Magic Cities

Awhile ago, I was sitting in Allen Gardens when a friend appeared. We hadn't seen one another for some time, so she stopped to visit with me, and we had a good, meandering talk in the cool of a Fall afternoon. My friend is one of those people whom I felt a pleasant connection to almost immediately upon meeting. There's a sure sense not only of enjoying her company, but knowing too that she enjoys mine. So meeting is always a pleasure. I feel that she carries a spark of magic.

Our connection has never gone beyond our casual meetings, but I feel that it easily could. So much so that, if she and I weren't both married, I would absolutely want to explore our possibilities. And perhaps that explains why we've allowed our meetings to remain random and unpredictable.

So here we were, on a perfect day, in a beautiful setting, relaxed and with no sense of expectation. And we chose to speak of cities. Which was the perfect complement to all the other elements. Because, just like special days, special places and special people, there are cities that possess qualities that are in no way exceptional, that may not stand out on their own, but that when combined is a particular way - including the ingredient of he or she who gets to behold it - becomes something magical.

We both came to Toronto about twenty-five years or so ago, she from a small community in Quebec, close to Montreal, and me from Seattle. Neither of us was very impressed with Toronto upon arrival, but we each discovered - after two or three years - that it is special in a number of ways. But we also agreed that, though Toronto has become, and we suspect will remain, Home, it is not a city that we would ever designate as magical. And we agreed that Montreal, on the other hand, is a magical city. This didn't mean for either of us that we'd rather be in Montreal than here in Toronto. Nor did it mean that we were sentenced to carry a regret for the rest of time, that we'd accepted living out our existence in a place as un-magical as Toronto. It was simply the recognition of a special and rare quality that sets some places apart from others.

Cities that I've felt this magical quality about, and that I've been blessed to live in, include New York and San Francisco. Others that I'm sure have this quality, and that I'd love to spend more time in, to confirm, are Paris, New Orleans, Prague, Krakow and Old San Juan.

And just as is the case with Toronto, there are cities I have personal history and strong connections with, that I've come to love, but to which I wouldn't attribute this same sort of magic. These include Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Berlin.

I wonder what other people think and feel about this: about the presence or absence of something very special in certain people and places; something not easily defined or quantified, but that is somewhat above and beyond the ordinary, the natural; something that speaks to spirit.

I'd love to learn what other people consider to be magical cities. I haven't travelled nearly as much of the World as I'd like, and it would be great to add some other special places to my list. I hope you'll be willing to share!

Ten ECM Albums that will Take You Places

Manfred Eicher's ECM label out of Germany has forever been a source of a fresh listening experiences for me. I did most of my exploration of new music during the seventies and eighties, and I still go to those decades for music that's new to me, however known or obscure its standing in the World. The label has a long list of regulars who return again and again at different stages of their careers, often collaborating with one another and incorporating new influences.

I have about sixty ECM albums, mostly from among their first two hundred issues. Collectively, they make up a good chunk of the progressive, non-commercial, freer part of my vinyl collection. These ten albums are my favorites from among them.

It's fitting that the first album I'll rave about it one I just came across about three weeks ago, in Dr. Disc, a great shop here in downtown Hamilton, where I picked up about twenty used albums. Six of them are ECM and the chance to take up that many discs by mostly unknown artists was easy to take up, because the product from that label is always good, and almost always something unique.

Barre Phillips: Journal Violone II

Incredibly beautiful tapestries of string bass, sax and voice. I have another of Phillips' efforts with the label and I like it, but this one is in a different league. 

One of the most wonderful things about all of the arts is how they remind us of the infinity of possibilities, and that creativity is inexhaustible, despite the too ubiquitous human habit of clinging to what we think we already know. Improvisational and experiential music can always brings us to something beyond what we know. And there's a quality it can have - but doesn't always - of feeling new even when recorded and listened to hundreds of times. That's because it carries us to places we aren't accustomed to being, into spaces and angles that we aren't used to inhabiting.

This album evokes all those qualities. It is an instant favorite and I'm looking forward to growing into it.

ECM, as a label, is supreme in inviting its guest artists to explore new combinations of sounds. Very often, the work an artist records for ECM is totally different than what they've recorded elsewhere, or even their other work on the label. I've assumed - though I haven't done the research to confirm - that Manfred Eicher was a producer who invited artists to do what they hadn't previously had the opportunity or the space to do. It usually feels like the musicians have plunged into some dimension just beyond where they've become settled, so that what they produce surprises even them.

