Writing Life

Archive for January, 2010

A couple of years ago I bought a packet of letters written by a woman to her husband. The two were newlyweds who lived in Los Angeles. The wife had gone off on a grand tour of Europe with her mother and sister. Over the course of the trip the wife wrote more than 100 loving letters to her husband back in L.A. Over and over again she stressed how much she missed him and loved him. She was from a wealthy family and had just about everything that is usually deemed necessary for a successful life: money, love, a good education, brains, social connections. When she wrote the last letter in the collection, the wife was back in North America and ready to make her way home to Los Angeles to see her husband. At that point, I didn’t want to know anything more about her. She was young; she was in love; she had just completed a fabulous trip of Europe; and now she was going home. I was more than happy to leave it at that. But not my wife. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past few days I have been traveling the Orient in the company of an unknown woman. What brought us together is her travel journal, which I purchased this past weekend at the antique paper and postcard show in Sacramento. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Julie and I saw the movie Leap Year, a romantic comedy starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode. It is a charming and formulaic chick flick that is nowhere near as bad as the critics would have you believe. If you like silly romcoms like French Kiss, The Proposal, or New In Town, you will like Leap Year. Prior to the film, we saw a trailer for another new romcom, this one called Letters To Juliet, which will be released in May. It appears to be about a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) who discovers some fifty-year-old love letters and seeks to track down the old woman (Vanessa Redgrave) who wrote them. This struck a chord with me because, just a day earlier, I had purchased a collection of about 30 letters written in 1943 by an Anchorage, Alaska, woman named Vera Downing to her boyfriend Rudi Becker, who was living in Cordova, Alaska, at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Julie and I spent another day at the antique paper and postcard show. Julie purchased a handful of postcards featuring bygone ocean liners. She found plenty of people there who shared her passion/obsession. If you are not an ocean-liner nut like Julie you may find it difficult to understand how anyone can be sentimental about what was essentially a collection of metal and wood that weighed about 56,000 tons and was roughly 900 feet long. At times, even I have difficulty understanding that passion. But late in the day we had a conversation with an antiques dealer that helped me to understand how people can become attached to big commercial objects like ocean liners. Read the rest of this entry »

Jules and I attended the Sacramento Antique Paper and Postcard show at the Scottish Rite Community Center today. It’s a two-day event and we will be attending it tomorrow also. Sadly, the recessed economy has had a detrimental effect on the collectibles business. There were far fewer vendors at this show than were at the previous Sacramento show, last summer. Even the vendors were surprised by the number of their fellow merchants who opted to take a pass on this event. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday I blogged about Sacramento’s Tamale King. Yesterday I blogged about Scheherazade. Today I visited Richard Hansen, owner of The Book Collector, at his shop on 24th Street between J and K Streets and was reminded of both those earlier blogs. Some of the best stories at The Book Collector are contained not in its books but in the mind of the proprietor. Read the rest of this entry »

It is well known that Christmas season is the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere. The days grow shorter as the earth’s journey through space causes the sun to move further south in the sky. The cloudy winter weather adds to the darkness, blotting out much of the sunlight that remains. December 21st is the shortest, darkest day of the year. After that the sky gradually begins to brighten up. The process happens so slowly that it is difficult to notice sometimes. But in our house there is a phenomenon that exaggerates the darkness of winter. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife is an ocean liner enthusiast. She keeps a scrapbook full of all the ocean liner memorabilia she has collected through the years. The scrapbook contains menus, passenger lists, itineraries, postcards, luggage tags, and other ephemera. Most of these items were purchased for no more than a few bucks. Unless your ocean-liner menu, postcard, passenger list, itinerary or luggage tag came from the Titanic, it probably isn’t worth much. But that doesn’t matter to Julie. She’s not in it for the investment possibilities. She is in love with the romance of old-time ocean travel. Read the rest of this entry »

Julie and I are both dieting this month. We gained a combined twenty pounds or so during the Christmas holiday season, and now we are paying the price for it. Throughout January we are committed to eating only one meal a day. That meal is dinner. And because it is our only meal of the day we have been doing our best to make it special. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the 1950s my father was part of a tennis team at the University of Portland that won an Oregon state championship. He has since been inducted into the University’s sports hall of fame. In the mid 1960s, when my older sister, Shauna, and I were roughly ten and seven years old, respectively, my father tried to pass his tennis skills onto us. Read the rest of this entry »