This just in: not a vampire

I'm reading a book by the very funny novelist Christopher Moore about young, unsuspecting, and otherwise ordinary vampires in San Francisco. I stay up late reading until I nod off in the chair by the fire. I get up and straggle in to work and drink coffee in my new cube by the 8-foot by 8-foot window on the east side of the building, and joy of joys in the heart of central swingstate, I feel the sun coming in directly in my face. There are check-in tasks to accomplish, e-mails to read and answer, schedules and calendars to remind me of what I'm doing, and lists to prioritize. Then, halfway through my large mug of java, I stand by the floor-to-ceiling window and stretch my creaking, awakening limbs, enjoying the morning sun and thinking, okay, I might live.

I'm clearly not a vampire. Sunshine is my friend. My other friend Gaylord gave a sermon a few weeks ago outlining a kind of theology of sunlight. Briefly, and this in no way comes close to the scope of Gaylord's well-researched argument, it is possible to reconcile a scientific understanding of the physical universe with a theology of a loving and caring community, and one way to do it is to gratefully face the rising sun every morning. I'm with you, Gaylord.

I've mentioned this proposition to several people, and I always get the same (like duh) response, which is what happens whenever I make a major discovery that everybody else knew all along. Reprising a mid-1970s mimeographed chapbook of poems entitled "Belaboring the Obvious," yes, of course we all knew this, but somehow it does some good, as we head into the rainy midwestern winter, to restate this truism.

Gaylord is a recovering Lutheran from North Dakota, so I'm guessing he knows a thing or two about seasonal affective discombobulation. As a SAD fellow-sufferer, and a recovering Methodist from Minnesota, I'm leaving the shades open whenever possible, glare (blinding light in the face, or that look from co-workers trying to read their computer screens) or no glare.

Mr. Bones

Not that I'm superstitious, mind you. But a lot of people are out sick this week, most for just a day or two, some longer, and don't tell me it's "the cold and flu season." Flu schmu! It's the post-holiday immune-system letdown, and it's unacceptable.

Yesterday alone, there was one migraine, one chest cold, one stomach bug, one degenerating disc, an undisclosed ailment, and a sore knee (that would be me). And that's in two rows of cubicles alone, not to mention the silently suffering who stoically choose not discuss their ailments. No lords a leaping, no ladies dancing, and no swans a swimming that I know of.

What's up, people? Just because the intensity of holiday preparations and gatherings is over, and the accompanying adrenaline surge that goes with it, you don't have to let your somatic guard down and succumb to whatever random virus happens to enter your energy field. We have to play better defense!

I have a number of answers, team, none of them foolproof. First, I hung the glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton, leftover from Halloween, in the window next to the back door. I thought it would be a tasteful, Martha Stewarty way to celebrate the darkest time of the year. Someone else in our house placed a stylish scarf around his/her neck and a pair of wool gloves on those dangling metacarpals to keep the bare bones warm. Pretty soon Mr. Bones was wearing an OSU tank top in anticipation of Troy and the Boyz kicking Gator-butt out in Arizona next week.

But also to ward off the evil eye, ear, nose, and throat bugs. You know they're out there, and if you give them even the slightest opportunity, they gotcha.

Another measure is to sweat. I don't care if it is 50 degrees outside on a January morning, put on your longjohns, drink your hot tea, and ward off the bad stuff from the inside out. Not to mention starting and ending the day with a little workout. Hey, walking up all those steps to the fourth floor would qualify. And speaking for myself, a short mid-afternoon break in the fitness room downstairs works wonders for body and mind after slouching in front of a screen all day.

Now that I've preached the good word, watch me be the next one to fall victim to the dreaded Lower Slobovian poultry flu.

First day of the year

He slept late, having stayed up late watching old black-and-white Commando Cody shorts on TV - bad guys in big suits, on orders from an evil genius on the moon, stealing cars and having outrageous fistfights and shootouts with good guys who fly through the air wearing a jet suit. He took a shower and got dressed, got a cup of coffee and went outside to test the weather. It was warm but windy, so he put on an old sweater and walked around the yard checking on the new shed roof, the unsplit woodpile, the dormant garden with catnip, onions, and kale still green and growing, maple and pear trees that badly need pruning.

