Wednesday

"Jackqueline" is the name on her tag, but now that we know each other I can call her Jackie.

Her very curly hair is one shade lighter than those Cutie tangerines and she has beautiful teeth.  She's a stunning black woman, especially when she wears the red Santa hat she's been wearing this week.  She's also my source of weather news.  This morning when I stopped by Dollar Tree, she told me it's going to be 21 degrees on New Years Day!

Today is wet, cold, and drizzly and I'm going over to Freda's later to make collages.

Pam and I saw Three Billboards at the Bijou yesterday and I liked it--but it won't be to everyone's taste.  It reminded me of a Flannery O'Connor story; the most racist of the policemen is reading a book of her short stories at the beginning.  The cast includes an angry mother (Frances McDormand), a dwarf, a policeman who can be brutal to black people, a man with cancer, flashbacks to a murdered girl before she died, an ex-husband with a ditzy 19-year-old girlfriend....

Last night I finished Insomniac City by Bill Hayes.  He writes beautifully about New York and the encounters with people he photographs on the streets and in the subways.  He writes about his grief when his partner, Steve, died, then his decision to move from San Francisco to New York.  He writes about his lover, Oliver Sacks, the writer of books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who lived a vibrant intellectual life, then died of cancer a little over a year ago.

"He was without doubt the most unusual person I'd ever known, and before long I found myself not just falling in love with O; it was something more, something I'd never experienced before.  I adored him."