Reading: Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

Moving: NT 36'00", 510 calories, 4.01 miles

13 March 2002: Nobody's Fool revisited

Yup. I still like Nobody's Fool. Someone asked me, two years ago the first time I read it, how I could like in print a man I couldn't tolerate in person, and I can curb my sarcasm on occasion enough not to have said, "Dunno. Writer's skill?" The thing is, Sully is a man I have known in person. Not well, not since I was a child, but the type is familiar. My grandfather's cronies, my father's elders and friends. Mornings at the Lymelight, evenings at Hundred Acres.

You know, that's another reason I hate that place's name. It's been "Cherrystones" since a change in ownership some years ago. "Hundred Acres" never referred to Pooh but to the adjoining golf course, but Change Is Bad and it could have been about Pooh if it wanted to be, and it's not as if anyone not suicidal would eat Old Lyme's clams.

Anyway. The single sentences that lay bare Sully's character one facet after another. That's what I like.

I received Nisou's photographs yesterday and today showed them at work like the proud godmother I am. CoolBoss, as her name suggests, admired as much as she should have, and Tex saw the joy in Nisou's face in one family triad shot. To me, Nisou looks now much as she did when I saw her every day, and I opened my DayRunner to show CoolBoss one of my favorites, from 1988. Nisou does look just about the same. Her hair might be darker, and in intervening years it was long but she cut it a couple of years ago, but the joy and Good Personness still shine out. CoolBoss remarked, as I knew she would, on the contrast between the then short-haired me and the now long-haired me, which reminded me that the greatest difference in the fourteen intervening years has been in HEBD. Her hair is tremendously long now, I told her. Past her waist, amazingly thick, gloriously lush.

And actually I remembered to show her the pictures in the first place because I had come across the then-and-now National Geographic photographs of Sharbat Gula.