79Trombones Are Too Many...

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The server for my website only serves a band 76 trombones in width.

Last night posting all those photos, I tried to squeeze 78 or 79 trombones into the parade.

The cruel server strangled several of my trombonists so that the band’s width was back to below 76 and some of my pages would not post.

That, after I fought the thing all night, is the way I understand what happened.

However, Donald, who is a computer person, did something or another to adjust the band’s width and now all my files march along just fine.

It would have been so much easier if the Dummies books had just explained about the number of trombonists allowed to live on a website.

Anyhow, now that that problem is solved I’m ready to take a nap.

Read a Florida crime novel, Virgin Heat, by Laurence Shames (Hyperion, 1997). It’s about the daughter of a crime boss and her father. Shames touches on a feeling I often have about my own children but I’ve never been able to articulate. Here’s a quote:

“Then Paul Amaro said, ‘Whatever I did, Angelina, I tried to do the best for you.’

“Even to himself it sounded lame, and no less because it happened to be true. But it was what every parent felt when looking at his child and seeing the wounds, the disappointment; when looking at the world and knowing that one had done nothing to make it any less unkind, any less fickle or grudging in its comforts. Paul Amaro looked at his daughter and understood that for every pain he thought he’d spared her, another had been heedlessly inflicted; for every opportunity he’d yearned to give her, some other path had been closed off. Suddenly he felt very sorry. Not for her exactly. Not for himself. Not even for anything he’d done. Just sorry, like regret was taking him over the way spores and lichen take over the fibers of a tree that’s dying from the inside out…

“Yet the loss he felt was tempered by the memory of their talk at Flagler House. She loved him for what he’d tried to do; forgave him for what he’d done. How many fathers could expect more?”

What a beautiful passage!

While I wish I did not often feel that way, I wish I could write so well.