Summer is For Watching Scary Movies

The Summer is for camping outings and paperback novels, for local Summer Stock theater and B movies, for long books on a day too hot to move, read under the fan, with a glass of ice water just out of reach.  My Summer was gleefully, and somewhat guiltily, given over to Bad B horror films.  These are not the Friday the 13^th part 20, but something darker, more randomly satisfying, and infinitely more pleasing.  Milking a good list or two, and my Netflix accounts tandem disk/watch on demand options, I rather overdid it. 

Right, so after years of reading gothic fiction and hoarding bad B horror films, I awaited Gillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak with a kind of longing saved for holidays and diet-breaking chocolate desserts.  I was hoping for the kind of lush lavishness of Pan's Labyrinth or the heartbreaking ethereal charm of Mama.  While this film has some stunning moments, it drowns a bit in its own storyline – one more easily guessed at than it should be -- and painted in too much red to see well.

The story begins well with a plucky heroine, Edith Cushing, played by Mia Wasikowska being wooed by a handsome and landed inventor, Thomas Sharp (Tom Hiddleston), and her pragmatic American father (Jim Beaver) stepping in to chase away the insolvent suitor before he lures the glowing Edith away to the English countryside, his crumbling manor, and decaying family.  The House of Usher has nothing on these folks.  Before he can succeed in saving his daughter, though Mr. Cushing’s skull is crushed by an ungentlemanly intruder into his club.  The wooing and wedding go as planned, and Mrs. Sharpe joins her husband and his sister in the family home, the only place her mother’s spirit has forbidden her to go.  It is a place where the red clay bleeds so effectively through the white snow, that the front yard and grounds look like a butcher’s shop after a busy week. 

Once ensconced in Crimson Peak’s lovely yet crumbling family estate, Edith finds that she is often visited by spirits with warnings, by things that go bump in the night, and subterranean levels rivaling Dante’s best visions.  The real terror, however, is Jessica Chastain’s coldly calculating Lucille, who has her own secrets and her own ways of keeping them. 

This was one of the first of my foray that I watched, and did so the same way that people engage in illicit sex:  privately, in a darkened living room at daytime, with a fist full of Vienna Finger cookies.  While this wasn’t the lowest budget film that I saw this Summer, it verged on being the campiest.  Crimson Peak, or no, the color saturation of the exterior shots is too much.  Edith’s wardrobe, wrought of golden colors and heavy fabric also seems heavily handed, and overly rich.  Occasionally you find yourself feeling a bit adrift, like you’ve wandered into Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland again, with a slightly subdued Mad Hatter, and a better dressed Alice.  While the set shots are beautiful, and Wasikowski’s wardrobe is beautiful, together they’re too much. 

Edith’s mother is rendered like Del Toro’s Mama with long fingers and snaking black tendrils that glide sinister and grasping towards the heroine.   There are scenes of real delight, however campy some of this film gets.  When Edith first sees the interior of her future home, a half-destroyed entry hall, and stairwell, leaves are carelessly fluttering through it.  It’s  a marvelously atmospheric scene that sets an achingly creepy and melancholic setting for Edith’s brightly colored bride.  It’s a masterful moment that comes off beautifully. 

Now naming Edith’s family Cushing with this first comeback of the Hammer House films is a lovely touch.  Jessica Chastain is eerily and coldly frightening.  You know that something is going on, and eventually, Lord Sharpe is told of his bride that he should “get rid of her.”  While we know that this deviousness is just a hint of what Lucille Sharpe is capable of, the garishness with which we are given some back story only matches the heavy hand with which the outer landscape is sprayed red, supposedly due to natural clays, but I suspect more so because this is a Hammer production, and that’s one of their signature touches.

Not that I didn’t enjoy this, but it lacked the subtlety of Del Toro’s earlier ghost stories that I deeply enjoyed:  The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Mama.  It’s that it feels as if someone took a magic marker to an old Tenniel plate, and in the spirit of livening it up, ruined it.

The Oregon Fire isn't in Oregon

There’s something tough about getting back to normal after an emergency.  It’s flat out uncanny to put up the coffee cups, start the laundry, and get back to the desk.  I’m sitting here playing Concentration with Connor, and realizing that I have none.  We had gone down to Sacramento to celebrate Dan’s birthday, and celebrate we did!!  (Tequila was involved). So we creebled back up the hill and were just pulling into our adorable and much missed mountain cottage when we turned a corner and saw a huge plume of smoke.  Not good.

