In the town where I live, we have the "road construction blues." Streets get blocked off - people have to drive in different routes to get where they're going because the usual routes are temporarily blocked.
Last night around 12:30 (this morning, technically) I was noticing that a residential street off the main street is rather full of parked vehicles on both sides. And just when I was thinking it was a little crowded, a gigantic semi truck (for one of the chain food-delivery businesses) turned off the main street because of the detour and bore down the residential street with ominous, exasperated determination.
You could tell from the outside of the truck - the way it moved - that the driver was ticked off and impatient with the detours and the inconvenience they cause.
It was a little scary.
Since the street that's being improved is right outside the windows of my writing studio (front room), when roads started getting blocked off at the beginning of this summer, I thought, "Oh it's going to be noisy."
But funnily enough, the opposite is true. It's quieter than it has ever been, because traffic is re-routed, and so that nearly constant buzz, bop, and clang of daily transportation outside has been removed.
And as it turns out, Road Construction isn't as loud as one would imagine.
Often, now, the Quiet takes on its own identity, and oblique power.
Like living out in the country.
------------------------------------------------ Reading Camera Girl, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony, I learned many new details about a history I already knew from other books. Jacqueline Bouvier's life pre-Kenndy was basically this:
-- college
-- working at a newspaper as the "camera girl"
-- getting engaged to a man named John Husted
-- meeting John Fitzgerald Kennedy
-- getting disengaged from John Husted and marrying U.S. Senator Kennedy
_______________________ Her college experience included three different schools:
Vassar
the Sorbonne, in Paris, France
and George Washington University.
------------------ [excerpt from Camera Girl] ------------- Her college friends consistently recalled how she stood out for her intelligence and sophistication but rejected the responsibility of being a leader, hating being a "schoolgirl among schoolgirls."
Jackie complained to Vivi that she felt "suffocated" on Vassar's isolated campus, adding, "Once classwork is done, I need stimulation." As 1950 began, Jackie had been reveling in the sophisticated urban life of Paris for four months, and had affirmed her conviction that she belonged in a city.
During prior visits from campus to see her father in New York and now in her letters to him from Paris, she complained about Vassar, but since she had completed nearly half her college education there, he insisted she return that fall to finish it.
After making her appearance at the New York Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in December 1947, she had posed with several other debs for a Life magazine photo. Although the image was not ultimately published, she had nevertheless earned her first paycheck, prompting her to suggest shortly thereafter that she quit Vassar and try to make a living as a print model.
Black Jack objected. When, in early 1950, she raised this idea again, from Paris, he snapped that "you don't waste a college education and a year at the Sorbonne to be a model in New York City - so forget that idea."
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