Good was my word... for the whole year? in These titles mean nothing.

  • Feb. 15, 2021, 11:10 a.m.
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  • Public

Oh well. Good is better than some things.

I have some stuff to write about but I’m not sure I want to do it… yet.... at all… ever. Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m fun, aren’t I?

It’s Sunday night. Valentine’s Day night.

My favorite Valentine’s Days were a few in the early 1980s when I was at my old old old job. We were busy then and had a lot of younger women working. There were a couple years when the roses were beyond belief. The local greenhouse’s van would show up several times that morning filled to the gills with vases of roses, red ones, then when the red ones ran out, pink and white ones. When the roses ran out entirely there would be carnations and mums and daisies. The office entry room would fill up and it would be exotic and beautiful and perhaps fragrant. When first break came the receptionist would read off a long list of those who had flowers waiting for them. The women would come in and ooh and aah and take their flowers out to their work stations. That would happen again at noon. When you walked around the factory the unexpected bright colors and lively beauty were really really special.

After the first few years the flower giving tapered off and Valentines was still special but nowhere near as spectacular.

Part of what makes flowers in February special too, is the cold cold winter just outside. Each bouquet came with a big plastic bag so it could be wrapped up for its trip home.

Guess I’ll take John Cheever into the bathtub and finish him up. It’s a short book - he didn’t write a lot of novels. He was more of a short story man and this one =-whose name I can’t remember- is in between - a novella, perhaps.

Cheever’s hard covers have the best dustjackets Plain really nice color with the same print - white in a silver Q. I have blue “Falconer”, peachy red “Collected Short Stories”, and the current bathtub book “Oh What A Paradise It Seems” in green. I wouldn’t mind having his diaries and/or letters. The diary was published over a number of New Yorker issues. He was a sad man. He drank way too much and he was sort of gay. Updike was more my favorite and no doubt a better writer. Cheever had him beat with dustcovers though.


Last updated February 15, 2021


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