 It’s been so dry here, that the slightest blaze, especially in a strong wind like we had last night, blows quickly into a wildfire.  Back in 2001, a wildfire had burned very close to the town and taken a number of houses with it.  Some of the folks chained three caterpillar bulldozers together and dug a firebreak around the town.  The winds changed and the town was saved.  Last night it started on the west side of town and blew pretty much  behind the high school and along the airport.  If there had been a lot of houses there, it would have been tragic, but back there is the dump, and the airport is a natural fire break.  Still, folks were nervous to see what would happen, but our local leaders and CalFire were on it.  They were calling it the Oregon fire, which I’m sure was confusing our New York friends, who were pretty sure we’d moved to Weaverville, California.   It still looked like Apocalypse Now over there, with bombers and helicopters dropping flame retardant, and folks moving around packing up or exchanging updates under the blood red sun.  If you’ve never seen a forest fire, it looks like a tornado sucked up smoke, opened up the ground, and spewed fire and fury.  I kept watching for flames on the nearest ridge.  I saw only smoke and that creepy, hellish sun.

A friend of my mother-in-law’s drove over to tell us that they’d evacuated one block over.  We grabbed the cats, shoved them in carriers, threw the backpacks and suitcases back into our green Honda CRV - the Road Frog - and headed up the hill to my in-laws.  You see, they’ve done this before.  Mom was packing up quickly, grabbing essentials, and us.  After a half-hour’s consultation on the direction of the wind and the burn, it appeared that rather than scooping across town, the fire was blowing NW to NE, and heading towards us.  I’m sometimes good in an emergency, but I wasn’t sure if we were staying there or leaving, and Mom was very clearly getting more anxious to leave by the minute.  So was I. 

Then Dan spoke up and mentioned that the town Supervisors were setting up evacuation at the grade school behind our house, so it would probably be best to evacuate back home.  We gathered Dan’s folks and headed over where with their truck and Papa’s police radio.  He also has done this before, but was hard to pry off his mountain.  I was glad that he were there with us, and his radio.  After a restless couple of hours pacing and listening to the street closures on the radio, we washed the child, put him to bed, and all started to bed down.   Mom and Papa were good sports and let us make them a bed out on the living room futon.  I think mine was the last light out, but as soon as the adrenaline left me, I pretty much passed out over my book.

We kept the cats in, so they danced on our heads all night.  Fig, the Siamese, was especially bad, moving in behind the curtains and talking and crying nonstop, like a hysterical Jerry Springer guest.  I woke about every two hours, but the first at 1:30, thinking someone was banging on the door.  It was just my father-in-law kicking a chair on the way to get a drink of water.  Poor man.  I came out of the bedroom like a jack in the box wielding a flashlight and pulling Dan behind me because I was sure it’s time to jump in the Road Frog and tear ass to Redding.  But no.  Just me, on high alert.  The rest of the night passed uneventfully except that each time I looked out the window, there was smoke in the streets and it smelled like fire. The cat finally settled down around 4 and so did I, then Bean crawled into bed with us, kicked us in the kidneys a few times (as a sleeping seven-year-old will) then settled into the boneless sleep of children. 

We slept til about a quarter after seven, when I couldn’t take anymore and got up to find Dan checking the emergency site on his phone.  All was well, it seemed, the fire had moved North, and we’d only lost one barn, no houses, the hospital hadn’t had to be evacuated, and no-one had gotten hurt.  The town was safe, we had coffee and toast, and everyone went off to work.

So I’m off to go empty the Road Frog and start the laundry.  Cause, well, the emergency is over, and if we do need to hit the road, we should probably do it with clean clothes.  Oh, and on a side note, it seems we need to refine our evac plan cause I was going to leave my computer and all of my photo albums.  I now get to empty the car and put everything back.  Glad it was a false alarm, but also glad that we were ready to leave so quickly, and with the essentials:  our family, our cats, a few family photos, and the envelope where I keep the passports, birth certificates, and Social Security cards.  My dignity, it seems, can be easily left behind.  Man, I’m tired, and now I’ve got to find a better place for the photo albums.

