The Unexamined Life

ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ ...

The unexamined life is not worth living.—Socrates

Fuck Socrates. What does he know? This fall I spent five weeks examining 40 years worth of my life’s detritus. And I can tell you with certainty, it wasn’t worth the examination.

The occasion for the exercise was the cleaning up and cleaning out of our NJ condo in preparation for its sale. I finally dug into the many boxes of high school memorabilia and uncovered honor roll certificates, notebooks from sophomore English and more. PSAT score, SAT scores, National Merit commendations, Iowa scores and more. I threw away 30+ years of birthday cards, handwritten notes from my parents, friends and more. Much more. Then I plunged into the books of college text books, spiral notebooks filled with class notes, doodles and love notes, research and term papers and final exam blue books. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were computerized print outs of final grades, freshman orientation materials, campus maps and more. Much more. I shredded journals, diaries and love letters and photos that still made me tear up, congratulating myself on how much lighter I felt. I shredded long-winded Hay job descriptions written in the mid-80’s, folders full of work memos and correspondence (including a mid-‘70’s letter to a pension-holder apologizing for miscalculating his benefit and offering “May I be struck by lightning if this quote isn’t correct.”). I am not good with nostalgia. It’s the next best thing to radioactive. It consumes me unhealthily, and so I try to stay as far away as I can get. This kind of disciplined avoidance creates a mountain of ancient history collecting silently but steadily in the attic or the basement or the back of your head. I threw away 99% of it. There are some love letters and pictures even I couldn’t let go.

From there we moved on to Peter’s office where nearly 30 years of income tax returns were spilling out of a tall file cabinet. Peter’s office—and the collection of cobwebs, candy wrappers, coffee cups, dust moats and ancient stuff that filled it—is off limits to everyone. That includes me and our housekeeper, Adria. So the dust fairies have reigned supreme for a long, long time. But now, Peter had to clean out his stuff. Actually, shovel is a better description than clean.

And so, finally, it was done. From the clean up we moved on to the newest way to sell one’s house--staging. No, staging doesn’t capture the essence of it. Staaaaaging is nearer to the fact. And the story of staaaaaging and selling the condo will appear in the next blog.

Peter and The Belle of Amherst

I like a look of agony,
Because I know it’s true;
Men do not sham convulsion
Nor simulate a throe. — Emily Dickinson

It’s not often that Peter comes face to face with the splendor of 19th century American genius. But this July I dragged him to a local production of The Belle of Amherst, staged at Centennial Hall on Harpswell Neck. I’ll start by saying that Marion Jeffery gave a remarkable and moving performance as the annoying Emily Dickinson. Emily must have been a finalist in the crazy maiden aunt category—twitchy, nervous and jerky, self conscious of her talent, yet without the imagination or nerve of the Brontë sisters who managed to get themselves published. (Of course, the demand for bodice ripper novels outstripped the call for obscure poetry—even then. The Bronte’s were producing the 19th century equivalents of The Delta of Venus. Who knew what to make of Emily’s precious squibs?) Anyway, one-woman shows always require the star to hold prolonged one-sided conversations with invisible people and to go through exaggerated pantomimes of waving out imaginary windows, drying imaginary dishes and worse. The Belle of Amherst is no exception.

The last time Peter came face to face with a formidable American Master was in 1979 when I dragged him to a showing of The Europeans at the Paris theatre on West 58th Street. This was a gorgeous Merchant-Ivory production of the Henry James novel, replete with lavish period costumes and luscious photography of New England filmed through a golden autumn haze. Lee Remick was exquisitely turned out: richly ruched, ribboned and corseted in ivory silk and lace. If it weren’t for the absence of indoor plumbing, modern dentistry and antibiotics, her wardrobe would have been enough to make me wish I were living in the period. But gorgeous dresses aside, one must have a taste for Henry James—which amounts to savoring the sound and quality of one’s own saliva being rolled around in one’s very own mouth. There are lots of long, meaningful gazes, laden with heavy meaningful emotions. The world is filled with slight gestures of the wrist and twitches at the corners of one’s mouth that conjure up entire lives of meaningful consciousness. Indescribably beautiful shafts of sunlight and the very dust motes floating in them are moments meant for eternity… I couldn’t live with that much endless subtlety. But it is a lovely place to pause and appreciate the endlessly examined life—if only for a short time. A very short time. After that, I want to stop rolling the saliva around in my mouth, swallow it and get on with the rest of my life. Peter’s tolerance for this kind of preciousness is considerably lower than mine. He spent the first half of the movie alternately smoking, squirming and sleeping. I woke him, thinking he wouldn’t want to miss another minute of Lee Remick’s costume changes. To my utter shock, he expressed deep annoyance and stomped out of the theater. I think he walked around the corner to the Oak Room to drown out the horror of what he had just endured. Too much, too slow, too subtle for his robust appreciation of life, art and adventure novels. If there is anything Henry James lacks, it is explosions and violence.

