1/31/07
Bad News and Weighty Topics
The folks over at CNN.com have shown an unusual contemplative side this morning, and I have to commend that. Usually all they care about are celebrity snits and goofy news stories with headlines like " Underwear tossing a deal breaker for opera star" (don't ask). And I won't link to CNN.com because its links have an annoying habit of going dead. But just today they were in, as I say, a contemplative mood, with a story that asked, "Are we going overboard with the controversy surrounding Tyra Banks' weight?" I have just three responses:
1.) Who is Tyra Banks?
2.) What controversy?
3.) Yes.
Now, what else is new? Ah, yes, the person who found my little curiosity shop here by searching on the phrase, "hunting for a picture taken about 30 to 40 years ago of Christ's image in the clouds." Um, I feel bad about this but I have no idea how that happened. We're fresh out of such images here. Over the years they used to report on the evening news now and then that people in the area thought they saw an image of the Virgin Mary somewhere—a pattern of peeling paint, or condensation on a window, or something like that. This is part of the reason that I stopped caring very much whether I had TV or not. Moreover, it's really hard for me to imagine any sort of a deity who would stoop to making coy, teasing cameo appearances in the world the way Alfred Hitchcock made them in his films. Dostoyevsky put it a different way, talking about the absence of miracles in modern life: "No signs from heaven come today/ to add to what the heart doth say." So anyway, sorry. No picture of Christ in the clouds here.
But I don't want you to go away empty-handed and unsatisfied, so let me at least make an effort. I happen to have the third edition of the college textbook Biology here on my desk. On page 19, the author, Helena Curtis, discusses the Big Bang. Here's her fourth paragraph: "According to current theory, it is from these atoms—blown apart, formed, and re-formed over 20 billion years—that all the stars and planets of the universe are formed, including our particular star and planet. And it is from the atoms present on this planet that living systems assembled themselves and evolved. Each atom in our own bodies had its origins in this explosion of some 20 billion years ago. You and I are flesh and blood, but we are also stardust."
Now look at your hand, if it helps. Think about it. Flesh and blood and stardust. That's enough of a miracle for the likes of me.
1/30/07
Windows Opening, or Mockrosoft Vista
I don't think I'm a better person than PC users just because I've been using a Mac for more than 20 years now. I'm just a much, much happier one. PCs work fine, I've used them and all, but I've always thought the Mac approach was easier and more elegant, and that Apple was by far a more forward-looking, imaginative company than Microsoft. So here comes Windows Vista, which David Pogue of The New York Times roasted hilariously here. (Social criticism note: Pogue is facetious the whole way through, which caused a number of mouthbreathing knuckle-dragging YouTube commenters to ask, "Is this guy kidding or what?" and causes me to sigh and wonder why eugenics is such and awful and bad thing anyway.)
At any rate, I just read a news story about the big opening. In Raleigh, North Carolina, they treated it like a new Harry Potter book was coming out, with the store staying open for the official midnight release. They blew up balloons, and all that. And about a dozen people straggled in. Sad, isn't it? I thought this quote from one Mike Johnson of Rolesville, North Carolina was rather touching:
"The biggest reason for me is the new interface. It looks so much better than XP," he said. "Apple computers have had nice graphical interfaces for some time. But it's the first time Windows has even approached that level."
1/29/07
Horses and Heroes
Children sent him drawings, they said on the radio this morning. That's the kind of thing I can't quite figure out. See, I live just a few miles away from the New Bolton Center, the large-animal veterinary facility of the University of Pennsylvania. It's where the horse Barbaro was put down yesterday. I would drive past, and see the bouquets and signs—"We love you, Barbaro"—and feel not quite right about it. I don't ride, or at least hardly ever. I'm certainly capable of appreciating horses—there's nothing quite like seeing one run across a field, without a rider. It takes you back to some elemental time when the world was young, I think. Up close, they're all impressive, and some are magnificent, and it seems Barbaro had a special quality even beyond that.
But the outpouring of emotion still troubles me. I haven't seen the television news, but I'm sure they carried on as if a beloved head of state, a benefactor of humanity, had been tragically taken from the world. On the radio this morning a woman who had written a children's book about him compared him to Mozart, spoke of "grace," called him a hero, recited long passages of prose that he seemed to her to be sending to the world with just his expression. "His main thought seemed to be," she said. "The message he leaves us," she said. And so forth.