Bennie and the Jets

My grandmother, Carmen, was a bit of a self-proclaimed gypsy.  She traveled a lot, stole sugar packets from restaurants, and saved boxes and anything with an Owl on it.   She worked hard, she drank hard, and she loved hard.  She had five husbands, and one she remarried at the end of her life.  When I was five, though, she married Hiram Benjamin Bentine, or Bennie.  He was a dear, fussy old fellow, with a lemon yellow El Dorado, a good palate for food, and similar drinking and talking habits.  We moved in with them to help everyone out a bit – them with money for the house and my mom who was working nights -- with me.  I remember Saturday night bowling.  Lanes for kids were free after midnight – if you could stay up that long.  I did, and after bowling, we’d pile into the car and go to Sambo’s.  It was a very non-PC breakfast joint that stayed open all night.  We’d eat breakfast, drink coffee or more cocktails (mine was a Shirley Temple for which with copious amounts of pancake syrup I account my late-night stamina).  Bennie was good to me, spoiled me, let me climb into his lap and poke at his fancy buttons and shirt pockets.  I don’t remember what brand of cigarettes he smoked, but that he did so copiously.  He drank Old Granddad on the rocks, which I remember from a photo taken in Mexico of him (Old Granddad) sitting on some rocks (on the rocks).  It was the 70’s before we all became so self aware about the drinking and smoking we were doing.  We had a pool with a changing room, a great slide, and a wonderful overhung patio full of ivy.  We had horses. They had a big house, a great entertainment space, and catfights at night with flying shot glasses. That was my grandmother.  She could hit any man running or walking with a shot glass at 30 paces.  She was a pistol. 

Bennie was the cook at our house, and he was good at it.  He also did a lot of the shopping, as none of the rest of the adults were to be trusted with the selection of decent perishables.  He and Carmen were both newspaper people and gone all day during the Summer, when his daughter and I lounged by the pool with her friends while I fetched them sandwiches and sodas.  The weekends were lively parties with everyone home, including my mother, by the pool with the dogs, and barbeques, salads, and yes, more drinks.  One day I was invited to the shopping expedition for ribs and briquettes.  It was a short trip, and for some reason, I was invited along.  Maybe my Grandmother and mother needed to talk, maybe he needed to get out of the doghouse for something, or maybe I was annoying everyone underfoot as being the only five year old in the house will do.  But he brought me and we took off in that lemon yellow El Dorado to the store.  We wound through the affluent neighborhood, listening to the radio, with Neil Diamond, Roberta Flack, and Elton John.  “Bennie and the Jets” played, and being five, I thought it amazing that I was currently riding with a Bennie.  I thought the song was about him.  We said so, and sang along even to the piano parts “Bennie and the jets, duh, da, da, da, da, Dum, dum, dum.  Bennie!!”  if you’re five and in the car with a beloved grandparent, it doesn’t get any better than this.

It was years before I figured out which one of our albums was Elton John’s, I loved his flashy clothes, and his cool lyrics, and his mojo.  It was the theme song of the summer.  The pool, the ivy, the drinks and cigarettes, Elton John, and those mad, mad riffs, “Hey, kid!”

40 years later, I’m back in California after a Big Move.  That’s one where you give up your job, your life, your big house in the South, and move to a small Northern California town to raise your child and reclaim your family, sense of self, intellect, time, and your sanity.  I am procrastinating from approaching the local district office for substitute teaching work and the local colleges for adjunct teaching.  I just want to hold onto Summer for another week before I dive into remaking my professional self, the self that cares about grading papers, making money, and maybe writing an article on how we are or are not Academically Adrift.  I don’t want to do this just yet.  I want to think, I want to write, I want to go to Farmer’s markets, and I want to play with my child.  I am carefully pulling out of the parking lot onto Main Street, when “Bennie and the Jets” comes on the radio, fuzzy, a little distorted, as if the song had to come through from 1974 and land like a faded and exhausted butterfly in the cab of the olive green Honda CRV.   For a moment, I am five again, fearless and without worry, singing with a single tear trying to leak through my utmost bliss.