Since The Europeans, I’ve kept Peter away from 19th century American geniuses until The Belle of Amherst beckoned. I’ll hazard that the temperature was still in the mid-80’s in time for the 7:30 PM curtain, and Centennial Hall’s AC is functional, but fragile. To the credit of its AC, the Hall was actually comfortable throughout the performance. Emily had to e-nun-ci-ate until her cheeks ached to be heard over the whoosh of the AC, but she did an admirable job of it.

This was my first exposure to the production, as well as Peter’s, so I didn’t know what to expect. I was hoping for more biography and less poetry, but it is what it is. And Peter, to his credit, was polite and attentive. He had no choice but to be so. If he so much as cocked his eyebrow in impatience in this tiny, one-room theater, Emily could have seen him, come down from the stage and slapped him for being rude. He had ample time to count the number of people in the audience (40) and to note that there were all of three men in attendance. The rest were women in varying stages of menopausal decay and worse. (This reminded me of my last high school reunion, when I demanded to know who are these old people? Oh that’s right, they are us.)

At intermission, Emily went backstage to rest her aching cheeks, and we stepped outside into the mosquito-filled evening air, where the gnats proceeded to swarm Peter. Usually they go for me, and so I’ve foresworn Nine Ricci and Chanel when in the country. But on this evening, Peter was their preferred meal. He stood there, swatting at the gnats and mosquitoes and sweating in the heat. Couple that with the discomfort of tiny, folding chairs set up for the occasion of The Belle’s performance, and he was just about done in. I took pity on his many complaints and returned to watch the second act alone. The air conditioning was still feebly chugging away and Emily was still heroically enunciating over its drone.

Peter went home to walk the dog and then returned to pick me up at the show’s conclusion. When he asked what he had missed, I gave him the same answer I did when his aching knees kept him from sitting through the second act of Copenhagen: If you’ve seen the first act, you’ve seen the second.

Middlemarch and Me

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eight times? Ten times? I read it at least three times during my undergraduate years, and maybe another two or three times in graduate school. After that I found that it nourished the soul to read it at least once every decade.

I first read Middlemarch when I was 19. I read it as a romance about Dorothea, an altruistic heroine who wants to do something meaningful with her life. In an earlier century she would gladly have been a nun—a Saint Theresa. But in the enlightened 1830’s, such radical career choices are not readily available to young ladies of the English landed gentry. Dorothea makes some idiotic choices in her journey, including a brief, loveless marriage. In the end, she renounces her late husband’s sizeable fortune to marry her true love. Best of all, she still has her own (not inconsiderable) inheritance to carry her and the true love over life’s roughest shoals. I thought this was grand, but then I was 19—when all of life is viewed through a pulsating, roseate scrim of hormones. (For me, blood lust had nothing to do with violence and everything to do with the panting desire to make babies.)

In these early readings, Dorothea’s quest for a meaningful love made her the central sun around which the 300+ pages of lesser, annoying characters orbited. Never mind that there were scandal, murder and other interesting marriages in the mix. Never mind that Dorothea’s true love was more of a cipher (with a ravishing curve to his nose and a divine mop of brown curls) than a realistic man. The story was about Dorothea’s choices in love, and not my literary criticism.

I revisited Middlemarch at 29, and it was like reading the book for the first time. Middlemarch was about making responsible choices in a life partner. This time around, Dorothea is a bona fide twit whose choices made me want to reach out and slap some sense into her. Her first marriage is to Edward Casaubon, a dried out husk of a man—lifeless, loveless and lacking in either passion or charity. Dorothea thinks of him as a latter day Saint Augustine. But who in her right mind wants to marry Saint Augustine? In fact, Dorothea believes that it would be a blessing to marry a blind Milton if she could be his handmaiden. In the absence of a suitable medieval monk or tortured genius as a suitor, she settles on Casaubon, whose overwhelming draw is a rambling treatise about ancient mythology at which he has been hacking away for 30 years. Dorothea, anxious to improve the world, wants to be Casaubon’s amanuensis, a helpmate in bringing his key to all mythologies to a bookstore near you. And who wants to sit across from either Saint Augustine or Milton over breakfast? Imagine either of those rays of sunshine beaming at you over orange juice and oatmeal.

