Little boxes. Their value is in who gave them or that they contain small gifts of nature from loved ones. Not all boxes are square, right?1
Here were today’s RomCom rewatches from 2005 and 1991. As with many of these movies, the number of years since their release dates often stuns me.
1From The Polymer Arts, 2013, “Today’s thought on boxes is pretty simple: a box does not have to be square. It doesn’t even have to have straight sides or be flat on the bottom. A box is basically a container used to hold or store things and has a lid. That’s a pretty wide open definition, which is great for an artist.”
Minute Maid Park is a retractable roof stadium in Houston, Texas. It opened in 2000 (under its previous name, Enron Field). It’s the home ballpark of the Houston Astros, a Major League Baseball team. I’ve seen the Astros play there under the park’s previous and current name.
In the fall of 2006, a new dog came into our lives, Lynne’s Minute.
Last night, Lynne posted about Minute on her Instagram. In her words: This girl has been with me for 18 years. She has been my reason to go home when it was the last place I wanted to go. She made the house not empty. She has run with a Doberman, a Mastiff, an American bulldog, and a chihuahua. She’s chased squirrels up trees, chewed many harnesses, and rode many miles. Stoic and brave. Not aware she was only 17 pounds of sass. She’s never been one to run off. She always wants to be where I am. Faithful and true. She has come to the end of her watch. I will miss her every day.
This morning, Lynne and Minute said goodbye. We will all miss Minute, too. I like to think I contributed to naming her. I don’t know if I saw a photo or saw her in person, but I said, “She’s no bigger than a minute!” Lynne answered, “That’s what Jess said, too.” It seemed fated that she become Jess’s little sister Minute. For a while, Minute had her own blog. I still go and look at it sometimes. She came into a home with siblings: Greta, the Dowager Doberman, and Little Blind Sparky. They were a great trio. She also became an aunt and best friends with Jess and Laura’s dogs and honestly thought she was the same size as them: Seig, a Doberman, Sue, the American bulldog, and Sam, a HUGE mastiff, and later, Ruby and Ginger. When she welcomed her chihuahua brother Paco to her family, it may have been the first time a family dog was smaller than her!
Lynne’s grandchildren have never known a world without Minute. Lila with Minute and Paco.
Isaac and Minute, photo courtesy of Lynne.
At The Compound, she was a running mate to our Margot, Guinness, and then Anime; Tim’s Rex, Pixie, Penny, and then Pollock. A friend to Rhonda and Lindsey’s Sugar when they visited. At Houndstooth Hall, she befriended Debby’s Harley and Stewie, and Rhonda and Lindsey’s Pepper when she joined their family. She welcomed Delta, Jack, and Eva into the batpack. Who knows how many of our foster dogs she met through the years, but I never saw her exchange a harsh word with another dog. As far as she was concerned, in the dog world, she never met a stranger. She gave every dog a chance to be a potential new friend, though there was a special bond between her and Anime. But all other dogs she met as equals, and she was their monarch.
Some of her photos through the years.
Timothy with Minute. He often took care of her and her siblings.
One of my first photos of Minute, taken on a baking night in December of 2006. We had a houseful of bakers and assistants at The Compound, giving Minute a big social debut at an early age. No dogs were intoxicated in the making of this photo. That bottle of Jack was for whiskey balls as an experiment with our rum ball recipe.
Rex playing with Minute.
Minute with her brother Sparky, and on the floor, her nephew Seig.
Minute ready to garden with Margot, Sparky, Guinness, and Rex.
One time, when I took care of Sparky and Minute, I had them both bathed and brushed by a groomer. Sparky LOVED it and was invigorated. Minute, who loved nothing better than getting muddy, tolerated it but was outraged that I let them put this silly bow on her. She was a WARRIOR, not a girly girl!
Minute and her little brother Paco.
Besties. Minute and Anime. Even as she aged and slowed down, Minute and Anime would become like playful puppies when they got together again. They were never far from each other.
Jack, Eva, and Minute.
Pepper grabs the couch, while Minute, Anime, and Eva sleep in the distance.
Hard to get them all in one shot, but here’s Delta with Minute, Eva, Jack, and to the far right, Anime.
Tom and Minute on a recent visit.
Sweet and spicy: a blended foursome.
