As the first half of March brought us sunny, warm Spring weather, along with beautiful early flowering trees, I was ready for a complete change of season. But as of a few days ago, the skies darkened, the temperatures dropped, the winds picked up, the cold rains fell, and (as happens every year) my belief in the arrival of an early Spring was shaken. So, except for last night’s Megillah reading, I have stayed home over the weekend, and may lay a bit low for the next few days. Not that it c-c-c-c-cold outside (it’s in the low 50s), but it’s colder than the 65-75 we had been experiencing over the past few weeks.

Some of my time this weekend was spent reading a book titled Winter Journal by writer Paul Auster. Auster too was hibernating during a cold winter (his in New York), holing up in a small studio he was renting, writing a different sort of a blog (not on-line, so I guess not really a blog). And yes, he noted, too, how it was still cold, even in March.

It’s a relatively short book, without chapters, but with little pieces (separated by a single blank line) that might be called biological tidbits. He is trying to explain himself; in fact, he is writing to himself, as seen by his consistent use of the second person. “You left the house”. “You flew to Paris, and then you….” . and so on. He is rethinking the story of his life. In non-chronological bits and pieces.

How did he decide which one piece followed another? I don’t know. But we have pieces about his growing up in New Jersey, his parents’ relationship and divorce, his experiences playing sports as a teenager, his early sexual stirrings and his later acting upon them, his move to Paris and the people he met there, his first marriage and its breakup, his second marriage (now about 40 years old), and so forth. Maybe they are in the order in which he wrote them. Maybe he spent months ordering and re-ordering them. Maybe he wrote three times this many, and threw the rest out. Or kept them in a file for a subsequent book. I don’t know.

It isn’t that I found his life overly fascinating, although it had its interesting moments to be sure. (I think he had more interesting moments in his life, for example, than I have had in mine…..and that isn’t a personal complaint, just fact, something I think may be true for most compared with me.) It isn’t that I found him someone to necessarily admire; in fact, I ended the book feeling nothing for him one way or the other. He clearly made a lot of early mistakes, but he clearly profited from some of them.

But the book reeled me right in, and I didn’t want to put it down. Largely, I think, this is because of the quality of his writing. He really writes well. And, by the way, we learn nothing of his other writings, or his film work, reading this book. That, like most of his interactions with his children, are left out. Maybe he has written about that elsewhere, I don’t know.

Many of the subjects he chooses are subjects that I choose from time to time writing my blog, although his skill far surpasses mine. And, to be sure, I don’t sit all day in a studio working on this blog. Usually, I sit down for maybe 30 minutes and often (as you probably have guessed) don’t proof it, much less gone back to alter it or polish it.

At any rate, I am sorry I have finished Winter Journal. I would like to have read more of his Paul Auster’s tidbits.

Only one of his entries seemed out of place, and I wonder why he included it. Along with all of the other pieces in the book, each of which discussed elements of his life or maybe touched upon his parents’ lives before he was born, but for one. In one long entry, he talked about a movie he saw one night when he couldn’t sleep. A film from the 1940s or 1950s, called Dead on Arrival, or rather D.O.A. He discussed this film in almost scene by scene detail – a businessman from southern California takes a solo business trip to San Francisco, orders a drink at the bar, gets sick, learns that the drink contained poison and that there is no cure and he will die within 48 hours, and spent the remainder of the film successfully tracking down the individual who poisoned his drink, discovering the the murderer thought something about him and wasn’t even true, so that his death was going to be a mistake.

This description comes about 75% through the book. Random, it seems. But maybe Auster found a hidden message there, although his only comment was to wonder what he would do if he found himself in the same position with only 40 years to live. He was 64 when he wrote that book, and clearly was feeling his age. Now, he is 77 and, I assume, feels it even more.

I saw a film yesterday, too. A film starring Caesar Romero and Lois Maxwell, from 1952, called The Lady in the Fog. I could tell you the complete plot, just as Auster told me the complete plot of D.O.A. But I won’t.

I will only tell you one thing. Have you ever heard of Lois Maxwell? No? Well, you have probably seen her in several films. She found her niche a little later. When she became Miss Moneypenny in all of the Sean Connery James Bond films. You learn something new every day.