You Just Never Know in Everyday Ramblings

The trees are coming into full gorgeous bloom under (mostly) sodden skies. It rained and rained and then rained some more yesterday. We are working on three times our average rainfall for March after four times during February. In case it seems like all I talk about. I need to buy another pair of rain pants and consider another type of hat as well.

Considering that Portland was named the best food city in the nation by the Washington Post recently I wonder if all those folks moving here are reconsidering…the traffic, the homeless and their trash, the gazillions of crows at dawn and dusk and… the endless rain.

Yesterday I walked by a perky young woman leading a Segway tour in the poring rain and thought about how intrepid those geared up tourists were so maybe it doesn’t matter.

I was listening to an interview recently with an author who has written a new book about The Spanish Civil War and he mentioned that some of the best coverage during the war was by a female reporter Virginia Cowles and recommended a specific book, Looking for Trouble. One of the many things that was amazing about her, besides the fact that she had never covered a war before is that she wrote about it from both sides.

The book was copyrighted in 1941 and the prologue is from May of that year from London with bombs falling.

She felt that the Second World War was birthed in Spain and the author I heard interviewed told a disturbing story about how Texaco secretly provided and profited from supplying fuel to the Fascists.

It is out of print so I asked for an Interlibrary Loan and the book; a beautiful old-fashioned book, came from Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington, donated from a private library in 1979. I picked it up yesterday.

They have a big prison in Walla Walla. I went there on a memorable trip to visit a friend of friends who was in for a drug related murder when I was a young woman. I also went to Walla Walla once after an impromptu pear-picking week with another friend who was trying to encourage me to get over my self-imposed isolation after a difficult loss.

That trip was also memorable. And now this wonderfully readable book comes to me from there for the asking.

Food was scarce even early in the war in Spain. “Some of the journalists had managed to bring in food supplies from France and Tom Delmer’s sitting room in the Hotel Florida became a popular meeting place. Tom had equipped the room with electric burners and chafing dishes. A ham was suspended from a coat hanger on the cupboard door and the table was littered with crackers and sardine tins. Although the food was distributed gingerly, there was always plenty of beer and whisky and the gatherings seldom broke up before the early hours of the morning…”

And yes, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn were there. Shortly afterwards a shell plunged into the room and pulverized everything. No one was there at the time…

The book is filled with wonderful detail, what people wore and ate and how they slept and handled daily life. I can’t quite put my finger on why it is such a good and interesting read but I have learned to trust my gut when it tells me to pursue a particular book.

As if I didn’t have anything else to read! Ha. I am hoping to get some insight about the rise of demagogues. Because I signed that petition asking that the 45th President release his tax returns I am now on the email list from The White House and the emails are full of propaganda in which the writers are not in the least bit shy about outright lies.

This is not something I ever expected to experience in my lifetime.

You just never know.

Anybody read the Jane Mayer piece in The New Yorker about Robert Mercer?

Last updated March 28, 2017