Two Murder Mysteries Worth the Watch on HBO

 "The Investigation" starring Soren Malling is a six-episode series on HBO.  Understated, muted, and snail's pace slow--with subtitles of course--it focuses entirely on the investigation of the murder of a Swedish journalist.

The acting carries the show, along with excellent photography.  No murder scene, few glimpses into domestic lives, spare dialogue, and no romance or courtroom drama, all six episodes cover the months of investigation by a group of Danish detectives into a horrific 2017 actual crime.

"Mare of Easttown" is another worth-watching HBO murder mystery --airing on Sunday nights, but the first two episodes are streamable.  Kate Winslet plays (impressively) a small town Pennsylvania police officer in a town where everybody knows everybody.  

If you don't like murder but you like mystery, these two are totally engaging in very different ways.  

In both--as in so many crime-solving stories--the people investigating the crimes, totally obsessed with their cases, have crumbling personal lives and seemingly unsolvable problems. I find this fascinating. 

Teaching an old horse new tricks

Will sent me this video this morning.  Elena has taught her horse to follow her around like a dog!

A Short Short Road Trip Story

The countryside in east Texas was beautiful, blankets of wild pinks and purples and blues. 

When we made it to Nacogdoches--almost 400 miles of backroads, we couldn't find a pet friendly motel, so I called the main number for Best Western and mistakenly asked if Palestine had one (I meant Henderson, but I was road addled and my navigation device on the phone wasn't working.) 

So we drove a little bit west and north and arrived at our motel before dark, but I'd forgotten to ask for a downstairs room and my knees were getting stiff and the other leg aching with road stenosis. But up we went, Luci on a leash, me hanging on to the banister and carrying a suitcase.  

I said to myself, "Self, you are too old for this!"

Self found it sad to hear those words and she cried and called her mama. Together we contemplated and came up with the plan: go back home and don't try to do 4000 miles until knee surgery. I imagined doing this 8 more times in three weeks and driving all those highways alone and I decided that traveling SOLO by car has lost its allure for a while. 

"In the last year and a half the world has changed," I said to Kate.

"And so have we," she said. 

Traveling through Trump country I saw hundreds of Trump signs.  By the looks of things, nobody in Trump country favors masks or vaccines--which make a traveler feel vulnerable.  I went in only one restaurant and got take out and ate a few bites of it in my room. 

So the adventure I'd planned will have to happen in the air from now on--and I'll plan to take Luci in a little kennel.  That or hope a friend wants to join me for a road venture.  

Carlene and Day--whose houses I was planning to stay in--were very understanding about my change of plans.  We'll arrange a visit soon when I figure out how to fly with Luci. 

So here are my two road trip photos and I am safely back at home in my own bed: 

Luci waiting for me to get gas.....

When we left Palestine this morning, the fog was thick and the orange moon nearly full.  And because I had mistakenly asked for Palestine, I was an hour closer to San Antonio, so the drive today was much shorter than yesterday's. 

A writing prompt for you

What people, places, and things have helped you get through this otherwise intolerable year?

We wrote about this in my online writing group led by no one.  This writing group has been one of them for me--six of us just writing, giving spare if any feedback to the seven-minute prompts provided by each of us on a rotating basis.  It's like a group blog.  I always check my email first thing every morning to see what the prompt is.  

Today is was this: You have friends coming to visit from out of town. They will only be in town for a day. Where do you take them and why? Describe the places/things you insist they must see/do with as much detail as possible.  

Another one this week: Write about a time when you were willing to make yourself vulnerable. 

So I offer this prompt to you this week--start making a list of the people, places, and things that helped you get through this otherwise intolerable year. It's my version of a gratitude list in retrospect.  

Off we go!

Well, here we go, Luci--off to parts unknown to you to visit people I love and haven't seen in a year and a half!  

I won't be solo traveling this trip, I'll have my sweet puppy riding under my seat, popping up from time to time to see if there's any savory delight for her.  

When the engine stops and my seat belt unbuckles, she gets up on the arm rest, tiny girl, and looks at me hopefully: "Do I get to get out with you this time?" 

Usually I answer yes and off we go--to Michael's or JoAnn's or even last week to a podiatrist appointment where she sat in my lap while I got a steroid shot that eased the pain within a couple of days.  She loves sniffing shoes of other shoppers and feeling them patting her and saying her name.  Many of them get out their phones to show me pictures of their dogs.  

If I say, "You stay," she curls up on the passenger seat and looks disheartened and pitiful. 

