Not long after we moved to our new house, we discovered a special tree in our neighbourhood. In September it turned a bright, pure, complete and lovely yellow. I loved seeing it as I drove by.



It got to the point where I looked forward to every fall to go by The Yellow Tree® again.

Last fall, I went by in September and it was gone. It had been so thoroughly removed that the stump was dug up, the hole sodded over, and you would never suspect that there had ever been a tree there.

It makes me feel old when I outlive some of the things I love.

Not sure why I get such a kick out of this story, but I do:

During the Swing Era of the late 30s and 40s, the big bands dominated the top of the charts. They were pop music. Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington... that sound defined an era.

But, by the 50s, that sound mostly died out, the hits stopped coming, and bands that size became too expensive to maintain. The charts became the purview of pop acts like Pat Boone and Doris Day, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, Rosemary Clooney and The McGuire Sisters. Plus, in mid-decade, Elvis showed up and started breaking records, turning rock and roll into the hottest fad in music. The swing musicians still appeared occasionally in clubs and on TV, but on the charts they were mostly a spent force. Now and then, one of them would manage to interest a label in putting out a record for them, but nothing much came of it.

And then, in 1957, Jimmy Dorsey released So Rare.

God knows why, but in amongst all the usual 50s suspects, that record spent over half a year on the chart, made it to Number Two [Number One in Canada], and ended up being Billboard's Number Five record out of the Top One Hundred of the year. During those few minutes it would play on the radio, it was suddenly 1942 again. Out of nowhere. The Swing Era had a sudden last blaze of glory, and I think that is so swell.

[It was only today that I learned Jimmy Dorsey died in '57, but he lived long enough to see So Rare become a big hit and to receive a gold record for it. Talk about going out on a high note.]

Why why why do my dishwashing gloves always die by springing a leak in the right index finger? I've got a bunch of perfectly good lefties piling up in the kitchen here... and the lack of expected randomness in the process is driving me a bit nuts.

sitting here, thinking: I cannot remember the last time my headache was mild enough for me to tune out and ignore completely. It might've been early in this year, but more likely was some time last year. Not sure.

I can, however, remember the last time my headache was 100% gone: Monday, November 13, 1989, at 2 p.m. And it stayed that way for two hours.

Driving alone on quiet midday streets with a quiet mind, perfect weather, and gorgeous music. In moments like that, life is as good as you could want.

Being called “weird” feels threatening to people who believe that “normal” has some sort of moral weight. But “normal” is really only talking about statistics — just because most people do a particular thing doesn’t make that thing good.

For the last couple days, I've been doing pencil doodles which are studies of faces and figures from Ponytail, an early-60s comic strip panel by Lee Holley.





This year I've also been doing a lot of mental work and planning for a new graphic project, and I find a lot of inspiration in Holley's approach, as if it could lead me into something new. Drawing these makes me feel like I'm Onto Something® — it's kinda exciting.

For a few years now, I've been saying that [the recently late] Alice Munro is my favourite writer. Now, news is coming out that calls her personal character into question. [It also suggests that efforts were made to suppress this news while she was alive?] This brings us once again to the issue of, "What do we do when good art, art that we love, has been made by a person who is not good, who we find it hard to love?"

There are various levels of separating the art from the artist (or not), and we all vary in how much we are able or willing to do this. Ultimately, it's a subjective and personal decision. I've come to realize that, for me, it's better and more accurate for me to say that I am a fan of a creator's work rather than a fan of a creator. I'm now trying harder to express myself in that way.

And now I'm seeing people going back to Munro's work, re-reading it in a new light, and wondering if they were inadvertently approving of messages counter to their own values. In this case, I don't have so much of an issue, I guess. For me, it isn't so much what she wrote about, or what her message was, as how she wrote it. Her writing has an elegant and insightful economy to it: she never sounds like she's straining to sound Writery®. That's what I like about her sutff. Those times when she wrote about dubious people doing dubious things, I never took it as approval of those things — more an awareness that there are people like that out there.

And now it turns out that she was one of them, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.


P.S.: I can understand boycotting an artist when we learn things like this about them, not wanting to contribute to them financially, etc. But, once they're gone, that whole aspect sorta becomes moot, I think?

After months of going without, I finally found my very fave chamomile tea back in stock at Dollar Tree! [And, as you can imagine, I stocked up in rather unseemly fashion.]