None of this is the animal's fault, of course. But I think that a true respect for animals in general or one animal in particular would acknowledge their otherness. Right now there's a cat sitting by a space heater in my bedroom, thinking whatever thoughts a cat may be likely to think. He was afraid of people once, and now he's not. Is he brave, then? I have no idea. I enjoy thinking so, but I hesitate to assume that a cat's mind is anything like a human's, or that a cat's emotions are similar either. I care for him very much, but I don't require him to care for me the same way. He seems to like me, but scientists say that if he went to live with someone else who was similarly kind to him he would forget me in about a day. And you know what? That's OK. The main thing is that the cat has a good life. I give him what he seems to want, and that's enough.
The horse that was up the road was being seen to by the best equine specialists available. It was taken care of as well as any animal in the world, you must admit. Other animals could have used a portion of the concern lavished on him. And there are millions of people who could have used some of it, too. But it was Barbaro who got the drawings and letters and flowers and signs. Barbaro got drafted into the role as hero, and injected into a story about different sorts of triumph, and in the end became nothing but a screen on which people's needs were projected. The stray cat in your neighborhood, the people of Darfur, all the creatures around the world that are suffering now, right now, this instant, and need help—I just don't see them up on that screen in the same way. Why so much concern for the pampered animal, and so little for those others? Do we need a hero that badly? Wouldn't it feel pretty good to actually be one—to actually ease some suffering in the real world? I really think people should take the money they were going to spend on flowers to lay near the entrance gate at New Bolton and send it here. Or here.
I know, I understand, how comforting it is to dream of a being noble and pure, full of grace and power, free of everything petty and mundane, venal and disappointing. A creature, in other words, utterly unlike our sadly imperfect selves. But in the end, we don't know what's in the mind and spirit of an animal, and it's not terribly helpful to get carried away with imaginings. It's easy to think of Barbaro as some kind of hero. It's difficult and painful to think about the people and animals who are neglected. By us, folks. By me, OK? By me. And you. Let's suck it up and face that. The reality is that the horse in question never needed your help or concern, but other animals and people do. It's really as simple as that.
1/28/07
Careful What You Wish For
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," said Shakespeare. Actually it was Hamlet, talking about Denmark. But I've had ongoing discussions with people over the years about this idea, and we've debated about whether it means that we create our own realities more or less out of whole cloth. I tend to take the rational, commonsense side of the debate, which is pretty funny if you know me. I agree that quite often the statement's true—Denmark, raw oysters, Jack Russell terriers, there are many things on which opinions can legitimately vary.
Just the other day I had a debate with a friend about whether it's bad or not to have a broken leg. She was talking about how in certain situations it could be good. While you were laid up you might take time to think, and arrive at some revelation that would ultimately improve your life. OK, fine. But I continue to maintain that some things are just inherently bad no matter what the broader context. A year or so ago another friend wrote to say that her neighborhood in Nevada had suddenly been infested with scorpions. She had been stung repeatedly just doing stuff around the house. Now see, here's the thing, I don't care what sort of positive train of events they might set in motion, I do not want scorpions in my house. I just don't. No scorpions.
Or let's take the example of my dad. He grew up in a pretty gruesome slum, but because of World War II and the G.I. Bill, he got to go to college for free. He became a college professor and didn't have to live in the slum any more. That was a good thing, I grant you. But something like 50 million people died in World War II, and millions more suffered terribly, and nuclear weapons were created that continue to threaten the human race's existence. I think that to avoid all that, my dad would have been just as happy to pay his tuition by working in the college dining hall. So let's have no more talk about it—some things are just plain bad, and bad things happen to the most positive people sometimes, and we don't create our own realities except in certain relatively limited ways and that's that. I'll cop with some pride to being a skeptic, and the only religious worldview I can support is Pastafarianism.
But sometimes you wonder. Just yesterday I thought to myself, "You know, it would be nice to have a piece of chocolate with this cup of coffee, but unfortunately I don't have any around the house." Not long after, I started opening my mail. One envelope was a little fatter than the others, and it was from a friend. I opened it up. It was a little piece of chocolate. I would rather have had seven hundred thousand dollars or so, (Universe? Are you listening?), but if only for a second or so, such things could make you wonder.
