Rain, Roses and a Florida Flashback

We did get some rain yesterday evening, thank goodness. It wasn't much, but it was slow and steady over a period of hours, and when I look outside this morning I see everything is pleasantly damp. The world seems refreshed. There's a better than 50-50 chance for more tomorrow and Thursday. Bring it on!

Before the rain came, I took Olga up to the cemetery for a leisurely walk. Here she is in front of the rose garden, which is at its peak at this time of year. There was lots of ball-chasing and grass-rolling.

Otherwise, I read. I finished David Baddiel's short book "Jews Don't Count," about modern antisemitism. He argues that while society is highly attuned to racism against people of color, and hatred toward LGBTQ people, it has become numb toward subtle (and even not-so-subtle) antisemitism. This is partly because there's an inherently antisemitic perception that Jews are no longer a disadvantaged group -- that they are, in fact, wealthy and privileged and even "in control." But he goes on to challenge this thinking and illustrate the many ways antisemitism still flourishes, largely by recounting exchanges from Twitter, the dark underbelly of human thought and expression. It's an interesting book and food for thought.

I also started "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, which I've never read before. It consistently lands on lists of challenged books (and indeed was one of the books recently challenged in our own library) so I've been eager to see why there's such a fuss. I'm only 45 pages in, but so far it has only reaffirmed my opinion that Morrison was an amazing writer.

I forgot to mention that my most recent old-Florida postcard came a few weeks ago, bearing a big number 6 and a cropped version of this photo. It's from June 1968, depicting two FSU students tubing at Wakulla Springs. The caption reads: "WHAT A PASS FOR A QUARTERBACK - Calling the play for the afternoon Steve Maresco does the 'tea honors' for Cookie Cook while drifting down the stream. Home was never like this... on a Sunday afternoon."

I'm not even sure what that means -- home games, I guess? Whatever. The photographer was Dan Stainer, from the collection of the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper. This isn't a scan of the postcard -- instead I pulled the photo off the web site of the Florida State Archives. (It's in the public domain.)

Here's an alternate version of the same shot. I like this one better, don't you? I wonder where Steve Maresco and Cookie Cook are these days?