Rich Wallace's Blog

Lucy's birthday

Today was Lucy's 11th birthday. We sang to her twice; Sandra made her a birthday cake (a rice cake spread with peanut butter and sprinkled with bits of carrots; we had a long walk in the park and barked at lots of squirrels. She's curled up asleep now, but says it was the best day of her entire life for the 4,018th day in a row.

"We must do"

"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."
-- Leonardo da Vinci

The Colonial Theater had a late cancellation of a live show, so today we found out about tonight's one-night-only presentation of Leonardo Live, which is a documentary about the da Vinci exhibit at the National Gallery in London, which closed a few days ago. See it if you get the chance; just watching one of the artists make part of a frame for one of da Vinci's paintings was enough to make me choke up. Incredibly, the completed da Vinci paintings in the world number only in the teens, and most of them (and lots of his sketches) were brought together for this exhibit, which the curators say will probably never be repeated. They have his two versions of the "Virgin of the Rocks" (one on loan from the Louvre) side by side for the first time ever. They say that even he never saw them both together, as they were completed about 25 years apart.

info here:
www.nationalgallery.org.uk/leonardolive

We visited the National Gallery last July on a layover enroute to Edinburgh. We'd been awake for more than 24 hours by the time we got there, but loved it along with the several other museums we visited a week later when we returned to London. The Victoria and Albert was my favorite of the London museums, but I could easily spend a summer exploring them all in detail. I miss the Queen's Arms pub at least as much, and would love a London Lager and a plate of fish and chips tonight, followed by some salted caramel ice cream.

The trees are the right height

Click here if you haven’t yet seen the relevant part of Mitt Romney's speech in Michigan yesterday.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHaMqHh5NZ4

You can just hear his handlers saying to him, "Mitt, this is one of your many home states. They love you here. Be sure to subtly work in your love of the Michigan terrain, its lakes and trees, and the auto industry as you speak." And Mitt walking to the podium repeating "Trees, lakes, cars" over and over in his head before blurting out these classic words.

(If that link doesn’t work, go to youtube and search for “Mitt Romney Loves Cars, Lakes, and Trees")

barriers

Sometimes I just want to get out of the way and let someone else speak who has way more important things to say. Here's a great friend of mine from Bemidji, MN (who's also a great writer). I asked Gina Marie if I could link to the story, and she said "If my words can reach even one person struggling with identity (and don't we all in some way?), I am more than happy to share."

The print interview and the video are from the St. Cloud Times. Please pass it along if you know someone it would help.

http://www.sctimes.com/article/201111...

why sports matter

I’ve written a number of novels about gritty, underdog athletes who usually have more heart than talent (and often not a lot of size). That never-say-die attitude is one I greatly value, and it’s one of the reasons I love the NCAA basketball tournament. Seeing a little team like Bucknell knock off a powerhouse like Kansas can’t be beat for sports thrills.

The college across the street from us has a pretty good basketball team, and has been on a winning streak this month. So tonight, when the top-ranked Division 3 team in the country came to visit, we went to watch. We’ve seen Keene State play a number of times; they’re very athletic and had been inconsistent. When they fell behind by 10 with five minutes to play, we figured Middlebury would remain undefeated and leave with its No.1 ranking intact. Then the smallest guy on the floor took over, and the tallest guy on the floor found the confidence he seemed to be lacking. Heart won out, and Keene State scored a one-point victory. The classic college basketball scene ensued—the full bleachers emptying out, the point guard held aloft, mosh-pit style, and no one wanting to leave the gym. It's the type of moment an athlete never forgets.

There are no small-time sports. For every 40 minutes of game action, there are hours and hours of practice and free-throws and visualization and frustration. When I race for half a minute, it’s the result of a hundred hours of solitary workouts. No one sees any of that, and I rarely talk about it with anyone. But after I raced this past Sunday, I had the experience of a little bit of notoriety as a result of my wife Sandra’s blog. A national track and field website spotlighted her post, and suddenly there I was, the lead article. You can read it here (scroll back to Feb.1 when you get to the site):

www.masterstrack.com/

another OJ crime

So today I grabbed a "half gallon" of house-brand orange juice from the shelf in the Market Basket supermarket and noticed that it held 59 ounces. It doesn't actually claim to be a half gallon anywhere on the label, but the carton is exactly the same as always except for the 59 ounces. How long has this been going on? Most of the other brands also held 59 ounces. I bought the only brand that was a full half gallon. Also noticed that a package of almonds that used to be a pound is now 14 ounces.

I blame Mitt Romney.

Caucuses

So with the weirdness of Iowa behind us, the national media spotlight now shifts to New Hampshire, which Chris Matthews beatified on "Hardball" this evening as a state where, in next week's primary, "What they'll do will make sense - to them - and will seem like good sense to the rest of the country. It very often does. It's why New Hampshire has won this job of holding the first primary."