Dorothea has already passed on two perfectly wonderful possibilities. The first is Sir James, a neighboring member of the local gentry who is eligible, appropriate and attractive in every sense of the word: he’s of suitable age and fortune, physically appealing, good natured and wild about Dorothea. But who would want any of that? The second, Doctor Tertius Lydgate, is as blind as Dorothea; the two meet and pass each other like ships in the night, each dismissing the other as not meeting his and her own ideal image of a mate. Lydgate, intelligent, handsome and fired with noble ambitions about the newly burgeoning sciences, arrives in Middlemarch with the intention of spending his days practicing medicine and his nights performing medical research. Meeting Dorothea at a social function, Lydgate thinks the lovely girl isn’t his cup of tea. And with that, he makes a bee-line for Rosamund, a beautiful bubblehead, whose own life ambitions are more in line with fine society and fine furniture than refined science. Lydgate and Rosamund are quickly married and Lydgate’s noble goals are just as quickly forgotten. Rosamund ruins him with debt (fine furniture doesn’t come free, you know) and Lydgate’s own choice of patrons in Middlemarch’s tight little community smears him with the taint of murder. The bottom line from this reading: Everyone seems hell-bent on marrying in haste and repenting at leisure. With a few notable exceptions, no one seems to talk to their prospective or current spouses to find out who they really are and what they really want. And on those few occasions when the minds do manage to meet, one or the other partner is disappointed, heartbroken or horrified.

By this time in my own life I clearly understood that prospective life partners should be chosen with an eye to bearable breakfast conversation, a companionable personality and a world view that is tolerably close to one’s own. Marriage is about compromise and acceptance as much as it is about love. The question is not, as Carole King put it, Will you love me tomorrow?. The real question is, Will I love you tomorrow…and all the days that follow?. (Was it Christie Brinkley who said that being a genius didn’t make Billy Joel a nice person? Or maybe that was Claire Bloom reflecting on her unhappy marriage to Philip Roth….) If you shudder at the thought of returning your beloved’s stare over the breakfast table, give it up. It ain’t gonna work. If your prospective life partner is a virago or a dybbuk, no amount of money or genius will make it worth your while or your life. And if their outlook on life makes the blood run cold in your veins, consider yourself forewarned. In the end, compatibility is everything. Marry a mensch.

As I approached my 40th birthday, I went through an 18 month-long maelstrom about the meaning of life. More accurately, Peter went through the maelstrom. We were on vacation in Kennebunkport, walking on the beach, when the angst hit me like a mallet. And so I let Peter have it. What is the meaning of life? Who are you? Why am I married to you? Why are we here? Is this all there is? Birthdays have no such hallucinatory effect on Peter, so when this storm hit, he was taken by surprise. I treated him to a similar tirade almost daily from September 1990 until my 40th birthday in March 1992, and he patiently let it flow over him. That’s what you call love. If he had dished that out to me for a year and a half, I’d have disemboweled him. On the morning of the looming 40th birthday, I woke to the prospect of a birthday celebration at the office and a lovely dinner out with Peter. Like it or not, life moves forward. Get used to it. Peter was relieved to find the rabid virago was gone and I was back. I, in turn, was thrilled to realize that I had, indeed, wisely married a good-hearted mensch.

Around this same time, Middlemarch enjoyed a pop culture revival. It was made into a BBC Masterpiece Theater serial, and all across England yuppies were staging Victorian dinner parties replete with mutton, butlers and period costumes. I settled for rereading the book, and this time the book was about community and how one lives out one’s role in it. The neighbors, business associates, family members and community concerns that make up the warp and woof of our adult lives now stepped forward with their own demands and concerns. In this reading, railroads and the industrial revolution creeps toward England’s bucolic countryside, the very real limits of family finances determine whether sons go to college (or not) and political discussions rage about the value of spending money on refurbishing dilapidated peasant cottages (or not). Even more clearly, the theme of What goes around, comes around flows faintly but steadily throughout the book. There are good eggs and bad eggs in every age and every setting—and while the good eggs warm the cockles of the heart, it’s the self-righteous hypocrites, meddling know-it-all’s and rich relations wielding their money like an auction gavel who capture the imagination.

