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Weather: Partly cloudy. Cooler with highs in the upper 60s. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the mid 50s. North winds around 5 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Happy Thanksgiving. Nothing is going on today outside of your homes, dining rooms and dens.
Trash pick-up in Palm Coast Suspended today: Residents on FCC Environmental’s garbage and recycling services scheduled for pick-up today should not put their trash out at the curb. FCC is closed and will not run trucks. There will be no disruption to regularly scheduled collections on Friday, November 24. For those with residential trash collection set for Thursday the service provider has arranged for a double pickup on the next scheduled service day. Additional details about FCC holiday schedules can be found here.
In Coming Days:
Nov. 25: Tree-lighting ceremony: The City of Palm Coast is inviting residents and visitors to the 11th Annual Tree Lighting Ceremony at Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave., Palm Coast from 6 to 9 p.m. Join Santa, the Palm Coast City Council, and the Rotary Club of Flagler County as they count down to the lighting of a beautiful tree and celebrate the arrival of the most wonderful time of the year! Details here.
Staring Nov. 25: Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: Somewhere in the very deep recesses of history there was a person–we don’t know if woman, man or in between, but I imagine it was a woman: the novel was really driven by women readers; how could the original book not have been so, as she hunted the imagination while men hunted lesser prey?–who late on an autumn’s evening did her cousin, the inventor of the wheel, one better: she picked up the various maple-leafy decorations she’d made in the previous season (carefully, because they’d become brittle), pondered over their sensuously undular look in her palms and decided not to discard them, as she had each year before the first snows. She would collect them. At least for a while longer: she was pregnant. She wanted to show her child the leaves after birth, there not being much else by way of entertainment. But she’d want them all in one place. She wasn’t interested in rustling them up all over the cave at every feeding. She’d had an idea that day, when her hands got sticky from resin picked up from a log one of her husbands had used, unsuccessfully, to swat at a spider (the same log he’d unsuccessfully used to try to swat away her sixth husband; he was her third, but had poor counting skills). The resin had, as always, been a sticky mess. When she picked up one of her leaves, the leaf had stuck to her hand. She had a hard time ungluing it, as we’d say today. It was only at dusk that it struck her, the way most ideas did back then (an early version of mail, without a postman). She would use the resin to bind together the dozen or so leaves, the leaves she’d discovered were like a year’s oracles. She liked to read the leaves’ veins and shapes, interrogate their changing colors and texture, each a Sheherazadian tale before her time. Worth collecting, preserving. She applied the resin to the side of one leaf and stuck it to another, repeating the process. She would not know it for a while, but she had created the first book. Her child would not be the first reader: we’ve been reading since before Olduvai—skies, fires, landscapes, storms, faces, pets’ curls: we are surrounded by epics. Compared to our pre-historic ancestors, who read their surroundings like scholars, we’re illiterates, we’re primitive. But she’d taken that further step, capturing her surroundings for her own pleasures, remaking nature to her own uses. She was the first book-binder, the first book reader. Her child was the second, at least for those weeks before the winter claimed the book, turned it to crumbles. She may or may not have repeated the process the following year. She surely was succeeded by others across centuries who eventually had the same idea. But there had to be a first. She was the first. It is for that woman, our ancestral binder, the book’s Eve, daily apple of my eyes, that I am thankful.
—P.T.
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She cooked, baked, did the washing, put the shopping away, ironed, cleaned, tidied, washed the dishes, sliced veg-etables, kneaded dough. But when the apartment was perfectly tidy, the washing up was done, and the laundry had been folded and put away neatly, then my mother curled up in her corner and read. At ease with her body, breathing slowly and gently, she sat on the sofa and read. With her bare feet tucked under her legs, she read. Bent over the book that was propped on her knees, she read. Her back curved, her neck bent forward, her shoulders drooping, her whole body shaped like a crescent moon, she read. With her face, half hidden by her dark hair, leaning over the page, she read. She read every evening, while I played outside in the yard and my father sat at his desk writing his research on cramped index cards, and she also read after the supper things were washed up, she read while my father and I sat together at his desk, my head slanting, lightly resting on his shoulder, while we sorted stamps, checked them in the catalogue, and stuck them in the album, she read after I had gone to bed and Father had gone back to his little cards, she read after the shutters had been shut and the sofa had been turned over to reveal the double bed that was hidden inside it, and she went on reading even after the ceiling light had been switched off and my father had taken off his glasses, turned his back to her, and fallen into the sleep of well-meaning people who firmly believe that everything will turn out well, and she went on reading: she suffered from insomnia that grew worse with time, until in the last year of her life various doctors saw fit to prescribe strong pills and all sorts of sleeping potions and solutions and recommended a fortnight’s real rest in a family hotel in Safed or the Health Fund sanatorium in Arza.
–From Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003). The paragraph is in reference to his mother, who killed herself when he was 12.
Pogo says
@And now this — too