Sometime in the early 70s when I was teaching high school in a private school for rich kids in Mexico City I remember using a pocketbook in my English class. It was called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Dr. Wilfred Funk & Norman Lewis. I have no idea if the book was absorbed by any of my indolent students. I do know that I learned lots of new words.

Of late three of them have all come together and reflect how I feel these days of a cold spring, a return, after a two week stay, from my city of birth of Buenos Aires and having had my prostate reamed.

If you look up the three words from 30 Days to a More…you will get the message that I have many things that I could do (including all the holes of my blog in the last two months) but that I don’t. I could be tinkering in the garden but the cold weather turns me off. I could read a novel but I would rather read Borges or Dickinson poems that I have read before many times.

The four words in question help me justify placing here a couple of images of my friend Bronwen Marsden who hates being told how beautiful she is. So we decided I take pictures of her with the sharpest film ever made (now defunct but I have quite a few rolls in my fridge) of Kodak Technical Pan in 120 format. The film is merciless in showing detail. To Marsden’s disappointment the resulting photographs still made her look like the beauty she is.