We will be driving 1400 miles to Day's house--divided into three or four days so we can take dog park breaks and let her run to her heart's content. Then on Monday, May 3rd, we'll head south to Georgia to see all my Georgia folks.  

The car is packed and circles cut from Gel Prints for a project I have in mind for nights in the motel.  I'm taking watercolors and pens and glue knowing we'll stop early each night and I'll have time to paper play before bed.

Brainpickings

 Maria Popova has been picking inspiration for us for fifteen years.  Her Brainpickings is, to me, one of the best things on the internet.  I don't read every single one, but I love that they are there, a library of reflections on books and art and science.  

This morning I was following the bread crumbs trail of the site, starting with Nina Simone and then meandering into a poet I'd never met before (Lisel Mueller) writing about life and death and immortality.  I was so moved by the reading of this poem that I wanted to share it with you all.  "What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious." 

https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/02/24/immortality-in-passing-lisel-mueller/?mc_cid=94584f4668&mc_eid=7940cd5ca2

I want to read more of the poems of this writer--who lived to be 96 and writes, as many poets do, about finding meaning in the ephemeral lives we get to live. 

You can subscribe if you like. You'll meet some extraordinary writers and artists and thinkers on this site. 

Wednesday

The children's book, Alexander and the Terrible Horrible Very Bad No Good Day is about a little who had one of those days.

Yesterday started out in that vein, but by the end of the day, it was climbing back up to Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah. 

When I saw that Javier--who'd come to prune the pecan tree--had trimmed my big bushy red tips, too, I about had a conniption, as we say in Georgia. They'd grown 8 feet high and provided a great screen to hide some of the dilapidated scruffy house next door. 

I felt that gut-punch feeling one can get after a ghastly and unexpected haircut. But within a couple of hours, the day took a different turn. Trees and bushes grow back; it's what they do.  

When I returned from errands, I was happy to see that Javier had otherwise cleaned my yard to perfection--definitely the best yard work I've ever had done.  There's not a twig of deadwood left, not a hint of hackberry babies.  He'll be the only yard man I'll call in the future. 

Eddie is the arborist I'd wanted to cut down the three giant hackberries, but the owner of said trees decided to have them whacked by non-experts after he'd said he wasn't going to do it.  We don't have the kind of results Eddie would have provided; they left trunks way taller than my house--but at least I can leave town without fearing that my roof's going to get a hit if the wind blows. 

Eddie brought Javier to trim my pecan tree, clean the gutters, and trim the entire yard. I'm happy to recommend these guys to anyone looking for excellent yard work.

As I was driving to get a haircut, Will called to invite me to join them at Kin's Thai (Dominion and 10) for dinner to celebrate Elena's music award at school.  It's their favorite Thai place and now mine as well--delicious!

Lab Girl

 "The more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world."

---Helen Keller

This epigraph opens Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, a memoir Bonnie Lyons highly recommends and I'm saving for my road trip reading.

The dedication: "Everything that I write is dedicated to my mother."

The beginning of the prologue:

     People love the ocean.  People are always asking me why I don't study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii.  I tell them that it's because it's lonely empty place.  There is six hundred times more life on land than there is in the ocean, and the fact mostly comes down to plants.  The average ocean plant is one cell that lives for about twenty days.  The average land plant is a two-ton tree that lives for more than one hundred years.  The mass ratio of plants to animals in the ocean is close to four, while the ratio on land is closer to a thousand. The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred. Plant numbers are staggering; there are eighty billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States.  As a rule, people live among plants but they don't really see them.  Since I've discovered these numbers, I can see little else.

     So humor me for a minute, and look out your window. 

Bonnie says that this writer makes science accessible and fascinating to those of us who are not trained scientists.  

So I am going to look out my window more and learn the names of more plants to increase my "joyousness and confidence " in my kinship with the rest of the world. 

Yoosie and Yinda Go to the Rodeo

Today I drove out to Tejas Rodeo to watch Elena and Bonnie in their sorting event.  Both did very well (Bonnie winning first place) and they even competed as partners on some rounds.  Elena was the only child riding today and it was fun to see her ever-growing confidence and happiness on horseback.

Kid Magnet that she is, Luci was the main attraction for Elena's cousins, Audrey, 9, and Christian, 4.  Christian can't --say L yet.  "I yove Yoosie," he said.

When he heard me tell Audrey that Luci weighs 10 pounds, he said, "I weigh ten pounds too, like Yoosie." 