Cooling off, he returned to his warm coffee on the patio, found a jump rope, and did a few minutes of jumping, first on both legs, then alternating two right and two left, four right and four left, eight right and eight left, and so on until he was tired. Then he walked around to rest and did it again. When that got old, he went inside and sat down with a new book of short stories from the library. He read a story about two strangers who meet at a party and can't figure out where they've met before, then keep running into each other with no plan or follow-up, and finally acknowledge their attraction years later when it's too late to do anything about it.

It's too warm for a fire, so he toasts some bread and makes more coffee. It's early, so he turns on the crock pot to heat up the soup he made yesterday. The soup was surprisingly good with cracked wheat, the whole pickled peppers really working in the kidney bean broth. Then he got busy outside, splitting a small stack of one-inch boards into a boxful of kindling that will last a few weeks, methodically slicing off thin strips from the roughly foot-long scraps of lumber with an ax. Most of the scraps are wet, but ironically the pieces on the bottom of the pile have been sheltered from the rain, so they get split last and end upon top of the kindling box, dry enough to start tomorrow's fire. He finds a place for the box behind a wicker chair near the stove in the den.

Back in the kitchen he pulls out the broiler drawer to try to locate the problem with the oven that hasn't been baking properly. The pilot area looks normal, lighting up electrically when the START switch on the keypad is pushed. The gas inlets behind the stove and in the cellar look normal, and gas is getting to the burners on top. He checks the owner's manual and goes through the trouble-shooting list twice, finding nothing, and concludes that it's either an electrical glitch in the oven igniter or a blocked gas line to the oven. In either case, a technician will have to check it out.

While he relaxes into another short story about a filmmaker who dreams of images of doors from a film he's become obsessed with, his wife asks what he wants for supper and reheats leftovers from New Year's Eve - sweet potatoes with pecans, roast pork with sauerkraut, red potatoes with mushrooms, French bread with olive oil and garlic - delicious with a glass of Pinot Noir. They talk about the party with neighborhood friends and the game that's not really a game, where each person answers a series of questions about the coming year: who to see, where to go, what to do, and one unrealistic wish.

He walks the dog, and it's still cool and wet outside. He watches a halfway decent sitcom, part of a football game, and part of a PBS jazz special with a pretty good young Canadian singer. He went outside and did a short workout in the yard; while he was practicing, his daughter came home. He went in, made some tea, and went to bed, wondering how much truth there is to the myth that the first day of the year shows what kind of year it's going to be.

Fiction for survival

The second time I went to the First Me church on Whitehomer Road was shortly after moving back to Clintonville looking for a job. (The first time was an Easter service way back during graduate school, which didn't stick and doesn't count.) But the second time, the minister was on vacation, so there were two lay speakers who talked about a method they had used as counselors to help people see themselves differently and find a way through their most sticky problems. Dave and Laura called it 'restorying'.

The major premise is that there is a narrative going on all the time. There's a postmodern school of literary theorists who like to call this the 'text'. Your job is a text; your family life is a text; your social life is a text; a basketball game is a text. Stanley Fish wrote a book called Does This Course Have a Text? So you get the idea: everything, not just printed, verbal accounts of things, can be seen and "read" as a narrative.

The minor premise, according to Dave and Laura, is that everybody constructs their own narrative of their own life, selectively working with the facts they are given. There's the rub! We don't choose our parents, siblings, birthplace, birth order, or what happens to us, but we do string together those facts in a way that somehow hangs together and makes sense. We also don't choose what other people choose to make of it, what conclusions they draw, and what meaning they give to the story.

It gets hairy when someone's version of the story does damage. That's when it's time for some restorying, according to Dave and Laura. My favorite novelist, John Barth, who is at least as serious about making art as Dave and Laura were about doing therapy, would call it fiction for survival. Barth is all about getting into the writing/living/rewriting of the life/story, which makes his writing convoluted and his characters complex. Like most people living an examined life.

This is a process I have returned to many times over the years, and most of it is boringly self-involved and not for publication. There have been other times where the writing of the song of myself spilled over the boundary in ways that should have been instructive, had I been paying attention. And maybe someday those episodes will find their way into a narrative I first committed to writing during graduate school, when the movement/discourse analogy began to crystalize into a group of fictional characters.

This miserable post has been sitting in my outbox fermenting for weeks (months?) now, so it's either ripe or about to "turn" - just as the would-be manuscript of self-revelatory metafiction has been sitting in a manila file folder and floppy disk so long there is no computer alive that will read it. But I continue to scribble Mitty-esque paragraphs that go in a drawer, because as Anthony Burgess said, the important thing is to keep writing.

