Lonely Farewell

Yesterday had the distinct honor of being a holiday week Monday, a little more tolerable than most Mondays.  Less traffic and work as everyone takes a deep breath from all of last week’s frivolity and leans forward into the incipient New Year.  My wife and the PanaGal did what PanaGals do when they swarm – a day long shopping expedition.  This meant a lonely dinner, except for the Wonder Pooch who would take rightful issue with the loneliness adjective.

Since I found myself abandoned and at loose ends I did what I usually do, I went to the movies (again).  I saw the movie The Gambler and really wished I hadn’t.  This was an action star’s (Mark Wahlberg) attempt at some dark earthy acting in a drama where the lead character is beneath contempt.  Wahlberg as a college professor was always going to be a huge stretch and he almost carries it off; almost being the operative phrase here.  The movie concerns his character’s descent into debt to gangsters due to his seemingly uncontrollable gambling addiction.

This movie might have worked if we cared one little bit about the lead.  I also did not need to repeatedly see John Goodman without any clothes on, I had just eaten.  Wahlberg really is a better actor than most would give him credit for but I sincerely hope he goes back to blowing things up (other than his box office appeal) soon.  Don’t waste your money on this; it’s too late for me.

One of the best things about the move of my daughter and WingMan to California was the ready pool of friends they were settling into out there.  A lot of them were former denizens of NYC and if the attached photo is to be believed – those friendships continue to prosper.  This California thing is looking better and better – except for the distance, of course.

NYC Friends gathering in My Daughter's Kitchen Last Night
WingMan on the Right

Yesterday I finished off my month long, frenzied trek through the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald with the last in the series, The Lonely Silver Rain.  This wasn’t a sendoff because MacDonald’s death a year after this was published wasn’t anticipated. I kind of like it that way because I can still imagine Travis hanging around the Busted Flush at Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale, now well into a richly deserved dotage, sipping gin while playing chess with Meyer.  I’ve truly enjoyed reconnecting with this series of books and the godfather of all my literary heroes – Mr. McGee, which I last read in the 1980’s.  I feel like I can get a little bit of my own life back because these books truly became an obsession over the last few weeks.  Thank you Mom for introducing me to Travis McGee as I send him off once again to take his rightful place atop my personal pantheon of fictional heroes.

In this last book you can see MacDonald preparing McGee for middle age complete with a surprise character descended from a long dead love.  McGee finds himself the target of numerous hit men when he’s held responsible for the death of a prominent narcotrafficker’s daughter. He spends the book figuring out who the real culprit is and aiming the vengeful folks after him. I leave you with some of MacDonald’s words as McGee cogitates about the major plot twist thrown at him at the final pages of The Lonely Silver Rain:

McGee

“Some strange mechanism in my head was projecting color slides of all the familiar parts of my life.  I seemed to hear the click as each slide fell into place.  Everything familiar had assumed different shape, sharper outlines, purer kind of color.  It seemed very much to me like the strangeness which happens after you have spent weeks in a hospital, when you come back out again into the world, seeing everything fresh – a stop light, a brown dog, a yellow bus.  Something had changed the world and washed it clean…When the hard winds of change blow through your life, they blow away a lot of structures you thought permanent, exposing what had thought was trivia, buried and forgotten.”

Slip F18 Bahia Mar

The Busted Flush