LOVING

Closing passage of Cricket on the Hearth:  "But what is this!  Even as I listen to them, blithely, and turn towards Dot, for one last glimpse of a little figure very pleasant to me, she and the rest have vanished into air, and I am left alone.  A Cricket sings upon the Hearth; a broken child's-toy lies upon the ground; and nothing else remains."

 

Last night I saw Loving at the Varsity.  It's a quietly compelling drama about an interracial couple who challenged Virginia's law against mixed marriages, with heroic help from the American Civil Liberties Union, leading to a Supreme Court decision that struck down all such laws and formed the precedent for a similar decision regarding same-sex marriages a few years ago. (I couldn't help recalling attending that same-sex wedding last month, which wouldn't have been legal in Canada fifteen years ago.) The husband was like a cross between Dobie Gillis and Popeye the Sailor!

I finished Cricket on the Hearth the other day and started reading A Christmas Carol for the second time.  The part where Scrooge sees himself as a lonely schoolboy finding company in books is moving! (Was Dickens describing his own childhood?)

 

Moira borrowed from the library a DVD of an episode of the series Globe Trekker, about Australia's history of convicts and gold prospectors and outlaws.  I'm fascinated by Australia, the way everything's a bit different there. (We once bought some Australian fruit cocktail packed in pear juice!)

Tonight was the fundraiser concert at Christchurch Deer Park, the Anglican church near St. Clair station.  Besides the chorus numbers, there was also stuff like Frank Sinatra's "All the Way" and a flute arrangement of Carmen highlights!

We've taking to putting our unsaleable books in a box outside so anyone can take them. (One day the other week we put out about twenty and all but two moved!) The other day I noticed we were giving away Don't Know Much About History, which my history group will be reading in a couple of months, so I kept it.

I've started translating Walt Whitman's poem "There Was a Child Went Forth" into Portuguese, because, why not?