Saturday, April 02, 2011

The Adirondack and Rosa 'Heritage'

We didn’t expect today to be the day it was. The sun was out and Lauren said, “Papi, I am going outside with Casi (Rosemary’s large male cat). I will be waiting for you.” Minutes later I was out there in my old jeans. I was going to garden for a bit while Lauren played with Casi. Besides Rosemary, Lauren is the only person who can play with Casi. Casi tolerates me, just. Lauren climbed on the back picket fence while I shoveled some compost on to my back lane roses. I did some further pruning and had a peek at some of my emerging hostas and Rosemary’s plants in her sunny perennial bed.

This year our garden is extra ready extra early. The folks, who aerate and fertilize our lawn, inside the garden, and outside on the boulevard, have already done their job. The garden, while bare (dirt shows!), looks nice and neat. The camellias are all in bud and will soon bloom.


As I walked into the house with Lauren, getting ready to partially barbecue a nice small (2lb.) cut of baron of beef (to be finished off in the oven with potatoes, carrots and onions), I spotted our pleasant next door neighbour who is a renter. He was positioning, with obvious forethought and planning, two brand new lawn (deck?) chairs. The barbecue had been covered all season and the umbrella had been there, too. But it seemed that our neighbour knew something we didn’t know. Could it be that he has an inside knowledge on the real arrival of spring?

Rosemary made extra batches of her famous Yorkshire Pudding while I made an extra batch of my famous gravy.


We (Hilary, Rosemary, Lauren, Rebecca and this blogger) all sat down for dinner with the sun still shining outside. We had a drink of blended strawberries with ice, water and some sugar, and for dessert we had ice cream. It was an almost perfect spring day. Not quite, as the Jim’s Adirondack chairs will not be outside until it is a bit warmer. Besides it is supposed to rain tomorrow and I would never leave them out to get wet.

The Adirondacks

The Adirondacks Again

The Adirondacks and Cherry Jell-O

Friday, April 01, 2011

Jurgen Gothe

I was sitting on the front row (left, so I could see Marc Destrubé and his baroque violin up close) on Friday night. This was the last Early Music Vancouver concert (not really last as the programme will be repeated this Sunday, at 3pm, at the Kay Meek Centre in West Vancouver)  until August 10th’s Purcell's King Arthur at the Chan.

There was an empty seat on my left. A ghost was sitting in it. Or at least I imagined it. It was the ghost of my mother who would have done anything to be there in real person to listen to two masters (the other harpsichordist Alex Weimann) play four (of six) of Bach’s Sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord, BwV 1014, 1015, 1016 and 1018.

In my youth I remember when my mother brought one of the earliest version of Bach’s 6 Brandenburg Concertos. It was an LP recording by the Dutch Concertgebouw Orchestra (since 1985 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra). My mother played the records and she cried. She told me, “This is my desert island music.” And she then began to tell me of the wonder that Bach was for her. I like the music and I must say I was not overly enthusiastic.

It wasn’t until the early 60s that a couple of jazzed up recordings, one by Jacques Loussier the other by the Swingle Singers led me into exploring Bach un-jazzed.

I have been a fan of Bach since. As I watched the emtpy seat I knew that my mother had no access to the equisite music I was listening to. In Mexico or Argentina (and certainly in the Manila where she was born) there would have been no opportunity to hear live all six of the Brandenburg Concertos (soemthing that I experience most recently here in Vancouver) or the smaller more intimate Bach compositions that we are now able to listen to in Vancouver via the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Early Music Vancouver or the many recordings now available that weren’t around in my mother’s time. It has never been yet why that one empty seat next to me?

Consider that Alex Weimann (the musical director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra) explained all the highlights of each of the four movements of the four Sonatas. His explanation was hands on and he made his instrument, the harpsichord (one that I have discounted and ignored for so many years) shine.



When Destrubé (leader of the Smithsonian based Axelrod QuartetM and Weimann played the sonatas my enjoyment was enriched as I looked forward to the particularities of the movements.

