 of the podcast, Hush, Leah Sottile tells the story of her investigation into this unsettling story. 

I listened to the second episode today. 

The episode moves in two directions.

The first direction fascinated me. 

Leah Sottile takes her listeners into a professional quandary she's working to sort out. 

She wonders what is the difference between the work she's doing as a journalist and the writing and broadcasting others do in the genre of True Crime books and podcasts and television shows and internet videos. 

Sottile expresses her devotion to journalistic ethics and how they guide her work in substantiating stories, verifying sources, and to investigate as a way of getting as close as possible to the truth, not concerning herself with being entertaining or fitting her story into a well-established true crime story telling formula. 

The second direction this episode takes involves the work of law enforcement as they have tried to figure out what happened to Sarah Zuber that night. 

Possibly, the most riddling dimension of this part of the story is the fact that the medical examiner changed her conclusion of Sarah's death from inconclusive to saying Sarah died by alcohol consumption and hypothermia. 

I don't know where Leah Sottile will take her investigation into the law enforcement's work or if she'll return to this changed autopsy report. 

I know that in Episode 3, she investigates the public's response to Sarha Zuber's death and the investigation. 

2. There was a time, not that long ago, when I would have, as they say, binge listened to this second season of Hush, even knowing all the episodes have not been posted yet. 

I can't do that anymore, though. 

Today, I needed time to digest the two episodes I've listened to and to get away from it for a day or two.

I picked the perfect way to get some distance from this awful story. 

I met Ed and Nancy uptown at the Elks for burgers. 

I had fun listening to others' stories and doing a little yakkin' myself.

I loved my burger. 

The burgers at the Elks are the perfect size for me. I don't know if the patties are a quarter pound or smaller than that and I couldn't tell you the circumference of the bun. 

All I can say with certainty is that they aren't huge and by being such a reasonable size, the Elks burger is perfect for me. 

The size is perfect and my burger was cooked perfectly and I totally enjoyed my side of fries. 

Thanks to my pre and post-transplant caution, I hadn't been to the Kellogg Elks for a burger for quite a long time and I was very happy that it felt right and safe to return and I look forward to going back for the next Burger Night on December 12th. 

3. After enjoying our burgers, Nancy, Ed, and I skipped across the street for a short session at The Lounge. 

We had a good time joking around about different things with Bob and Tracy and yakkin' some more with each other. 

Back home, I continued to relax with a bowl of popcorn and, taking my time, I managed to complete the always challenging, but fair and gimmick-free, Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle. 

I also achieved my current goal of 3000 steps a day and just that modest number of steps helped me sleep deeply and peacefully through the night. 

Three Beautiful Things 11-13-2025: Dr. Bieber Says Things Look Great!, Friends Encourage Me to Keep Moving, Scott and Kathleen Expand My Listening Options

1. If all goes according to plan, it will be three months before I open up my laptop and write about a post-transplant visit to a doctor's office. 

I did, however, have another one today. 

I honestly couldn't hope for a more positive visit. 

Dr. Bieber confirmed my observation that my lab numbers look great. My "bad" cholesterol is down. My filtration and creatinine numbers improved. My blood pressure was solid. I'm not retaining water in my lower legs or ankles to any concerning degree. The amount of protein in my urine decreased. 

Dr. Bieber liked my news that my in-home exercising has contributed significantly to alleviating me of the discomforts I've experienced over the last four months. 

So, I'll continue to go in for labs monthly (on Winning Wednesdays!) and I see Dr. Bieber in February and return to Sacred Heart in January and April for specialty blood work and in May for my next annual exam which will mark my transplant's second anniversary. 

2.  Because of entries I made here at kelloggbloggin', I've heard from several friends over the past few days. Byrdman, Terry T, Liz, Kathy H., Carol Y.. and Rich B wrote me encouraging messages in support of my efforts to get my body moving again. 

They all have experience with improving their well-being and I will imagine them being with me, encouraging me, holding me accountable as I work to stay in motion day after day.

3. I also received two wonderful responses to having mentioned my recent plunge into the symphonies of Johannes Brahms. 

Before I mention my friends, I've been thinking a lot about when Debbie and I used to hang out at the Old Line Bistro in Beltsville, MD. A good and enjoyable crowd of people hung out there and so there was a lot of great conversation at the bar and sometimes the talking nearly drowned out the music playing over the house sound system. 

But, from time to time, I'd hear a fragment of a song by Tom Petty or The Cars or Mumford & Sons ("The Boxer" featuring Jerry Douglas), Elle King and others and I'd snap to attention to that music and immediately know the song.

That's where I want to get with Brahms, and as long as were on the subject, Beethoven. 

It all comes from familiarity and I'm trying to grow more familiar with Brahms' symphonies and Beethoven's. 

Then when someone says to me, as Scott Dalgarno did yesterday, "You take them [Brahm's symphonies] in remembering that they are following in the wake of Beethoven's 9 symphonies. Who dare write a symphony after Beethoven's #3, 5, 7 and 9? But for my money the Brahms 2 (which I heard recently with the Oregon Symphony) seems every bit as monumental." 

I would love to be able to read this sentence and immediately have themes from the Beethoven symphonies Scott mentioned as well as Brahm's second all be at the front of my mind and memory. 

They aren't. 

"Running Down a Dream" is at the front. So is "Let's Go" and Jerry Douglas' dobro solo during "The Boxer". "X's & O's" lives in my memory -- even though I don't always remember Elle King's name (sigh). 

Right now, Brahm's 4th is getting close to being a permanent resident in my memory. 

But in order to fully experience Scott's assessment of Brahm's 2 in relation to Beethoven's #3, 5, 7, and 9, I'll need to go to Spotify and play them. I have in my lifetime listened to them all -- and listened to Brahm's #2 often lately, but none of them are embedded in my mind enough to be able to call them up on the spot by memory. 

Will I ever reach that level of familiarity with these symphonies? 

Good question! 

I also heard from Kathleen Horton who wondered if I'd listened to Brahm's Schicksalslied.

I'm not sure if I have.  

SiriusXM's Symphony Hall channel plays choral music exclusively as Sunday night becomes Monday morning, and it could be that this composition of Brahm's played while I was asleep or half asleep. 

But I've never listened to it on purpose. 

Soon I will. 

As with the friends who responded to my writing about exercising, Scott and Kathleen's posts encourage me to keep listening to classical music, to continue to try to absorb it into my memory, and to learn more about it -- I know so little despite hours and hours of having it on while in college at NIC and at Whitworth and listening at home in Spokane, Eugene, Greenbelt, and Kellogg and in the car wherever I've lived. 

But Tom Petty's songs have stuck in my memory more reliably! 

As have Guy Clark's. 

And Debbie Diedrich's.