The sun is back today, but it's cold and blustery. Two orchids gaze out the back window with longing at what would kill them dead.
I took Dora with me in the car today to pick up her anxiety meds at the vet. I'd ordered a refill before I went to Texas, but my husband didn't have time to pick it up while I was gone, and then another week went by, which is how lots of things happen around here. This interval has given me ample opportunity to reflect that Dora needs these meds, or some meds, anyway, to take the edge off so she can function. In fact, I'd planned to take her into the vet with me, for a little practice in going there when nothing uncomfortable is going to happen to her, but we only got as far as the grass outside. She was so wound up that when I scattered food for her to sniff, she took no notice. You can't really do much with a dog who isn't interested in the treats you have to offer, so after letting her nose around a little in a state of high emotional arousal that didn't abate –– she did sniff a little, but mostly she just plunged around maniacally at the end of the long leash, and I was glad we were by ourselves –– I put her back in the car and went in by myself to get her prescription. Then we came back home.
All that was really enough for one day, especially before taking the Trazodone. Now she has had some, and depending on how calm she is later, we might go out for a little leash work and counter-conditioning on our own street. I've been taking her up to the corner, where our very quiet street intersects with a slightly busier artery street, and scatter feeding while cars, trucks, and motorcycles go by. Traffic noise is one of the seemingly infinite anxiety triggers in her universe, and we can't walk around the corner onto that street for very long before her ears are pinned back, her body is tense, and she's showing signs of stress. Generally before we get to the first stop sign, she's ignoring the treats I offer, which means that the lesson has passed the point of being meaningful in any way. Trazodone so far hasn't cured this, and I really don't expect it to, completely –– but if it raises her emotional threshold some, so that we can get farther without a negative experience, then that's a win.
Now she's nesting in her favorite chair.
Yes, she took great pains to remove the cushion, the little weirdo.
We watched the final episode of Poirot last night, having binge-watched all thirteen seasons steadily over the last several months. Curtain is a strange story. I read it when I was ten –– in fact, it was the first Agatha Christie I ever read. I'd bought it in the grocery store, vaguely recognizing the author's name as maybe someone who wrote interesting things, and read it straight through, having no idea who Hastings was, or anything about Poirot other than what I could gather from the end of his life and career, and being confused about what was going on. I haven't read it since, though I've retained the memory of the bullet hole in the exact center of the forehead. Somehow I had thought that the person who died that way was Poirot himself, and that he'd induced his new, strange valet to shoot him, but as it's been almost fifty years since I read the book, I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, I'd been dreading watching this episode, because I thought it would be sad, but my main impression was really not that at all. It was just depressing, which I guess is appropriate for a postwar return to what had been a splendid house in 1917, but is now in decay, as are the people who return to it. But it also seemed in keeping –– and I don't mean this in a good way –– with a trajectory over the final several seasons in which Poirot seems to figure as an agent of divine justice. I'm not sure whose reimagining this was, but the effect overall is to flatten out the character given to David Suchet to portray. Not that I think that David Suchet –– as of this week, Sir David Suchet –– would be capable of less than excellent work, but to my mind, the last several seasons feature far too many scenes in which Poirot defaults to shouting or pontificating (or both), as if he were offended on God's behalf by the sins of whoever that week's murderer is, with little of the winsomeness that makes him so compellingly complex in the earlier seasons. That seems like an uphill grind for the actor, to continue to render his character as sympathetic as he needs to be to sustain our interest.
Mind you, I was happy to see, in these same seasons, the foregrounding of his Catholic faith –– crucifix in his bedroom, rosary by his bed and in his hand. There's one otherwise rather dreadful episode which ends in his pressing a rosary on a young girl and telling her that God will heal all her wounds; in another, he assures a woman who has had an abortion under duress from an abusive lover that God is all merciful and all good, and that anyone who seeks His forgiveness will find it. There are really some very beautiful moments for the character which make me glad that the producers and directors decided to make something of his faith, to inscribe it as an integral part of his identity. In those moments he is entirely sympathetic, and also entirely credible as a Catholic believer. But where they go with it too many times is the Shouting Poirot of Justice, personally affronted by sin. The character in those scenes just becomes too perilously like a cartoon Catholic, as written by people who don't especially like or understand Catholicism. Again, it's really a testimony to Suchet's gift, and his deep indentification with Poirot, that he can continue to pull out a dimensional human being from what he seems to have been given to work with. This, even though as a believer himself, Suchet is bound to have found it illuminating to inhabit that territory in his character.
Anyway, what happens in this production of Curtain seems, in many ways, like the logical conclusion of that particular trajectory, and I very much wanted him, for his own sake, to ask for a priest. Meanwhile, I've been reading a number of Poirot novels and meditating on the difference between the Poirot whom Hastings, as his Watson, narrates, and the Poirot who emerges in later stories when Hastings is absent. The latter character is more interesting in many ways than the "strange little friend" whom Hastings describes. I'm not sure the Hastings of the books is quite as vacuous as the Hastings of the series –– "Good Lord! What a stunner!" –– but as a first-person narrator he presents some serious limitations. I suppose Watson, the obvious model, does as well, though it does occur to me to marvel a little at the devotion of these men who keep showing up to have their intelligence denigrated by their greatest friends. That tendency might be more revelatory than it's meant to be.
Anyway. I'm back to Rory Alleyn and marveling afresh at the sheer excellence of Ngaio Marsh's writing, as she moves about again in the familiar world of the theater. Granted, there are tropes that show up again and again as a formula –– already there's a young couple set to be in love, and though each of them had credible motives for the murder in question, you know in the end they won't be guilty, because nothing spoils a love story quite like a hanging. But she's so. good. at raising dimensional characters out of virtually nothing, chiefly through dialogue. Her novels would act well as plays or films, especially if the adapters just left her dialogue alone. I know there is an Alleyn series out there, and I imagine I'll track it down at some point, but truly, these novels are object lessons in the ways that a writer might benefit from also being an actor.
After all this mystery-novel reading –– which I must say is good for learning about plotting, a thing I'm not good at –– I keep playing with the idea of letting the thing I'm currently writing become a murder mystery. It's this set of characters I've been writing for the last two decades, off and on, and getting nowhere with, and the idea keeps niggling at me: maybe somebody just needs to die, and it needs to be murder. But then I think about all the niggling details I'd need to get right for it to be at all credible, and I turn into Dora Without Trazodone.
But in what have I clothed all these experiences and thoughts today?
A really smeary mirror, that's what.
I'm continuing to experiment with the clothes in my closet –– not deliberately trying to repeat or not repeat anything, but seeing what outfits I can make.
Today, as it happens, I have repeated yesterday's secondhand Icebreaker merino pink micro-striped tee. It's my favorite of the four merino tees I own, for its color, its cut, its neckline, and its size. Everything about it is flattering for me, but I hadn't worn it yet with trousers, at least not without a tunic or pullover over it. Here I've paired it with these cotton knit paper-bag-waist pants and my thrifted Athleta cotton drape cardgian, which I think adds a needed feminine element to the very basic formula of tee + trousers. Ragg wool socks, Doc Martens, which echo the gray cardigan without matching it. Hair in a stretchy headband, a look I keep wanting to like but am not sure I do.
At least it's out of my face.
I do feel good in this shade of pink, which seems to pick up and amplify my skin tone.
Not much else on today, formally. Some bedmaking. Some laundry putting-away. Some more reading. I really need to read that Guy de Maupassant novel. I told myself I would. It's not uninteresting. But what I want to read is Ngaio Marsh's False Scent.
Daily Wardrobe Tracking Spreadsheet