On Susie Bright’s substack today, 1/14:
Today is the Clinically-Proven Worst Day of the Year
It’s not just you — January’s third week contains the Worst Day of the Year. You’re probably in pretty tough shape.
According to the brightest publicists and mathematical statisticians, today sucks. The Clinically Proven Worst Day of the Year is Blue Monday, also known as the start of the third week in January. Terrible Tuesday isn’t far behind. And WTF Wednesday . . . you’re not getting out of it until February 1st.
I can verify that I’m in pretty bad shape, just barely managing, with things going wrong left and right, and with my hands barely working (I lose control of them and drop stuff; and can’t manage to pick up and hold books of any size, which is a real problem for someone in my business). Meanwhile, I’m deaf in my left ear again, and there’s a rat on my patio.
I’m on my third caregiver in a week — I can’t tell you how time-consuming and exhausting it is to get acquainted with and break in a new caregiver, instead of freeing me up to do my work it eats up all my time — and the third one is now half an hour late, oh god is he even coming at all? (Answer: no. He has a family emergency, so caregiver #2 is coming back just for this day, though she has barely learned about my house and how it works and what help I need.)
And the wider world? The juggernaut of the incoming Grabpussy administration, Los Angeles neighborhoods in flames.
I despair.
But I already knew about the awfulness of this time of the year.
The Mournful Valley. From my 1/16/20 posting “At the rim of the Mournful Valley, singing”:
January 16th today. At the very rim of the Mournful Valley. From my 1/21/15 posting “Antonio Soler and the Mournful Valley”:
Not long ago, WQXR [NYC FM radio station specializing in classical music] played some keyboard sonatas by Padre Antonio Soler, a favorite composer of mine since my student days at MIT but one not especially widely known. That tweaked bittersweet memories of those days in Cambridge MA, especially powerful at this time of the year, in what I’ve come to think of the Mournful Valley of Mid-Winter, in between January 17th, the anniversary of Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s death ([in 2020, the 35th anniversary; she died at age 47]) and January 22nd, my man Jacques Transue’s birthday ([in 2020, his 78th]; Jacques died in 2003) — and with celebrations of love, for Valentines Day, very much in the air.
In the context of the Mournful Valley, VDay is definitely bittersweet. On the one hand, I’ve been alone since 1998, when J went into a dementia care facility. On the other hand, VDay is Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday, and that makes the holiday a very big thing.
For discussion of Soler, see my earlier posting. But there’s more music, the theme song of the Mournful Valley: the Christmas carol “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”.
After Ann died, we had a wake, and a memorial service that Ann herself had blocked out, with organ music of her own choice, including that Christmas carol and some New Orleans jazz funeral music. (She had some months to prepare for death, and used much of that time to smooth things for the rest of us and to say goodbye to family and old friends.)
(The music playing during her last moments was the Mendelssohn String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20, which still seems to me to be a work of extraordinary warmth and affirmation, a little miracle. See my 1/8/16 posting “Some favorite music”, about the Mendelssohn Octet and the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Handel.)
The night she died was fabulously cold, and then it got colder, so these funereal events did indeed unroll in the bleak mid-winter.
(Meanwhile, Jacques’s birthday was completely overshadowed that year by Ann’s death and its aftermath.)
And now, into the valley again.
January 14, 2025 at 7:57 pm |
We need more types of “Like” for articles here. This was a bitter Like.
January 15, 2025 at 4:18 am |
And my Like here is of rueful appreciation.