Yesterday I was checking the dates of Love in the Time of Cholera to add to my blog and i got tangled in some other facts that I enjoyed. I’m not sure now what led me on in the first place, but the Book of the Month Club (founded 1926) popped up and I thought of Clifton Fadiman who I remembered in later years was a judge/juror on the panel that selected books. Did you know that Lolly Willowes was the very first selection (in 1926)? I wasn’t alive then, but I think I have it. I looked up Wikipedia and it doesn’t sound familiar. I’ll think about that tomorrow. Back to Clifton Fadiman.

I admired him. I didn’t have much access to serious literature or research. I was a stay-at-home mother with four young children and I was grateful and hungry for whatever intellectual stimulus I could find. Fadiman was more available. I have a number of stray memories I’m going to have to pursue, but not now. I’m still writing/finishing my screenplay and I have to get back to work.

Stick around.

Here’s an interesting message from my ATW (Around The World) friend:

"Did you notice that yesterday was a palindrome date? I hope so, since none of us will be around for the next one. Yesterday was February 2, 2020, or 02/02/2020 (the same backwards as forwards). The last one was 11/11/1111. The next one will be many hundreds of years from now.”

Isn’t that interesting? I hadn’t noticed and I usually do, things like that, only simpler, like the 19th day of a matching year (2019), or better, the tenth day of the tenth month of a matching year - 2010. That, of corse, was the thinking behind Armistice Day: the eleventh hour of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the 20th century (1911). Oh, and the Summer Olympics in Beijing—remember?—began on the eighth day of the eighth month of the year 2008.

My ATW friend is the woman I met on my Around The World cruise (four years ago now or is it five?). Some of you may remember that I had an RFH (Roommate From Hell), but I met June on that trip and she has been my friend ever since—such a lovely person. She has kept on world-cruising (up and past the Diamond Level in cruises) with a wonderful man she met on that first one. They are living out the happy ending of Love in the Time of Cholera,* cruising forever. June could write a book—has, in fact, in terms of volume and interest—about their trips. I am lucky enough to be on her email list. She writes a detailed, memorable travelog from the excursions they go on at each stop. I have printed them all and keep them in a binder.

Nice reading for my old age!

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014). Published in English in 1988, it won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. A movie adaptation in English was released in 2007.