This is the title of an Ann Patchett essay published in the March 1, 2021 is of The New Yorker. (article requires subscription – one free article per some period)

The author describes helping a childhood friend, Tavia, clean out the house of her friend’s recently deceased father. The father – divorced for decades and moved to a new city – had pretty much just had his daughter to clean up years of accumulation.

Patchett – herself married with just her husband and one (out-of-town) step daughter left alive – and her childhood friend came to a conclusion:

Holding hands in the parking lot, Tavia and I swore a quiet oath: we would not do this to anyone. We would not leave the contents of our lives for someone else to sort through, because who would that mythical sorter be, anyway?

I saw an ad for this article in March 2023, as I was just finishing up helping move my (still living) father out of his house of 59 years – two floors plus a full basement, two-car garage and yard…into a one bedroom senior assisted living center.

As the closest (distance) relative, I did most of the cleaning, deciding what to give /to whom, so this story/description struck a nerve as they say.

I made a note of it and about a year later went looking for it. The New Yorker search was worthless (even with essay title and author – bad magazine!). Found via Google, of course.

It was well worth the search.

Yes, the author and her friend made a pact to not have others do for them what they had to for her friend’s father.

Where does “How to Practice: come in?

Patchett and her husband were approached by a real estate friend about a house the agent thought they would just love. Patchett and her husband had talked about her labors with Tavia, and agreed that if they moved they would do a purge of belongings before settling into the new house.

Nothing came of the new property, but Patchett floated the idea of “practicing” the purge in their existing house. Her husband – a doctor, and less of a pack-hound than the author – agreed.

What follows is – mostly – Patchett’s purge. How many kitchen whisks are necessary? And so on.

But it’s not just getting rid of stuff – give away, sell, toss in the trash. It’s getting ready for your death. As she and Tavia swore, no one should have to go through their “stuff” after they died; they would try to proactively do the same.

Patchett was essentially performing her own Estate Sale before her own demise. She was “practicing” to be dead. That’s a powerful … rite of passage(?).

What would you give/toss of yours before you’re dead? Patchett found her limit. A friend’s daughter was looking for a manual typewriter, of which she had – even after “practicing” – a couple left.

But she could not part with the typewriter that she essentially had not used for decades because it helped type her grants, first published/rejected pieces etc.

To the friend’s daughter, it had value. What she was looking for to use.

To Patchett, it had immeasurable value because of what it HAD been used for in the past.

A very New Yorker (in a good way) article on several levels.

“Practice” at your own risk, especially as you age.

I can’t remember where or when I ran across this book: It was either an online review or a recommendation from someone I saw on social media.

Whatever. It was the type of books that I don’t normally follow (graphic non-fiction book, about a just barely post-college woman), but it looked fascinating. Stuck it in an Amazon list, and finally got around to buying & reading it recently.

Fascination for many reasons:

• First, it IS like a graphic novel, but its a first-person memoir.
• The book is a door-stopper – 400+ pages, most with a dozen or so panels. And the spreads – chapter leads – are often incredibly detailed. She must buy India ink by the barrel.
• Despite its length, it is a quick read: it is like a comic book, not a lot of descriptive detail – not necessary, as there are drawings!

Basically, the story is: the author, a Nova Scotia resident, graduates from college in the early 2000s with a non-viable degree and lots of student debt.

As Beaton notes, Nova Scotia, and the eastern Canadian maritime provinces in general, were first known for exporting coal. And then the coal ran out.

Then they were known for exporting seafood. And then that industry was depleted.

At the time she graduated (2005-ish), the area was known for a new export: People. Exiles who would help power industries in other provinces, such as the Ontario auto assembly plants.

After reflection, she took a different path: Working at the then fairly new Albertan tar sands, joining a variety of camp jobs in frozen (-50 in the winter) Northern Alberta, helping extract the oil trapped in those sands.

A young woman – in the middle of nowhere – in what was decidedly a man’s club.

I won’t give away her adventures, misadventures or other experiences except to say I wish she included more than the 400+ pages of panels held. It’s a high-level yet tightly detailed account of her roughly 2005-2008 time there that reads almost like a novel.

A highly unusual and very compelling work of graphic non-fiction. Well done!

This is not a happy result – but it’s a vindication of the Rule Of Law.

Some may celebrate, but to me it’s sad that a former President of the USA has been so UNANIMOUSLY convicted of Criminal Charges.

I heard an add on my local NPR station this week, and they were teasing a special they are doing on colleges’ “Class(es) of 2024.”