She was a tiny girl, and in honor of Tiny Tuesday, I tried to find the little dog I put on Lynne’s birthday cake in 2007. I never found it. Maybe I gave it to Lynne.
I did unpack these two Birthstone Barbies with their companions.
Miss Sapphire with her Westie. Sapphires represent love, royalty, and protection, and that tracks for Minute on all three counts. On a whim, I checked Miss Topaz, because that’s Lynne’s birth month, and what better dog to be represented than a little tan and white chihuahua. I know Paco was first to greet Minute at the Rainbow Bridge; how he must have missed her. The wild rumpus then began with her many friends at their reunion.
The plan for today is to keep working on Book 7 of the Neverending Saga. For some reason, I’m in the mood to listen to Holland, a classic Beach Boys album among Beach Boys fans and collectors.
Thinking of Holland in general, I decided to show this assortment of items from the dresser in the master bedroom. From left to right, that’s a ginger jar that belonged to my mother and still has potpourri that she put in it. (I don’t think it has a lot of scent anymore.) On the bottom, she wrote “Lola, 2001,” so possibly it was a gift to her from Aunt Lola. Next to that is a blue and white candle bowl which may have come from Bombay Company. If so, it was likely a gift from my mother to me (she liked to shop there for me, and I liked their merchandise). The three in the middle: a small ashtray, a windmill, and two Dutch boys sharing a kiss, were all gifts from our friend Steve C after he went to The Netherlands one year. On the far right is a vintage vase that Tom’s parents gave us from his grandmother’s house after she died. She was the only one of his grandparents that I got to meet, and I just adored her mischievous humor.
Behind these items is the Holland doll from the Arco Gasoline Dolls of the World collection. I had several of those when I was a child, and somehow they were donated or discarded. A few years ago, I replaced the ones I’d had thanks to the magic of eBay!
I rewatched 1998’s Hope Floats this morning. It’s categorized as a RomCom, and I do really like it, but I’d forgotten how sad it is, too. I’d also forgotten how uncomfortable the beginning is, because it hits a little too close to home related to an incident from my past. Thankfully, my humiliation wasn’t televised in every time zone. That part will go well with what I’m currently writing.
The main reason I picked the film was to honor the late Gena Rowlands, who plays Sandra Bullock’s mother and is a longtime favorite of mine. In mid-August, I edited a post from July 25 to note that Gena Rowlands had died on August 14. I’ve appreciated seeing so many tributes to her on Instagram. She truly was a gifted actor with a long career.
ETA: Couldn’t resist some of these photos that have shown up on Instagram of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Their longevity as a couple seems like an uncommon thing in their business.
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1996
Shot on film with Canon AE-1
This is one of the places Amy, Tom, and I visited when we volunteered at the NAMES Project’s AIDS Quilt display. Founded in 1869, the Corcoran Gallery of Art was the first institution in the United States created specifically as an art museum. The Beaux Arts building that housed it was designed by Ernest Flagg and opened in 1897.
When the museum closed in 2014, the National Gallery acquired approximately half of the Corcoran Collection, and the remaining objects were distributed to other museums in the Washington, D.C., area. The building is now home to the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, part of George Washington University. Located at 500 17th Street, NW, Washington, D.C. the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Since I was definitely in the mood for something more lighthearted than the previous movie I watched, last night, Tom and I streamed 1999’s Dick, a fun comedy with Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst as two teens who stumble into encounters at the Watergate facility on a fateful night. This happenstance later repeats on a class trip to the White House, when they encounter Nixon, his dog, and major players in the Watergate scandal. The timeline was compressed a bit, and it was a fun watch for me. I was an avid Watergate follower (and kept making little asides to Tom about how true facts were bent to involve the girls). It was also nostalgic to remember being a teen in that era, having fun and cutting up magazine pictures of our teen idols with a best friend. (Note to Lynne: Can you believe they love Bobby Sherman? Like Susan B.)
The dog Brunswick played the movie’s version of another Checkers (Nixon’s original dog Checkers, who died at the age of 13 in 1964, never lived in the White House, as Nixon was elected president in 1968).
There were three dogs in the Nixon White House: King Timahoe, Nixon’s Irish setter, Vicky, Julie’s French poodle, and Pasha, Tricia’s Yorkshire terrier. All three dogs wore flowers and participated in Tricia’s wedding.
I don’t remember if there’s a dog in my last RomCom DVD with a president to rewatch during DNC week, 1995’s The American President. I haven’t seen it for quite a while, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it again.