By now I have been to enough baroque concerts to understand that nothing is exactly as it seems. My education into this anomaly began in 1993 when I purchased one of my desert island discs, Corelli’s Sonatas for violin and cello or harpsichord op.5. This monumentally beautiful work listed Monica Hugget on violin, Mitzi Meyerson on harpsichord, organ, Sarah Cunningham on cello and Nigel North playing archlute, theorbo and baroque guitar.

I accosted my friend Graham Walker who knows about these things and he explained, that Corelli’s work for two instruments really was a trio sonata and that trio sonatas usually had four instruments!

An explanation for this was was clearly set out by Marc Destrubé in Friday night’s concert program notes:


The six sonatas for harpsichord and violin, BWV 1014 -1019, represent one of J.S. Bach’s most important compositional innovations: the transformation of the baroque solo sonata and trio sonata, the two most prevalent chamber music forms of the baroque, into what became later as the ‘duo sonata, music for two equal instruments (instead of a solo instrument with an accompanying basso continuo), as later exemplified by the sonatas of Mozart and ten of Beethoven. In fact what Bach really did in these six sonatas is to write trio sonatas for two instruments: the upper voice of the harpsichord replaced the second ‘solo’ voice of the trio. And in case this has already confused you, baroque trio sonatas are normally performed by four people, with a second instrument, usually cello or viola da gamba, doubling the bass line played by the left hand of the harpsichordist.


In a nutshell think of rock band trio with an extra bass guitar. In baroque parlance that bass accompaniment is called continuo which means in-the-background-all of-the-time!

For anybody (a bit on the callous and even somewhat cynical about things) who had listened to the concert without any of Alex Weimann’s explanations, the music would have appeared as a casual romp by two very good musicians. But Weiman had mentioned that the fourth movement (Vivace) of the Sonata in f minor, BWV 1018 was very difficult. He added that the left hand part (the bass line) of the harpsichord was challenging as if Bach had a bit of a perverse sense of humor.

I concentrated and watched the performers play the Vivace and it all seemed smooth and effortless. Destrubé’s expression was one of angelic pleasure, of someone about to dunking a fresh croissant into a hot café latte. Weiman had called this sprezzatura. Here is the definition according to Wikipedia:

Sprezzatura is an Italian word originating from Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” It is the ability of the courtier to display “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them.” Sprezzatura has also been described “as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance.”The word has entered the English language; the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "studied carelessness."

I like that, studied carelessness. My mother would have smiled.

Early Music Vancouver has never been a stuffy organization of the overly serious. After all there was artistic director, José Verstappen in socked Birkenstocks, amusingly clashing with his Order of Canada pin on his vest. In an effort to further unstuff, Early Music Vancouver has hired the services of one Jurgen Gothe (he of wine, food, good music and Fernet Branca) to act as a specially dour master of ceremonies.  Gothe was funny and brief (twice as funny) and I think that this portrait that I took of him some years ago, epresses what I felt at the end of the concert.  It was good to the last drop.

Destrubé/Weimann

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Pork thigh?

This blog, according to Blogger Stats averages 55,000 page views per month. I have said before that I should not see this as a genuine interest in my blog. Most of those page views come from random image searches. I have a feeling that few of those 55,000 ever linger. Friends say I should (based on the stats) seek Google ads for my blog. Few would (or would you?) understand that putting ads would not only deface its look but somehow cheapen it. My wife thinks I am nuts and every once in a while when I tell her I am busy writing my blog she says, “Where is the money?”

My friend, illustrator and designer, Ian Bateson of Baseline Type & Graphics might agree with my wife as he says that somehow in this 21st century nobody wants to pay for content. The NY Times is going to attempt to change this view with its just imposed pay wall.

It was just about three years ago that Bob Mercer, the then editor of a magazine that gainfully employed me (but is now defunct) VLM (Vancouver Lifestyles Magazine) proudly showed me the cover (in sharp b+w) of a cute puppy. He  told me, “I purchased the photograph from a micro stock agency for $10.00 and paid only GST. The cover cost me exactly $10.50.” I knew then that most magazine photographers (or at least those in Vancouver) were doomed!



