Scatterings

A low-key evening with Mr B. He apologized for not being quite "on", with a combination of tiredness and work distractions, timing of things, etc. His not being quite on is better than most people's best day.

Listening to Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. I used to read it every Lent. Before I gave up reading actual books. The author has both a style of writing I like --echoes of Hopkins-- and a set of responses to the world that used to feel familiar to me. I still like the book; it's refreshingly not political at all. All nature and theology and poetry and philosophy rolled into one. Minute observations of the details of the world jumping right into The Grand Questions. She has a simultanous eye for nature's endless brutality and its endlessly jawdropping beauty. But it makes me a little nostalgic for a me that I no longer am.

Neither is Tinker Creek what it was. Completely suburban now.

Watched two films about young men in love. By young men, I mean high school guys. One flick is American, a very arty piece about the last summer together of two boys in a small Arkansas town. Like Big Eden, it is counterfactually uncontroversial for men to love each other. That fiction at least removes the need for all the LGBT posturing; a blessing. One thing that it was successful at was creating the memory of lush, wet and humid eastern summers when I was a teenager. The second is Dutch. Less arty but still foreign-feeling. Though it maps the tentative and life-changing experience of first love.

I generally don't find youfs attractive much. Gangly and underdone. But the memories of that phase of life --its intensity and its confusions--came back with the images of the boys and their stories.

One thing I do miss is how I could run!

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