My grandmother died about two months ago from fatigue, loneliness, and a bit too much Vodka of a few too many evenings.  She was 85, though, and had a good run.  I didn’t always call her back, or friend her on Facebook, or write her enough notes, I know.  Her life was rough at the end.  She remarried husband number three, the tall, big, charming but terribly immoral Sean Connery looking fellow at whom she’d thrown a number of shot glasses in her stunning 30’s.  He’d died and left her the house that they’d shared, but being broke she’d taken in lodgers, including an aunt with questionable pharmaceutical habits, and a few of her friends.  It wasn’t pretty, and it probably wasn’t nice.  I sent her red Christmas gifts of silk and good perfume, but wrapped up in my own petty dramas, little else.  Bennie died of lung cancer years before and left her to rely on her friends and family.  They are sometimes fun, great in a crisis, but everyday life confounds them.  When I am here, I can forget for a moment, so much that I neatly sidestepped when I went to Grad School.  But I’m always going to think of Sir Elton John’s Bennie as my Bennie.  Oooh, you’re so spaced out. 

Perhaps, but time is starting to do this weird thing where it folds in on itself.  Supposedly, this is how wormholes are created, and the universe bends, but for mere mortals who are not scientists, it’s also how memories survive over 40 years of Lacanian theory and childrearing to become important about what has made up our imaginations.  One day, I’ll look up Elton John’s Bennie to see who he was, but for me, he’ll always be Hiram Bentine, cruising in a yellow El Dorado, with a borrowed grandkid, who thought he was so very, very electric cool.

Artichokes

An artichoke is a laughable object. Roughly the size of a softball and deliciously edible, it nonetheless tries to ward off such eating with spiky ends to succulent leaves. There’s a joke that goes something like “I pity the poor hungry sod who looked at this spiky ball of green stuff and was hungry enough to try to eat it anyway.” My momma and I used to steam one up and she’d teach me how to peel the leaves, dip them in butter or mayonnaise and scrape the tender flesh off the husky handle. These were a treat, purchased sometimes as the center to a Saturday night’s entertainment while we watched bad B horror flicks on Tom LaBrie’s Waterbed Warehouse-hosted run of films.

Shopping the other day, I thought I’d pick one up for Dan and I. It sat in the fridge while we did something else that Tuesday night, had band practice on Wednesday, met friends for beverages and conversation on Thursday and then was still there when we got the call Friday that our young friend had lost her bout with cancer and that it was time to go North to pay our respects. There was only one problem. Connor was sick with a stomach virus and plane travel for him was out of the question.

So we sent Dan up to grieve for us while Connor and I struggled with his bad belly and a sore ear that was quickly turning into a bad ear infection. I held him while he fussed for hours, made meal after meal for him that he wouldn’t eat, fed him rounds of juice and water and little containers of yogurt while we watched Finding Nemo again and again. Finding Nemo is an underwater adventure and soothing to our boy, a Pisces. And every time I went into the fridge to get another carton of yogurt for him, there sat the slowly darkening artichoke, a testament to shabby handling of produce and missed opportunity. Saturday night I seated Connor down with his dinner and steamed this artichoke. It seemed a decadent thing to enjoy with a sick baby on one hand and grievous loss on the other, but had I waited much longer, the thing would have dried and rotted, no longer been good to eat. I tried to scrape a little of the green off the leaves to give to Connor, but he wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t interested. So I ate the whole damn thing by myself, but saved half the heart for Dan.

Ah, artichokes. They’re a wonderful, easy, cheesy symbol of a rich life – sometimes spiny on the outside but tender and succulent at the heart, where most of us love and have the richest dialogues with the essences of our selves and the ones we love. You always eat at a funeral and I hear that there’s something about the confrontation with death that often raises the libido. It’s a matter of proclaiming the vibrance of life in the face of loss, a thumbing of the nose and flash of the ass to Mr. Death. I can’t say that my illicit artichoke eating was anything near that, but rather not wanted anything else exquisite to go unappreciated. I had been complaining that my little boy was growing too fast, that he doesn’t stop moving much and that I don’t get to hold him much. Well, that weekend he wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be put down. At the end, I didn’t mind much. Everything was moving way too fast and the best way to confront our loss for me was to hold onto one of my most precious people as if for dear life, eat artichokes and wait for his Daddy to come home and hold me.