Throughout the book, Nick Bulstrode, Middlemarch’s powerful banker and most upstanding community pillar has bullied, cheated and shortchanged strangers, family and business associates. He barely registered on my seismic scale in earlier readings, but this time I found it positively gratifying when Bulstrode turns out to be a pious fraud who has spent years concealing his early history of theft, duplicity and deceit. With the discovery of his sordid story and with the suspicious death of a former associate who was blackmailing him, Bulstrode is publicly shamed and broken. At this lowest moment of his life, another minor character comes forward in a moment of sublime grace: Bulstrode’s wife, Harriet, wordlessly promises him her continued love and forgiveness. Grace comes in many shapes and forms. And this time it arrives in the form of Harriet Bulstrode—a gentle, middle-aged dumpling of a woman whose love for her husband is mature and infinite even in the face of public disgrace.

I’m 59, and it’s time to read the book again. I wonder if, this time, I will feel more empathy for the bloodless and sickly Casaubon? The rest of the middle-aged characters will, no doubt, have more to impart to me this time around, too. I can’t wait to be enlightened.

The Doloff Upholstery Shoppe

I am recovering my dining room chairs. This adds up to new opportunities to staple my feet to the floor or simply and directly—to maim myself. The dining room chairs—all eight of them—are handsome, heavy pieces, with wide hips and 25 year old upholstered seats begging to be put out of their misery. I am more than happy to oblige.

First I spent some time getting a 21st century education in the 18th century craft of upholstery: I watched YouTube videos. I’ve watched enough YouTube videos in the last few years to learn that shame and discretion are lost graces and that Charlie Sheen is in need of more assistance than conventional rehab can likely supply him. I’ve even watched the boil-popping video (enough to gag a maggot, but riveting none the less) and Alan Dershowitz doing a stand up routine on oldjewstellingjokes.com. But, there is actually useful stuff out there. After about 45 minutes of culling through videos of expert and not-so-expert upholsterers, I came to diyuphosltertysupply.com. These guys really know what they’re doing, and—best of all—they demonstrate and explain the craft succinctly and clearly.

With my new education under my belt, I headed to my new Bloomingdale’s—Home Depot—for $200 worth of new tools for my new trade. This included a work table, an elegant and functional staple remover, a heavy duty electric stapler and staples, pliers and work gloves. And by the way, that doesn’t include the cost of the upholstery fabric, the polyester batting to put the cush back in the cushions or the cambric liner for putting the finishing touch on the underside of each chair. I was ready and set to make history.

I successfully removed the seat of one chair, pulled the staples from the old cambric liner and the old seat cover and was ready to start stapling the fresh poly batting to the seat. Everything was going nicely until the first shot of the stapler. Have you ever listened to an electric stapler? It sounds like a gunshot. If you shoot several staples in rapid succession, it sounds like a volley of gunfire. And that’s when Teddy suddenly recalled his earlier life as a World War I veteran who fought in the trenches. At the sound of the first shot he hit the ground like a seasoned combat soldier and lost control of every sphincter in his little body. Teddy spent the rest of the day trying to crawl into the arms of whoever would hold him and scanning the ceiling overhead for incoming fire. There was no comforting him. And at 3 in the morning, I had to take him out for a walk. His little bowels were still spasming.

The factory had to close for a day while I figured out what to do with the little dog with post traumatic stress syndrome. The solution seemed to be simple: I gave him a mild sedative, tucked him into his crate/bed upstairs in our bedroom, turned on NPR to supply him with a sound track of civilized conversation and shut the bedroom doors to muffle the sound of gunfire going on downstairs in the living room. I spent an afternoon working on the chairs and when I went upstairs to free the little prisoner, he was shivering with terror, but (Praise be!) didn’t have diarrhea. Okay, so this worked fair to middling well. But how often could I dope the little dog? And besides, even slightly foggy with a sedative, he was still not a happy camper. He continued shiver and scan the horizon of the living room ceiling for the next barrage of shells.

