For dinner we had chicken tacos. The tortillas were old, so I fried them in a little olive oil. It makes the tacos so much better to have fried tortillas. So I take any excuse.
It was okay to have fried tacos because I was starving.We'd spent the previous two hours at the cinema, viewing a movie called " A Better Life." This movie was, in a nutshell, corny. Ostensibly it was the story of a poor inmigrante mexicano in LA, trying to make a life for himself and provide for his son a better life than he'd had so far. The fact that this migrante spoke perfect English and communicated in English with his son--well, the movie really lost me there. No Mexican has ever learned English that well in just six years spent at manual labor in gardens of Los Angeles, in the first place. That he'd bother to converse with his high school aged son in English just for the convenience of American moviegoers was the last straw. No, it didn't happen. The only good part was the last scene was when the immigrant, having been deported to Mexico after a lot of shenanigans involving a truck, is returning to LA on foot with a lot of his compatriots--returning "home," to the only home he has on this earth. I could buy that. But it was too late.
Too late.
Now to the books of the title. Lee Child is the author, and someone had given Ben a handful of thrillers,one with "Bad Luck and Misfortune,"in the title. These books are purchased at airports by persons desperate to occupy their minds with something other than their present reality. Anyway, that book is GREAT....very readable...very suspenseful. Not too much gore or prurient action...very very good. So next, I read the first book in the series, The Killing Floor, and enjoyed it a lot. It is a book that you cannot put down, and that is a very desirable quality in the circumstances described above. And the author can write, very well. I brought the third book home with me and it succumbed to the very forces I have mentioned as being so undesirable in books in a series--over-familiarity. Over-familiarity of the hero and his mannerisms or quirks...his taste in women...his moral code...his chivalry...and his determination to revenge himself on everyone who crosses his path in the wrong way. He's a killer, folks. His name is Jack Reacher and he makes Elvis Cole and his strong stalwart sidekick Joe Pike look like amateurs.
But--over-familiarity is a killer too, and as a result I will never know what happened to the Vice President of the United States back in eighty-something....
The story is a story whose title has slipped my mind, as has the author's name. I read it in one of those compendia of stories that are culled from all over as "Best Stories of....," in all different genres and years. In this story, the heroine is in Spain perfecting her Spanish and struggling with the subjunctive case of verbs. In the background of her thoughts if the lover she left at home who was crumbling before her eyes as a result of the onset of mental illness. Now, the subjunctive case is the form used for the unknowable, the improbable, the possible. For life, in other words..It's too bad we stopped using it in English. It opens up the mystery of our world as nothing else does. People "take" Spanish, and learn it from the Indicative point of view---our English viewpoint---that's the way it is, so take it or leave it. However, that is NOTthe way life is. Life is unpredictable, un=understandable, unknowable. You can't pin it down in the Indicative Case. It's NOT the way it is, and you have to take it. Thus, the Subjunctive Case, which tells us as we speak that we don't really have a clue, folks. Anyway, her bewilderment and sorrow and tragic sense of loss as she loses her lover to his destroyed mind--are perfectly expressed in her struggles with the Subjunctive in Spanish. Good story. I keep looking for it but haven't found it yet in my welter of books. If you love language as I do, Spanish and English both....I hope you find and appreciate this remarkable short story....Hasta manana, and..Buenas noches a todos. YAZZYBEL
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