Afterwards, the kids and I walked around the rodeo grounds and took pictures of the old buildings there.  "What is this thing?" Christian asked, standing on exposed tree roots.  I told him that the roots go as deep down underground as the tree stands above ground, we just can't see them.

"I can," he said.  "I have underground eyes."  

Speaking of trees: Friday night, Luci and I woke up to the sound of  a crash. The arborist came back the next morning, the same one who'd told me hours earlier that getting these branches down was an emergency.  "Yeah," he said.  "It cracked some more during the night.  Do you have another place to sleep just in case?"

The part of the huge hackberry branches over my fence line will be cut down on Wednesday and Thursday.  He can't tell if there's roof damage yet because the limbs have to be tied with ropes and removed before they can actually see the roof under it.  

The renters next door are moving out in May and the landlord is unwilling to cut down the trees on his property. The house is in terrible shape and the roof could cave all the way in at any time, the roots rotten and the roof already bent as if it's made of cardboard. 

If all goes well, Yoosie and I should be able to head east on Thursday or Friday!

Hackberry trees

Kate and Joy have told me that hackberry trees are trash trees.  I wish somebody had told my neighbors--not Jan but the ones on the corner. 

That house is a rental house falling apart at the seams.  One huge hackberry is literally pressing into the roof.  For weeks I've been calling and telling authorities about it and they all said, "There's nothing we can do."  I finally located the owner and he refused to do anything. 

There are three hackberries in a row.  In the last week, two of them have big branches on my roof.  When the arborist recommended by a friend came over today, he showed me how one broken tree is the only thing keeping the other from crashing into my roof.  It's a two day job requiring a tree climber and lots of rope and possibly a crane.

Hackberries may be trash but when they reach the size of a pecan tree, which all three of these have, it's expensive to carry off that trash.  If you have any baby hackberries, cut them down while they're little. 

They grow huge, but unlike their cousins, the ash, they are very brittle--an arborist's nightmare. 

The finale

The first two seasons of Shtisel had 12 episodes, so I was prepared for 12 in Season 3.  Season 3 was filmed four years after Season 2 and during the pandemic, and it only contained 9 episodes. I didn't want to let these people go.  I didn't want it to end.  

Spoiler alert in case you're watching: 

The finale was perfect. Alone in his apartment, wondering where everyone had gone, the elder Shtisel said to his son, Akiva, and his rascal of a brother (Akiva's uncle): "Nobody ever leaves.  Every man is a graveyard of of his parents, grandparents, wife or husband, and children.  They are all here, all the time."  (I'm paraphrasing.)

All the chairs around the table then fill up with the living and the dead.  

Since eating, drinking, and smoking are major scenes throughout,  it was fitting that the gathering of four generations happens at a dining table. I hope they make a follow-up season.  

Three Seasons in Jerusalem

 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190411-why-shtisel-has-captured-the-global-imagination

I've watched the first two seasons of Shtisel, a series that's introduced me to the culture of ultra-orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem.  The main characters are Rabbi Shtisel (recently widowed) and his adult children and their children.  

As one of the women asks another after her husband leaves her, "Why are we like this?  Why do we suffer exactly like the non-religious women?

"He will come back, I promise," her friend said--having been through the same thing.

"The problem is, I don't want him back.  Why do we have to take them back after they treat us like this and pretend we like it?"

This conversation is one of the many things I love about this series.  As different as their culture is from ours, the human condition is universal just wearing different clothes depending on our tribes. 

It's a story of family, rituals, and strict expectations for children to follow the Jewish laws.  It's about the clashes between generations.  Do I follow my own dreams (to be an artist or singer, for example) or do I give up who I am to satisfy the expectations of my people?  Do I wait until I find someone I love, or do I marry the person my parents and the matchmaker find for me?

Aisle 17 with Luci

Home Improvement Stores are the best places to start up conversations with wonderful people--especially if you have a dog with you.

People of all ages ask if they can pet Luci and she eats that up.  Old people bend down as best they can to pet her and children whose parents tell me are afraid of dogs timidly stretch out their hands.  Today a little girl named Olivia said, "I touch her, I touch her, my first doggie!"

A week or two ago in Home Depot two young teenaged clerks asked if they could pet her.  The one with dyed orange hair said, "We've been singing the Miss America song watching her cause she's so pretty." Then she took out her cracked cell phone to show me the picture of her rescue dog.  "We just got her and we think she's about nine years old," she said.  

Today in Lowe's a man I wouldn't have expected to like dogs said, "God has blessed you with a precious creature."