Maybe that's only a reflection of how this music feels to me.

Keith Jarrett: Facing You

This may be the first ECM album that ever came into my possession. That would've been in '75, when I was twenty-one and living in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was a used record store called Deja Vu - the first in my experience, and a place I explored whenever I had a few bucks extra from whatever I was gigging. In those days I spent money on rent, books, food, ounces of herb and records. And life was pretty simple. I listened to Eric Jackson's late night radio show, and he was always hipping me to artists that opened my ears in different ways, that brought something alive inside of me that felt like possibility, like newness, like the untried. And I also picked up new tastes from friends, swapping visits and thumbing through each other's small but always growing collections of lps.

One place this album takes me is to church, and into the ecstatic joy that church sometimes inspires. And it doesn't just take you in the front door, bound up in suit and tie and good manners. This is like stepping into the side door of a Baptist church, where the brothers shout and the sisters catch the spirit and roll in the aisles. And in the kitchen, some of the church ladies are preparing suppers for sale: greens and fried chicken and cornbread. Jarrett takes his solo piano on journeys to wherever his mood and spirit and thundering or tickling fingers take him.

The Koln Concert is of course Jarrett's and ECM's most revered classic and all-time best seller. But this studio album was Jarrett's first solo album, and it's may favorite because of "In Front", the tune I've been referencing.

Keith Jarrett: The Survivor's Suite

I intend to mostly stay away from multiple works by one artist. But Jarrett need this representative of his other most loved performance idiom, that being the small combo. And - respect to the Peacock/DeJohnette tandem, and to the Garbarek/Danielsson/ Christensen quartet - my favorite is his "American" quartet, with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. This is characteristic of their terraforming magic.

Julian Priester: Polarization

I wish there was more of this out there in the World. Julian Priester was onto something with this and his earlier atmospheric beauty. Ephemeral, pulsing, moody. It's long been a late night favorite of mine.

Bennie Maupin: The Jewel in the Lotus

This is undoubtedly one of my three bests on this list. It too is moody, but also sweet, caressing, evocative. This is a prime example of an artist's work diverging from the rest of his discography, which features Head Hunters funk. If I was a smoother guy, this would've been my 'make out' album.

Dave Holland: Conference of the Birds

Here, we're more into the hard bop side of ECM, with Holland mixing it up with Braxton, Rivers and Altschul. This is a great batch of quirky melodies that actually do evoke a social clustering of twittering, squawking, keening birds. Bright and bouncing.

John Abercrombie, Dave Holland & Jack DeJohnette: Gateway

A driving, grooving Set featuring the virtuosity of three masters. If you like it, they reassembled every couple of years until they'd recorded four.

Jack DeJohnette: New Directions

Another of my top three! This impressionistic stew finds DeJohnette with Abercrombie again, and joined by Lester Bowie and Eddie Gomez. They all play their instruments loose and rolling, slippery and smoky, with the leader dancing around and beneath them. Bayou Fever for REAL!

Pat Metheny: 80/81

At the time this came out, I had Metheny pegged as a proponent of music that wouldn't offend the ears of the tourists who want to listen to jazz as a backdrop to their cocktails. This album showed me how transcendentally beautiful his music could be, and that Metheny subordinated his chops to the service of his land and spirit-scapes. "Everyday I Thank You" is truly prayerful.

Chick Corea: Return to Forever

For me, this is the top of the mountain, a musical voyage that delivered the World to my ears. It's earthy, impassioned, playful and soulful all at once. And it jams! The musicianship of Joe Farrell, Stanley Clarke, Flora Purim and Airto Moreira is epic!

Feed your Hungry Ears!

Trickster Trip

We’re in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and it’s been a helluva time getting here.

We left Hamilton on the 15^th on our sailboat Trickster, expecting to arrive that night.

But we’ve endured high winds, a loose shroud and torn sails, and sputtering and stalling engine. We’ve run aground and got our jib line tangled in our propeller. We’ve been rescued by the Coast Guard and chased out of Smuggler’s Cove. And we spent a night bouncing around off an anchored buoy in the mouth of the Niagara river, and spent a night dodging visions of coming loose and wakening as we hurtled over the Falls. (It was pointed out to me that this fate was impossible, as Niagara-on-the-Lake is down river of the Falls. Embarrassing.)

And now we have to turn around and try to make it home without drowning!