1/27/07
Strongarm Tactics
I've been mulling over my predicament: I want to write for the marketing world, I know I'm perfectly capable, but it's a subculture I don't yet belong to, a subculture I don't yet know the passwords to or folkways of. But thinking about it, I remembered that years ago I was involved with a woman who was something of a football fan. One time a friend of ours who was himself a rabid fan came up to us and said, "Do you guys see the irony here? One of the few women in the United States who's interested in football, involved with one of the few men who isn't?" We did, and one time we used the situation as a kind of sociology experiment. I'd complained to her that often, hanging around with the guys, the talk would turn to football and it was like the conversation had switched to a language I didn't know. I couldn't make any contribution; I just had to sit there like a dope. She thought about it.
"Look," she said, "next week we're going to that party at Joe and Judy's, right? They'll have the game on. One of the quarterbacks is named Vinny Testaverde, and he's famous for having a strong arm. Just sit down with the guys, and as soon as there's a reference to Vinny Testaverde, make a comment about how he has a strong arm."
OK, sounds like a plan. We arrive at the party, I drift over to the TV, the announcer is nattering on and here's the reference to the QB. "Boy," I say, "that Testaverde's got a strong arm."
It was like magic. All the heads along the sofa are nodding in agreement. A chorus of comments—"Yep," "Strong arm, all right," "Said a mouthful there," all that sort of thing. I didn't exactly burst out laughing, but I was quietly amazed at the effect. Now, one of them might have cocked an eyebrow and said, "Say, Matt, what does that mean, exactly? Don't all quarterbacks have fairly strong arms? What are the practical effects or consequences of Mr. Testaverde's egregious armic strongness?" If that had happened I'd have been in trouble. But it didn't. For the first time in my life, I was an official contributor to the football conversation. Simply put, I was in.
So I figure that all I have to do to deal with these marketing types is to get that one magic phrase, the password, the bit of jargon that says "He's one of us." The other day I was looking at an ad agency website "about us" page and it said this: "Brand translation is the heart of our business." Do you know what that means? I sure don't. But I think if I said stuff like that in the right place and right time, it wouldn't matter if I understood it or not. "Brand translation," "value proposition," a few phrases like that. The heads would nod, the glances would be exchanged among the gatekeepers, and I'd be in.
1/26/07
Preferences List
How odd, on such a cold midwinter morning, to notice that the birds are signing. Noticing anything means that at least a portion of my attention is devoted to the world around me, and not to that damp interior dungeon where our worries pace darkly like embittered monks. Lately I've been brooding a bit, and I'm embarrassed by it. I didn't exactly expect pots of money to fall from the sky, but this next phase of my career requires a few things to happen and they haven't happened quickly enough, and now it's Plan B: dipping into my savings. I did figure on that being necessary, but I'd have preferred not to. Oh, well! Then yesterday I was fiddling with a little software problem and managed to overwrite the wrong preferences list (it's an OSX thing) and basically put my desktop back to where it was when I first bought it. I didn't hurt the document files, but I had to spend most of the day setting things up the way I had over the last two years. It wasn't analogous to burning down the house, it was more like suddenly finding all the furniture out on the sidewalk again, where the movers had left it on the day you moved in. And then I checked my cell phone and found I'd missed a message, and my family was gathering to celebrate my nephew's birthday in a very short time. Too short, really, to make it. So I had some moderate worries and moderate frustration with my own sorcerer's-apprentice stupidity compounded by a sour taste of familial guilt. Nice! The only thing you can do in such a mood is to listen to this bouncy little number from 1915: "Smile, Smile, Smile." (But the funniest song of the whole era, and the one you really should listen to, is How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree).
