H arold and I have just returned from a trip to Key West and environs, where I bent the knee at the shrine of Ernest Hemingway, observing his workroom complete with old typewriter and cats, but did not do any fishing. For a complete account of the trip by Harold, see A Trip to the Keys with Kate and Harold.
T he Malice Domestic panel on historical mysteries went well, the tee shirts sold like hotcakes, and I said hello to many friends. I also crept around taking pictures, to see what I could make of them when I got home. Here’s a tiny little two-minute movie of the pre-banquet reception for Real Player, and if that doesn’t work for you, here’s an identical one that works on the Windows Media Player.
Still no publisher, folks, but I’m going to the Malice Domestic traditional mystery fan convention in Arlington, VA, at the end of this month to promote the first book by Irene Fleming (my new pen name). They wanted a donation for the auction, whose proceeds go to the John L. Gildner Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents (JLG-RICA), a community-based public treatment and educational facility. JLG-RICA offers day and residential services to children and adolescents ages 10 to 18 who have severe emotional disabilities. Their goal is to successfully return students to their families, schools and communities to live successful and fulfilling lives.
So I offered them some tee shirts in assorted sizes.
If you’re going, you’ll get an opportunity to bid on the shirt. The image is of the very first movie kiss, filmed by Thomas Edison’s studio. If you’re not going and you want a shirt, maybe we can work something out. I had a couple of extras made. Drop me an email.
I still have no idea what to do about the plastic bags, but I have one thing I didn’t have last August, and that’s a literary agent.
Under the name of Irene Fleming, I’m hard at work on a new series, one set in the days of early silent movies. The first book is written (The Edge of Ruin) and the second is well under way (The Brink of Fame); all that remains is to find me a publisher, which my literary agent, the elegant Peter Rubie, is doing even as I write these few lines.
He’s beginning to hear back from people. The first editor to reject The Brink of Fame explained that it was too light-hearted for her list.
I love that. I think of myself as an essentially morose person, and to be too light-hearted for anybody’s list is purely delicious. I’m going to enjoy that for a long time. It’s better than being too sexy for my shirt.
Today the temperature in Lambertville plummeted from 92 degrees Fahrenheit to 62, a delicious breezy cool that was too much for my Southern husband, who closed the doors and windows as soon as he got home from work, to keep the heat in.
Other things are changing. The stock market has been falling all week, and the finance pundits say it’s the result of the sub-prime mortgage implosion. Just the other day people were frantic to put their excess money into risky high-yield investments, so it’s said, never asking what their true nature might be. Today, everything looks risky; there isn’t any excess money; nobody can get any kind of credit, and nobody can sell his house because the buyers can’t get credit either.
The eco-pundits tell me that plastic bags will be the end of the world, now that all the landfills are full; not only can I not get credit or sell my house, I can’t throw my garbage away with a clear conscience. Changing times. I now have enough reusable canvas bags to tote home a week’s worth of groceries, you’ll be happy to know, but what the hell am I supposed to do with my garbage? The days are long gone when the garbage man would take it straight out of the can without a plastic bag around it.
How do the Europeans deal with garbage? They’ve been throwing things away a lot longer than we have. Surely they’ve developed some nice green approach to the problem, which we can study to our profit. The ladies’ fashion pundits assure me that the approach of European women to their clothing is far superior to ours, for they keep only a few garments, well fitted, meticulously maintained classics of the first quality, and whenever they buy something they get rid of something else. Presumably they dispose of the item in some way other than putting it in a plastic bag or throwing it in the landfill.
This sounds like a very modern, streamlined way of maintaining a wardrobe. I embrace it. In fact, I embrace all this modern stuff. The twenty-first century will not find me napping. I’m sure I’ll be able to live a perfectly fulfilling life with one jacket, one skirt, one pair of pants, one pair of shoes, no credit, no plastic bags and no gasoline.
Harold and I went to New York City on Tuesday to check out the Paul Poiret exhibit at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not to be missed, if you like clothes. As we strolled along the avenue we noticed steam squirting out around the edges of a manhole, rising five feet or so into the air. We eyed it nervously, wondering about terrorists and failures in the infrastructure. But it was apparently benign. Manhattan, it seems, is undergirded with an immense network of high-pressure steam pipes. They're everywhere.
Why steam in July, we asked ourselves. Surely nothing needed heating in this weather. And then we forgot about it, until the following day when some other steam pipe blew sky high, scalded a whole bunch of people, and made a hole in the street next to Grand Central Station big enough to swallow a car and a truck.
This morning's Star-Ledger explained that the steam was used by many New York City buildings, both for heating and cooling. Who knew. Lucky for us we were home by the time the pipe burst, safe in Lambertville, where life may be slow but at least there's nothing waiting under your feet to blow up and kill you.
Well, hardly anything. We haven't had a gas main explosion fatality, for instance, in a good thirty-five years.
Bill Shepherd died this week. My first reaction on hearing this news was not sadness but profound irritation. An important piece was gone out of my universe. Bill lived to dance; I thought sure he would live forever.
Well, all right, of course he didn't live to dance. He lived to enjoy his whole life, his wonderful wife, Betty (they were married for more than fifty years), his children, his grandchildren, his friends, his house at the shore, all the good stuff the lucky old ones can have in the Delaware Valley.
But he loved to dance. And how he could dance! A tiny little guy, he seemed to be all made of springs. He knew the steps to all the Irish dances, and a couple of tap dances too. No ceili was really fun unless Bill and Betty showed up.
Harold and I were privileged to go to their fiftieth anniversary party a few years ago. There was great food, good music--maybe Harold was playing, I've forgotten--and lots of dancing, but what I most remember are the old photographs that Bill and Betty's children had copied and strewn around the tables, pictures of Betty and Bill when they were young, their wedding photo, Bill in the navy during WW II, Betty posing with her girlfriends, Bill diving into a swimming pool. They were always cute.
Last month the Bucks County Irish Society threw a festival and hired Harold's band to play. It was a beautiful afternoon, there was dancing, and Bill and Betty showed up. Bill asked me to dance a couple of the dances. It was really fun.
But he did not live forever. When I get over being angry about that I'm going to be really sad. Who will dance with me now?
First entry in my animadversions. This is as close as I'm going to get to a blog at my time of life. Now and then I'll say something pithy. (or not.) Catch you later; right now I'm going to bed.