We’re at the dirty end of spring right now. It was cold for a couple days, but we got up near 50 (Fahrenheit) today, and the whole week is supposed to be mild. (Thank Providence, I defrosted my freezer last week.) Most of the snow is gone now; just some crusty edges left – which doesn’t mean we won’t get more snow. We probably will. But that will be short-lived. The ground made visible now is unlovely – dead grass and black dirt. A monochrome, frostbit world.

This week is for me a wild social whirl, which means I had/have two things going on. Or three, if you call a doctor’s visit a social event. That was Monday. I had to see my clinic’s Diabetic Educator. As it says somewhere in Job, “The thing I have greatly feared has come upon me.” (Norman Vincent Peale quotes that repeatedly in his Positive Thinking books.) It actually wasn’t as bad as I feared. The nice lady didn’t put me on a diet. I’ve got some documents I need to get around to reading, but what I took away was mostly that I needed to consume fewer carbs and more fiber. Fiber, apparently, can buffer the carbs in your digestive system, reducing insulin spikes. Good to know.

(Note: I don’t have full-blown diabetes. But I am On the Road. Enough to make lifestyle changes advisable.)

The day before, Sunday, when I was still ignorant of this wisdom, I attended a Swedish Meatball Supper in a church basement. Meatballs for protein, and green beans for fiber to counteract the mashed potatoes. Could be worse. We were fed by Swedes, and it’s always pleasant for a Norwegian to be served by Swedes, after the humiliation of the Outrageous Union of 1814, which we have never yet forgiven.

I was impressed that they served us off china plates. I’ve eaten many a church basement meal, but I think it’s been a decade at least since I last ate in a church basement off anything but paper or Styrofoam. I cannot but salute the diligence of the organizers, who took the extra trouble to wash dishes afterward.

I must also salute my friends, Mark and Renae, who invited me along.

Friday is going to be less pleasant. I’ll be attending the funeral of one the guys from my men’s Bible study. A fine guy who loved the Lord. He used to wear bowties to church, so several of us from the study will be wearing them in his honor. I had to order one from Amazon, but I got next-day delivery, and it’s here now.

Reading notes: The book I’m reading right now (I’ll review it soon; maybe tomorrow) did something that pleased me a lot. A small thing, but it delighted me.

One point I’ve thought about occasionally, over my many years as a reader and writer, was a very trivial issue – the lack of same-name characters in fiction.

This is what I mean – in real life, people with the same first name often show up in the same circles. My Bible study group, for instance, though numbering only eight men on a good night, has two Toms and two Daves in it.

But in fiction, this rarely happens. The reason is obvious, and entirely sensible – it confuses the reader. Unless a plot point requires it, it’s so much easier to just give two characters different names. And since the author is the god of the fictional world, that’s his prerogative.

But in this book, there’s a scene where somebody says, “I was talking to Kate and Kate….” This wasn’t confusing to the reader, because Kate and Kate are throwaway bit characters who never appear again. But the line adds just a half-millimeter of verisimilitude, since we all know that such things happen not infrequently in real life.

That’s a nice literary touch. Wish I’d thought of it.