And it’s been a WONDERFUL trip!

My Bardzo often teases me about being boring, and with good reason. These days I’m generally happy with my books and lps, Netflix and NPR, and the odd bike ride and takeout from Popeye’s.

She, on the other hand, can be accused of being the antidote to boredom! Meaning, interesting things always happen when I hang out with My Bardzo. And it’s been just that kind of trip. So full of the unexpected. One of those reminders of the incredible richness of the world and of simply being alive and in it.

We’ve spent the nights in beautiful spots, have had wonderful meals on the boat, laugh about Mawa, our cat, waking us every night with her squawking and squalling, have met a handful of really nice, helpful boaters, have enjoyed having electricity, thanks to our newly added solar panel, and even the motor, as tempermental as it’s been, has always come through strong when needed. And the job of diving under the boat, to cut and clear the tangled line was both easy and provided a huge boost of confidence, and plenty of story material for years to come.

It's actually been an intention of mine these last weeks, to consciously feel all of my feelings, especially the fears. Reaching my late sixties has me wanting to prepare for a healthy death. And it's been said - and I believe it - that one of the best ways to gift oneself peace during one's last years is to meditate on death. And this trip has given me more than one premonition of dying, and with them a very clear-eyed appreciation of whatever the circumstances were at the moment. Even with the motor unresponsive and our sails down, and a strong offshore wind of 20 knots pushing us out onto Lake Ontario as dusk approached, the sky and clouds and light were God's gift beautiful. And then, when death doesn't happen...!?

 

Addressing Law & Order

If the Left is going to survive Trump's Law and Order assault, and elect Joe Biden to the presidency, I believe we will have to make an adjustment in how we address that visceral and sensitive issue.

The right - and Trump in particular - has ramped up tension by supporting police crack-downs and encouraging armed militias. They contrast violence on the left as 'mob violence' and as 'destructive', while upholding the violence of the right as 'patriotic' and 'defensive'.

The right is focusing on this issue because it’s one on which they feel they can win. And they may well be right. By stoking the fears of ‘middle America’ as they did so persistently during their convention, they’ve managed to divert attention away from the issues of police violence, institutional racism and the needs for reform.

The right is equating Biden and democrats with lawlessness, just as in the past it has succeeded in equating liberals with weakness, blackness with welfare and crime, and republicans with patriotism and the constitution.

Too often, the Left has been afraid of fighting back, of actively engaging in the war over definitions, over what things mean. This is a case in point.

It's become a white, republican conservative thing to say that you want your streets to be safe. That you want dangerous people to be watched, contained. But liberal democrats of color want these things too. We too want an end to violence in the streets, and want active criminals to be dealt with, at least constrained.

One of the problems is, the social systems of control that make safe streets happen are largely under the control of the right, and they are highly suspect in many communities of the left. Which is why the left has always protested against the agents of the law, as far back as there has been Black protest in America, since the days when slave-catchers had legal authority to kidnap free human beings and re-claim them as some man's property. 

The right keeps wanting to say that the problems of police have disappeared, except for the odd, bad apple. The right wants to deny any responsibility for the state of distrust and for the demands for social justice, reform and defunding the police.

They pretend that legitimate protests have not been happening, because there's nothing to protest in Trump's America. The only legitimate action by citizens is the armed defense of the nation against vandals, looters and those who hate America. It's right out of Rynd's "Atlas Shrugged", a brilliant fantasy novel about godlike heros who overcome the hoards of the weak and servile socialists who want to sap the wealth and vitality of real humans.

The Left can't afford to make the mistake of leaving the definitions to the other side. And we can't win the war - which is already underway; no use arguing about whether anyone wants a war or not - if we won't even engage. We can't afford to focus so insistently on the social injustice issues that we hold ourselves indifferent to the vandalism, looting and attacks on police. That's even if we want the repudiation and defunding of the police. We - and not just the right - have to be willing to recognize personal responsibility. Not just that of a police officer who stands by while a fellow squeezes the life out of a citizen with his knee, but also that of a demonstrator who torches a store, or who doesn't, but who afterwards decides to help himself to the goodies that were made available.

These are issues that cannot be ignored without alienating a large segment of the American voting public. And without eroding the integrity of what the protests and demonstrations are about.

