The Spring We've Earned Comes to New Hampshire

It's Easter, the day of Resurrection.  However you feel about that story, there is something about this holiday, coming as it does (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) at the cusp of Spring, and rejuvenation, there is hope in the air. Looking out my window now, there is still snow on the back lawn, running into the woods, but more grass than snow, and although the trees are leafless, you can see the buds at the tips. 

We have earned this Spring and summer in Hampton, New Hampshire. 

Hemingway said about Paris the only problem in Spring was deciding where to be happiest--you would be happy anywhere in that city in Spring.

And while it's not living in the city of light, we do have a sort of life on the airwaves in the 21st century and that life is full of light and marvel. This is the golden age of television and creativity and mastery. 
"Game of Thrones" is coming back, that tale of evil and evil and a little good trying to peek through now and then, based on the books, which my sons have read cover to cover, all 5,000 pages and now I can actually join their discussions.  What is most amazing about GOT is the most essential, intriguing, illuminating character has achondroplasia, which has got to be a first in television history and breakthrough for disadvantaged people worldwide. 

"Broadchurch" has the distinction of beginning its second season with episodes which exceed in every way the very good first season. It was a little too much like "The Killing" and nameless other shows where children were murdered or threatened and the killer or killers pursued by police who had their own demons. But the second season injects Charlotte Rampling, and re examines cases we thought were closed, signed and sealed, during the first season, and it turns out, "maybe not." It's a very sly reversal of the first season, where every thing seemed a little too familiar, but now, turns out not to be. 

"Mad Men" returns for a last season to much hype, most of it deserved, as it examines the mores and adventures of a certain class of people, of the important driving force they were part of in the 1960's (the world of advertising) , and it helps baby boomers and those just behind the boomers to examine where we came from, where we got our hang ups about the place of women in the world, about the importance of the workplace in a sense of self worth. If you want to look at values, there can be no better place than advertising, because that is where stories are told which embody the values by which a culture lives. "Mad Men" has turned out to be an intelligent soap opera, and, for my money, it has held up better than "Downton Abbey" and it's not even the product of Great Britain. If Freudian theory emphasizes the child is the father of the man, then "Mad Men" reminds us, we all came from somewhere, and that past may be behind us, but it's still in us.

"Justified," is a show with a premise which held no interest for me: A Southern cop pursuing local crooks, drugs and prostitution. I only watched it because my sister-in-law recommended it and my sister-in-law is intimidatingly brilliant, so I figured there must be something there. It took me six episodes to see what she saw, but I eventually did. "Justified"  surprises on almost every level. It is not exactly a hill billy "Wire," but the writing is extraordinary. The rhythms of the speech, the Appalachian formality is almost Elizabethan and works to make the listening to the lines a delight. Raylan, the cop, Boyd the crook, and Art, Raylan's boss, are indelible characters, each with his own complexities and rewards. 

"Call the Midwife" is not for everybody, but as an essay on the meaning of meaningful work, on the role of women in the 1950's work force and as a reminder of how long it took England to recover from World War II, it is worth recording. It is based on memoirs of a real woman who lived through it all and it again provides a stark reminder of times when women did not have full control of their own fertility and its consequences. 

And then there is "Wolf Hall" which I have not yet seen.  Nor have I read the books, but  reliable sources say it will be worth seeing. And it has Damian Lewis, (from "Band of Brothers" and "Homeland.") I have never been able to sort out Thomas Cromwell from Thomas Moore, and this promises to settle that much. The manipulation of religion and its place in power politics,  as Henry VIII proclaims he can speak for God just as well as the Pope can, has got to be instructive.

And that is just TV.  For anyone with a Kindle, Life After Life  by Kate Atkinson, is not to be missed. A girl gets born, dies, reborn and manages to avoid the thing that got her dead in the prior life, and moves on, but at some points, she wonders whether it was such a good idea to have made it past that early death because the life she's got is proving pretty miserable, but she moves forward. 

With all this available, I have to wonder when I will have time to take the dog to the beach, work and practice my piano scales (in about that order of importance.)

Spring is not yet sprung, but with all this available, time management is going to become paramount. 

The question is, where can you be happiest--providing no disaster presents itself. 

A friend told me about her niece moving into her first apartment in Boston, having landed her first job out of college, and looking around at her new digs, she burst out, "I'm just so happy!"  Which sent a chill through the aunt, who is just old enough to know no happiness goes unnoticed and none lasts forever. It's just a question of how long. 

Which is, I suppose, where that phrase "Carpe Diem" came from.

For those of us who have had that joy, of leaving the nest, having our own place, being open to new people and adventures, that is a Siren's call. Likely that sort of joy happens only once. But Spring is here and there is joy enough.