Summer Reading

Richmond Public Library’s catalog is on-line! You can look for your book before leaving home and renew on line. The program is much more powerful and intuitive to use than pokey old “RichCat” -- plus, no more amber screen! You have to set up an account, which I will do after I replace my shredded key card.

As for me, I am still plowing through Baseball and Richmond. It will be a good reference, but it’s not a delightful read. It gives a sense of the ebb and flow of early professional and minor league ball, and of the perpetual struggle between Love of the Game and It’s a Business -- but that's about it. On my nightstand, I have a book on diners, bowling alleys & trailer parks. I’ve read shorter pieces on all of these places and already understand the chronology of their development. This writer goes further by focusing on class. More than I realized, diners were assumed to be the province of the working class man, well into the 1950s. I guess it’s one more change 1950s Teen Culture made to our world.

Yesterday, I read this week’s New Yorker at the hipster pool, with Alex and Felix. A startling number of people I know belong to this modest little club in the subdivision across from Willow Oaks Country Club. A startling number of my peers and friends have become those skirted-bathing suit, tot-toting Moms. Does the butterfly tattoo in the middle of that one’s back cancel out the fact that the bottom of her bikini is a skirt? Was she wearing it ironically? (everything Gen Xers do id ironic, right?); her figure appeared quite respectable. Expecting Alex, of course, looks fab in her skirted maternity suit. Luckily, another family invited me to go today, so I can further my research.

Capital City Weather: 90 and clear.