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Donald's Blog
November 2, 2014 Here we are in a new world
Some news at last! I have been handicapped because my Nook is a lousy tablet. (Yesterday I could not reach this page using Ethne's laptop; today I can. Don't ask.) All our stuff is locked up in a storage unit, including my computer; but our short sale is going through, and this week we shall be inspecting and appraising, and soon closing, and then the rest of the chore will begin: we will still be living out of suitcases while ratty carpeting is disposed of, floors are refinished, maybe some walls moved, as well as heaven and earth. There will be more inconvenience. I have told Ethne that if she ever tells me I have to move again I am climbing to the top of Pike's Peak and jumping off. But we are in Colorado Springs, and I have not been so happy to be anywhere since we moved from London to the village of Yaxham in Norfolk nearly 30 years ago. There's no humidity here - this morning I went out with the dogs at 5 am in my nightshirt and I thought it was nice and fresh; it turned out to be well below freezing. The sunshine is real rather than filtered through tons of allergens and pollutants. The traffic here is insane, as in the Lehigh Valley; unlike Pennsylvania however, Colorado has adequate roads. (A small downside: here there are more drivers with tattoos and loud exhaust systems, such as we wanted when we were teenagers before we grew up.) There are plenty of mom'n'pop restaurants as well as chain stores (the pizza at Villa Roma on North Nevada is as good as the best I've ever had, and cold the next morning it's still that good). There are brewpubs on almost every street corner. The Chamber Orchestra of Colorado Springs (directed by Thomas WIlson) is the equal of the Pennsylvania Sinfonia, which we enjoyed in the East; they did a very creditable Beethoven Eroica a week ago, and the Colorado Springs Philharmonic (under Josep Caballé Domenich)... well, comparisons are odious, but the omens here are good: their Smetana Bartered Bride Overture was a jolly romp, their Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra shimmered, and their Brahms 2nd piano concerto (with Orli Shaham) made a good case for the piece, which I thought I didn't much care for. Next year they will be doing Brahms' First Symphony, one of my favorite pieces since I was a kid. We had left Allentown without looking back on October 7, spent the first night with nearby friends for riotous table talk (all of us saying goodbye to a certain publishing company). We had excellent chicken-fried steak with white gravy in Lebanon Tennessee, as good as any we ever had in Texas; a lovely time seeing friends in Memphis (and bbq as good as any we ever had), two nights in a Frank Lloyd Wright skyscraper in a fly-blown town in Oklahoma (a comically uncomfortable and impractical building: details and pictures at some future date), then many miles of roads so straight the Romans must have built them, often appalling stink from feedlots across southern Kansas (we decided not to pay for entry to Boot Hill in Dodge City, which looked like a tourist trap), and finally thrilled to see the Rockies. One night in a decent hotel in Colorado Springs, then ten nights in a cottage in a working-class backyard, the very nice landlady a member of a cowboy church with a licence to carry. We have now moved in with a high-school classmate of Ethne's while we wait for our new house: some damn bank was sitting on a piece of paper, but as I say the logjam has broken. This could be very inconvenient in a small house with the dogs and all, but Barb and Ethne are delighted to be able to talk about everybody they used to know: they are charter members of a group of Park Forest classmates called the Dangerous Babes, including ceramicist Sylvie Granatelli and novelist Kathy Reichs ("Bones"); and Jay is a swell guy (retired high-school biology teacher) with a laid-back sense of humor. They have a boat in Mexico and will soon go away for months leaving us to house-sit. We are in the Black Forest half an hour out of town and higher than the Springs, elevation 7500 feet; their house only escaped a forest fire in 2013 because the wind had changed. Jay took me on a tour of the area on November 1: what are now open fields were recently heavily forested; about 500 homes were lost, and some of the people who lost everything are now out in the woods helping one another clean up the devastation. This is the America I heard tell about. Meanwhile we are accomplishing a lot - joining the library, opening a new bank account, making an appointment with the Social Security people; it's true that we already have more friends here than we made in five years in Allentown, and I am told that the neighborhood we are buying into is full of the right folks, active in the yarts. I will be working at a new Barnes & Noble. It's lovely to be near our David (though right now he is in Denver for two weeks, sitting in a room doing nothing, pretending to guard some non-existing documents: they call this "training"). The future is ahead and looks good!
November 2, 2014 Two days to go Ethne and I will not be able to vote two days from now. We neglected to vote early, or acquire absentee ballots or whatever, in Pennsylvania, and now we would have had to be here in Colorado 22 days before election day, and in any case we cannot prove we live here: no address, no driver's licence, no nothin'. Too bad. It promises to be a cliffhanger, and of course the pundits and talking heads just won't shut up. Kate Bachelder, an assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal (remember the Rolling Stones' "under assistant west coast promo man"?) published "The Top 10 Liberal Superstitions" last Friday, full of dangling questions. "Only 4.7% of minimum-wage earners are adults working full-time trying to support a family," Bachelder writes, "and nearly all would be eligible for the earned-income tax credit and other welfare programs." But if the minimum wage in my state is $7 and I am making $8, then I am not a minimum-wage earner for her purposes, while if the minimum wage were raised to $10, I would be a lot closer to being able to support a family, with the help of food stamps and any other "welfare programs" I could get in on. (I work in retail, so unlike Bachelder, I know some of the people she thinks she's talking about.) Colorado's Senator Udall, who might lose his job on Tuesday, is in favor of women being paid the same as men doing the same work. Bachelder writes that "the Washington Free Beacon did a little number crunching and discovered that women in Sen. Udall's office earn 86 cents on the dollar compared with men. Whoops." But we need to know more. How many women are senior advisors in Udall's office? Are the men and women who are senior advisors and have the same qualifications paid the same? Are the boys and girls who make the coffee and stuff the envelopes paid the same? Some of the editorialists at the Journal, like the Karl Roves and the Bill O'Reillys, are very good at comparing chalk and cheese; in fact what they do is lie to each other, and to us. And no doubt some of the "liberal" writers are just as bad, but somehow I don't feel the same need to keep an eye on them. The right has the Supreme Court on its side, which makes them more dangerous.
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