A Book and a Movie

The sun came out yesterday morning, much to my surprise because the forecast called for a cloudy day. Olga got in several hours of sunbathing, which always makes me happy, and I sat next to her and read more Barbra. (I'm up to "Yentl," Streisand's movie from the early '80s, about halfway through the book.)

I also did two loads of laundry and wandered in the garden, trying to take a picture of the sleeping Olga from a different and more interesting angle. I pictured her with our Gallery Valentin dahlia (top) and with our hollyhock, showing the sun coming through the petals (above). It was fun to experiment.

One of our rose bushes, the salmon-colored one with the wonderful scent, recently formed a bud that didn't manage to bloom. The bud shriveled on the bush and when I touched it yesterday it disintegrated in my hand. It still smelled nice, though. The petals look more yellow than salmon, but trust me, the adult flowers are mostly pink.

(Maybe I need to call Barbra's rose expert? Will he bring me ice cream from Santa Barbara?)

I took Olga for a brief walk up to the trash piles on West End Lane, her favorite destination these days. I tried to get her to go to the cemetery but we didn't even make it past the corner. I think our cemetery-walking days may be over.

Finally, in the afternoon, I rented "Up the Sandbox," a Barbra movie from the early '70s. In her book, Streisand told the backstory of several movies she did during that time that I realized I'd never seen -- "The Owl and the Pussycat," "Up the Sandbox" and "For Pete's Sake." So I'm going to make an effort to watch them.

"Up the Sandbox," which is based on a book, tells the story of a young New York mother who has a sort of Walter Mitty-like fantasy life as she struggles with the tedium of keeping house and raising small children. When she discovers she's pregnant with a third child, she must decide whether to keep it or not. She goes to a clinic, walking down shadowy hallways populated by somewhat menacing figures, and ultimately winds up in a climactic fantasy battle with her fellow patients and a grotesque doctor. I won't give away the ending.

It was an interesting movie, but very much of its time. Once or twice there was some casually denigrating language for LGBTQ+ people, for example. Streisand said in her book that the film is not about abortion, but that seems disingenuous -- it was about the lives of women in a broader sense, but the pregnancy and abortion question were certainly at the center of the plot.

And now, back to work!