This just in: grass greener

Pissed off? Dissatisfied? Fed up? Bored? Just plain tired? Had enough already? Honeymoon over? Everything gone south? In the toilet? Down the tubes? In the pits?

So quit. Leave. Get the hell out. Splitsville. Vamanos, hombre! There's bound to be something better out there. Slip out the back, Jack, make a new plan, Stan, and all that. I mean if the story isn't going the way you want, write a new chapter, right?

When I have this inclination, someone sagely reminds me of the conventional wisdom, and of course I don't do anything drastic and impulsive. Sure, there are better jobs, classier neighborhoods, hipper cities, and cooler living situations out there. But who knows what the unintended consequences would be?

This is not - repeat NOT - a "healthy dose of realism." I'm not acknowledging the necessity of what is, and I'm not affirming some kind of facts, irrespective of perception or perspective, that are true regardless of what anybody thinks. I'm not that far gone yet. I'm just too lazy or busy or complacent to do anything about it.

It's a lot of freaking work to make major changes happen, aside from the risks involved, and who has the time and energy? Learning the ropes of the new workplace, the streets of the new city, the habits and requirements of a new set of people? I have my hands full as it is, so I think I'll stand pat for now.

I asked the I Ching, and it said, "Wait in the midst of danger...take the line of least resistance...there is no way out for three years...(then) cross the great water with deliberation." Oracles - can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

vertigo in centro swingstatum

Can be induced merely by climbing (puff puff, pant pant) from the third floor to the fourth floor of a glass and steel office building. Look out the window. You can see the horizon.

It's so flat here that most of the time there is no visible horizon, so there's that building next door, and the one behind it, and the clouds. Now I look out the window from the vertiginous height of the fourth floor (facing southeast) and I see the ridge that rises slightly beyond two water towers, probably the rise that separates Alumni Creek from Big Walnut Creek east of Methodistville. Not exactly a birdseye view, but still a different view.

All due to the move that's part of a reorganization that's part of a merger. My department has been subdivided while being shifted up one flight of stairs, so I have new officemates as well as a cube by the window. We have yet to meet our incoming K-5 editors who either migrate from the Big Apple or join from somewhere else. For now, most work processes are continuing unchanged - if we can find each other in the new physical layout.

My biggest immediate challenge is conditioning my heart, lungs, muscles, and energy systems to walk up four flights instead of three. And I ain't taking no elevator, nosir.

Time passes. I walk - no, I stride - up the four flights every day without undue effort, albeit without boxes full of files, and I'm adjusting body and soul to the new space. Pictures are finding their way onto the walls of my cube - not all that were in the old cube, only those I can't live without - and I know where to find a pen or paper clip or dictionary when I need one.

In short, it's good to be up and running again and able to function in the rarefied air of southern Delaware County with the morning sun streaming in.

Givingthanks

A few unexpected blessings came our way this week for one of my favorite holidays.

My sister Jo Jo Golly came up to Swingstate from Crackerstate, something she has done several times in the last few years. Last year she dragged along her son, Bubba Golly Badly, who is around Jessi's and Zelda's age, and it was a lot of fun. He is a good sport, and it was fun to spend time with him, listen to music, talk politics, and hear his point of view. This year it was just Jo Jo, as Bubba spent the day with his girlfriend and her family in Atlanta, so we got to talk about him behind his back.

Zelda Golly came home from Northeast Swingstate University, of course, now careening anxiously down the homestretch toward the undergraduate finish line marked "B.A." Now that she has her own wheels, it's not as big a production to get her home for breaks and holidays, but it's still a big deal for her presence to be present in our presence. She and Jo Jo go way back, and Z takes after J in many ways. It's hilarious to walk into a room and see Zelda, Jo, and Gven sitting there talking and knitting furiously.

Equally strong is the vibe created by her brother Jessi Golly. A week ahead of time, we received word that he would be making the bus trip from New York, so we had a houseful. He rode in Wednesday morning on the Chinatown Bus, an independent budget busline that connects New York with several east coast cities, and now central Swingstate. Among other good news, Jessi is starting a new job this week at a comic book shop in the East Village called Forbidden Planet. We're relieved that he has a regular job and excited that it's doing something he's really interested in. He even brought a beautiful handwritten message to us from Alex, who was in Connecticut with her family.

