His mother wondered why her one-year-old choked while eating his first sliver of watermelon. Kind of cute but a little worrisome. Watermelon seems like such a natural food for babies, we all agreed so what was it with this summer treat?
 
As it turns out, eating watermelon requires a rare hybrid feat of preparing our throats for swallowing at the same time as we chew. Or all that luscious pinkness will trickle down our throats and cough-cough-cough.
 
I marvel at all that children teach us. And, as if eating watermelon wasn’t pleasure enough, now I’ll always think of this steely-eyed toddler and his first bites of summer.

As we ate our lunches at the Quilt Expo, a table full of friends and strangers, we talked salads and the difficulty of avoiding spoilage. The oldest woman there said she puts a sheet of paper towel in her salad fixings and the greens last forever. She said a sheet in her cheese fends off mold.
 
Not talk to strangers? Not me.  

Something Emma Thompson said to an interviewer at Vulture.com made me think about what’s wrong with politics today and why I prefer to get my news from Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers.
 
I’ve always felt that humorlessness is the root of all fascism, really.
 
And maybe that’s why she turned down a date with Trump even when he was just a landowner.     
 
http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/emma-thompson-in-conversation.html
 

Oh Emma, where have you been? Rather, where have I been? I knew she was an actress and I associated her with the Victorian era, not a particularly kind era to women. But I did not know she was a writer, a director, a producer and HILARIOUS! And almost 60! I’m officially obsessed with her.
                      
As she promotes her new movie, “The Children Act,” she’s been making the talk show circuit. Last week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she danced her way to him and then grabbed him for a spontaneous spin around the stage. Gorgeous! And Stephen just crushed on her along with (I hope) all of America.
 
Here’s what she said in an interview with Vulture,com about turning 60:
 
So this should be one of the most powerful patches of your life, the youth of old age as it were. I’d say it’s the best bit ever.
 
The youth of old age.
 
I love that.
 
http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/emma-thompson-in-conversation.html

 

Xray of my tooth overlaid with a photo of lava

I love the daily poems I receive from Matthew Ogle, pome@mattogle.com. His choice one day from Frank O’Hara written in the year of my birth helped me confront my toxic impatience with myself.
 
from Mayakovsky
 
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
 
Frank O’Hara (1957)
 

Our latest read in a classics book club I’m in is The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett. I laughed so hard when a character named Miriam left her thug boyfriend with these words.
 
“I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.”

A physical therapist told her patient with MS that it’s better to walk one block without a cane than a mile with a cane. In fact, she said, get rid of the cane.  
 
I think about my canes. Nostalgia is my crutch when I’m low. It’s my wistful, trusty prop that makes past love shine even when it mostly stormed.
 
And cake thick with butter cream frosting and crushed peanuts.
 
Nostalgia I can probably discard. Cake I keep.

"The earliest evidence of human art is 40,000 years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only 10,000 years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves."
 
From Big Magic. Elizabeth Gilbert
 

My left ear feels like a bedsore, a raw cup of flesh that attends every sound. I hear a bead of sweat land just before the pin drops. I hear the last echo in a canyon when you shout. I hear infinity.
 
It’s a little like achieving 10/10 vision. Seeing so well spawns excruciating headaches and thought is impossible.
 
Hearing infinity doesn’t hurt that much. And I think I can think ok. I’m actually relieved because deafness runs in my family.
 
But it can be distracting. When I wear dangly silver earrings, I can hear clearly through walls of walls, maybe even through lead. I can hear your girlfriend’s heartbeat when I walk past your house.

Someone told me that she always buys new books. “Library books breed germs, you know,” she said. I guess she thought the occasional brown fingerprints could be poop and yellow blobs could be boogers. But I didn’t press for details because she wasn’t the type to tolerate questions of a sanitary nature.  
 
She reminded me of my mom who insisted on reading the newspaper first for the same reason. She said a fresh newspaper was the cleanest item in the world. At the time, I wondered if this obsession might shave minutes off of her hour-long handwashing routine.
 
I considered their arguments. And that new books keep our precious bookstores afloat.
 
But it’s just too lonely for me to read a fresh book. I love to find a daintily folded corner especially in poetry volume. Or nearly invisible pencil marks -- a check or an underline, a rare exclamation mark. Someone is helping me see magic! Someone traveled this road before me.
 
I’m not alone.