x
x
x
Despite my overpowering desire to sleep until next week or next month or next year, Nancy convinced me to have breakfast at Andrea's on Thayer Street. They do a great feta cheese omelet.
In today's humidity and haze, I didn't really want to do much. Nancy suggested a short browse at the Brown Bookstore. But what started out to be a browse atturned into a book binge because they had this promotion going:
buy 2 Vintage contemporaries get a free Vintage anthology
buy 4 Vintage contemporaries get a Vintage anthology and a Vintage/Brown Bookstore t-shirt
Who could pass this up? Not me! As I browsed I found books I've been wanting to read that I didn't even realize were Vintage contemporaries. I settled on:
The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie. I loved Midnight's Children (it goes on my personal list of the 100 greatest English language novels of teh 20th century even if it doesn't make Modern Library's list) and heard Rushdie reading from The Moor's Last Sigh on NPR awhile back so this has been on my list for quiite awhile.
Spartina by John Casey. It's set in Rhode Island so it's a must read.
The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer. Any book that both Tom and Right Wing Anne recommend has got to be good
Tropical Classical by Pico Iyer - essays and book reviews.I heard him talking about it on one of those NPR shows (maybe Fresh Air) with Tim Cahill , about travel writing
Uncommon Guide to Common Life of Narragansett Bay - not a Vintage but a definite must have.
I was still kind of in a humid and hazy malaise when we left the bookstore, but we decided to go to the cove anyway and at least see what we could see. We were rewarded with a couple of unusual sights: a woodchuck, and some unusual swan food.
|
|
|
Watching a woodchuck eating the weeds, I expected him to break into a little flamenco dance with the flower between his teeth.
Swan eating bagel |
|
|
|
If it's Sunday, this must be the Loof Carousel again, as always. Neither of us ever seems to tire of the carousel. It seems like the essence of summer, going around and around amidst the colorful horses and camels and dragons and catching fleeting glimpses of the bay through the windows like a gleaming jewel. The music seemed unusually loud today but instead of being irritating, it made it easier to lose ourselves in the experience. When I'm going around on the carousel I transcend time. I'm a little kid at Norumbega Park grabbing for the brass ring and actually catching it. The whole world is magical. Today there was a petting zoo and pony rides at the Carousel. It featured goats and sheep as well as the ponies. Kids fed them 25 cent handfuls of food pellets. It seemed a little bizarre and kind of sad. |
When I got the carousel pics back I noticed how much the wires connecting to the telephone pole mimicked the shape of the carousel. Instead of lamenting how wires were in the way, I used Photoshop to make them sharper (using Unsharp Mask and Find Edges) and turned the photo into the image above, which I think catches more of the mood of the carousel on a hot summer day.
Coffee cabinet at Dari-Bee: There's nothing like sipping on a coffee cabinet and listening to the Red Sox on the radio on a hot summer day, especially with Pedro Martinez pitching. It may be hot and humid, but the ice cream goes down real smooth and Pedro is hot hot hot. They're really gonna get the wild card slot aren't they? I guess I have to stop thinking the playoff format has killed off all the excitement of the fall pennant races :-) Once we finished up our cabinets, I drove around with the air conditioning on finding vantage points over the bay watching sailboats and listening to the game until it ended.
x
x
