Sunday--Doing Nothing or Being No Place.

Sundays often present some options that the rest of the week does not.  What are we doing, where are we going?  Despite my best efforts to leave Sunday wide open, my better half will start asking the day before.  On a pretty day, do I really want to commit to driving someplace?  Driving is driving, especially if you are not going anyplace new.  Our outside temperature will be over seventy degrees, with plenty of sunshine.  We could stay at home, ride our bikes or walk on the beach, although that actually will be nothing new either.  Trying hard not to be complacent about activities that aren't available to everyone in December, but it's looking like our most likely alternative is going nowhere.  I say being not very active helps us contemplate the here and now, which is all we have anyway.  

Another common Sunday activity--watching football on TV--is pleasant enough, but we'd have to go to a sports bar somewhere to see the only team playing today that I want to see (Da Bears).  Last week we met a couple visiting for a few weeks from NY at the bar while we watched a game and they picked up carryout ribs (from the best barbecue place in Hilton Head).    Chances are we would not see them again anyway.  Getting caught up in football can be fun, if your team is succeeding.  But, how you feel about it whether they succeed or not is up to you.  Sometimes it's just fun to be in a group watching.

We could sit at the beach and read, but that's more of a summer activity--the breeze this time of year makes reading a challenge--blowing the pages around fiercely.  As I think about it, I am behind in my reading.  I have no less than five I am in the process of reading.  I can do that with non-fiction books.  TIme to finish one, wouldn't you say?  I don't know, keeping them all going at once, you cannot help but see their interconnectedness--in part because you don't remember where the earlier thought you are connecting came from when you have that many books going.  But, interconnectedness is another facet of life I like to revisit on Sundays.

Is this what depression is like?  You look at all the possibilities, then do nothing?  It seems like I read every day.  I have thought for some time that Sundays are for doing nothing much--if that's what pleases you.  Doesn't sound depressing to me.  I am however married to someone who wants to be "doing something" every day.  It's probably good for me, as I might otherwise retreat into books and football.  Together we achieve a kind of balance, doing nothing or going somewhere, being no place or doing something.  Today, I'll try to do and go while being no place in particular.  Or will I go someplace and do nothing special?  The trick is to focus on the rest of the world and not on your own self, which is mostly a figment of your mind and imagination.  Either way, it's a Sunday mindset.  I'd better go...

Read, Travel, Read

If you have followed some of my earlier posts, you know I have started to search out books and stories set in the locations I plan to visit.  This time around, I visited San Francisco.  

Picking a book or two of fiction set in the location you will visit turns out to add layers to he experience. This time, it was San Francisco and two mysteries.  One related the tale of the murder of a man so obsessed with Sherlock Holmes that he renovated two stories of his townhouse as if they were in 19th century London.  Even more interesting, homicide detectives discover that he had found a story for his collection purportedly written by A. Conan Doyle during an actual visit to SF in 1924.  His body was found in the Marin Headlands in the exact location in which the fictional victim in his story was found.  The other novel is a story of blackmail, politics and murders among people at the top of the political machine in San Francisco.  

I read the story about the Sherlock Holmes collector before I visited SF, and learned the history of the Marin Headlands, where the Golden Gate Bridge lands after crossing the Golden Strait.  I also learned about  Russian Hill, and other neighborhoods in the city.  Once there, we rode the hop on-hop off tour bus across the GGB, and cable cars up and down Telegraph Hill and walked Fisherman's Wharf, all of which were part of the story.  It gave me a small edge on the sense of the place, but there was little that made it personal.     

After coming home, I began the second book and found it chock full of references to places I had seen--Haight-Ashbury, Fisherman's Wharf, the Sausalito Ferry, Nob Hill, CIty Hall, the federal court house and more.  Now, I have a story or a scene associated with many of these places in my head.  Once again, the trip is enriched by sandwiching it between the two books I read.  I have a story associated with many of the places I saw.  I guess some day in my old age, I may even confuse the two and "recollect" a much more exciting story of my visit--not that the place needs to be enhanced--it was a great visit.    

We have only one trip planned for certain the rest of this year--to St. Louis.  Now the challenge here will be to really find a story that enhances that trip, since I know that city very well already.  I am thinking something historical may work, but I am starting the search with an open mind.