Last night I took the dog to Peaks Island for a nighttime walk. The ferry was cold and I didn’t wear quite enough layers – perfect for the walk, but the wind coming across Casco Bay, combined with the perky pace of the Machigonne II car ferry, meant I was chilled to the bone when I got back to the mainland. I put the dog in the back of the car – after a three hour walk he curled up and immediately fell asleep – and I popped into a bar for a quick whisky to warm up. The woman next to me struck up a conversation when her husband excused himself to use the loo. She was from northern Vermont, she and her husband owned a craft brewery, and they had engineered a few days holiday in Portland around a “business tour” of a couple of breweries in town.
Conrad’s fools
I’ve been rereading Joseph Conrad of late. I was looking for books a few weeks ago at a book shop in Seattle and came across Nostromo, which I vaguely remembered reading many years ago but once I started reading it last weekend I realized I hadn’t read it before, I had only purchased the book and intended to read it. As often happens, though, you read truly great books when you need to read them, not before.
Learning to swim
Yesterday I took my son for a swimming lesson at the downtown Seattle YMCA. It’s for “high functioning autism spectrum disorder” children, which means he gets one on one time with a specially trained instructor for a half hour. Continue reading “Learning to swim”
Goodnight Jackie Robinson
I had the flu – realizing too late, after a few days of feeling shaky and feverish, after driving an hour and a half to see good friends while trying to shake it off. I spent a day in bed, drinking madeira and reading Thomas Mann, not a good thing in my condition and with my particular personal demons, and I was tired, ready for bed.
Valuation
I used to work for a bank called ATB Financial, which was really just a “doing business as” name for something called the Alberta Treasury Branches. I have some of my fondest memories of my life from ATB, and met some of the best people on earth, period, during my time in Alberta. ATB is essentially a regional bank (although please don’t tell the Canadian federal regulators it’s a bank) owned by the Province of Alberta, making it unique in North America as a full-service banking institution owned by the people of a state or province (there is a Bank of North Dakota which is state-owned, but doesn’t offer a full slate of banking services and doesn’t have an open-ended mandate). I loved my time at ATB but a friend of mine reminded me tonight that I really loved the concept of ATB – the bank itself is, alas, just another human institution.