Blogging with the Aliens

I walked Connor to daycare this morning. We call it “school,” and it feels a little better, even if all he’s learning is how to hang out with other kids and not bite them. On the way to “school” and on the way back with the empty stroller, which always feels weird, but is a necessity of walking a child to daycare with a stroller, I met five people whom I know either well or as acquaintances. Five. The first two commented on how big Connor is and how much he’s changing. Someone else was walking their dog and waved. Another was on her way to work and honked. Yet another said he hadn’t seen me in a while and asked how I’ve been. Man, I love this town.

But those who know me know that I’ve slowed down a little these days. A friend loaned me season three of X-files and I’m just as likely to be watching “Paper Clip” or “Nisei” or dipping into the Aliens Quadrology that I bought for the Monsters Ink course. When you get really successful, you know, because you can write your favorite toys off your taxes. So it’s a lot less porch, a lot less cocktail hour, a lot less late nights and beverages and more. I’m hoping this is more than the encroachment of age and responsibility, but it might just be a vestige of 40 creeping up a month or two early. Mostly, I think, it’s just fatigue. I’m too tired, too sad and too tired of being tired and sad. Think I’ll go watch something with Aliens eating people.

It used to be that when I was having a really bad week, I’d dig up my copy of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and reread it. It seems a funny choice except that no matter how hard your life is and how many people seem to be in threat if imminent or future demise by long, slow, bone-and-body eating diseases, at least the vampires aren’t eating your town. There is still a place in the imagination where it could be so much worse. To me, that’s comforting. Sick, perhaps, but comforting. The only caveat is the new ghost stories. I saw one (Silent Hill – thanks, Stephen!) that really creeped me out; kinda like The Ring meets Jacobs Ladder meets Hellraiser. And anything that the Japanese have dreamed up lately can full on give a ghost-and-dead-thing connoisseur nightmares. One most go gently into this good night or get the socks scared off ya. It’s enough to make you want to stick with the classics: Aliens, The Thing, Ghost Story.

Speaking of ghosts, I got to wander out and about this last weekend during our local Bragg Jamm music festival. Dan’s band couldn’t play because the lead singer had a wedding, but he sat in with a good new band and did a great job while folks danced and sweated. It felt like a kind of homecoming, an old home weekend. Everyone was out, dressed up, playing music, dancing, sweating in the Georgia summer heat that even new air conditioners couldn’t properly combat. But either side of Saturday night, I just couldn’t get my dancing feet up to their usual revelry. I’m sure it’s because some very good friends are about to lose their first child to bone cancer, and I just wanted to hold onto mine for a little while. It could also be that the thought of their losing their little girl and having to face the long, slow suck that this is going to be just made me physically ill. Either way, I was happy to take it slow this weekend, and then to take it even slower this week. My stomach is in accord, aching when I don’t eat and then punishing me heartily when I do something stupid, like take asprin on an empty stomach, or eat chili and eggs for breakfast.

So we’re going gently this week, playing with the baby, starting back on the manuscript, planning the Fall literary festival and watching movies about how the things that haunt the night eat the unlucky. Survivor’s guilt much? Sure, all the time. But that’s the full contract price for being lucky, then, ain’t it? Ain’t it. Aint it, just. Think I'll go watch The Mummy again.

