[lit-ideas] Re: On not recalling who Melinda Grimsley-Smith might be

Here is the complete draft of a message I began on Tuesday, thinking that I'd been silent too long: 

Melinda Grimsley-Smith
Good, eh? Not too wordy--how the modern world hates "wordiness"-- sounds well, with a sufficiency of pith, no provocation of or from thought, just a hint of meaning. In the words of a wine writer: drink now, or hold for the next decade. 

Can't recall where I saw the name.
I have been visiting daughter number one in her current life and showing daughter number two some possibilities. Daughter number one gave us a tour of her dorm room--a double, not a triple, and thus not one of the ones I refer to in my previous post--of the library (which on a holiday afternoon was full of students, working)--of the cafeteria (where Julia and I compared Reed's hamburger to Occidental's...Reed's won) of the art made by students (which reminded me that PNCA is good at what it does).
After visiting campuses, we drove to the Queen Mary and another round of Highland dance competition. Emily didn't dance--she's still injured--and Julia went up against twenty of North America's top dancers (nine were from Canada) and so didn't stand a chance of getting a medal. Once again I enjoyed the power of the British army re-enactors' cannon and gatling gun, walking the worn teak decks of the ship, feeling quite reptilian in the sun.
Laura and I skipped day two of the Queen Mary and joined a friend for lunch at the Getty museum. Great food, wonderful buildings, slightly less impressive art collection with enough, however, to stop me in my tracks at least three times; it was a great place to watch people who--all shapes and colors--filled the place, to the point that the art was sometimes hard to see. Emily had made an effort to get us tickets to an antiquarian book show, so I lobbied hard to persuade the other two we should try this. Laura argued that we have plenty of books at home, but the vote was two to one in favor, so with only a half an hour of the show left, we walked into a hotel's convention space and saw Dead Sea Scrolls... for sale!...a sixteenth century advice book on how cooking is "good physic," some early gynecology texts, a child's board game about money lending, "Play the Jew," a first edition of Mary Wollstencraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" ...for only $22,000. I bought a first edition of a history of Scottish poetry, edited by Carlyle...for quite a bit less than that.
It was an altogether fine trip until I dropped our rental car at the airport and was presented with a bill for eight hundred dollars. It has taken me a while to figure out what happened, which was this: through Priceline I bid on a one-way rental. Avis accepted the bid, but changed the contract to a rental with pick-up and drop-off at the same airport. I didn't notice the change. Avis says they never accept one-way rentals from Priceline. I double-checked that I hadn't made an error; Priceline's website does offer one-way rentals with Avis. Avis is now claiming that the contract was voided by my dropping the car at an airport twenty miles from the point of origin and further claiming the right to charge $160 a day for a mid-size car. (Clearly this is the company that tries harder.) I e-mailed Priceline. First they sent a boiler-plate response that had nothing to do with the case. Then they replied that they were going to look into why I had been "overcharged by sixty five dollars." Finally, at the third try, Jayaraj M. took over the case from Soniya M. and he seems to have understood the issue. We'll see. 

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon

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