It’s hard for the Left to call attention to the 'disruptors', anarchists and looters whom so many are doing their best to make the symbols of what the Left stands for. I understand the reluctance, because the size and importance of this segment of the left is already exaggerated. And because attention to them has consistently been used to ignore the underlying causes of unrest and protest. And also because we understand the anger about a capitalist system that has consistently 'looted' the poor in favor of the rich, and then uses the law to both maintain inequalities and to punish those who oppose them. And, because much of the violence taking place is caused by policing forces, and by the vigilantes that come out to support them, with the backing of the president and republicans.

But we lose the effectiveness of protest, and ultimately will reinforce the crushing of dissent, if we lose the upcoming election because voters have been too frightened by the prospects of lawlessness and disorder to pay attention to anything else. And if Democrats become identified with an indifference to Law & Order, because our attention is so focused on Justice and constitutional law that we are seen as willing to overlook - or outright forgive - street-level crime and destruction of property, we may truly be inviting a new American fascism that goes beyond our worst nightmares.

I'm not sure how the message "You will not be safe under Biden" will be successfully corrected, but it has to be addressed directly. I think the democrats missed an opportunity during their convention, by not addressing these issues preemptively. I have to agree, as the republicans charged over and over during their convention, that the democrats hardly mentioned the disorder that has occurred - however minimally - alongside peaceful protests. And, by not naming it where it does occur, democrats can be more effectively charged with ignoring or tolerating it..

America isn't going to change overnight - as we should all know by now, especially after witnessing the strong, reactionary lurch backward that began immediately following Obama's election. I too felt a kind of jubilation at the overwhelming reactions, nationwide and worldwide, to George Floyd's murder, and the calls for justice. But I'm not deluded that the celebrity activism of the NBA is representative of the 'likely voters' who will mail in their ballots or stream to the polls on November 3.

Some of those likely voters are already tiring of all the attention on systemic racism - which a great many of them still do not grasp. They may be much more concerned about the rising numbers of assaults and the threat of street violence. And Biden and Harris damned sure better have a lot to say about that. At the very least, Democrats need to point out, again and again, that the violence occurring in America TODAY, is occurring in Trump's America, out of the discord HE has generated.

Can an Entire Nation go Insane? Can an Entire People lose its Soul?

Yet another shooting that defies understanding. But even without understanding, the story will be scripted in scars across a paralysed body, and in the minds of children.

I once saw a young man lose his mind.

One day, he was lucid and clear as water, sharp and smart, cynical and blaming, counting up all the pricks and pokes that daily life sent his way, sure that he was better than all the distained realities that oppressed him, and that he would transcend them.

And the next time I saw him, he was no longer tethered. He’d begun to be prodded by what he couldn’t see, but which he could hear, voices telling him things, scaring him, daring him. His cynicism was now free-floating, detached from the realities I knew, and from those of his girlfriend and community, the world he’d known.

Our communication, which had always been strained by tensions between what was and what ought to be, between the offered and the demanded, it now devolved into desperate lunges at meaning that eluded and shape-shifted us to exhaustion. Until we could only make exchanges of raw emotion, of wanting, or dismissing, of coming or going, yes and no, on and off.

This was a white young man, by the way. This isn’t that kind of oppression tale.

I hadn’t known that sanity could be lost so suddenly.

I watch the news, and the political conventions in the self-proclaimed ‘greatest nation in the history of the world’. And I wonder if an entire people can lose its collective mind, become insane. Does a nation, a community even have a mind? And if so, can it become severely disordered?

A young woman, slippers on her feet, as though she just left her living room. Maybe she plunged through her television screen to enter the drama unfolding blocks away. She is excited, as though she’s just been called up from the audience by a game show host, and now gets the chance to spin the Big Wheel. But she stands in a store, looters smashing display cases all around her, grabbing up plastic baubles and cardboard boxes. Exultant. Exuberant. Not wanting to miss this moment.

A young man, dressed like the citizen-soldier of a Marvel comics universe, transported by duty and super-hero fantasy, for God and Country, protecting property that isn’t his. Filled with fervor and carrying an automatic weapon which will soon leave two people dead.

Two of thousands or millions, talking back in their souls to the talking heads that don’t hear us or each other. Language that will not translate anymore, because there are no rules for translating passion and propaganda into lived, shared truth.

I didn’t know that sanity could be lost so suddenly. When a body cannot reconcile its visions of right and wrong with the world in which it finds itself. When it will not turn down the volume of its own fantasy, to accept why it can never be reality – these puffed-up, animated, choreographed and sound-tracked dreams.

