While swimming laps in UNH’s outdoor pool this morning—my penultimate visit of the season ending tomorrow—I found it (1) boring and (2) hard to keep track of the laps completed.  In the early 80’s I swam laps in the Tulane pool because that seemed the only thing that would quiet my mind after hours of cramming for my doctoral orals:  my head was stuffed with review of Renaissance (now called Early Modern) English literature, my body cramped from hours of sitting in the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.  (By the way, what does it say about academia that where we once looked back to classical models, we now search earlier literature for intimations of what we have become?  Smacks a bit of narcissistic solipsism, don’t it?)  The pool was tonic then, as it is now, but for different reasons.  Now I go for the exercise, of course, and the delight of watching little kids with their moms, hoping to dispel the quotidian gloom with which I typically awake, especially on yet another of this summer’s too many grey, overcast days.

Since I returned from Wisconsin at the end of July, I’ve been very much aware of summer’s lease expiring.  Darkness falls much sooner, the goldenrod is in bloom, and we’re past the Perseids’ annual show.  The Lee Market Basket is selling mums now, for Christ’s sake.  Too soon, too soon!  Summer treats are whizzing by as quickly as those meteors:  a lovely seaside picnic to watch the first of August’s two full moons rise over the Atlantic, seeing the Barbie movie, having lunch with a former colleague returned to NH from her condo in The Villages, visiting Tanglewood and enjoying the hospitality of new acquaintance formerly at UNH and now happily retired to the Berkshires. 

None of the big summer projects I meant to tackle are complete, the wet weather less to blame than my own ennui.  I worry for my sister Jane, brought low by seven rounds of debilitating chemotherapy, her signature Blonde Wind hair now all but gone.  My one remaining London friend—yet another widow—wrote yesterday of an amputation that’s left her unable to stand, let alone walk.  And as “back to school” days near, I am both relieved I have no courses to prepare and bereft of purpose.  And I miss my darling David.  Watching the video he shot for my 40^th birthday—clever, bawdy, cute, and dear, filled with joyful anticipation of our life ahead—beggars the life I lead now.

And then there’s the Orange Menace, four indictments in and still leading the party of Lincoln.  HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE??!!  How could the Founders ever have foreseen such a test of their Great Experiment?

Well, the good news is that Heather Cox Richardson’s coming visit to the Music Hall in Portsmouth where she will flog her new book, Democracy Awakening, sold out as soon as it was announced.  And, to avoid a spiraling dive to despair, I’m taking up my friend Carol’s astute conviction voiced as we sat together anticipating the start of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie:  that movie’s phenomenal success is a Good Sign.

During the past week and a half, Barbie passed the billion-dollar mark at the global box office, and is likely soon to overtake The Super Mario Bros. Movie to become 2023’s highest-grossing movie worldwide.  As Kyle Buchanan noted in the New York Times (16 Aug 2023), “no movie directed by a woman has ever topped the yearly box office, and it’s been well over two decades since a live-action film without any significant action elements became the biggest movie of the year.”  Carol and I had earlier seen Christopher Nolan’s fine Oppenheimer, and the two films’ simultaneous release begs comparison:  the ethically wracked genius become “the destroyer of worlds” (and, as the film reveals, of women, the mistress driven to suicide and the wife to alcohol) vs. the epitome of unattainable perfection doll whose journey outside Barbie Land, where she discovers sexism as Ken discovers the patriarchy, unites an estranged mother and daughter in a quest to make being female possible.  Barbie’s early mistaking a billboard of attractive women for the Supreme Court may be a bitter joke in light of the real Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, but it is Barbie that has bested Oppenheimer at the box office.  As of 13 August, Nolan’s film has grossed a terrific $649 million worldwide, but Barbie has brought in 1.2 billion.  And it is Margot Robbie’s (Barbie’s) zinger of a last line that suggests the political power of female anatomy (no spoiler, I) to swing an election.  We can only hope.  I also predict that the film’s America Ferrera’s (Gloria’s) ferocious feminist philippic on the impossibility of being female will become the most-often rehearsed audition piece for the next year or so.  (Google it, Dear Reader.)

And why not?  You Go, Girls!

Another iconic woman saved the day last weekend at Tanglewood, when Yo-Yo Ma, scheduled to play the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, tested positive for COVID.  So Renée Fleming stepped in to substitute, singing six Strauss songs with orchestra.  She did not disappoint.

Neither did Susanna Mälkki, conducting the BSO on the previous Saturday night, when pianist Seong-Jin Cho first enchanted the audience with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271 plus a Chopin encore, and then Mälkki (her assurance at the podium reminiscent of Cate Blanchett’s Tar) absolutely nailed Bartok’s demanding Concerto for Orchestra in a thrilling performance.

Our generous hosts for the weekend, Gary and Beth, had treated us to a pre-concert stroll through the grounds of Edith Wharton’s mansion, The Mount, with its free display of large-scale sculptures.

The success of Wharton’s career evidenced by the opulence of her Gilded Age estate now for me chimes with the theme to which I’m clinging, floating like Kate Winslet on her Titanic door above my end-o’-season blues:  the prospective hegemony of females.  I’ll even wrap our post-concert stops at the High Lawn Dairy Farm and Olivia’s Overlook into that optimism:  those cows make mighty fine ice cream possible, and Olivia’s got a superb view of the Stockbridge Bowl.

Traffic to and from the Berkshires was heavy and impeded by road work, so much so that sweet baby James Taylor’s “Traffic Jam” kept playing in my mind:

               I used to think that I was cool

               Driving around on fossil fuel

               Then I found what I was doing

               Was driving down the road to ruin.

But after such a lovely weekend away, I have much to be grateful for.  Even my favorite sculpture at The Mount, ByeongDoo Moon’s I Have Been Dreaming to Be A Tree, found a living, breathing analog to welcome me back to my very own Strafford County estate.

It’s good to be home.