CAUTION GEEK TALK: BTW, I won't be posting too many YouTubes until I figure out why my version of Safari won't play embedded videos in this blog. It just stopped the other day, and I have no idea why. I suspect, the way Gertrude suspected what was really bugging Hamlet, that the real true problem is I've mulishly refused to upgrade to Tiger for the year and a half it's been out. I'll bet that if I got it, and got Safari 2.0, everything would be ducky. But my cat is named Panther. How, I ask you, how can I give up an operating system named after my cat? It would be like B.B. King getting a new guitar and not naming it "Lucille." GEEK TALK ENDS HERE SORRY
1/25/07
Say "Snow Squalls" Fast Ten Times
One of the things the weather does is furnish you with things to talk about, and it's furnishing beautifully today. Nine degrees out this morning, which in southeastern Pennsylvania is cold. (That's Fahrenheit above, by the way.) It's pretty cold most anywhere, but it's also unusual here. Sadly, I know that it's nine by looking at The Weather Channel's website. One of the things I have to do before declaring bankruptcy (Ha ha! Just kidding! I hope!) is to buy myself a real thermometer and screw it into the porch woodwork. What I really want to do is lean toward the window, steaming coffee cup in hand, peer through, and say, "Wow! Look at that! Nine above!" Now I have to go shovel the walk free of the snow that I was so much in favor of yesterday. I think the sidewalk is in the lee of the house—it's pretty windy out too—but I guess I'll find out. It's 7:37 now; if I'm not back in 20 minutes, send blankets and brandy.
Brr! M'hands is friz! Can barely move my fingers to type! Breakfast time now. So glad I'm not a street person. Yet, at least. (Ha ha! Just kidding! I hope!) At any rate, I just encountered the term "snow squalls" last night, checking the Weather Channel. They said there would be snow flurries, and "snow squalls." There's about three-quarters of an inch of snow on the ground. So working it out from the context like an eight-year-old learning to read, I suppose that a snow squall is a flurry in which the snow comes down heavily enough to "lay," as we used to say. They used to just say that the flurries would be occasionally heavy, and predict the amount of accumulation. But I guess the lords of weather rhetoric decided that the word "flurry" didn't strike enough panic in the viewers' breasts. "Flurry" is a gentle, friendly word, like "panda" or "picnic." But "squall"! Typically a squall is a little stormlet that takes you by surprise when you're out boating. Suddenly there's wind and rain and big waves. You could die from a squall. Ergo, as we ratchet the weather rhetoric up to ever more hysterical heights, a weather event that puts three-quarters of an inch of snow on the ground shall now be known as a "snow squall."
Setting: an old-fashioned front parlor on a winter night. An elderly couple is seated there.
MAW: (setting down her knitting) "Well, I suppose I'll see what it's doing outside. They were calling for snow earlier."
PAW: (from behind his paper) "Mmm."
MAW: (pulling the curtain to one side with a finger to peer out) "Well, there's some sort of weather event happening, but I can't tell you what it is. There's no name for it."
(Expectant silence. It lengthens.)
PAW: (finally putting down the paper, with a weary sigh) "Is it like a flurry, but heavier? Is it sticking?"
MAW: "Yes."
PAW: (raising the paper again) "Snow squall."
MAW: "What's that you say?"
PAW: (another weary sigh) "Snow squall. They're calling that sort of thing a snow squall nowadays. Just read about it on The Weather Channel website the other day."
MAW: "Well, you could have told me."
PAW: "Why?"
MAW: (growing angry) "Well, maybe so I wouldn't have had to stand there searching for a word you knew the whole time!"
PAW: (glowering at her) "It seemed ridiculous! One of these pointless neologisms you hear, like 'fauxtography' or 'badonkadonk'!"
MAW: "We could have talked about it, at least!"
PAW: "What, we need to evaluate every last bit of minutiae related to the development of the language? Well, I'm sorry! I didn't realize I was married to the Académie française!
MAW: "That's it! The Académie française is now going to go shell peas in the kitchen! With the TV on! At least the appliances know it's considered polite to make a noise in the room now and then!"
(Paw glowers at her departing back, grinding his jaws so that the pipe in his mouth waves ominously back and forth, like a cat's tail. From the kitchen, pots bang. The television comes on, set to The Weather Channel.)
1/24/07
Snow and Scorpions
Well, don't get the idea I spend all my time in bars but one does have friends, after all, and if you walk around town late in the afternoon you may be invited to go have a drink. There's a place uptown that serves hideously expensive and hideously delicious Belgian beers, among its other charms, and it's a pleasant place too. I avoided it for years because I would poke my head in on weekend evenings and it would be crammed to the gills with little knots of hard-charger types, all blowing smoke at each other and making an unbearable racket.
