March 11, 2024: Downtown Kenosha, looking north from 5813 6th Ave.
Another Week: Number 64
But there will come a time, remind yourself, just be reminded that the time will come when you’ll think of your husband, wife, son, daughter, mom or dad, and you’ll get a smile to your lips before you get a tear to your eye. That’s how you know you’re going to make it.
Amy and I had different approaches to organization.
From May 1999 on, I have organized our digital photos into 298 folders, one for each month, with names like “1999-05-May,” so they could be sorted chronologically on the computer.
Our printed photos, meanwhile, are stored in banker’s boxes along with — but mostly not inside — photo service envelopes holding negatives. Filling in the date when getting our film developed, Amy would write the month and the day, but not the year.
At some point, she went into our collection and sorted handfuls of our photos into Ziploc bags, including a slip of paper with a notation describing each bag’s contents.
Here’s the one that made me smile before crying:
With Amy’s memorial gathering on April 6th fast approaching, I have spent hours and hours going through all of these photos for a couple of related projects — scanning the printed ones, copying out the digital ones, cropping, adjusting levels, and so on.
It’s been a kind of anguish and therapy at the same time. Very gradually, though, I can feel the needle moving a little from grief to smiles.
Meanwhile, outside, temperatures have rollercoastered, sunshine has alternated with lashing rains and light flurries, buds are budding, birds are nesting, and we have enjoyed 7 p.m. sunsets for the last seven days.
This week I walked 16.18 miles.
Wednesday, at Petrifying Springs, there were suddenly lots of bicycles.
Friday in downtown Kenosha, a man with a walker stopped me and asked, “Know why you shouldn’t hang out with rabbits?”
I did not know.
“They’ll make you hop to it. Know why you shouldn’t hang out with frogs?”
I gave up.
“They’ll make you hop to it until you croak.”
This week’s earworm.
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Great Expectations (1946)
After subjecting my mom to Poor Things last week, I tried to find something more to her taste to watch on Thursday night along with my sister Karen.
Mom favors the classic movies – but she has also seen almost all of them, so finding a good one she doesn’t know can be quite a challenge.
David Lean‘s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations scores 100% on the Tomatometer, is highly lauded by the critics, and is available to stream on Max, so that’s what I selected.
Yeah, it’s fine. It has the excellence.
It is also dragged out and peculiar, taking a long and tedious path to arrive at its eventual point. Not having read the book, I suspect this is Dickens’ fault, but I can’t say for sure.
One interesting thing I learned from Wikipedia is that this version and its Miss Havisham character inspired both Sunset Boulevard (1950) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
Now we have seen all three.
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
Saturday night at my mom’s we watched another of my recherché finds: Mikey and Nicky, from 1976, written and directed by the brilliant Elaine May.
To grab Mom’s interest, it stars Peter Falk (Mikey) and John Cassavetes (Nicky). There’s tension from the get-go because Nicky is convinced that there’s a contract out on his life, and Mikey is trying to calm his extremely anxious friend.
Anxious — and also obnoxious. Nicky has an ulcer and a handgun, and he leaps from one emotional paroxysm to another every few seconds.
The movie follows this pair through the course of a single night. There’s a plot and several other characters, and some musings about death — but mainly it’s Peter Falk trying to calm the ever-erupting John Cassavetes.
At one point, Falk prays in Hebrew, so I looked him up on Wikipedia and learned that both of his parents were Jewish.
And now we have seen this one, too.
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