On to the next solution: on Saturday afternoon, Peter took his Kindle and Teddy for a trip to the Watchung Reservation. He would give Teddy a good long walk on the green and then enjoy reading in the car with the dog asleep in his lap. This worked out pretty well, if you don’t mind a lapful of snow-melted mud. But it did work. He brought the dog home, in time for the little veteran to suffer the misfortune of hearing stray stapler fire. Done went the tail, and Teddy resumed his place in Peter’s lap, scanning the skies for incoming and seeking safety from the hell of a vaguely remembered past life. At 5:15 in the morning, Teddy and I once again answered the call of his unhappy bowels…

The chairs are finally finished, and they look pretty good if I say so myself. My hands have been put through hell. I managed not to staple or slice myself, but this is hard work on manicured hands unused to manual labor. No matter! Peter foresees a new career for me. I think he has his eye on some flea market sofa that he thinks I will reupholster from the bones up. But although he’s getting ready to hang out a shingle for The Doloff Upholstery Shoppe, I am not.

The Everlasting Condo

“You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave.”—The Eagles

The family burial plot—or as I think of it, the condo—has been on my mind of late.

My maternal grandmother, Anna Sulzer, died in February 1963. With her passing, the Sulzer clan needed a burial plot pronto. Uncle Irv, ever planning ahead, suggested that the entire family purchase burial plots side by side in Mount Ararat Cemetery on Long Island. That way, the banter, bickering and general family mishagoss could go on forever. And I do mean forever. The four Sulzer siblings bought a stretch of adjoining burial plots that looked more like a land development deal than a final resting place. With the exception of a tiny patch of plots that had already been bought up by some other family’s forward thinker (and who refused to sell to our clan) and that stood in the midst of the Sulzer real estate, the field seemed to roll on uninterrupted and forever. My own parents bought eight plots. Either this stuff was going at rock bottom prices, or my parents were planning on inviting the neighbors to pitch tents of their own. Anyway, I guess this is what’s meant by buying the farm.

As it turned out, the Sulzer condo had only one rule for admission: you had to be a member of the family through blood or marriage. But if the Sulzer condo had its ground rules, so did Mount Ararat, which allowed only for family headstones. Individual graves were marked by brass plaques that were flush with the ground. It was dignified and serene, if somewhat sterile. In contrast to Mount Ararat’s absolute stillness was Mount Hebron Cemetery, where my father’s parents, Charles and Sadie Doloff, were buried. This was an old fashioned cemetery with a headstone sprouting from every grave. Each headstone had personality, art work, exotic carvings, even tiny enameled photo portraits. There were infants lost to at birth, teenagers forever in our hearts, octogenarians finally at peace after tumultuous lives. It was as if every grave’s soul were talking aloud, anxious to be heard. The place was crowded, undignified and busy. And within this bustling village, Charles and Sadie were buried in the Lomzer Young Men’s Benevolent Association. To access the graves you walked through a dramatic entrance gate of tall marble pillars topped with a beautiful wrought iron arch that announced the name of the burial society. The marble pillars were engraved with the names of the association’s first members. If not exactly lively, it still fairly bristled with life.

But back to Mount Ararat… In 1963 there was just the one grave—my grandmother’s. But over the years, the plots were filled by the very people who had thought ahead. My grandfather, Joe Sulzer, died in 1965. The eldest of the Sulzer siblings—Sylvia Sulzer Bram—died suddenly in 1978. Esther Sulzer Danton, my favorite aunt, died in 1991 and was buried in one of the eight plots my parents owned. As each family experienced a death, a family headstone was erected. The plots were slowly filled, the vibrant voices stilled, the aged hands were folded in final repose and the great empty space has filled with foot stones. My mother died in 2003, and my father died in 2007. They lie there now, and my heart is with them.

But cemeteries don’t exist and burials don’t happen without the living. And my family is no exception. My own parents, thoughtful to a fault, had their own family headstone erected in 1997. As my mother put it, This way, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s all taken care of! A little ghoulish, I thought at the time, but eminently sensible. She and Dad cheerfully forked over $8,000 for a headstone the size of a Volkswagen, with DOLOFF engraved on it in huge letters.  I have never felt so taken care of in my entire life. It was about that time that I developed an aversion to the condo, as I had come to call the family burial village. Even with both parents alive and accepting compliments on their brand new headstone, I had difficulty visiting it. That headstone chilled me.