Maybe a nation raised on Batman, Skywalker and Superfly cannot grasp the need to do its laundry. Vigilantes, revolutionaries and citizen tricksters, made into familiar storybook figures, devoid of responsibility or conscience, or the need to step backwards, and to sleep.

Journeying Through My Journals

              Awhile ago, I began generating a list of books I’ve read, and to help me along, I cycled through my journals. I started to journal when I dropped out of college for a year, just before turning twenty, and have kept at it in a very irregular way for almost fifty years now. I knew that here and there were lists of my reading. And even before I started the lists, I’d gotten into the habit of underlining titles of books, so they stood out from the texts. I wasn’t intending to actually read the journals, but I guess it was inevitable that as mentions of people and places and events caught my eye, I would be drawn in, which I was.

              My thirty or so journals were mostly still boxed, from our last move. I used art sketchbooks all those years, the ones with the black hardcovers, and thick, acid-free, unlined paper, so except for the difference in the two sizes I alternated between, they are almost identical. They can hardly be distinguished by wear and tear either, because in later years I began to carry my journals with me instead of writing all my entries at home, making them appear much like the older ones. In any case, in my search for book titles, I picked up the journals randomly, so that I bounced backward and forward through my life, which made for an odd effect. It reminded me of Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s character from Slaughterhouse Five, “unstuck in time” and bounding randomly through his past and future.

My journals are a wonderful thing. For several reasons. They remind me of things I’ve forgotten, including how I felt at the time of an experience, rather than how I feel about it years later, looking back. And, they provide evidence of what a lousy memory I have. Actually, not lousy at all. Just that it does its thing with the aid of some super, creative editing.

I’ve begun to think about what to do with this shelf of books, how to dispose of them. I don’t have children to leave them to, and there’s so much explicit and personal material in them, I don’t know if I’d have the courage to leave them behind if I did. A dear friend once told me about stopping journaling and burning the evidence in a bonfire, and I couldn’t imagine doing likewise. But it increasingly seems possible that I could follow that example.

But here are just a few of the precious memories I came across in my journal scan. Some were all but forgotten, and feel almost like the experiences of an alternate me in an alternate life; others got a detailing from the re-reading that brought them back to vivid life, and carry me back to their time. They make me grateful for the long years, for the experiences that pile up and continue to shape me, for good or bad. They reaffirm for me that I’ve lived a life.

Repeated mentions of a friend, Theo, who called me over and over again during a long period of struggle and sadness, just to see how I was doing, and that she was thinking of me.

A couple, in their fifties, who picked me up on a bitter cold night, as I hitch-hiked north through Cleveland one January. They couldn’t take me very far, but as they dropped me off, with best wishes, they gave me ten dollars, a bible and the remains of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On a long Greyhound bus trip, returning from a cross-country visit with my 91-year old grandmother. I wrote about a young child, Marcus, who crossed the aisle to sit with me and look out the window at I can’t remember what. He shyly accepted my invitation to sit on my lap so that he could see better, his smiling mother looking on. Could that even happen these days?

Getting the beauty of a desert for the first time, as I drove through the Yakima valley at daybreak. Then, decades later, experiencing the Negev and understanding how such a place could give rise to visions.

I bounded from the volume where I went for a 3-day holiday in San Francisco, backward, to the volume of fifteen years earlier, when I lived there for six months. Everything had changed in those intervening years. Especially me.

There was an invitation to a party I gave, with a hand-drawn map of how to get there, because I lived on a hillside, on a crooked, dead-end street. On the back is a list of all the people who came.

I awoke from a dream sobbing, my face and pillow damp from tears. I was awash in sadness from a dream I couldn’t remember. But the feeling that was predominate was relief. I hadn’t cried in years, had felt bottled up. The experience came as blessed release.

Getting off of an Amtrak train on an impulse, a couple of hours before my destination, Raleigh, North Carolina, because I recognized the name of a town as my grandfather’s birthplace. I called a distant relative whose number I happened to have. We visited, and as I left her home, she pointed to the cultivated field next to it. “Have you ever seen cotton?” she asked. I hadn’t. I picked a handful of it, and tried to connect to the spirits of un-named ancestors.

A sudden and surprising one night, sexual indulgence with a young woman I’d had fantasies about. But all the pages before and after are about another woman I was emotionally obsessed with and longing for.