But one time I wandered in on a Saturday afternoon, and it was nearly deserted. You could sit with a contemplative pint and watch people go by. So that became a habit, and now that I'm running around town now and then this place becomes the default have-a-drink spot. That's how it was yesterday, early in the evening. Nobody in the place at all. The bartender who's usually there when I go in is a young fellow with one excellent attribute for his job: He always wears a trace of a genially mischievous grin, and one eyebrow seems just a trace higher than the other, as if he's constantly amused by life. He mostly hovers in the middle of the bar, leaving people be, but when he sees their drinks diminishing he drifts over and leans toward them, his grin now conspiratorial and interrogative. Of course he wants to know whether to refill your glass, and what to fill it with this time. But he seems to treat that information as a delicious bit of gossip, a naughty little confidence, the hearing of which will afford him a worldly, knowing amusement.
Well, yesterday he was looking through the glassed-in front of the bar to the street beyond with that same bemused glint on his face. There had been an intense snow flurry earlier, the wind driving snow thickly through the air, but the snow never laid on the ground. The bartender said that if it was always like that, snow would be OK. "No inconvenience," I said, miming the use of a shovel. He just grinned. And I know what he means. I like just seeing the snow whirl in the air. And I don't especially like to be inconvenienced, to track muddy slush into the house, or try to nurse the car along without sliding into things, and all the rest.
But what I really, really like is when the snow goes beyond inconvenience, when it brings everything to a stop. Schools and businesses close, people can't get their vehicles out for hours or days, and everyone has to hunker down and focus all their effort on just staying warm and fed. Sometimes, you know, the daily bustle can get on your nerves, and the sum-total of human activity around you seems like a constant yammering, like a bar crowded with noisy, pushy, inconsiderate patrons who yell and smoke and carry on obnoxiously, and then a blizzard arrives, and it's as if Mother Nature had gotten exasperated, drawn herself up to her full height, and suddenly bellowed "Shut up!" and right away the bar got very quiet.
The formerly noisy patrons are shocked, faces frozen in dismay, drinks half-raised to mouths, cigarettes hovering over ashtrays. Nobody moves but me. Over in my corner, I raise my glass to Mother Nature, and give her a slow, grateful wink. It's a pleasant little break from the uproar. That's how I feel about it, when everything stops for a blizzard. I think it's worth a little shoveling.
What's that you say? You want to know what our old friend W. has been up to? Well, mostly the same old stuff. A colleague gave her some memoirs of his from the first Gulf War. His thought was she might have some judgment about them as an editor, but with her, really, it's a question of her essential pathological curiosity. Any piece of information about another person, no matter how utterly trivial, affects W. the way a cavity affects a cat: she's got to stick her nose in and investigate further. You can imagine, then, that memoirs of a tour of duty in a combat region would be irresistible. I asked her what was happening in the memoirs, and she said "His colleagues are training scorpions to fight." That struck me. "You'd think scorpions would fight naturally," I said. Their arms end in claws, their whip-like tails end in a poisonous sting, and God knows what else they've got going on. But then I thought of the Robert Heinlein quote, "An armed society is a polite society." Maybe scorpions take a look at all that firepower the others have, think about it, and say, "Oh, no, after you." They sting us readily enough, the filthy little horrors, but maybe they're gentle as parsons with each other. In a strange way, it's kind of a nice thought.
1/23/07
Privy Counsel
I've visited bathrooms on my own for years now without mishap, for the most part, and frankly you just don't anticipate mishaps—it's pretty much an everyday business. Except for yesterday. I blame a vaguely bug-related grogginess, but at any rate, I decided to spend a couple of hours in a library, work on the laptop some, maybe look a few things up. But the first thing I did, before settling down, was to visit the salle de bain. No big job to do, you know, just powdering my nose and all.
Well, I finished powdering and flushed. Not much happened, and then slowly the bowl filled very nearly to the top. Still groggy but waking up, I watch this. It comes right to the bottom rim, and stays there. And stays there.
Hmm. What to do? Say what you will, but I call myself a civilized person, and I like to walk out of a bathroom leaving it fresh and tidy for the next person. A key part of this is leaving a toilet that has clearly and definitively been flushed, and this one wasn't. People do leave them unflushed, and I've never seen an outraged citizen raise a hue and cry and go chasing after the culprit, but I wasn't taking the chance. Notify someone about the problem? No, that won't do. They're library ladies, they remind me of the little old ladies at my old elementary school a block away. No, that will never do. So I'm on my own here—just me and you toilet, and by God, we're going to find out which of us is the better man.