So it was the five of us sitting at the table in the dining room of Om Shanty in Old Methodistville. Though it wasn't a very Methodist holiday. We linked hands and thanked the universe for being together. We listened to some old LPs of Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary that haven't lost their relevance in the 40 years since they came out. We ate turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing, asparagus, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie. We drank a little rum and OJ, a little Cabernet Sauvignon and a lot of coffee. We sat by the fire, read a little, and talked about stuff.

Friday it was gorgeous outside, so we spent the afternoon at Inniswood, the gardens that were given to the county by the Innis family and made into a public park. Going there does what John Muir said about mountains: you find more than you're looking for. Saturday We walked around the backyard checking out the garden in November. Jo Jo is an experienced and knowledgeable gardener, so hanging out in the garden with her is like being in Baker Street with Holmes.

Jessi got in touch with his friends Andy and Andrew from high school, and they hung out at Andy's house, but not without great difficulty coordinating logistics with Zelda, who was meeting her friends Max and Jara from high school and hanging out at Ryan's house. It wasn't easy, and it never has been, but they worked it out. That was a recurring theme: my siblings aren't likely to stop doing the things that irritate me, and I'm not likely to stop being irritated by them. But we'll keep finding ways to put up with each other, and maybe learn how to act in ways that doesn't make it worse.

On that cheerful note, I'll just say that it was a great long weekend. Jo Jo went back to Atlanta Saturday afternoon, Zelda went back to Kent Sunday afternoon, and Jessi got on the Greyhound for the Big Apple at midnight Sunday. Leaving a post-Thanksgiving vacuum in their wake. Is this the post-holiday blues, or am I just getting a jump on the upcoming pre-holiday blues?

On melancholy

1 a: an abnormal state attributed to an excess of black bile and characterized by irascibility or depression... 2 b: causing or tending to cause sadness or depression of mind or spirit - Web10

Long story short, I'm for it. I join President Carter in doing my part to affirm our national malaise. I urge my fellow citizens to embrace their inner darkness, get to know their shadow, and enjoy a moment of personal gloom.

And why not? This is not a Disney movie, and we don't all live in a theme park called Happyland. Uh-oh, maybe I didn't get the memo. Is real life all about being cheerful 24/7? Okay, so we're not supposed to experience the ups and downs, and everybody is better off either ignoring or denying their reality. As the saying goes, I stand corrected.

Yesterday I was walking around the back yard - this is mainly what I do on weekends - picking apples off the ground, tossing some in the compost and putting some in a basket, pulling the odd weed, picking the last few peppers, beans, tomatoes. A faint tingle of sadness washed over me for no particular reason, and it occurred to me, okay, so this is fall. I happen to enjoy fall, but that doesn't mean I'm all buoyant and happy about it.

It's going to frost tonight, so I have to do something with the more tender potted plants. We'll need firewood soon. The furnace is already in use at night. I'll only have to mow a few more times until April. I already have some raking to do, and I'll wait until all the leaves are down before doing the serious pruning of trees. It's fall, nothing depressing about it.

Tell you what. I'll try not to drag anybody else down with me when I'm feeling down myself, okay? I won't insist that everyone around me see and acknowledge how dark thw world looks at the moment that it all looks hopelessly gloomy to me. And in return don't ask me to be happy, which is code for 'act happy when you're around me because I don't want to hear about it'.

Ravenna at night

Wood-Kortwright Funeral Home is on Main Street on the far side of downtown at the corner of Freedom Street. You go past Friend Construction, the Portage County Courthouse, and the bank; you can't miss it. I was driving up after work on Monday to join my wife and her mother, who were there to support Uncle Than and his family. Aunt Evelyn died last Thursday.

Than (for Nathaniel) and Evelyn Alexander had lived in Portage County forever, it seemed. They both grew up in Carroll County, Virginia, but they raised their kids here in Swingstate. I've been hearing about Wade and Kay since I joined the extended family 30 years ago, but this was my first time meeting them. Kay has worked at the Northeast Swingstate University library for a long time and has three sons. We got to meet them while standing in line beside Evelyn's casket.

Wade married Pam, who grew up right there in Ravenna, and both of them taught school in Ashland County, a little west of there, and now they have a Christmas tree farm called Alexander Family Tree Farm. They have two kids, a boy and a girl, around our kids' ages. Trevor just passed the bar exam and works at a law firm in Capital City; Lindsay teaches middle school math in North Carolina. Nice kids.

Wade was standing between Kay and Than in the receiving line, and it looked like they were successfully getting each other through the whole experience. A couple of hours of greeting well-wishers, standing next to the open casket, must take its toll on one's endurance and emotions, but they held up very well. Evelyn had been sick for some time, so everyone had plenty of time to prepare themselves, but still.