Directed and produced by Rob Reiner and written by Aaron Sorkin, Sorkin has said that the film influenced his later TV series, “West Wing,” which aired from 1999 to 2006. Websites attest that Sorkin says much of the first season was actually taken from material he edited out of the first draft of The American President’s script. Though it was highly recommended by Denece and Tom, I didn’t watch “West Wing” when it aired, but watched it in full a few years after it ended. Marika simultaneously watched it late at night (she from either New Orleans or Arkansas; I from The Compound). We Google-messaged each other with commentary while we watched each episode. Some of you may remember I joked that from November 2016 to January 2020, I chose to keep my head in an alternate universe wherein WW’s Josiah “Jed” Bartlet (Martin Sheen) was my president. =)
As predicted, I started reading this last night and finished it today. Once again, enough time has passed that things seemed fresh and new to me, and it was nice to read it without an inner critic. Some things are dated, of course; it was written over the years 2006-2008. But I no longer think the beginning is problematic. It may take a little effort for some readers: We’re being dropped into someone’s life as she deals with an automotive crisis and has time to think briefly of how she got to that point, plus she tells us about two encounters with the person who’s going to help her resolve said automotive crisis. Basically, we’re getting her backstory as she mentally processes it in three parts before the action begins.
Here’s another shot of the Super Full Moon. Wish I could have captured how it looks to the human eye, but my camera or camera skills just weren’t up to it.
As predicted, I did watch Moonstruck yesterday, and it was as entertaining as always. However, I’d said I thought the movie was quoted by members of the Revere family in my novel A Coventry Christmas. As the DVD played, I grabbed the novel from the library and started flipping through it to look for the quotes when my brain suddenly went, “D’oh! The Revere family isn’t in this book, they’re in A Coventry Wedding, and you are a moron who can’t remember your own novels.” I mean, it’s been a decade and a half since I wrote them, and they’re all set in my fictitious small town of Coventry, Texas, but still… I corrected yesterday’s post.
A little Baby Beanies hamster given to me in honor of my character’s hamster, Hamlet.
That little bit of page flipping lured me in, and after the movie was over, I began rereading A Coventry Christmas. It turns out that even though the Neverending Saga is not the same style or narrative (it’s not chick lit or contemporary romance or lighthearted), my characters were storytellers back then (as are my current characters) and there were a lot of them (that’s still true, too…bound to happen when you’re writing a series spanning decades).
The novel made me laugh, it gave me tears, and I read it all the way through. Afterward, I talked about it with Tim, Jim, and Tom and wondered if my satisfaction with it was vanity. The consensus was, NOPE. To paraphrase Tim, isn’t it the goal for a writer to be happy with what s/he creates? Of course, now I’m going to end up rereading A Coventry Wedding, which I remember as having a beginning that challenged some reviewers. Can’t please everyone…
I’m glad I watched my co-favorite RomCom movie and enjoyed reading A Coventry Christmas, because the movie I watched in recognition of DNC week was an emotional and mental about-face. It did have some comedy and even had some romance (I think this is the first time I’ve seen a movie with Timothée Chalamet, and his character was one of the movie’s redeeming features for me–really, it’s full of good actors), but mostly 2021’s Don’t Look Up just made me sad.
If you like short stories, before I changed my sidebar links to various merchants, Houston-based and otherwise, I always had a link to Jeffrey Ricker’s website. ← If you visit that link and sign up for his newsletter (trust me, you won’t be inundated with e-mail from him, and what you do get will be informative, thoughtful, and often humorous, because that’s basically the man I know), you’ll get the opportunity to download a pdf file with five of his short stories.
There’s a reason why Timothy and I included Jeffrey in the anthologies we edited, and why I’ll always read him, even when he writes outside the genres I usually read. Good writing is good writing.
Yesterday, brace yourself, I didn’t watch any RomComs or any movie at all. I did other things, mainly working on my manuscript. Slowly, but progress is progress. I also took a break to glance through the pages of Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal. I followed the direction on a double page to create a nonstop line. Then I realized it looked like “The Long and Winding Road,” so I paged through my sticker books and sheets and turned it into a journey with roadsigns (the “roadsigns” come from Adam J. Kurtz’s sticker book).