Hitchhiking from Atlanta to San Francisco in four and a half days and eighteen rides. Why was I in such a hurry? My one visit along the way was disappointing. My first girlfriend. Never saw her again.

I was surprised to discover that one period of time, when I was in great personal distress over a relationship breaking down, and another period of time when I was soaring with energy and enthusiasm around my professional and volunteer work with youth, were in fact the same period of time. I never remember them that way.

Taking my Dad with me to my jazz deejay sets at the Dominion on Queen on Wednesday nights during his visit with us. Six weeks in a row. He was in his eighties at the time, and still a charmer and a flirt. For years after that, whenever I ran into regulars from those days, they asked about him and told me what a kick he was.

When I was just starting to write, and was frustrated at my inability to imagine strong plots, I was given a story in a dream. It was complete, beginning to end, and I immediately wrote it down, marveling at the ways of creativity.

Being laid over in Chicago's O'Hare airport for about three hours in the early, early morning. I hopped on the subway heading downtown and was soon on the elevated track going through a working-class neighborhood waking to the day. I got off and had breakfast at the counter of a greasy-spoon, thinking: “These people have no idea that I’m an alien, briefly touching down.”

 

 

Balancing the Books

              What to do with all these books?

              There are so many of them, filling tall shelves all over the house, and stacked on tables and deskstops here and there. And I keep buying more. I love books.

              Years and years ago, after moving almost a dozen times, and going through many variations of book turnover and re-cycling, I gave myself permission to be a glutton about my books, to never discard another that I didn’t want to part with.

              I love the over-indulgence. Love having rows and rows of books I’ve read and remember the joy of discovering, and ones that tantalize but that I haven't dipped into yet. By habit, I organize my books according to size, to be efficient with the use of space, at least. Otherwise, they are shelved randomly, so that I can have a paperback of classic sci-fi short fiction next to a textbook on economics, abutting a recent novel by an unknown that I picked up in a remainder’s bin, then a biography next to an all-time favorite epic.

              But books are dusty and heavy! And down-sizing is going to come, sooner or later. I dread having to move again before I've thinned these shelves! As loved as they are, I begin to think about living without all of these books within arm's reach. And as I prepare myself for that psychic shock, a desire grows to somehow catalog my books so that, once they’re gone, I have a way of maintaining touch with them.

              And Goodreads.com has appeared as a helpful solution. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to list the books I’ve read in my life under the “My Books” tab on the site. I don’t expect to get all of them, but hopefully I’ll be able to sketch out the highlights of a long, soulful connection with worlds on pages.

              In my first two or three visits to the site, I just added books by memory as I could recall them, but I didn't even come up with two hundred titles. Going through some of the ‘Favorites’ lists on Goodreads got me another few hundred. Then, I spent time at my actual book shelves, adding a few hundred more. 

              But I knew that, despite my long ago allowance to myself, there were lots of books I’d read and loved that were neither of my growing list, nor on the shelves throughout the house. And that’s what brought me to my journals.

              Over the last week or so, I’ve been scanning my thirty-plus artist's sketch books, filled with my self-conscious document of my times: my wonderings and wanderings, my steps and stretches toward figuring myself out, with all the jobs, the dreams, the adventures, loves and travels of living my life. 

               Among the photos, drawings, notes to self and ticket stubs in my journals were lists of books I'd read, and I went looking for them.  And I've been finding them one at a time, and each time I'm taken down a side road I'd forgotten, picking up scraps of those different people I've been and have known and lived among. All from the titles of books and their authors' names, sometimes a sentence or two about how the work struck me.

               I was surprised at having failed to remember so many books that worked magic upon me at some time, that had wholly possessed me, had prodded me along my path. But the memories came rushing back. I was more surprised at the so many other books that I couldn't remember reading even after confronting the evidence of my lists and my notes! There is such an interesting contrast between those books remembered in vivid detail, decades after a single reading, and those that are completely forgotten. Of course, it's like that with people, too. And looking through my journals never fails to remind me of the peculiar workings of my own mind.

               It's been a fun way to spend some of my self-isolation time since my jaunt into New York State. I'm enjoying these wonderful, brief visitations with the books of my life, with the other minds that wrote them, and into the worlds they spin. It's a joy I'll never give up entirely.

p.s. One of the small side bonuses of the pandemic has been peeking into the private domiciles of media figures, and those of friends/acquaintances I've connected to virtually. I love catching glimpses of their bookshelves and trying to read a title or two!