Bateson might comment, “Wow,” If I told him that some anomaly (it has to be that) has produced a jump to 116,194 page views , and in the first few days of April [I am writing this blog on Saturday April 2] page views are already at 33,437. But I will take it all with a grain of salt. I have studied the statistics and the searches and have come to the conclusion that there has to be some error in the page count as I did nothing different in that last week of March, when the hyper-jump happened. One possible one (but not listed anywhere in the traffic source box) is this one. Could that title: A Labyrinth of Gaddafi, Kaddafi, Qadhafi... have been the culprit?

Those reading this will certainly be amused by the web page captures I made from the stats traffic sources. You will immediately notice the whimsical randomness of these searches. The blog that does have some sort of permanence (it is always high in the traffic source) is the one (and a few others) about Rosa ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’. This rose is the whitest and healthiest in my garden. It is also one of the earliest to bloom and, to boot, it is extremely fragrant. Notice the screen capture of that page translated into German! If you google Rosa 'Blanc Double de Coubert' you will find my blog on the first page.

In German

One traffic source  really baffled me for a while. It was the traffic source search for pork thigh. The page showed one of my pictures of two females (wonderful females!) dancing the tango. I went to the blog and then noticed the title! Check that title here.

The other one that surprised me, too was one that came from a search hawks, 1946 and featured a sexy picture I took of Bif Naked a few years ago as The Little Sister. The explanation was obvious once I went to the blog. In it I had this quote:

Vivian: So you do get up, I was beginning to think you worked in bed like Marcel Proust.
Marlowe: Who's he?
Vivian: You wouldn't know him, a French writer.
Marlowe: Come into my boudoir.

The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946, with Humphrey Bogart, Marlowe, Lauren Bacall, Vivian).

Hawks, 1946

All in all I can only smile as to how search engines work and I can accept with some resignation what I have known for a long time. You see, my mother often told me, “Alex, you and I will have to work for the rest of our lives and money will only come off the sweat of our brows.”

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Try googling Robert Montgomery/images/Lady in the Lake and all you will get is the movie poster. You will find no stills. Why?

Robert Montgomery by Laszlo Willinger

In 1947 handsome and urbane actor Robert Montgomery made his directorial debut in a film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake. Montgomery also acted in the film with the beautiful noirish looking Audrey Totter. This film was a failure to most that went to see it but for a few (including this blogger) it had a few merits. One of them was that the film used what is commonly called camera point of view. Except for a few heres and theres (reflections in mirrors and shadows noirishly cast on walls) you never get to see Montgomery. A camera is placed where Montgomery would be standing (in our digital age, Montgomery would have had a miniature version, soon to come,  Redcam strapped to his forehead). Montgomery is punched in the face and film viewers would see a fist coming at you. I can imagine a point of view film in 3-D! It is interesting to watch Totter react to what Montgomery (playing Marlowe, says to her). The film failed in probably the same way a film on Gypsy Rose Lee with Lady Gaga playing the part (but from a camera point of view setup) would fail today if you never saw her at all!

A point of view is always important. For quite a few years I took pictures for magazines of glamorous women in which I used as a makeup artist and assistant who had been an expert in taking her clothes off. She had a knack for dressing up my subjects with little bits of clothing or bolts of satin that she put together with safety pins and in a pinch with gaffer tape. I won a few minor accolades with these pictures and people asked me what my secret was. They would always and invariably scoff at my stating that my secret was an exotic dancer assistant.

Audrey Totter and Montgomery as shadow

For me my assistant was a great help because her point of view was not the norm. Today people would say she styled outside the box.





Dana Zalko pregnant styled by my assistant

Montgomery’s directorial debut may have failed but is showed his earnest attempt to show a different point of view in a world that was becoming bland and uniform.

My friend Richard Staehling, a former magazine art director, editor and CBC Radio film critic had a penchant for using a method he called cross casting when assigning photographers for magazine assignments. He would use a fashion photographer (as an example) to photograph an ugly old male politician. Or in my case he assigned me (I was a photographer of the planned editorial photo shoot) to document a Socred political convention. He wanted my pictures to not have the point of view of a newspaper photographer.