Peter and I have, of course, discussed our own final arrangements. There’s never been any doubt that I would be buried in the condo. Peter’s own family does cremation in a big way. I don’t think any of his family has actually been interred—in the conventional sense—since they came to these shores in the 1800’s. There must be many jars of ashes that have passed from one generation’s mantles to the next—or wherever it is that jars of ashes go. I haven’t seen them, and I fervently hope I never do. And although Peter’s family may not do a bang up job of parking the departed in clearly designated final resting places, they do memorial services with a nice flourish and refreshments about a month after the dear one departs. But I am losing my train of thought…

Peter plans to die before I do. And like the rest of his clan he wants to be cremated. His exact words on the subject are: I don’t care what you do with me after I’m dead. You can hang me upside down outside the front door and paint my balls blue, for all I care. Now there’s an image I don’t care to contemplate closely. What’s more, Peter really wanted our first dog, Chester to be freeze dried, stuffed and kept on our mantle until the whole plan could come together: when I am buried, Peter’s urn of ashes should be tucked under my arm and the little freeze dried dog laid at my feet. He reasoned that any casket in which I was laid would have plenty of foot room for luggage. So far, we have done a slipshod job of executing the plan: Chester was not freeze dried when he died. So it looks like it’ll be just Peter’s ashes and me in my allotted plot at the condo.

Nanook Heads North

Wednesday, January 12
Most people go south for a break in the winter. But not us. No, we make a beeline for the epicenter of everything I detest—snow and cold.

So here we are in Maine. I am seated at the kitchen island, enjoying a view of the relentless snowfall outside the window. How bad can this be? I’m warm, drinking coffee and working on my computer. For starters, I had to drag poor Teddy out into the snow for his morning walk. Dragged isn’t quite accurate. I shoveled a path for the little prince. The snow was too deep for the little dog to make his own way through. I put his red leash on him, even though I knew I wouldn’t really be using it. Teddy wouldn’t venture far off in the snow. But thinking ahead, there were contingency plans to be made: if he sank too deep in the snow, the red leash could provide a visible trail for me to locate him. I eyed the little dog, thinking even further ahead, If all else fails, that is a source of meat. Visions of the Donner party are never far from my mind.

Two days ago—long before it ever snowed—I was making a pot of soup. (You can never have enough stick-to-the-ribs soup on hand throughout the winter. And at this rate I will be foraging in the snow for root vegetables to make more soup.) Peter came up beside me and offered instructions, “You’re cutting the carrots too small.” Jesus Christ! Get out of here! I screeched. If I run out of dog meat, Peter may be my next source of protein.

Peter just told me he thinks the falling and drifting snow is pretty. Pretty? I think it portends death and starvation. But that’s just me. I’m not a Georgia on My Mind kinda gal. I have more of a Wisconsin Death Trip outlook on life. Well, if not all of life, then certainly winter. Wisconsin Death Trip was a 1973 book of photos that testified to the unsettling effects of Wisconsin winters on rural townspeople. The book is chockfull of wild-eyed portraits of the living who look like they’ve recently dined with Death, of the dead sweetly tucked up, dressed up and ready to meet their Maker, of elaborate funeral wreathes, of mutilated bodies and other evidence of the less than salutary effects of prolonged winter oblivion. Without benefit of cable TV, Facebook or (most important) antidepressants to while away the endless winter, raging cabin fever and bursts of inexplicable violence passed the time.

Where was I heading with that? Oh yes, if Peter doesn’t stop micromanaging the minutia of life, I may lose my mind. How big are the carrot slices? I can see blood in the snow already.

Thursday, January 13
My sister-in-law (a licensed family counselor with tales of dysfunctional families that would curl your hair) tells me that a single day stuck in the house does not beget cabin fever or any form of winter/snow madness. She was explaining this to me on my cell phone while I was driving from my favorite coffee house to my favorite antique shop in town. After more than two feet of snow, the secondary roads have been completely and exquisitely cleared, and even the tertiary roads are plowed. Our landscaper plowed our driveway yesterday. We had only to shovel out the excess snow blocking the garage doors. The sidewalks, curbs and streets in Brunswick are easily walk-able in shoes (rather than boots). I have to admit: They really know how to manage snow up here. No muss. No fuss.

So perhaps I was over-reacting yesterday. After the antique store, I met Peter for lunch in town. After that I trotted off to the super market where I picked up some lovely Clementine oranges. Okay, so we’re not the Donner party, and Teddy is not on the menu for the time being.

Friday, January 14
We had dinner in a charming little Italian restaurant last night. I am refreshed and restored to my usual equanimity—such as it is. Pasta and wine are wonder drugs.