A woman said, "You are lucky.  Both of you."

The checker said, "Thank you for adopting her.  She's really special.  I love her."

When an easy-going old soul dog is present, no one talks of politics or the troubles of the world.  Rich and poor, young and old, people see a friendly dog and tell me about their dogs, past and present.  Some of them want to know where they might get a little dog just like Luci.

A couple with a very well behaved Lab-Shepherd mix (wearing a "support dog" halter) laugh when Luci jumps gleefully on their all-business worker dog, trying to initiate a game.  The big dog looks ahead, paying no attention to the little pipsqueak jumping all over her, just as she's probably been trained to do.  

Two large men covered in tattoos stop in their tracks in the parking lot and smile at me.  "That's a damned cute dog you got, Mam."

Luci likes them all, every single one of them.  She sniffs their feet and jumps up on their jeans, knee high.  

"See?" Olivia's dad says to her as they are walking away.  "Some dogs are real sweet." 

I almost always drive away from Lowe's with a lump in my throat.  

April 11

When Janet first brought Luci over in January for a look-see, she told me that every day she would show me more of who she is.  That has proved so true.

Luci pretended for a week or so that she was a shy and docile little doggie, but she is far from that.  I take her with me everywhere I go and she greets everyone.  She can be very docile when she's sleepy, but she can also romp and run with the best of them.  Luci is incredibly fast and playful.  If I'm busy refinishing a table or whatever, she brings me her ball and her cloth toys, one after the other, to tempt me to do something a lot more fun.

This week she has revealed her diva side.  While she's a picky eater, she will eat even boring kibble if hand-fed.  Her former owners must have hand fed the little rascal.  So now I know: when we travel, all I have to do is hand her a bite at a time in the car.

Speaking of which, this week seems to have been a week to get ready for travel.  I've gotten several repairs completed in the house and yard and some flowers planted where the rosemary died.  Tomorrow Reyes comes to do some roof repair work and plant some more plants.  

Today I'm putting the second coat on a table I'm finishing-- a beeswax and linseed oil combo that works beautifully and is easy to do, at least after three or four conversations with men at Woodcraft to learn the finer points of refinishing wood. 

In a week or two, I'm thinking it will be road trip time!

Kids' Rodeo, Atkins, Texas

 This is how I'm spending my Easter weekend.

Friday--had a wonderful afternoon and evening with my girl!  We did a toy store run and Elena chose a few small toys and a watch, the old fashioned kind.  At dinner, while we were waiting for our California Pizza, our favorite, I taught her how to read an analog watch face.  

After dinner, I asked her several times, "What time is it, Elena?" and she had it down pat.

We watched three episodes of Free Rein, a horse show we often watch together.  When her parents came to pick her up, she started crying.  "What will I do if Junior dies?"  We said what grown-ups say, "It will be a long time," and "You'll be very sad."  But that didn't answer her question, so she asked again, "What will I DO?"  

Life and death questions are hard, for kids of all ages, including those who call ourselves grown ups.

Yesterday, she was right there on top of Junior again, happy, at the kids rodeo.  Hundreds of kids were there along with their ponies and horses and dogs. I wasn't able to stay for the main events, but I got a show of Elena doing practice runs and tricks, and she's a natural on horseback, making everything look easier than it is.

Today I'm on the floor putting a second coat on two cabinets in the bathroom and about to put a sealer on them.  After this, I'm going to tackle finishing my silver maple dining table top.  (I had a glass top table which I didn't love as much as I thought I would, so I ordered a wooden top from Etsy.)

The people at Woodcraft, one customer and one worker, were wonderful in explaining the different types of stains and how they can be applied.  I'm pretty sure if I do it today I have it sealed into my brain and can make it happen.

Freda's birthday lunch

Joy and Bonnie and I celebrated with Freda for her birthday at the beautiful restaurant Jardin at Botanical Gardens. Every bite of tapas, salmon and dessert was delicious!

It was wonderful to share a meal outside on this the first day of April--and we all highly recommend the food and ambiance of Jardin.

When I got home, Luci was right where I left her, looking out the window for me to come home.  What a welcome!

A poem shared by Bonnie, by Marge Piercy:

What happiness looks like

Some things are ordinary but perfect: drinking coffee on summer mornings with you as the cats laze about, fed, on you or on me or curled together in the bay window on a sunny pillow. Outside the weeping beech stirs in the wind, leaves hanging down like just washed long tresses. We talk softly of the pending day. This is all I would need of heaven that I don’t believe in, but this I believe.