March 13, 2021 DON'T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME

YOU KNOW YOU'RE GETTING OLDER WHEN:        

•   You read People magazine AND DON'T RECOGNIZE THE CELEBRITIES. 
•   You say something to your kids that YOUR MOTHER USED TO SAY TO YOU.
•  It takes you TWICE as long to look HALF as good.
• You think you have more patience--but you really--JUST DON'T CARE ANYMORE.
• You look for your phone for an hour and it's in your pocket.
•  Your address book contains mostly DEAD people. Maybe just having an address book makes YOU old??
• You hear SNAP, CRACKLE, POP when you walk down the stairs. 
•  The "Oldies Station" is NOW playing the music you grew up with.

Yup--That about sums up my week.  Now on to bigger and better things. I'm a huge fan of Richard Russo, so I'm trying to read all of his books. I recently finished Nobody's Fool which was written in 1993 and made into a film staring Paul Newman in 1994. The novel is set in upstate New York in a tiny blue collar town called Bath and centers on the main character Donald "Sully" Sullivan. Sully is a 60 year old divorced  man with a bad knee who lives in a rented room above his landlady, Beryle Peoples. Because of his ailing health, Sully has difficulty working, but he is generally a construction worker when he can find the work and enough pain pills to make working bearable. Sully also seems to have commitment issues--an on again off again affair with a married woman and a son he could never commit to being a father to--because he's haunted. Haunted by his dead father, a mean drunk who abused him when he was a kid. Sully has never forgiven his father so in a sense--he's stuck. After his estranged son, Peter, returns to Bath, Sully is forced to face the choices he's made. This is a novel really about a small town, with a bunch of eccentric wonderful characters just trying to figure out life--which at times can be very complicated. It's about 560 pages or a 7 mile run that is well worth your time.