Today Staehling sent me the following missive:

Hi Alex-

The last thing the world needs is another blog so here are my two new efforts. The Thumbscrew is where I post a movie production still a day. Title, date and cast members in the image are noted and that is all. Scanning all the images—they are from my own collection, not the Internet—took a helluva long time but now that I have a large inventory posting them every day is actually fun!

The other website, Hold Back Tomorrow is more complex: it is where I post images (with short two-three sentence captions) from my archives.

The thematic connections here are less obvious but: everything must be old, of interest to me, and whenever possible original. Of course neither of these sites has any commercial potential or chance to
connect with the public at large. I'm sure you will understand.

Rick

I urge you to take a look. Staehling has a monumentally accurate memory for films, plots, actors, directors and with his time as a magazine art director he has all the knowledge of the trends that have affected magazine design (and film posters and record albums). Like it or not, you can be assured that his take will certainly be from a point of view that is not the norm.


Addendum, July 13, 2013
 It seems that Mr. Staehling has killed his blogs.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

There was a girl going along on a little wagon right in front. " Girl," I says, "come and help me haul these things down the hill. I'm going to live in the post office."
Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty


It was reading Eudora Welty’s Why I Live At The P.O. today that made me reconsider my views on the short story.





For too long for me the short story has been the potato chip bag of my literary menu. When possible I opt for the roast beef that is the novel. And yet I must admit that my venture into reading really began in the late 50s with science fiction short stories such as Tales From the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury’s The Golden Apples of the Sun. In Spanish I was delighted by Julio Cortázar’s Ceremonias (the first story, Continuidad de los Parques appropriately begins with a man in a wing chair reading a novel)  and I have a solid collection of Jorge Luís Borges stories of which Ficciones and El Hacedor are my favourites.  I continued reading short stories in Spanish and in  particular the short stories of Cuban-born Alejo Carpentier.  I loved his Viaje a la Semilla which is as short story that is written "backwards". It  begins with the candles at a wake getting longer and ends with the metal nails of a wooden ship flying off to the iron mines whence they came from and the ship's timbes go out to become trees again. In his longish short story El Acoso all events, are initiated and end, within a live 45 minute performance of Beethoven's Third Symphony.

Sometime in the early 70s one of my English students in Mexico gave me a nice hard cover copy of William Faulkner’s Go Down Moses. I started Bear many times and only in the last few years did I finally find the gumption to finish it. If anything Go Down Moses proves to me that roast beef need not be the exclusive territory of the novel.



But I did start begin “serious” short stories in 1979 when I ordered The Stories by John Cheever from Book-of-the-Month Club. After reading The Swimmer I was hooked to Cheever and I read whatever I could find. It has only been of late (last year) that I finally got to read some of his competition, Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson.

It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying," I drank too much last night." You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlive preserve where the leader of the Audobon group was suffering from  a terrible hangover. " I drank too much," said Donald Westerhazy. "We all drank too much, " said Lucinda Merrill. "It must have been the wine,"  said Helen Westerhazy. "I drank too much of that claret."
The  Swimmer - John Cheever



My most recent interest in short stories is thanks to finding the on-line version of Eudora Welty’s gem. If anything it all points to some of the definite advantages of the internet age. I printed (and stapled it together) Why I Live at the P.O. with  my b+w laser printer (this has been one intelligent choice in the many silly ones I have made in the last few years). Rosemary read it and found it delightful, too. She has commanded me to go to the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library to find some more Eudora Welty. We are both plotting in getting Rebecca to sit down in our living room as we take turns reading it  Why I Live at the P.O. out loud. Who knows perhaps the short story can be a bag of potato chips and once you have one you cannot stop!

Ceremonias

Addendum: It is curious that in our paperless society my stapler is one of my most useful devices and that somehow the rubber stamp is alive and well at my local bank.

