WWW.WEDNESDAY

 

WWW. WEDNESDAY asks three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here. 

PS I no longer participate in WWW.WEDNESDAY via that link because her blog won't accept Blogger comments. I mention this only to save you the frustration I experienced trying to link up.

1. What are you currently reading? JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil. Terenzio – John's personal assistant – teamed up with People magazine correspondent McNeil to collect and edit reminiscences from people who knew him throughout his life. While the book was done with Caroline Kennedy's knowledge, it does not benefit from her participation. Maybe that's just as well. We're encountering John and his singular life the way his classmates and coworkers did.

 

As I write this post, I just finished Collegiate School with John. He spent the school year in NYC and holidays at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis or on the Christina, Aristotle Onassis' luxury yacht, in Greece. While terms like "compound" and "yacht" were not bandied about by my friends growing up, it was not unusual among his classmates. He went to school with Manhattan's elite, the children of movie stars and Broadway glitterati, network executives and captains of industry. 

 

Instead it was his ridiculous level of fame that defined him and made him stand out. Take, for example, fire drills. Every schools has them, right? At Collegiate, all the kids, including John, practiced filing out of the building. But every once in a while, during a drill, Secret Service agents would pull John out of line and spirit him away in a car. His classmates understood that, on those days, the fire drill was really the response to a bomb threat or assassination attempt aimed at John. Your whole school evacuated because of you! I can't imagine how isolating, how embarrassing, that must be for a boy between the ages of 8 and 13. I think only Princes William and Harry could relate to this. 

2. What did you recently finish reading? Contents Under Pressure by Edna Buchanan. Reporter Britt Montero works the crime beat on a major Miami newspaper. She's really good at her job, and uncovers one of the city's biggest stories when a retired football player and local hero dies after a run-in with the police. D. Wayne Hudson was black, the cops were white and Cuban. There are charges of police brutality and a high-profile trial with dangerous ramifications. 

It's an interestingly crafted book. I enjoyed going along with Britt as she peeled back the layers of cover up and corruption. When what happened to D. Wayne goes to the courts, I was about 75% done. The pace slowed and I very nearly DNF'd the book. I mean, all these pages just to cover off on Britt's love life? Yawn. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't. There's a sudden plot twist and some genuinely harrowing shit goes down. I admit it: Edna Buchanan shocked me.

3. What will you read next? I don't know.

 

  

 

 

August Happiness Challenge – Day 19

My 2025 Happiness Icon

Today's happiness: BOTH games of the double header! My Cubs took two from the Milwaukee Brewers, the best team in baseball. Their All Star Break slump has ended in style, and I'm going to sleep happy.

  

Happy August Happiness Challenge!

 

Each day in August you are to post about something that makes *you* happy. Pretty simple. And, it doesn't even have to be every day if you don't want it to be. It's a great way to remind ourselves that there are positive things going on in our lives, our communities, and the world.

 

Photo by Ayşegül Baykal on Unsplash

 

Working it through

Are you as sick of reading about my grief as I am of feeling it? I spent some time discussing it with my shrink today and she thinks I'm doing as well as can be expected, and my impatience is a good thing – it means I'm inching my way through it. She warned me, though, about "toxic positivity." That I shouldn't work too hard to put a good face on my feelings, because that's not real and it won't help my healing.

One thing that's helped me get a grip on the grief is putting it in perspective, examining the "why" behind it. It's bothered me that my mourning for Henry and John has been greater than my grief over losing my mom. Somehow that doesn't seem right, does it? I mean, they were my dearest friends but she was my mother. What did this say about me?

Nothing. It says nothing.

Part of what got me through losing my mom was having Henry and John. Henry met my mother and they got along so well. John had already lost his own mother and knew just what to say. 

And they weren't just my friends, they were the brothers I chose. If my mom was here today, she'd help me through losing Henry and John. But she's not. 

So I don't have Henry. I don't have John. I don't have my mom and my oldest friend is too chaotic and absorbed with her own stuff to be any help. I'm facing this with no ballast.

Understanding this helps.  

Now I just want the pain to be over already!