Longer one this time in These titles mean nothing.

It’s 3:15 am. Plenty of time to do pretty much anything. So far I’ve made coffee, done a puzzle of collectible Czech dolls, dealt with the dog and put off Wordle.

Any of you into Wordle?

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I just edited this and then lost it.

Wordle is this new-ish simple word game invented by a man named Wardle - ha ha ha. The charm of it is that it can only be played once a day so it can’t suck hours out of your life. Generally I mean. It’s a five letter word you get five or six chances to guess. Guesses have to be real words. If you guess matches any letters in the word and are in the right location they turn green, if they are in the word but not in the right location they turn orange. There is a keyboard below to show the letters you have chosen/have left to choose. It’s easy. It’s hard. So it’s kinda fun. Yesterday I did it with Jim’s help so I thought I would wait for him to get up to do it today.

The guy who invented it - to play with just one person - has sold it to the New York Times with the promise that it won’t be changed. So there. He lives in Waless and works for Reddit.

My puzzle this morning was sweet - doll faces.... the same faces pretty much with different hair and clothes that showed. The faces were the same - from the same mold I suppose with different painted features. They had a pleasant non-committal expression, one that had anticipation. When I saw they were Czech dolls I thought of the Czech/Bohemie* women I knew in the Cedar Rapids area. Two of my husband’s friends had married Czech women and I suppose if I hadn’t snagged him they would have set him up with a Bohemie too. One with a pleasant expectant expression on her face. Oh well that is not how life turned out. One of my husband’s friends stayed married, one didn’t.

The novel I’m reading is called 4321 and it’s by Paul Auster. I saw him and his wife Sari Hustad on youtube and was attracted. She’s a Norwegian Minnesotan and he’s my favorite type, a New York Jew. Keep in mind the only New York Jew I ever met was the NY Times reporter covering John Kerry’s 1994 campaign. David Helbfinger gave me a hug in the doorway of my town’s Chinese restaurant. He was wearing a black leather jacket, he was tall, and I had told him I was more impressed to meet a NYT reporter than a presidential candidate. Considering it was Iowa and an election year, there were a lot more presidential candidates than there were Times reporters.

Ah, anyway. Life is full of memories.

I think what I got from Auster talking about his book was that it was about how small changes in your life could result in big changes down the road. He said it was about the same person, the same DNA, going through different lives. I expected totally different people but I wonder now if it’s just one person with different paths taken through the woods. I’m on page 155 of 866 total. I had my computer do the math and it said that was 13%. Actually it was carelessnness in asking the computer to do that that made me lose my first explanation of Wordle.

See how life is all about choice, big ones, little ones, ones at 3 am, ones at other hours.

OK I’ll save this - for Jinn and four.

• Bohemie is slang, a slur I suppose. It referred to the Czech population in Cedar Rapids. I use those not terribly nice terms sometimes. I’m not sure why. I’d like to be a nice person. I guess sometimes I’m just not.

4321 has some baseball references. The Dodgers, Giants and Yankees were all playing in New York when the main character was a child. He would watch games on tv with the Black housekeeper. She was proud of what she called the ‘colored’ players. There was an account of Willie Mays making a famous catch in a 1954 World Series game against the Cleveland Indians**. I told Jim and he, who wasn’t born till 1967, knew about Mays catch.

Point being the boy had been told not to use the term ‘colored’ but to say Negro. But it was ok for the Negro housekeeper to say it.

** another slur.
Our local school sports teams are the Indians. Every so often it comes up that it should be changed and there is always a flurry of opinion but nothing changes. I was thinking what we need are some suggested changes. The Catholic high school in my town in my day only had basketball and a little baseball. Its teams were the Wildcats.

I haven’t hit save yet. I suppose the asterisks I’ve used to create italics will battle the asterisks I used as asterisks. Damn. Suck is life. Such is life. Gimme a break, friends, it’s 4am now.

Have a good day. Wish me luck with the 751 pages I have left in 4321.

Last updated February 25, 2022