Monday, March 28, 2011

I am grateful to Brother Gerald Muller, C.S.C. for his biography God's Cellist - A Biography of Brother Jacob Eppley, C.S.C.

My grandmother's Remington Portable Model 5 with Spanish qwerty

Today’s blog is dedicated to a man I knew not at all who failed me in the only class he ever taught me, typing.  Brother Jacob Eppley, C.S.C. was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1896 and he died in 1999. In that long trajectory of 103 years Brother Jacob did many things well and he played the cello for the glory of God and the delight of his listeners.


Of this latter talent of Brother Jacob’s I was never to know until at a class reunion at St. Ed’s in Austin, 2009 my schoolmate Milton Hernández told me (we were comparing notes on our favourite brothers who had taught us in our years at St. Ed’s), “Brother Jacob was the most saintly of all the brothers and he played a virtuoso cello.”

In my four years at St. Ed’s my dealings with the tall and slim man with the permanent smile was a fleeting one. I avoided him like many others because he had a penchant of cornering you and then telling you one of his terrible jokes. Sample:

Always remember no matter how poor your prose is, it could be verse.

On a more serious note Brother Jacob once wrote:

If  I’ve proven an inspiration to others, it’s because the recipients have provided the impetus to effect the desired gift that can only come from above.


I found Brother Jacob aloof and this is probably because I never made much effort to know him better. I failed (the only course I ever failed at St. Ed’s) Brother Jacob’s typing class. At the time I was unaware that I was dyslexic. But I learned well enough that I can type this without looking at my computer keyboard.



In today’s NY Times in a column called Tools for Thinking, David Brooks writes:


A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?


The good folks at Edge.org organized a symposium, and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of path dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that feels normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”


For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the latter arrangements for the qwerty keyboard.


The above last paragraph startled me and I remembered how grateful I have been all these years for the good typing lessons that Brother Jacob managed to help me absorb. They have served me well and when I watch people peck at their computer keyboards I feel most superior and blessed!

Christopher Latham Sholes

If the qwerty keyboard, which was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes and patented ( 207,559) in August 27, 1878, is of no further use, why has not someone invented the better “mouse trap”? I watch my granddaughter Rebecca peck at her computer keyboard and I wonder why they have not taught her the qwerty yet or some variation of it? It would seem to me that in a world were hands are no longer gapping sparkplugs that writing on a computer keyboard has become something of paramount importance.

I predict that in the next few years iPad of the future will project a qwerty keyboard display on your table and you will be able to forgo the real keyboard. Will Rebecca be pecking even then?

My relationship with typing became a necessity by the middle 60s when for reasons I do not understand, my ability to write legibly began to deteriorate. I cannot even sign my complete name now without missing letters and deforming the others beyond anybody’s understanding. I had to switch to the typewriter and that was a terrible situation. As soon as I made a mistake (many when you are not aware of dyslexia) I would tear out my sheet and start again. Writing was frustrating.

Eudora Welty

Liberation came in the form of a blend of typewriter with word processor called a Smith Corona PWP-40 in the early 90s. It had a small screen and I could fix my mistakes. The machine would then store my letters and essays in little floppy disks, that, alas, were not compatible with the then emerging PCs.

Further liberation came in May 1995 when I wrote for Equity Magazine an article on how I first went on line and communicated via email with Celia Duthie and her family who were on a vacation to France. I remember to this day the first time I dialed up (my email address was [email protected]) and Duthie’s Linux expert told me, “Alex, you are on line.”

To do this I had borrowed my wife’s Think Pad which was an early IBM version of the universal laptop. My email program was called Eudora.

I was so afraid of computers (I stuck with my PWP-40 until my increasing work as a freelance writer made it stupid to continue with it) and so afraid of Word that I would write all my articles using Eudora. At the time I remember Nick Rebalski, who was my editor at the Vancouver Sun, telling me, “Our computers at the Sun are not compatible with Word Perfect so I have no problem if you keep sending me stuff with Eudora.”

These days I am fairly computer literate and I use, like most others out there, Word and  Outlook Express (but sometimes Thunderbird Mozilla). I long for the early and wonderful days when Eudora seemed to be a magic wand to the world.

