Welcome!
I spare you the gory details, but I am coming off a head cold right now. It started last Sunday, but it came on real strong on Monday. I felt better Tuesday, which was fortunate because my brother and I planned to drive to Olympia that day, but during the trip, my eyes started to tear up, and my nose had decided to train for a marathon. It ran fast. Fortunately, I had brought the tissues. At the hotel, I went to bed at 7.
We traveled to Olympia because Bruce, my brother, had lost his son-in-law in July, and his daughter was giving him a memorial on Wednesday. It was a solemn event. It was in the Garden Chapel at Mountain View Memorial Park. After the memorial, my niece had a reception. It was nice but sad for me. He was only 43 when cancer took him.
Driving back to Spokane on Thursday, we stopped at Moses Lake to have lunch. We lunched at Paradise Bar & Grill. We both had fish and chips. It was a lakeside restaurant attached to the Best Western. The view was spectacular. If you are ever in Moses Lake or driving through it, I recommend it.
Between my head cold and traveling, I didn’t do a lot of reading. I can’t concentrate while blowing my nose three times a minute. I started Alicia is in the Basement, but I completely only two chapters. Now that I am over the worst of the cold, I am confident that I will finish today or tomorrow. It only has 94 pages.
I have a shelf dedicated to short stories. Some of them are anthologies by various writers, but most of them are collections by one writer. One of those is Grace Paley, and the book of hers is Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. I read the first two stories, “Wants” and “Debt”, with the intention of reviewing them for this blog, but they are small stories, and I wouldn’t have much to say about them. They were published together in The Atlantic in 1971 under the title “Two Stories.”
“Wants” has the female narrator running into her ex-husband at the library. He wants to rehash their marriage; she wants to pay an overdue fine. “Debts” is also a first-person narrative. The writer recalls the detail of a friend’s upbringing. Both are entertaining and meaningful. Together, I took only fifteen, twenty minutes to read. If you get the chance, I recommend you read them.
Tomorrow, I will publish my review of The Thirty-nine Steps, a spy thriller. Next week, I will review Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane. He also wrote The Red Badge of Courage, which I am sure I will review sometime, but I decided to review Maggie because it is lessor known. I think of it as muckrake literature. Whether Crane thought of himself as a muckraker, I don’t know, but I think he was.
Take care!
