Rep removal

I did a change of address for my mom’s healthcare and discovered that my dad is still listed as someone who could speak for her, a so-called policyholder representative. But he died in 2015, I told the rep, a point verifiable from the company’s records. It would be nice if you could speak to my dad, I said, though it may be tough to reach him.

But guess what: a policyholder representative cannot be removed merely because they are dead. It’s necessary to fax a letter to the company asking that the rep be removed. I’m on it.

[No, that last sentence is nor sarcastic. I’m on it. And this was not a dream.]

Headline

[The Washington Post, September 14, 2022.]

A genuine headline, at least in mobile view. “A familiar end”? Maybe an expected end? A predicted end? That comes as a blow? I can figure out what the writer meant to say: the primaries (New Hampshire, Republican) ended with yet another blow to Kevin McCarthy’s hopes and dreams. But that’s not what the writer said.

Doorbell

Night. We were watching TV downstairs. All the lights were off upstairs. 11:30: the doorbell rang. What? We walked upstairs together, turned on the porch light, and opened the inside door. A boy stood on the other side of the storm door, three feet tall, roundish, wearing a mask. Elaine said that his parents had locked him out of the house because he hadn’t done his math homework. “Do you want us to call the police for you?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Okay,” I said, and we closed the door.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Likely sources: While on a walk last week, we found a boy, maybe two years old, alone in a driveway, wearing only a diaper, standing next to a pickup truck. His hands were filthy from the tires. We rang the bell and the boy’s mother came to the door: “His dad was in the truck.” Also: watching Dead of Night (1945), in which the arrival of an unexpected guest is a plot element. This dream doesn’t show me in a kindly light. In waking life I would open the door.]

Theory of dairy farming

Darya Aleksandrov Oblonsky and Konstantin Dimitrievich Levin are talking about cows. Levin would like the keep the conversation from straying to the subject of Darya’s sister Katerina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

Casual speculation: I wonder if this passage is the inspiration for the famous quip “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems,” often attributed to Paul Erdős. Erdős, however, credited Alfred Rényi.

Also from this novel
“The turning point of summer”

Positive anymore at the pump

I heard someone on the other side of the gas pump:

“Lot of rigmarole just to get fuel anymore.”

I don’t know if he was complaining (about the ATM-like keypad) to himself or to someone on a phone. What I do know is that I was hearing an instance of positive anymore.

[I was slightly surprised to hear the standard form rigmarole and not rigamarole, which is the way I’ve known the word since childhood.]

A Ted Berrigan event

A Ted Berrigan Celebration: a Zoom event, September 15, 7:00 p.m. Central, at Magic City Books, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here’s one of Ted’s sons, Edmund Berrigan, also a poet, talking about his father with KTUL.

The occasion for this event: the publication of Get the Money!: Collected Prose (1961-1983) (City Lights Books).

Related reading
All OCA Ted Berrigan posts (Pinboard)

Defeated former president in D.C.

The defeated former president flew into Washington, D.C., wearing a brown jacket, white polo shirt, and what appear to be golf shoes. Oh — and pants. This news was all over Twitter last night, but it’s still largely unreported by the press. What’s it mean? A medical emergency? An impending indictment?

*

The dfp says on his faux-Twitter that he is “working" at his D.C. golf club.

Urban density

[C. 58 East 14th Street, New York, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I went browsing in the Village and found this lovely moment of urban density. I tried counting the words: close to ninety, I think. This stretch of East 14th Street is now — what else? — a Duane Reade. Three words. Duane. Reade. Pharmacy.

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

9/11

Twenty-one years after the fact, and I can’t see a cloudless sky without thinking of September 11, 2001. I remember that day and those that followed as having intensely blue and cloudless skies.

Marsha Hunt (1917–2022)

She had a fine comic turn as Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1940). But our household knows her better as a familiar face in film noir. The New York Times has an obituary.

The documentary Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity (dir. Roger C. Memos, 2015) is worth seeking out. I suspect TCM will air it again soon.