I feel more back in the swing of things today than I have for quite awhile. Oddly, not having to worry about how to dispose of the dead mouse seems to have liberated me from the black mood I've been in for the last 2 weeks. I had coffee with Tom and Julie this morning at the Coffee Connection (really Starbucks) and it tasted great. We talked about child labor (Julie's next book project), the Defense of Marriage Act (my current hot button), history ( as always), Unitarianism, and the upcoming Lowell Celebrates Kerouac weekend.
Julie's always been involved with the Kerouac weekend since its inception. This year's theme is Jack the Athlete. Kind of lame after themes involving spirituality, but essential nonetheless. Julie was off to the library archives after our coffee to look up the newspaper for the day of the famous Thanksgiving catch. The one thing I noticed in the brochure for the symposium, was that the panel included a baseball writer but not a football writer. Odd considering Jack was a football hero.
I let Julie use my car phone to call her publisher who failed to sign her check for the labor movement history book. She didn't want to have to walk home to make the call and then walk back to the library.
The local minister's cluster was meeting in the Italian restaurant upstairs and both the North Parish and the South Parish Unitarian ministers waved effusively to Julie thru the window of the coffee shop. The North Parish minister was Tom's roomate in college so he's an old friend of theirs. He detached from the cluster and came into Starbucks to give Julie a big hug. Then he was off to the meeting. David the bookstore guy also stopped in. He teaches ESL at the same college Tom does and they are exchanging some students. David the bookstore guy has never been to the Kerouac weekend. Lowell is a major outing for him. He doesn't stray far from the bookstore. No sign of Ned, or Dick, or Richard, or either of the Larry's today. I really want to ask philosophy Larry if it's really true that the college he teaches at is eliminating their entire philosphy department. How can you have liberal arts without philosphy? Anyway, no Larry's were in evidence this morning. It's such a wonderful thing to be underemployed....