Smashed Up Little Slushbox

Okay, so what’s with the lotion booger? You know, that hard half-congealed knot of goop at the end of the pump-nozzel of the lotion that, if left long enough, turns to concrete. What do they put into this stuff that the drying of it leaves a gelatinous booger harder to remove than that crust that forms around Jurassic fossils? Now this is not a problem, really. I don’t have problems these days. People with brain cancer have problems. Those with three kids, a broken arm and no health insurance have problems. Those with no homes around November have problems. I do not have problems, but I do have lotion boogers. In all of the bottles. I went through the house today and got rid of them all. It seemed like part of the Spring cleaning that’s a few months late but applies to closets, parts of the floor the babysitter’s puppy didn’t get to, and an occasional desk drawer that’s gone feral.
I am thinking about such things because I’m making a to-do list of all the crap I want to have finished by the time I head back to campus in mid-August. It’s things like switching the credit card for the gym membership, getting a battery for one of the calculators that gave up the ghost, getting a hotel for a conference I’m going to in October.
At the top of the list are two numbers, one for a mechanic and another for a body shop for my car. It all started so harmlessly. I backed into a lady in her new, red Honda Civic at the grocery store. A series of scratches on the back white bumper seemed hardly worth reporting, so I put an 11th Hour sticker over the biggest one and got on with my life. Years went by and we contemplated selling the car and buying a newer, slightly bigger one. With Boogs in tow and a large carseat to fit into the back, it seemed like the thing to do. I looked at Nissan Altimas and Toyota Camry’s, even the new Hybrid. After test-driving a lovely light-sage 2006 Camry Hybrid, I ran the math, got sticker shock and came home and detailed my little white slushbox for further use. It’s a good car, gets good gas mileage and aside from the fact that it’s white and has a cassette deck and no cd player, is a fine, practical vehicle.
Then in the middle of the night one night, someone bonked that rear fender. It was a little mashed, not badly, and I was going to get a dent doctor to come fix it. After calling him and verifying that there can be no paint damage in order for his fix-it to work, I realized that yes, I had some cracking and some rust and was going to have to get the fender fixed the old-fashioned way – take it to the dealer and have them bolt another one on.
Then my dealer screwed up. While driving to work, I noticed the car pulling hard to the right. I pulled over, adjusted all the inflation on the tires, and was bummed to find that it still pulled to the right. Since we were going to be heading out of town the next day, I figured that I should bring it in to have the dealer look at it. I barely made it before the tread flew off the tires that this particular dealership had been inspecting and rotating since I bought the little car. So, in a fit of umbrage, I fired them as my mechanics and am now using a well-recommended private mechanic. I figured I’d call them and get the number for a reputable body shop.
Then, we scraped up the poor little burro of a car yet again, getting out of a Taco Bell. My inveterate vehicle decided to take on one of those cement posts that stand along the curbs of many fine fast-food dining establishments. This post has obviously been hit often and cantilevers hard to one side, yet now there’s another piece of the car that needs to be bolted back on. Quel Dommage. It’s time, though, to admit defeat, get the insurance company involved and just bolt back together this poor smushed up little slushbox. She’s a good car, even if she’s a little boring, and I owe her that. That and it will give me something to do other than hunt down lotion boogers.

Spectres of Dancing

Fuck, why can’t I do this anymore? I’ve got all the focus of a three-year old with a World Book Encyclopedia Atlas. Sorry, my friends, I’ve become a bad blogger. To those of you who have been waiting to hear my wit and slightly caustic sense of humor, well, it’s missing these days. Or not. Mostly, I’m using those talents, when I have them, in the classroom or on the porch and have not reserved a lot of time out of those spaces to come in and write things down. This is supposed to be a log and instead it seems to be more like a message in a bottle, or a postcard from the middle – “Having a grand time, wish you were here.”

In the background, of course, is the fact that my mother is still seriously ill, but she’s bucked this last challenge (a bowel surgery) with all the grace and strength that she bucked some of the earlier challenges, so it’s still very serious, but she does not die today.

In the foreground is the edgy kind of anxiety you get when you have a lot to do and you’re playing hooky writing blogs. Maybe its because this blog was supposed to be a kind of translation from the world of those who have children to those who don’t about what the experience is, why anyone would do this to themselves and what the draw of the little boo-boo face and those little arms around your neck at bedtime really are. It’s a fool’s errand and I think only one who didn’t yet arrive there would think it were doable without getting squishy, sentimental or just plain dull. Nothing is so dull as those who go on about their kids, except perhaps those who go on about their grandkids. Dull. Like watching the dirt not move or watching kudzu. Always gonna be there, nothing much new there and by the way, when is lunch?

Monster’s Ink, my new course at the college, has been a blast. We’re doing ghosts next, hauntings, traces, poltergeists and things that go bump in the night. I’ve been studying this stuff since I was thirteen and can do this blindfolded. In fact, I owe those guys a final essay assignment that I promised last Thursday. I suppose, though, it’s not for nothing we’re doing ghosts this week. Trying to explain the life of being Connor’s mom to those who haven’t yet had the pleasure and torment of having an infant in the house is like trying to describe the green of Ireland or the round flavors of an Italian Chianti from the café off the Trevi Fountain before you’ve been there. Some things have to be lived. And in the midst of all this living, I’ll try to be better about dropping a postcard now and then to remind myself of how lovely the trip is being.