Part of the Alexander family mythology, retold at every reunion, is the fact that Gven was born on her cousin Wade's birthday, and one generation later our daughter Zelda was born on Wade's son Trevor's birthday. Whoa. Maybe that's why Wade was always Nancy's - Gven's mother's - favorite nephew. As an in-law and relative outsider, I enjoyed stepping into the story, watching the family interact and reminisce, seeing the connection they have with each other.

After a while I sat down next to Uncle Clayburn, whom I first met at his place in the mountains when Gven and I were courting. He's had some health problems, but he looked good. Gven sat one row in front of us with her mom and Aunt Gail, whose husband Bobby sat next to Clayburn. That worked out well, as Clayburn and Bobby had plenty of stories to tell, while Nancy and Gail chimed in regularly with their versions of the truth. These people are part of a big family, and they've known each other for along time.

The whole event, a very traditional small-town ritual, caused Gven and me to appreciate their way of doing things and wonder about what our way will be someday, when the time comes. Our way will be somewhat different, but we haven't made out a will or made any definite arrangements for executors and all that. Which we should, of course.

Speaking strictly for myself, I'm mostly in denial of the inevitable end, and if I had to make those decision today, I am in doubt about the way it should be handled. Gven thinks a party would be appropriate. Church funeral or not? Burial or cremation? Family plot - where, I don't know - ashes in an urn or scattered in a garden or forest somewhere? Plain pine box floating down the Mississippi or sinking to the bottom of Lake Superior? Would 'I' rather turn into compost or smoke?

So I had stuff to think about on the drive home to Capital City, while Gven and her mother stayed overnight for the funeral the next day.

Detroit Stories

Gven Golly's friend Kate had the opening of her show at the new art department space over at Evangelical Brethren College Friday evening, and it was the least I could do to show up. As I confided to a co-worker at the end of another long week, it really was about all I could do. So I dutifully dragged my exhausted left brain across Alumni Creek to Collegeview Road to schmooze and let my right brain look at art.

Am I ever glad I did. Like the sign on the transmission shop across the street from Tiger Stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull: LIMP IN, LEAP OUT! The gallery was a clean, well-lighted space full of vibrant visual stimulation, friendly people, and balm for my weary mind. The whole show was composed of narrative quilts linking the artist's family and friends with mythological characters, and they were beautiful, some of them emotionally touching, like dyed cotton fibers pieced together by human muscle fibers that drew upon memory fibers to penetrate deep cardiac fibers. I felt better.

By the time a bunch of people regrouped at the home of Kate's neighbor for a dinner in her honor, I was well on my way to accomplishing re-entry into the everyday world of social interaction - no mean feat. With a glass of red wine in my hand, I found the next portal in the company of Kate's main men - her son Tedy (Icarus), her husband Jim, and her father Dick (Zeus stirring his drink with a lightning bolt).

For the next couple of hours, the conversation flowed as freely as the wine, with Dick's stories about selling Fords for umpteen years - first in Detroit and then in Pittsburgh - and gambling in Biloxi. Dick likes to play poker and drink Crown Royal, thinks we should pump oil wherever we can find it, in the Artic or in your front yard, and he enjoys the perks of being a regular at the casino, the complimentary hotel room and meals, the quality competition, the occasional big win.

This was when the Tigers were about to play in the World Series, against all odds, so everything Detroit was briefly cool again. We shared our admiration for their old-school manager, their strong young pitching staff, and their few steady veterans. And how can you admire the '06 Tigers without paying tribute to the '84 Tigers, like Trammell and Whitaker, and of course the '68 Tigers, like the aging but peerless Al Kaline, the clutch pitcher Mickey Lolich, the psychotic and lucky and self-destructive 31-game winner Denny McLain.

For the elders, of course, that legacy goes back another generation, so Dick had stories about Charlie Gehringer, George Kell, and Hank Greenburg, who were playing baseball before my time except in legend. By this time, the party had thinned a bit. Tedy and his high school friends had gone to a dance club in the hot rod Lincoln his grandpa Dick gave him for his birthday. Jim and I listened eagerly to the tale of how Lee Iacocca rose like a meteor from selling Ford trucks in New Jersey to master-minding the company's comeback during the '60s by introducing the Mustang, which infuriated Henry Ford, Jr., and then bolting to Chrysler.

