Left to my own devices

Not long ago, I watched the 1993 film, The Remains of the Day . Based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, it's a Merchant Ivory Production about life at a British estate, pre-WWII. It stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, as the butler and housekeeper, respectively. There is the most subtle element of potentially romantic feelings between the two, but Hopkins's character is far too repressed to ever be able to acknowledge them. Today is the 25th anniversary of my father's passing. There's rarely a week that goes by where I don't think of him -- what his life would have been like had it not been cut short by cancer, how our father-son relationship would have evolved as I'd grown more into adulthood, what he would've thought of everything that's happened since August of 1997, etc. I've also come to realize that he's one of the reasons I tend to be drawn to emotionally unavailable men in fiction and, sometimes, in real life.

Today is National Arbor Day , and folks are generally encouraged to go out and plant trees and some such. I'm all for it. While I enjoy living in a moderately urban environment, the fact that it is suffused with so many trees is something to treasure. To that end, I am today reminded of Mildred Sims, my teacher for both second and third grades, and the tree our class planted in Clark Park many moons ago. From 1983 to 1985, Millie Sims was not only my teacher, but an adult whom I looked up to (both figuratively and literally). She was smart, fun, warm but knew how to keep her distance, and had a supremely endearing personality. She is to date the only person to have gotten me to eat celery (by smearing peanut butter in the hollow of the stick, placing raisins on it, and calling it 'Ants on a Log'). She brought local weather celebrity Judy Fraser to our class one day to discuss meteorology, which I thought was one of the coolest things ever.