I just finished The Wedding Group, which I found in the bookcase in Venice, CA (thank you, Janet for having so many good books I have never read), and it was such an amazing portrait of a mother and her grown son, a sensitive but brilliantly controlling, independent but quietly needy, utterly indulgent mother. Hmm. A blueprint for Cathy? Or should I stick to the mother on Absolutely Fabulous? So hard to choose one’s role models sometimes.
I have no idea what this cover art has to do with the book.
It really is a beautiful, surprising, emotionally discerning book. I had read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont ( a wonderful editor gave it to me years ago), and now I will have to read it again. And all her other books! Lucky me!

This evening when I walked the dog, there was what could charitably called a briney smell coming from the river. Well, I’m feeling charitable, so I will call it that. Then I walked up the little hill, made the turn at the playground, admired the white billowy hyrangeas and then…between 81st and 80th…the Linden trees! The blooms have arrived. I declare today Linden Tree Day!
And as I stood there drinking in the scent, I noticed a bird in another kind of tree (an acacia? maybe) screaming and screeching. It was wiggling its tail like a mockingbird, but it was backlit and I couldn’t see it very well and I’ve never heard a mockingbird make such bizarre buzzing noises. It was freakin’ out, man. Then it flew back and forth a few times between two trees and I saw that it was definately a mockingbird. And then, I saw the red tailed hawk just sitting there, motionless. The mockingbird was mobbing the red-tailed hawk, the linden trees were in bloom and Hector found a big stick to carry home. When we got back there was the smell of fresh brewed coffee in the lobby. And now I am having a big drink containing gin with its own lovely juniper perfume. HAPPY LINDEN TREE DAY!! It is my favorite holiday of the year.

Here’s a picture of a mockingbird mobbing a kestrel from www.richard-seaman.com

And here’s a picture of a bottle of gin

I just took the dog out for a walk and for just a second the breeze came up from Riverside Park and brought with what I have been waiting for all spring: the intoxicating scent of Linden trees.
Then it disappeared.
But that means there will be more tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that…
I’m obsessed with Linden trees.

I don’t really know what this is all about, but I love the graphic and I have a cairn, so any of you in southern California, take note!

I recently read this amazing, surprising book. It is the 18th-century memoir of a remarkable man taken from Africa as a boy and sold into slavery. Africa and the family he lost, the nightmare of the passage and of plantation work, the differences in status for a slave in the West Indies, in England and Georgia and Philadelphia–and then a kind of sea faring adventure story, too. I had never heard of it, but I gather it is something of a classic, and I see why. It is so idiosyncratic, so beautifully written, so horrifying, and so exciting all at the same time.
The black and white is him. The color picture is probably not him, though it was used on the copy of the book I read. I included it because it’s so beautiful.