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Commentary
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
As a seventy-seven-year-old I’m about as healthy as I might hope to be.
And yet, without being despondent, and realizing how active I still am, able to lift weights and walk long distances, to enjoy meals and interact well with people, to engage in an exciting and edifying long-range endeavor, my blog, I still hear windows close.
I’ve had to cut back on my intake of alcohol and caffeine.
I struggle with short-term memory issues.
I can’t run much or fast.
And I’ve recently begun to experience balance issues.
Old age easing in.
Recognizing it without a sense of gloom.
Analyzing the role death plays in everyone’s life, in order to face it rationally.
To make good things happen.
Good things like the gathering for several days of thirteen of us this week, all but one of my direct descendants and spouse.
For several days we will celebrate being together, sharing a memorable event.
To inoculate us to a degree against the empty feeling that comes with a passing.
To obviate the “I wish that;” replacing it with “I’m so glad that…”
Not that there is any immediacy.
As a seventy-seven-year-old I’m about as healthy as I might hope to be.
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Tip
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
See the new form for Reader’s Comments located directly under the subscription test box.
Add a thought with ease.
We will publish the comments after reading them to ensure suitable content.
We’re in a warm stretch.
What fun!
Let’s enjoy this weather, each day of it.
The hours are ticking away and if we don’t make the most of our time another day will soon click past.
Unnoticed.
Unappreciated.
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
Enjoy the week.
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Postings Count, Weather Brief, and Dinner
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Our 410th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 410 posts we’re at the 8.20 percentile of our commitment, the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Time is 4.01am.
On Tuesday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 66* with a feels-like of 66* under mainly sunny skies.
Dinner tonight is Fried Chicken, hoping to make it with daughter Kat to help her navigate through her first household. Locating now in New York City, she’ll be interning at Atlantic magazine and by the time she gets home she and her boyfriend will need recipes to execute simply and easily.
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Question of the Day:
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Who was I M Pei?
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One Picture, or group of, One Word
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
The bee-eaters are a group of near passerine birds in the family Meropidae,
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Chuckle of the Day:
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
A woman is driving with her husband at her side and her mother-in-law in the backseat.
The pair won’t leave her alone.
Mother-in-law, "You’re driving too fast!"
Husband, "Stay more to the left."
After ten mixed orders, the woman turns to her husband, "Who’s driving this car – you or your mother?"
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Love your notes.
Contact me at domcapossela@hotmail.com
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
From Ann H:
“It worked with my son Eric.”
Harbor Towers, the two buildings on the right.
Love the architecture.
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Answer to the Question of the Day:
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Ieoh Ming Pei (26 April 1917 – 16 May 2019) was a Chinese-American architect.
Born in Guangzhou and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged.
In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He was unhappy with the focus at both schools on Beaux-Arts architecture, and spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.
After graduating, he joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and became a friend of the Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
In 1948, Pei was recruited by New York City real estate magnate William Zeckendorf, for whom he worked for seven years before establishing his own independent design firm, I. M. Pei & Associates, in 1955, which became I. M. Pei & Partners in 1966 and later in 1989 became Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.
Pei retired from full-time practice in 1990.
In his retirement, he worked as an architectural consultant primarily from his sons' architectural firm Pei Partnership Architects.
Pei's first major recognition came with the Mesa Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado (designed in 1961, and completed in 1967).
His new stature led to his selection as chief architect for the John F. Kennedy Library in Massachusetts.
He designed Harbor Towers in 1971 and the Hancock Tower in 1973, both in Boston, both experiencing major issues with their windows.
The I M Pei Hancock on the right dwarfs the original Hancock tower to the left.
He went on to design Dallas City Hall and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art.
He returned to China for the first time in 1975 to design a hotel at Fragrant Hills, and designed Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong, a skyscraper in Hong Kong for the Bank of China fifteen years later.
In the early 1980s, Pei was the focus of controversy when he designed a glass-and-steel pyramid for the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
He later returned to the world of the arts by designing the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, the Miho Museum in Japan, Shigaraki, near Kyoto, and the chapel of the junior and high school: MIHO Institute of Aesthetics, the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou, Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art, abbreviated to Mudam, in Luxembourg.
Pei won a wide variety of prizes and awards in the field of architecture, including the AIA Gold Medal in 1979, the first Praemium Imperiale for Architecture in 1989, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2003.
In 1983, he won the Pritzker Prize, which is sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture.
Here’s a list of doors that opened for me this week.
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Good Morning on this Tuesday, the twenty-first day of May, 2019
Our commentary points out that aging gracefully means that we’re aware of each window that closes on us.
We posted the weather report and calendar, and tracked the number of postings.
We posted an announcement that we have a new Reader’s Comments section.
and posted our first ever One Picture, One Word section.
We posted a chuckle and our q and paid homage to I M Pei.
And now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your love.