I had never put the two together, but a college senior graduating this year would have entered college in August/September 2020 – just as COVID was ravaging the US.

And they are graduating during a time of campus unrest unseen for decades – the bitter protests against the Israeli – Palestinian State conflict. There’s a lot to digest there, but I’m looking of things from a different viewpoint.

• Did some of those Class of 2024 students have a high school graduation or did COVID make it a virtual (or non-existent) event?
• Are some of those students now at universities that have cancelled commencement?

That just never occurred to me – I just don’t “hang” with any 24 years olds.

Kinda sucks for them – I personally wouldn’t have minded not having a ceremony, but that’s me. Others would (will) miss it, as will their families.

No great message – just something that is out there.

I just finished Heather McGhee’s book The Sum of Us.

I had a hard time getting through it, to be honest – the book started strong, but it became repetitive and – to a degree – stretched its point a bit.

What is the point of the book? It’s right there in the tome’s subtitle:

What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

Her best, clearest example is one she used in a TV interview I saw (which prompted me to buy her book). During the civil rights battles in the South, towns/counties were ordered to allow everyone – regardless of color – access to public pools. Many areas elected to just fill in the pools rather than support / tolerate desegregation.

Who wins there? No one. Everyone lost access to the pools, even those who had previously had access. Yes, private pools – which could discriminate – were built, but that came at a cost, as well (money to build, money to become a member).

And it still left out poor white folks, because they couldn’t afford memberships.

Lose/lose. And probably not what many people thought about this issue at the time or even now. It was just an action by whites to maintain their status quo.

The author continues with other examples (redlining, public schools, subprime loans) and points out – with voluminous data and great anecdotes – how the “anti- black/brown” efforts actually hurts those (i.e. whites) who put these principles/laws/norms in place.

That’s all fine – and eye opening – but she kind of gets out over her skis to prove her point on some matters that, to me, are really not supported by her supposition that racism hurts everyone.

An example she writes about is oil/energy companies and climate change. She correctly points out that most oil execs are wealthy and white, and the ones who will be hit hardest – and soonest – are overwhelmingly poor and not white.

True, but is it really racism at work here, or just a continuation of the process that has made oil execs/companies filthy rich for decades?

In this case, it seems to be the latter. While it’s not a virtue to ignore what is happening to those less fortunate that yourself, it is – to a degree – self-serving human nature. Especially in a capitalistic society (but that discussion, capitalism, is a whole other massive conversation).

But for whatever faults I found in the book, the pluses vastly outnumber the minuses. I learned a lot, and that’s an important yardstick for me. It’s not up to the quality of other race-facing books such as Caste or Between the World and Me (both breathtakingly brilliant and without precedent), but it’s better than, for example, White Fragility or What Truth Sounds like.

Your mileage may vary.

Yes, it’s as American as baseball or apple pie.

• A local sports team/athlete scores a big win
• A home-town celebration kicks off honoring the team/individual
• Shots ring out, leaving revelers dead or wounded

In this case, it was a Kansas City, MO, parade to celebrate the back-to-back Super Bowl wins of the city’s football team.

Currently (next day), one confirmed dead and 20 others wounded, including a number of children. According to the Associated Press, more than 800 law enforcement officials were part of the crowd (working the event).

It’s a uniquely American problem, and we collectively seem to have less and less of a desire to pursue a solution.

As Kurt Vonnegut would write, “and so it goes…”

We lost Mr. Bibbs* on Monday, January 22, 2024. He died after a – fortunately – fairly brief illness, so he didn’t have too many bad days at the end.

He came to us as a feral cat. You can’t tell from the picture, but his left ear has been clipped, meaning he was “caught and released” – caught, neutered, probably got a rabies shot – and released back where he was caught.To this day we’re not sure of his actual age.

We fed him (outside), and Romy even made a little Rubbermaid house for him outside for the inclement weather. However, in January 2019, our area endured what they call a polar vortex, with temps as low as -23° (not even counting the wind chill). At this point he was a partially inside cat – even though we still had an existing, inside-only cat, Koko.

When Koko passed several months later, Mr. Bibbs took over the house.

But he never really took over. Unlike our earlier cats, who loved to lounge on the under-the-windows bookcases in my upstairs office watching the world go by, or sitting by the screened front door. Bibbs never got into it. And to the end – after living in the house for three and a half years, he was still weirded out by visitors or even technicians who never came into the house. A very un-catlike cat.

