Fitness, Cats, and Books

The Pine Island Fitness Center is just a little over seven miles from here, and that's where I drove this morning.  The race is still five days away, so this seemed like the opportune time for a session of light weight-lifting.  The tennis instructor who mans the front desk is always friendly, and he also happens to play bass in the very good blues band that has played at the finish line of the Flying Pirate and also at the Duck and Wine Festival for the past two or three years.  I had the place to myself.

There was still a little time before lunch, so I drove to the little independent bookstore in the Scarborough Faire shopping center, The Island Bookstore, to search for one or two books on my list.  I ended up with a hard-cover book I had been looking for, Women Rowing North, by Mary Pipher; I had heard Ms. Pipher being interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, and immediately put it on my list.  Ms. Pipher cites a UK study finding that women are happiest between the ages of 65 and 79; she herself just turned 70, and the book explores how older women (and men) can adapt to the new circumstances of what the French call Ces misères de l'âge.  Martha will enjoy this book, but I am finding lots of wisdom in it as well.

I spent more time than I had intended at the bookstore, chatting with the woman at the desk; my OBX Marathon shirt drew her attention, and it turned out that she was a runner herself who had run the OBX half marathon (the one in November, not the Flying Pirate).  So we ended up talking about running and life and aging (she just turned 60, I just turned 70, and I was telling her about our friend Fred who has just turned 80.).  I started to recommend the book that I had just purchased, but thought she might not appreciate being told she is "rowing north."  Pipher writes, "We need to make an effort, choose a positive attitude, and maintain a strong sense of direction as we travel toward winter and the land of snow and ice," which is a land we might not want to discuss with casual acquaintances, after all.

On the way to the bookstore, I almost tripped over this frisky little cat, who jumped at me from around a corner and clearly wanted to play.

"She just showed up one day," one of the shop-keepers in Scarborough Faire told me.  "Are you feeding her?" I asked.  "Oh yes, we're all feeding her."  That explained it.  Cats . . .

This afternoon, we explored some of our old haunts in Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills, and I stopped in at the very nice Kitty Hawk Public Library to check out the author Peter Robinson, whose classic British Mystery books I have recently discovered. 

They had the next one on my list, but I was told that my Fontana Regonal Library card was no good here, nor was my Pamlico -Carteret one from Beaufort.  My options, I was nicely told, were to read the book in a comfortable chair by the window as long as I liked, or pay $25.00 for a temporary library card.  Or I could rummage through a head-spinning assortment of books for sale on a big table (where I found Stephen King shoulder to shoulder with James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, as if they were subway passengers uncomfortably heading for the same station.)

I quickly realized that I would much prefer taking off my shoes in the evening and curling up on the sofa at Ocean Watch, so I declined the temporary library card and instead I began the next Robert Galbraith (the pen name for J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter children's books), Lethal White, which I gave Martha for Christmas and which she has completed. 

Like the first three Galbraith books, it is very good! - three-dimensional, complex characters, and an entertaining mystery as well.  So I stayed up reading on the aforesaid sofa, listening to the lulling sound of the ocean outside the open screened porch until I could no longer stay awake.