Today, along with mending Eva’s favorite dog bed, I watched one romantic comedy, my beloved Notting Hill from 1999 (twenty-five years old, geez). I was reminded again of one of my favorite lines, when Anna and William discuss Russian-French artist Marc Chagall’s painting La Mariée:
“Happiness isn’t happiness without a violin-playing goat,” Anna Scott, Notting Hill.
Damn right.
Speaking of violinists, in the Neverending Saga chapter in progress, I reference a character who plays violin. Seems like a nudge to get back to my manuscript. Maybe before bedtime, I’ll watch 1989’s Cousins with Ted Danson, Isabella Rossellini, Sean Young, and William Petersen.
Oh, yeah, bonus: In Notting Hill, Hugh Grant’s character owns a bookstore.
The toy chest overflowed long ago. There are toys in every room of the house except maybe the kitchen and bathrooms. We never had children, but our friends and family did. The toy chest is never this organized and never left open, or four dogs would turn Houndstooth Hall into the Great Beanie Babies® & Friends Massacre.
I did watch my Fried Green Tomatoes DVD yesterday evening, realizing that I’d never watched this extended version before. Then, before bed, I watched the extras including at least one filmed-but-unused scene (I loved it, and it was similar to a scene in the book which I’d found particularly moving), the director’s commentary, and interviews and thoughts of many of the actors. It triggered such a yearning for me to teach this novel along with the film, and all the ways I could encourage students to analyze and break down storytelling devices and choices. As a result of that yearning, I tormented Tom for at least an hour-long discussion of it after he finished work today (just one of who knows how many reasons our friends call him “poor Tom”).
There was also an interview with Fannie Flagg, and she spoke of the years a writer spends alone in a room with all those characters. You never actually feel alone; they are your people, your friends, always there with you, their level of enthusiasm at your same level. It’s why you feel protective of them when other people ignore, misjudge, and criticize them.
Then I went back to something I started last night and finished tonight. I thought of the kitchens in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (novel and movie). I thought of the kitchens of so many women from my life… Mother, Aunt Lola, Aunt Drexel, Terri, Debby, Mary, Pollye, Granny H, Gran, Elnora, Lynne, Liz, Amanda, Lil, Audrey, Debbie, Juanita, Carreme, Helen B, Kathy, Helen L, Chris, Geraldine, Amy, Pat, Lindsey, Rhonda… There are, of course, also men like Daddy, Jerry, David, Timothy, Jim, Steve, Jeff, James, John, Craig, and Tom. I know I’m leaving out names (a couple even deliberately–they won’t know or wouldn’t care). These kitchens are where we cooked, baked, ate, shared stories, sat around the table, played games and cards, shared confidences, laughed–OH, the laughing–and even shared our tears and troubles now and then. I thought of the kitchens of my characters, who are carrying on that tradition, as I try to carry on the tradition of storytelling through them.
An homage to the kitchens that nourish our lives in far more ways than only the food they offer us.
As I colored, I imagined stories attached to items on that cabinet and realized I could write a novella using those.
As predicted, I did watch Moonstruck yesterday, and it was as entertaining as always. However, I’d said I thought the movie was quoted by members of the Revere family in my novel A Coventry Christmas. As the DVD played, I grabbed the novel from the library and started flipping through it to look for the quotes when my brain suddenly went, “D’oh! The Revere family isn’t in this book, they’re in A Coventry Wedding, and you are a moron who can’t remember your own novels.” I mean, it’s been a decade and a half since I wrote them, and they’re all set in my fictitious small town of Coventry, Texas, but still… I corrected yesterday’s post.
I’m glad I watched my co-favorite RomCom movie and enjoyed reading A Coventry Christmas, because the movie I watched in recognition of DNC week was an emotional and mental about-face. It did have some comedy and even had some romance (I think this is the first time I’ve seen a movie with Timothée Chalamet, and his character was one of the movie’s redeeming features for me–really, it’s full of good actors), but mostly 2021’s Don’t Look Up just made me sad.
Yesterday, brace yourself, I didn’t watch any RomComs or any movie at all. I did other things, mainly working on my manuscript. Slowly, but progress is progress. I also took a break to glance through the pages of Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal. I followed the direction on a double page to create a nonstop line. Then I realized it looked like “The Long and Winding Road,” so I paged through my sticker books and sheets and turned it into a journey with roadsigns (the “roadsigns” come from 
