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Weather: Mostly cloudy. A slight chance of showers in the morning, then a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Not as cool with highs in the upper 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Friday Night: Cloudy with a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Lows in the lower 60s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. See previous podcasts here. Today: Carrie Baird, executive director of Flagler Cares, and Trish Giaccone, executive director of the Family Life Center. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
The Blue 24 Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
First Friday in Flagler Beach, the monthly festival of music, food and leisure, is scheduled for this evening at Downtown’s Veterans Park, 105 South 2nd Street, from 5 to 9 p.m. The event is overseen by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and run by Laverne M. Shank Jr. and Surf 97.3
‘Tuck Everlasting,’ at Limelight Theater, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. Tickets: $22.50. Book here. 7:30 p.m., except on Sundays, when the show is at 2 p.m. What would you do if you had all eternity? Eleven-year-old Winnie Foster yearns for a life of adventure beyond her white picket fence, but not until she becomes unexpectedly entwined with the Tuck Family does she get more than she could have imagined. When Winnie learns of the magic behind the Tuck’s unending youth, she must fight to protect their secret from those who would do anything for a chance at eternal life. As her adventure unfolds, Winnie faces an extraordinary choice: return to her life, or continue with the Tucks on their infinite journey.
Notebook: In my more senile moments especially, I don’t always understand the obsession with pretending that age doesn’t matter, that we can always be, act, think, behave as young as we were in our prime, that age is just a state of mind. It’s a very American thing, this age denialism in a country where age is admittedly, paradoxically, treated like a disease sometimes, which in so many respects it often is: age itself isn’t the disease, but to be aged is a riddle of diseases, which is really saying the same thing. I keep thinking of Donald Hall’s memoir of being over 80: A Carnival of Losses. That says it all. (Hall’s description of Garrison Keillor’s face: “It bulges here, it bulges there, possibly assembled from spare parts.”) Life is not being prolonged. Disease is being contained, it’s being better treated. Two very different things. Our cells haven’t changed. They’re not made for the centenary life. We may be more capable of getting older, but at what price? “Once at a literary event I got talking to an elderly woman,” Knausgaard tells us in his Summer. “She said, ‘You might think that life is short, but you’re just in your forties. I am over ninety and I assure you, life is long. Life is very long.’” I got quite the backlash for my piece on Biden’s age a couple of weeks ago–how time flies: it feels like I wrote it a few hours ago–especially by those who didn’t read past the first line about Carter, or the first paragraphs, as most readers generally don’t. I can’t blame them: reading me must age them, especially when it takes half a year to make it from the beginning to the end of a piece. I would have liked to see a younger candidate, but if it’s Biden we’re stuck with, I just wish he’d stop dancing–shuffling–around the obvious and just level with us, tell us, show us, that he’s well aware he’s old, but that it’s not the end of the world, his or ours. Not yet, anyway. “… time, then, had continued to bring forth changes in its furtive, unobservable, secret, and yet bustling way.” So says Thomas Mann in his Magic Mountain, always the final word on time, that endless, and endlessly cruel, enigma.
—P.T.
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“The most terrible thing about getting old isn’t that death approaches, or that one’s health deteriorates and what used to be simple and easy becomes laborious. Those are things one is prepared for. The most terrible thing is that one disappears. I think that is especially so for women. Nothing had prepared me for that, that no one would look at me. Early this morning I went to the supermarket to buy some groceries. On my way home I walked through the park. I sat down on a bench. A young man, he was maybe around twenty-five, sat down next to me. He had curly hair and a moustache which didn’t suit him. He didn’t see me, even though his body was half a metre from mine. He was leaning forward, with his hands on his lap, gazing up above the trees. He was dressed in a pair of very short shorts, red with a white stripe down the side, and he had a white T-shirt on. He looked like he had been playing football or tennis, but he wasn’t carrying any equipment with him, so it was probably just the way he dressed. Well, he saw me, of course. He saw an old woman with wispy grey hair and a face full of wrinkles. She caught his attention about as much as a pigeon on the gravel in front of him would have done. It is this lack of interest I am talking about. If he had only known what I was thinking! I looked at his hairy ankles and his compact powerful body, and I thought, oh, to be able to lay one’s hand on his chest. My thoughts are not dry and old, they are as young as when I was sixteen, they are just as alive. But when I look into the eyes of a man, I am no one. That is the terrible thing about getting old.”
–From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Summer (2018).
Pogo says
@Notebook, GC, and quote
So true. So let’s get busy living, or…
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (even paid by the word hacks, who would be canceled by today’s politically correct critics, have their moments)
Pogo says
@FWIW