There was the night Dick walked into a bar at Nine Mile Road and Telegraph, and the bartender said, "Hey, Dick, don't make a big deal of it, but that's Lee Iacocca sitting over there." Sure enough, tie loose and jacket off, the boss had stopped in for a drink on his way home from work. He lived in Bloomfield Hills, you know, because the Fords all lived in Grosse Pointe.

Welcome to the world's largest dictatorship

Doesn't it make you proud to live in the richest, most powerful authoritarian state in the world? I can only speak for myself, but I'm bursting with patriotic fervor, knowing that the military-industrial complex is working 24/7 to keep me safe from information that might make me question my good fortune.

If you grew up in a Readers Digest environment like I did, where the only news is good news because all the "bad" parts are filtered out, disturbing facts are indeed disturbing because they are unexpected and sometimes suspect. How could this be - what with god on our side and all? So I'm slowly weaning myself of that habit, acquired as a wee sprout, of thinking that all is well in the land of the free and the home of the brave. So pardon me, younger readers who have known this all along, and older readers who never bought that fiction in the first place.

Today's wake-up call comes from MotherJones.com (MoJo Blog 10/27/06) under the headline:

When It Comes to Press Freedom, We're Number 53!

Reporters Sans Frontières recently released its annual ranking of press freedom around the world, and it's not good news for the United States. Our ranking's been steadily dropping since the survey started in 2002, when we were in the index's top 20. Now we're at a dismal 53rd place, down from an undistinguished 44th last year. That puts us in the same league as tiny democracies like Botswana, Croatia, and Tonga. To be sure, we're a long way from the atrocious rankings of Iran, China, Burma, Cuba, and North Korea. But it's nothing to write home about.

The United States' poor showing is largely to blame on the excesses of the war on terror. As RSF explains, "Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism.'" And then there's the journalists we've got locked up, such as a Sudanese Al-Jazeera cameraman being held in Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein , who's been in U.S. custody in Iraq for 6 months without charge. That's just the official hostility to the press. During the past year, right-wing commentators debated whether the editor of the New York Times should be sent to the gas chamber or the firing squad for revealing a program to track terrorist funds. It's not clear whether this episode figured into RSF's rankings, but it was another sign of why, when it comes to freedom of expression, we've got a long way to Number One.

[Ed. Note: This week's Sports Illustrated carries an excellent column on Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who used leaked grand jury testimony to blow the lid off the steriod scandal. They'll be heading to jail soon for failing to reveal their sources, and may still be in the big house when Barry Bonds, documented to have commited several crimes in Fainaru-Wada and Williams' reporting, breaks baseball's all-time home run record.

A detail from the column, which unfortunately is subscription-only: The Chronicle has received 80 subpoenas of reporters over the last 18 months, compared with five over the previous 18. That's the world's strongest democracy, leading by example.]

- Dave Gilson

Gagas for Degas

I learned so much over the weekend:

That it's not pronounced "DAY-gah" but "duh-GAH", because the painter was from an aristocratic family but favored the more modern spelling Degas rather than the traditional deGas.

That he also had family ties in Naples, studied and imitated the Italian Renaissance painters.

That he didn't see himself as an Impressionist or want to be considered one of them, with Manet, Monet, et al, didn't join in the general enthusiasm to get out of the studio to paint outdoors in the plen aire manner.

That he said, when walking past a painting by Monet, that he felt a draft.

That he wasn't crazy about all those dancers, wasn't a particular admirer of most of his women subjects, and was considered something of a misogynist. And when you look at the postures of some of the famous pictures of dancers, they're not all that flattering. And some of them are just a figure in the foreground of a landscape that's much more interesting. So that's what the exhibit was about - the landscapes.

A disclaimer is needed here. I like the museum, and I can get wrapped up in it, but I know nothing really. Other members of my immediate family know much more than the old man, but I do get into it. The rocks, hills, lakes, forest, mountains, and rivers figure prominently. Lots of downward vectors working across the plane of vision.

Gven's favorite was "The Return of the Herd" - animals moving resolutely through the streets of a village - which reminded me of a scene in the great Anthony Quinn movie "La Strada" where nothing much is happening except a huge horse walks past the camera. I especially liked the angular streets of the seaside town of Saint Valery where Degas liked to paint, the planar roofs of the houses at the foot of a hill, the way he left the sea out of the picture.

Then we went to a Greek restaurant in the Short North and ate appetizers, watched people go up and down High Street, listened to the loud laughing people in the back.