Tonight in NH, we did what we do several nights a week: go down to Brewbakers on Main Street for tea. The wind chill is on the wrong side of zero so we drove there for a change. Didn't know there'd be an open mike tonight. Got there as they were setting up, and it looked like it'd be an early night. But soon every other person who came through the door was carrying an acoustic guitar, and it was standing room only (in a room that holds about 25.) Great stuff; probably the best open mike I've ever been to. Particularly liked the two guys from Blackjack Crossing (Brattleboro bluegrassy band) and hilarious but Dylan-Neil-Youngish Tad Dreis, newly arrived from North Carolina. Also the two pots of tangerine-ginger tea and the housemade brownie. Looks like the first Wednesday of the month for now.

Always blown away by how much talent there is out there, and how gutsy people are to get up there and perform their stuff. We stumble upon things like this all the time in Keene. Coolest town I've ever lived in.

2012

An interesting Talk of the Town item on the nature of time in this week’s New Yorker mentions “The Pitch Drop Experiment,” in which a physics professor “designed an experiment to show his students how viscous a fluid could be. He poured hot pitch into a glass funnel, let it cool, and waited.” That was in 1927. It took eight years for the first drop to fall, and nine more years for the second. And it’s still dripping! The ninth drop is likely to fall sometime in 2013.

“Unpredictability is one of the great things about nature,” said the man who presently oversees the experiment. (He’s been in charge since 1961, and has never seen a drop fall.) “I’ve been around long enough that I just see time before and time after. It’s only when the drop has happened that what has gone before makes sense in the flow of time.”

Also in 1927, my parents were born. About a week ago, with much help from my sister Lynda, they sent the first email of their lives, copying about 35 of their progeny. I expect that their use of this technology may seem relatively like the every-10-years-or-so drop of pitch, but I’m hopeful that there will be quarterly correspondence, at least, with the grandchildren. Their second great-grandchild is due to arrive any day now, and we are very eager for the first electronic photograph of the baby.

Happy new year. We will eat Thai food tonight, watch the wonderful Gilbert and Sullivan movie “Topsy Turvy,” and be asleep well before the new year’s ball has fallen.

credit where it's due

World AIDS Day. Most liberals, like me, would assume that we aren't doing nearly enough to eradicate it. But I learned a lot today reading a column by U2's Bono in the New York Times. He says we've made incredible progress. And he credits an unlikely mixture of American leaders. Here's part of what he wrote:

"For me, a fan and a pest of America, it’s a tale of strange bedfellows: the gay community, evangelicals and scruffy student activists in a weird sort of harmony; military men calling AIDS in Africa a national security issue; the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Lee and John Kerry in lock step with Bill Frist and Rick Santorum; Jesse Helms, teary-eyed, arriving by walker to pledge support from the right; the big man, Patrick Leahy, offering to punch out a cranky Congressional appropriator; Jeffrey Sachs, George Soros and Bill Gates, backing the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; Rupert Murdoch (yes, him) offering the covers of the News Corporation.

Also: a conservative president, George W. Bush, leading the largest ever response to the pandemic; the same Mr. Bush banging his desk when I complained that the drugs weren’t getting there fast enough, me apologizing to Mr. Bush when they did; Bill Clinton, arm-twisting drug companies to drop their prices; Hillary Rodham Clinton, making it policy to eradicate the transmission of H.I.V. from mother to child; President Obama, who is expected to make a game changing announcement this World AIDS Day to finish what his predecessors started — the beginning of the end of AIDS.

And then there were the everyday, every-stripe Americans. Like a tattooed trucker I met off I-80 in Iowa who, when he heard how many African truck drivers were infected with H.I.V., told me he’d go and drive the pills there himself.

Thanks to them, America led. Really led."

Read the whole column here:

www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/opinion/a-...

Thanksgiving

And I am very grateful for my life.

Thirty-seven years ago I went with a bunch of my friends to Madison Square Garden to see Elton John. Midway through the concert, out comes John Lennon and they do "Lucy in the Sky," "Whatever Gets You Through the Night," and the greatest-ever version of "Saw Her Standing There." It apparently was the last live performance of Lennon's life.
I was with a very sweet girl named Dorothy. I wrote in my diary that night that it had been the best night of my life so far, and that I knew there would be many more to come. That's held true.

I spent today--and every day of the past twelve years--with the love of my life, Sandra, and every day gets better.

Great songs I listened to today:

"The Boxer" by Paul Simon

In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame,
"I am leaving, I am leaving."
But the fighter still remains

"The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze . . ." by Gilbert and Sullivan

Observe his flame,
that placid dame,
the moon's celestial highness;
There's not a trace
upon her face
of diffidence or shyness

"Lillian" by Ian Fitzgerald

She danced like the only one who heard the song . . .

"I Was Glad" by the St. Paul's Cathedral Choir of London. Had the pleasure of seeing them live during Evensong last summer.

"Idiot Wind." Dylan.

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the war
After losin’ every battle