I guess his upbring shaped his personality, and it’s tough to teach even a young cat new tricks.

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* Why Mr. Bibbs? Well, he was a gray tabby with a white “bib” of sorts. And Romy added the “Mr” and extra “b” as an homage to Sidney Poitier’s character in In the Heat of the Night: “They call me Mister Tibbs.”

What to say about this meta-movie? It could have gone wrong in so many ways. As it is, it’s imperfect and a little confusing (yes, a Barbie movie confusing) at times, but – overall – it’s magical. Pure entertainment.

Entertainment with a message, but Entertainment with a capital “E” first and foremost.

The movie begins with a brilliant take-off of the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith scene to introduce Barbie – a smiling Margot Robbie with looong legs – and then moves into BarbieLand, which is full of Barbies and Kens (and Alan and Midge…).

Eventually Barbie has to go to the real world (Ken tags along) and what they are surprised by what they find.

The movie takes shots at everyone: capitalism, the patriarchy, Barbie herself. Sure, she can be a doctor or astronaut . . . as long as you have a 26-inch waist and permanently flexed feet.

Choreography is amazing, both the Barbie and Ken dances, and there is so much going on in the background or just in an instant that it merits a second screening.

It’s made about $1.4 billion to date worldwide, and there’s a lesson for Hollywood: Sure, have your sequels and comic-based films, but the public will flock to watch something different that’s well made.

And this one scores five out of five stars on both counts.

I really don’t understand the stink people are raising over Amazon’s decision to begin including ads in Prime video (beginning Jan. 29, 2024).

There will be a $3/month fee to avoid this, but what’s the fuss? Virtually all streaming services have an ad-supported tier along with a higher-priced ad-free tier. There are exceptions – I’m looking at you, Apple+ – but if they don’t have an ad tier today, they will soon.

I’ve pretty much been expecting this for some time: Amazon Prime is for free shipping, the free video was just a perk (and, yes, a hook to keep you hooked).. And at $3/month to nuke ads, that’s not breaking the bank (though I expect that to rise year after year, just nickel and diming us to death). And would I prefer to shell out the $3/month? Of course!

I haven’t looked too deeply into this, but any streaming service that puts ads in their proprietary movies/series is making a mistake – sure, you can stream John Clancey’s Patriot Games here or there, but you can only get, for example, The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime – that’s often why you sign up for one service over another. Again, I don’t know much about this but…

The 1992 National Book Award for fiction went to Cormac McCarthy for his modern-day Western, All the Pretty Horses..

One of the finalists for that year’s prize was Dorothy Allison gritty Bastard Out of Carolina, a book that’s been sitting on the shelf of one of my bookcases for, well, decades. Not even sure when or where I bought it. Or why. I must have read a review.

Finally got around to reading it last week, and I really delayed my reading pleasure by 20-30 years. Gritty, sad, hopeful – just a snapshot of the human condition by a poor white extended family in a small 1950’s North Carolina mill town.

Narrated by the titular character – Ruth Anne, AKA Bone – from the time before her birth until she’s roughly 13 years old. It doest even seem hokey that she narrates the terms of her gestation (briefly) and birth – the way it’s written indicates that her family has a strong oral tradition, and she’s just passing on what she’s heard from her relatives, colored by her own experiences.

The men are the main breadwinners – this is the 1950s in the South – but they are almost all damaged goods and get relatively little play in the book. Feared by townspeople for their tempers, they are drunks, self-indulgent and philanderers. They protect their families as needed, but that was not their focus.

It’s the women who hold the families together – each is a vertebrae that form the spine that supports the entire group. And that even includes a young Bone, who is sent to a dying aunt’s house to help the cancer-stricken woman until her help is no longer needed. The female children spend a lot of time at different aunts’ houses – again, it’s the women who are the glue. Sometimes it’s the aunt helping the child, sometimes it’s the other way around.

The main theme of the novel is the intrinsically unbreakable bond between mothers and their children, but also of the women and all their female relatives. The men and boys will endure.

Without airing any spoilers, when this primary bond slips even just a little near the end of the book, it upends Bone’s entire world.

The book’s epigraph is a James Baldwin quotation and it really sets the mood:

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have let themselves become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

– James Baldwin

This novel reminded me of Jane Hamilton’s The Book of Ruth, about a different white trash family – this time in Wisconsin – and the (quite different) relationship between the daughter, Ruth, and her mother.

Neither is a feel-good novel, but both are well written and pack a punch.