Earlier this year, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls released her fifth solo album, Lung of Love. While I have often felt her solo work less stellar than her music with Emily Saliers, I really feel she’s hit her stride with this album. I find the record as a whole to be one of my favorites so far in 2012 and enjoy nearly every song on it. This is “Little Revolution”:
I am basking in aloe and awash with Vitamin D with tea in hand and cat at my side, so it’s clearly time to look back on three beautiful things from the past week:
1. Fava bean spread on baguette, enjoyed as part of dinner three nights in a row.
2. Our first Friday night picnic is a wash-out due to tornado-spawning storms. Sarah, Nicole, John, Rudi, and I turn it into a pizza party.
3. Today, Rudi, Sarah, Sarah’s brother, Brian, and I had tickets to the afternoon game of the Nationals and the Mets. The day was warm, but not too, with a hint of a breeze. The sky was blue, with occasional clouds covering the sun to give us a break. I ate a tasty falafal sandwich and had free sodas (today’s designated driver coupon, as well as Tuesday night’s, when the line for the stand where it was redeemable was several innings’ long). The Mets won. Then, because it was such a nice day and because Brian couldn’t drive back to Virginia until after rush hour and because it was still early on a day when we all ought to have been at work, we went out for an early dinner and sat on a patio along Barracks Row.
(A bonus: We harvest our first full-sized tomato from our garden ever. It is a shade-happy variety, which makes for a happy plant in our plot under a tree. The second tomato is just starting to turn red, so I imagine it will be perfect when I’m next able to pick it on Sunday. It serves as the star of our salad.)
How about you? What was beautiful in your world this week?
Old Crow Medicine Show performs “Wagon Wheel,” based on and expanded from Bob Dylan’s “Rock Me Mamma”:
Incidentally, D.C. peeps, OCMS will be playing at the 9:30 Club August 2 (their 8/3 show is already sold out). Any interest?
The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green
From the jacket: “Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.”
My take: Hazel Lancaster, age 16, knows she’s dying. She’s come back from the edge before, from the moment when her parents held a vigil at her bedside believing each breath would be her last. And most days she’s, well, okay with it would be wrong, but as okay with it as you can be when you’re supposed to be counting the rest of your life in decades and when dating and college decisions are supposed to be the biggest hurdles in your immediate future. But she’d rather live out her life in the small circle she’s created — hanging out with her folks, taking classes at the local community college, and enduring the treacly support group sessions her mom makes her attend — than create new relationships that will only cause pain when they inevitably end.
So it’s highly ironic when the support group that her parents force her to go to — where the heretofore high point had been exchanging heavy sighs with half-blind Isaac at every excruciating moment of cheese — brings her into contact with hot ex-basketball player and cancer survivor Augustus Waters, who immediately begins a flirtatious relationship by comparing her to Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta.
They bond over their favorite books (his is a sci-fi series with a high body count featuring a hero who routinely escapes from near death adventures; hers is a high-art YA book about a girl with cancer that ends mid-sentence). They flirt. They play video games. They try to help Isaac deal with the loss of his sight and his girlfriend. They establish relationship boundaries and then attempt skirmishes at them to see how well they hold. (Augustus agrees to friendship, but no one has any doubt that he wants Hazel for a girlfriend. Hazel doesn’t want to cause him pain when she dies, so she insists that they can only be friends.) And then, “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
If the book, like life, is doomed to follow a single path that we, as readers, know it must take from shortly after the outset, it does so compassionately and with the knowledge that just because an ending has been pre-ordained does not mean that we can’t mark the milestones, enjoy the company, or find some answers along the way.
Pages: 318