I never thought I'd see this again!!

 

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

(Click on the link to watch!) I was astonished and deeee-lighted to find this entire series on Internet Archive! There are only fragments of it on YouTube, and a confusing array of chopped-up pieces on Dailymotion, so this was buried treasure, unearthed at last.  I LOVED this series when I first saw it on PBS in 2014 (it's yet another Ken Burns masterpiece), but it was never shown again. It is fourteen hours long, the most ambitious thing Burns has ever done, and by far the best. And it never seems too long or tedious - in fact, I didn't want it to end.

So what do I love about it? Everything. From the superb gallery of  photos and archival film clips, to the meticulous research, to just the right amount of commentary from the inevitable historians, and - most of all - to the superb narration, there is not a false note in it anywhere.

Bad narration, which is nearly universal on YouTube now (most of it AI-generated) is the bane of my existence, but in this case, the main narrator, not to mention the dead-ringer, right-on voices of Teddy, FDR and Eleanor (the last voiced by no less than Meryl Streep!) are so note-perfect that it's no surprise the music is sensitively chosen and utterly appropriate as well. I begin weeping when they feature Aaron Copland at his most tender and majestic, the heroic Richard Strauss (Death and Transfiguration, which is now my theme song), and sublime quotes from Stephen Foster.

It all works. But what was most gratifying to me was watching the first part again, and far from having my usual reaction to something I used to love and now can't fathom, I think I loved it all the more.  I've started reading more about the Roosevelt dynasty, but none of it is more poetic and hard-hitting than this series, which I honestly thought I would never see again.

Comes at a time when I am still feeling pretty rotten at times. Having supposedly dodged the bullet with my surgery, now I am not so sure. "Things" are showing up in my x-rays and blood tests, and I am more than concerned. I will be seeing a hemotologist, which made no sense until I finally clicked with the fact that I had to have a blood  transfusion in the hospital (why?). And I also might be seeing a nephrologist, a kidney specialist, because my poor old ageing kidneys might be out of whack as well. In the hospital, they found a spot on my lung which terrified me, though the followup x-ray seems to have indicated it was resolved. But my doctor is not so sure. So, more tests, more specialists, more trips to the lab.

I am trying to convince myself, and sometimes I even seem to believe it, that the surgery fixed everything and I am now back to full and vibrant health. But once they gut you like that, you're never quite the same, and I feel it almost every day.

I don't want to overshare online, but it gets lonely sometimes, and this blog is supposed to be more personal than, say, Facebook or YouTube (which I am now "off" in many ways, just fed up and not wanting to keep feeding something nobody watches anyway). I feel the same about the blog: I do post links on Facebook sometimes, but I am not sure why I bother.  I am convinced nobody really reads them. They are, however, there for my own reference, so that is something.

Something, but I am not sure what.

So when I find something as superb as this series, whole and complete, and in magnificent HD, it geos a long way (though not far enougth)  to make me feel this is all worthwhile. But I had a thought at the grocery store today, when I could not lift a five-pound bag of sugar into the cart: the natural limits of a human lifespan used to be "threescore and ten" - and by that reckoning, I'm already one year over the limit.