After reminiscing over the shirtless Goran Ivanisevic, and wondering if memory was serving me correctly, I turned my blog entry over to my fact checkers.
My son responded:
He took his shirt off at, I think the quarter and semis, but the finals took three days because of rain delays and he was, I guess, just too exhausted at the end.
So I went back to Youtube and was unable to find either of those dramatic victory moments, but there is still lots of confirmation over Goran's topless tendencies, as well as this Championship moment:
My guess is that he was probably urged not to do his joyous strip in front of the Queen if he won the finals. I'm glad he found time for an unofficial pose.
It's the Men's Finals at Wimbledon, and I have been following Roger Federer through this championship. I was tickled when he won the semi-finals; like me, he is getting a bit older and he has never been as competitive as, say, Nadal, who apparently blew it in the early rounds.
So this is my plan:
DVR the finals so you don't have to spend half your life sitting through commercials.
Don't listen to the news because they will definitely announce the winner at Wimbledon, even if there is another attack by al-Qaeda.
On Sundays, when my kids were here with me in Charleston, we did Sunday matinees, with popcorn. Now that I am by myself, I don't allow myself those extra couple of hours in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon. But today I've got the popcorn popped and a martini in hand, and I am tuned in to Federer v. Murray.
My cat, Molly, who watches TV with me at night, is not with the change of program, and is probably napping on a bed somewhere.
Since I've been watching tennis by myself, I have begun to sound like a guy watching football. In other words, I'm loud. I don't mind coaching Roger and making crass remarks about Andy Murray, like whipping a serve right past his weaselly moustache. And Molly, ordinarily skittish, has learned not to jump, or even wake up, when I shout.
The other thing that happens when I'm watching tennis alone is that I can hurl insults at the sportscasters, who are idiots, and even the same insult over and over again, without some child saying, "Mo-o-om." When I cannot stand another inane comment, I will turn down the volume just low enough that I can still hear the pop of the ball and the sportscasters are reduced to just a couple of really annoying people that are sitting behind you in the stands.
This is fun. But back when we first moved to Charleston, and I was postponing the expense of cable, we would sit in front of the TV in my bedroom "watching" tennis, and imagining we could see the ball with just the antennae and rabbit ears. One of my fondest memories is the match where a very cute and charming dude named Ivanisevic fought and sweated to a win, at which point he threw himself to the ground, and I am sure he took his shirt off and threw it into the crowd, which we could see perfectly well without cable. However, Croatia recalls it differently:
Okay, given the choice, I would much rather recall seeing Ivanevic shirtless than all those balls.
This is why I finally broke down and bought a Nook: I have arthritis and I am planning my big two-week vacation.
Let me explain.
I love books. Not just reading, but books. Not electronic screens with words on them -- BOOKS. I love the feel of holding them, of turning the pages, of checking out the size of the print as well as the number of pages. There would be absolutely no reason for me to cave and submit to the economic tsunami of profit that is being raked in by producers of electronic media. Green be damned; the people who are selling you eBooks as the green alternative are making buckets of money by selling at top dollar items that it costs virtually nothing to sell virtually.
But now that I am retired, and since I have finally admitted to being arthritic, I noticed that my fingers and hands were aching and that holding a book for several hours was either causing or making it worse.
Then there is the issue of traveling lighter. I will not leave my house without a book; I will not go on vacation without several times the number of books I could ever devour during my allotted vacation time -- just in case. But when I take the train I am a comically old person barely lugging around baggage and bags, and there is also the real stress on various body parts like shoulders and knees that I really need to be careful about.
I have done things like collect over the year the rattiest paperbacks -- destined for the recycle bin even by someone who never throws away books willingly -- with titles that are on my interminable "to read" list, just so that I could tear out pages as I read them. This helps to some extent, but there are so many more books that I would not throw away but that I must have with me when I go away.
So I decided to get an eReader. I spent a day researching and reflecting on my research, and chose a Nook over a Kindle ONLY BECAUSE AMAZON CHARGES $40 MORE TO GET A KINDLE THAT DOESN'T STREAM ADVERTISING -- ARE YOU LISTENING, AMAZON???
When my Nook came, I eagerly went to the library's electronic resources catalog and found, out of about 50 titles I searched, only two. And of those, only one was actually available.
So I downloaded it and "read" it. It really doesn't feel like really reading, but I figure eventually I'll get used to the "faux" feeling of it. It had some neat features like bookmarking. You can set the size of the type, which I tried, but I just couldn't see reading "pages" that had a paragraph per.