I had always known that Eudora was named after the American writer Eudora Welty (1909-2001) but until today I had not known why.

Katheryn & The Smith Corona PWP-40 - Ivette & the Remington Portable M. 5

It seems that Eudora’s creator Steve Dorner in 1990 who worked on the program at the University of Illinois in Urbana also worked for NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), and his first version of the program, which took about a year to develop, consisted of about 50.000 lines of code. Dorner wanted to make email easier to send and receive. He wanted this form of communication to be universal. While most now have no memory for Eudora, this program was indeed responsible in taking us to where we are today with email. In college he had read Eudora Welty’s Why I Live at the P.O. When it came to give his program a name Dorner remembered the title and rearranged it a bit to 'Bringing the P.O. to where you live,' and used it for the program's motto.

Today I read Why I Live at the P.O. and I must declare that it is wonderful, that it is gothic and that I want to read more Eudora Welty.

I told Rosemary that my blog today was a connection between qwerty and welty. She looked at me puzzled and I gave her a Brother Jacob smile!

Why I live at the P.O.

Eudora Welty pecks at the typewriter

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Dryocopus pileatus - woodcut by Celia Duthie

Just about anybody with a little of a memory (memory fades very quickly in Vancouver) will tell you that Celia Duthie was a forward-thinking woman who got things done until big box bookstores changed the playing field and the rules of bookselling in Vancouver.

I will be the first to point out that once I stopped buying books at Duthie Bookstores (because they had all closed down) I suddenly found myself buying many more books at very attractive prices. For many years the remainder section of Chapters kept me happily in bed reading for $5 a shot.

This wonderful utopia of books changed in January 2010 when I looked at my collection of 4000 books and realized that parting with them when and if Rosemary were to move to a smaller place, would be a seriously unhappy event. I made the decision then to not buy any more books and depend on the wonders of our Vancouver Public Library. And wonderful it is.

But there seems to be an extension of Patterson’s Law (that stipulates that Murphy was an optimist) that dictates that if you give a book away, within a week you will need it to retrieve an important quote. Google is not always a help in finding such quotes. I am learning to live with Patterson's Law of Reading.

But overall I am happy with my relationship with the Vancouver Public Library.

With the last Duthie store on 4th Avenue, Celia Duthie no longer has access to an unlimited supply of books. Unlike this reader, Duthie must read the latest Le Carré as soon as it is out. It took me three months (I was on a long waiting list) to get my hands on le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor but Jerome Charyn’s The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson was readily available. Duthie has been brought down to our level. You would think that this would make her morose and unhappy. I must report that this is not the case.

She happily runs her Salt Spring Island (Duthie writes the name of the island as two separate words so I will oblige) gallery (Duthie Gallery/ Salt Spring Woodworks) and exhibits truly beautiful artefacts that in some cases are not only art but happen to be useful art in that Judson Beaumont’s lanterns can light your way, and Brent Comber’s saucy and sexy furniture also happens to be furniture (which includes spacious drawers). Or something as simple as Jeff Triggs’ steamed spruce lamps can light your kitchen as seen here in my photo of Duthie’s guest suite.

Steamed spruce lamp by Jeff Triggs

As you enter the Duthie residence you will find to your left a table that contains the latest stuff that somehow has affected Celia Duthie and her husband Nick Hunt. This time around I was greeted by a woodcut of a woodpecker (you must forgive me for the fact that the scan here is incomplete as the work is bigger than my scanner bed), Dryocopus pileatus. I commented on how I liked it and Duthie immediately informed me that it was part of her “unlimited” (that’s the word she used) edition of woodcuts that she now makes.

Within days of leaving Salt Spring the door bell rang and I opened the door to find Duthie with two wood cuts which I will have framed and give to my granddaughters. I am sure they will be as delighted as I was and meanwhile I hope Duthie visits our public library. She will find treasures there but will have to adjust to being on a waiting list for those best-sellers just like the ordinary folk we all are.