Dear George,
Last week Katja and I were upstairs watching TV when we heard a huge crashing noise outside our house. I looked out the window, but there weren’t any cars that had collided at our corner Because it had just started raining, I concluded the sound must have been a thunder clap. A few minutes later though a fire engine pulled up across the street. I went downstairs to reconnoiter and discovered a large gray pickup truck upside down on its roof in our neighbor's driveway. The truck had been speeding up Ludlow Ave., jumped the curb, knocked down a fire hydrant, destroyed our neighbor's front porch, and skidded to a stop about two feet from the pillar that holds up our front porch roof. Amazingly neither of the two passengers were injured. It's not the first time something like this has happened. I overheard someone say that the truck had been speeding 70 m.p.h. up the hill. I complained online to the city but I haven’t heard back. They did, however, put one of those big monitors that shows drivers their speed on my neighbor’s curb.
I’ve been plagued with muscle pains in my legs for months, and, even though I’d had a recent checkup, I called the doctor’s office to make another appointment. My doctor wasn’t available for six weeks, so I went to see his junior colleague. The colleague agreed with me that the pain might be due to the statin that I’ve taken for many years to lower my cholesterol. He recommended that I not take it for a week to see what would happen. Just by chance, I had a routine checkup with the cardiologist a few days later, and he told me to stop taking the statin altogether. Katja thought this was frightening and called him to discuss it, but she never got through. Happily, all the pain is gone and my legs are back to normal. Even more surprising (after a couple of decades of taking Ambien every night to get to sleep) I now have no sleep problem at all. I don’t take any pill, fall asleep in five minutes or less every night, and sleep soundly till eight a.m. When I checked on the Internet, I discovered that insomnia is one of the most frequent side effects of the statin I was taking. I can’t help but think that my doctor knew this all along.
Katja and I are still trying to adjust to our close friend Donna Durham’s moving to Nashville last December. Katja and Donna were colleagues together at their agency, and, when we all bought sheepdogs fifteen years ago, the three of us started spending a lot of time together (along with Sophie, Mike, and Duffy). Friday nights at the movies, getting together for dinner at least once a week, doing Jumbles and the I Ching, watching the Oscars, the Super Bowl, and the Wimbledon finals. Among other things, Donna and I probably spent 2000 hours over the years hiking with the sheepdogs at Miami Whitewater Forest, Fernbank, Eden Park, and elsewhere. Suddenly lots of fun and excitement has disappeared from our lives, and I don’t know how we’ll fill the void.
There are, of course, some pleasures in life to be had. One of them is that Katja and I watch a couple of episodes of Frasier on Netflix every night before going to sleep. It’s a very warm, funny, feel-good show, and both of us are hooked. Part of the appeal is the connection between Frasier and his dad, Martin Crane, who lives with him. Frasier and Martin are near-complete opposites. Katja and Frasier seem to share identical interests: the opera, symphony, chamber music, theater, literature, fining dining, antiques, elegant clothes, home furnishings, the wine club, etc. On the other hand, Martin, a retired cop, is a low culture guy: sports, camping, TV, beer, his dog, etc. — just about all the things I like most in life. We’re always pleased that Frasier and Martin manage to get along as well as they do.
Katja belongs to a long-established women’s writing group called the Contemporary Club, and she is obligated to write and present a paper every year or two. Months and months ago she decided to do a paper on translation. She majored in French in college, studied French literature in graduate school, and did a number of jobs as a translator along the way. She put off her paper until a month before the due date, then took out 22 books from the library, and worked night and day. Lots of pressure and anxiety. It turned out very successfully, and now I think Katja misses having such a compelling mission. She was thinking about doing a paper on Elie Wiesel, and I encouraged her to start on it soon. She’s thinking it over.
We went to see the tax guy recently. Katja is in charge of financial matters in our household, and I got upset (as I do every year) by her list of forty plus charities to which she donates. Some make sense to me, but there are lots of things that we have no personal connection to at all, e.g., tigers, Tibet, the Smithsonian, National Parks, firefighters, etc. I asked the accountant if we were giving too much to charity. He smiled and said no, that our charitable donations were perfectly fine for our income. I ask him that same question every year and he always gives the same answer, but it doesn’t seem to stick with me from one year to the next.
Since we have enough money to help support the Dalai Lama, I decided that perhaps we should spend more on ourselves. We’re on spring break right now from our OLLI courses, and it seemed like a good time for a beach vacation. Katja was thrilled when I brought it up. The beachfront hotel prices that I found online were hefty, so we went down to the auto club to see if they could get a better deal. Much to my dismay, the prices they found were double what I saw on the Internet. I asked Katja what looked best to her, and she picked a highly rated resort on Siesta Key near Sarasota. I took a deep breath and made the reservation. We’re all excited. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Love,
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