What you can't do with a Nook is touch the page, not unless you want it to do something. Like I said, I am a physical type of reader. At times, if my eyes are getting tired, I will run my finger down the page as I read. I also have these wonderful bookmarks called "Last Line" that is sadly no longer in business, but that you can stick in the page exactly where you stopped reading. Can't do it.
The other thing I do is keep a slip of paper in the book, not to mark the page, but to jot down notes, about the book, about things I need to remember to do, about ideas for my blogs. Sure, you can take notes somehow on your Nook, but you can't stick it on your refrigerator, can you?
Then there's the borrowing part, because I've been a library devotee my whole life, and the only time I will actually buy a book is if I've already read it and liked it so much I want it on my bookshelf. Libraries are the best thing we have in this country, and libraries are free, so if I won't buy a book actually made of stuff, I am certainly not going to buy a book made out of nothing.
But as of now, even the best libraries don't have enough eBooks, and they are contracted so that only a certain number of them can be "checked out" at a time, and there are interminable hold lists. AND they check out for up to 21 days. Period. No renewals. No overdues. If you haven't finished that very last chapter, too bad. It just electronically locks itself up, which I think is just about inhumane and definitely immoral.
So there I was, storing library books on my Nook to take with me on vacation mid-July. If you "check-out" an audio book, and put it on your iPod, and don't put it anywhere near your computer, the book doesn't go away. But they have apparently perfected the technology of locking up an eBook after the due date while it's right on your Nook, wi-fi off, and nowhere near your computer.
Can't beat that kind of technological advance, can you?
So now I have a half dozen eBooks on my Nook that I can't read.
And even if I could, I couldn't run my finger down the page to keep my place.
July, my birthday month and the month of summer vacation, has always been my favorite. When I married and moved into my first house, on Manchester Lane, off Memory Way, on Long Island, it was time to ring in the holiday traditions, and when my babes came along, I had another two to enjoy the party with me.
Mother's Day was never anything like summer. I remember chilly days trying to get a start on gardening, planting the canna lily tubers that had been wintering in boxes under the beds with frozen fingers.
Memorial Day, supposedly ushering in the summer, was a fraud. The pool temp was reliably in the 60's and after the first year or two I was hardly tempted to take the plunge. June was barely summer.
But July was summer. And the Fourth of July was the first real summer holiday.
I began the day at 5 a.m. That's right. And that is the only day in the year I saw that hour, willingly.
It was because of my recipe for Chocolate Bread, that I had cut out of the Sunday Times, that I began that tradition. I decided that brunch would be at 10, and working backwards, with two rises, I had to start the bread at 5.
After I started the first rise, I swam. It was glorious, being awake and in the water, doing laps, at that hour, when no one else was up and about. And especially since I knew I would never do it again, until the next 4th of July.
When the 4th fell on the weekend we would move the TV outside and watch the Wimbledon finals at 9 a.m. I say we meaning Stephan, because he did the hauling and hooking up, I did the watching.
Somehow I don't remember Wimbledon after the kids came along to share the holiday. I think it just got replaced with chocolate bread with strawberry butter and a day of playing in the pool.
A few years before we split up and I left for the South, our best friends, with children of similar ages, began to join us for the 4th. They had up until then visited for one or two pool days a summer, but two days of food and wine and laughter just weren't enough.
I began making dips and spreads, the more new recipes the better, days in advance, the menu was extravagant, the wine, well, the wine came in a box and was just fine. Stephan was in charge of the grill, just as Chris was the griller when we visited them.
The visit always began with a glass of wine and a tour of the garden. These were city friends who, as the summer wore on were totally impressed with the giant zucchinis, the dozens of tomato and pepper varieties, the bizarre cucuzzi and the 60 pound pumpkin. This early in the summer, they were gratified enough by the size of the garden and the spring flowers and strawberries.
At some point the morning wine became mimosas, along with the chocolate bread. Meals were separated by time in the pool.
The older kids were inseparable. The third child to join in was my son, and tried and tried to fit in. The baby was the baby and just graced us with her presence the last couple of years we lived there.
I envied Linda and Chris their ease with the kids. They spent hours in the pool inventing delicious games where they were monsters chasing, of course, small children. Chris invented something wherein he would periodically belt out "Don Giovanni", and I have no idea if the game had rules or any point at all except to sing out "Don Giovanni".
We drank and ate and played all day. At one of the first of these summer parties, Jeremy ate his first solid meal of grilled flank steak, which he promptly threw up.
As dessert came and went and eventually it got dark, we waited for the first sound of fireworks.
Because when we first moved to Manchester Lane, we had to work to see the fireworks, climbing out on the roof of the house, or climbing a chair by the fence.
But those last few years, there were fireworks, big, real fireworks exploding nearby. Easily seen from the back yard, even better from the middle of Manchester Lane.
