Old crone, are you of stone? Oh, no, I'm flesh and bone

I had a time-sensitive errand to run on foot this evening and I made it into Davis Square in under fifteen minutes, which used to be much closer to my normal speed. I record it to remind myself of a body that works no matter how I feel about it.

I have ordered the challah for Rosh Hashanah; this weekend is for baking the honeycakes. Hestia attempted to taste the Caesar salad I made for dinner tonight even before I put the anchovies on.

I must have seen Maggie Smith first in Hook (1991). I had no way of knowing that she was so much younger than the character she played with the frail and slightly weird beauty of the ink-washed illustrations of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) I had grown up perusing in my own grandparents' house, the most haunting and most magical part of the film for me without fairy dust or flight because she had lived inside the story and not lost it. Being in a Spielberg movie, it was probably the least tart characterization she ever turned in onscreen, but she could still upend a man's life by just turning a page, although she did rather more in Travels with My Aunt (1972) where I most recently saw her, a flightily wily one-time grande horizontale breezing into the placid dahlia-bounded existence of Alec McCowen like a henna-haired ten on the Beaufort scale. In between she seemed to be in everything and it seemed only reasonable that she should go on being so, whether that meant stealing half a caper of early computer hacking or demolishing Ivor Novello. This thing where the landscape keeps sliding away is difficult. What a geologic imprint she leaves.