chores

My daughter and her husband will arrive tonight and spend time in our small house as they get their feet under them: Rich, Olivia's husband, has a new job in nearby Hartford and so they are moving from Pennsylvania, and where they will put down more permanent roots has not yet been settled. They will stay here....

As a result, there are chores today -- chores that would make an energetic (wo)man snigger, but chores that look uphill from this aging vantage point.

-- Wash the sheets and various other laundry.
-- Clean the bathroom.
-- Vote.

Tomorrow, perhaps, or perhaps within the subsequent seven days, a book about the Zen Buddhist sociopath Eido Shimano is due out from Atlantic Magazine Books. The fact that it is written by a New York Times reporter, Mark Oppenheimer, means that a certain stamp of approval will be granted to all those who felt Shimano's lash in one way or another during a period of 50 years or so ... felt the sting and had their cries and concerns ignored. As with the airing of the Vatican's pedophile proclivities, I doubt if the book will provide much relief to those who suffered ... but it's a start.

Chores.