I see there's a plunger by the toilet. Maybe this is a common problem. The toilet is prone to upbacking, and someone else got it mostly clogged, and it's fallen to me to put things right. Well, I'm a helpful soul, right? A good citizen, a responsible, caring person, civilized to the bone. So I get to work, gingerly because the bowl is still near flood stage. Nothing happens. Except that my laptop case's strap comes sliding down my arm, and I reflexively throw my shoulder back to stop it, which in turn pulls the plunger back, out of the bowl, and somehow the laws of plunger physics mean that this throws about a quart of the water on the tile floor.
I stand and look at what I've done. Oh. My. God. About a third of the floor is swimming. Civilized person? I'm a biohazard, that's what I am. Did I mention that this is a unisex bathroom? Any second now, a sweet and lovely young mother will have an emergency involving a toddler, and will need to come in now. I check the door lock. And start to drop towels on the vast expanse of mess. More and more towels fall like snow. And the only way I can use them effectively without befouling my own fair hands is to scatter them until there's a layer about three inches thick and then start sweeping them around with my shoes in a demented parody of skating. And all the time I feel this deep sense of shame and jeopardy—how do these things happen? Will I get away without being caught? But in time the floor is more or less back the way it was, and the huge mass of towels has been crammed into the trash.
Only barely aware of my surroundings, I make my way to a set of booths and sink down. Slowly I set up the laptop. And after a few minutes one of the librarians comes padding over, walking slowly and silently, as if all the other patrons were asleep. Excuse me, she says, but these booths are reserved for teenagers between three and eight p.m. on Tuesdays. I slowly reach for one of the signs thickly scattered around, pick it up, and read. So they are. I force my mind to work—what day is this? Yes, it's Tuesday, I finally realize. The dame's story checks out.
I gather my stuff and go downstairs. The farther from the scene of the crime, the better. I share a table with an adult college student who's highlighting books on biology and Western culture. Behind is a street person is ensconced in a chair with his shoes off. We're all elaborately polite with each other. I'm a civilized person, I keep thinking. I really am, most of the time.
Later, waiting for friends in a bar, I order a Belgian-style ale. The bartender and I make some knowledgeable talk about such things. Sophisticated, debonair, that's me. I regard the beer affectionately, as the memory of the bathroom incident slowly fades. See, I think to myself, I really am a man of the world. I've been to Belgium. I've written articles about highfalutin beers just like this one. And I've used bathrooms thousands and thousands of times with no trouble at all. Occasionally, I act like the character made famous by the French actor and director Jacques Tati, particularly what Wikipedia calls the "well-meaning but clumsy" Monsieur Hulot. All he wanted was to have a pleasant time, to be polite, civilized, maybe even a little sophisticated. It's just that once in a while, it all falls apart. I've resolved to be careful, in the future, when I'm holding a plunger and a laptop case at the same time, but next time it'll be something else. Sigh.
Here's just a taste of Jacques Tati, from "Mr. Hulot's Holiday." It's really only a taste, the film is gentle-spirited and howlingly funny too, unless you're a huge Pauly Shore fan and need stronger meat than Tati dishes out. Trust me, it's a good one.
1/22/07
Just Sick Enough
First, let me say that in most cases it's better to be well than be sick. That being understood, let me throw this out there: Sometimes you can be just a little bit sick and it's not so bad. I got a sinus flareup and it made me feel sort of warm and tired, about the way I would if I'd been skiing all day and came in and had dinner. It's like a very mild cold. And again assuming that you have the freedom to rest, that's what you do. You're pleasantly tired, and warm, and you're resting. No concerns plague you, because you don't have the mental energy for it. You rest, and rest is exactly what you need. How often does any of us get exactly what we need? In many ways it's like being a cat—if you actually feel like doing a thing, then you do, but otherwise you curl up and sleep. I don't want to be more sick, of course. But this isn't bad. That's all I'm saying.
1/21/07
Silent Night
Well, I've been saying for two days now how consistently my neighbors express their affection on or very nearly on the hour of 2 a.m. I was in danger of talking about it to the point of being a little predictable myself, but last night I either slept through it or they opted for sleep themselves. Perhaps it was the soothing, calming effect of the falling snow, the first accumulation we've had this winter. I've always been glad to see the snow, always thought it brought a hush to the world, and softened its hard edges. And it's a little like the Japanese idea of sakura, the cherry blossoms, isn't it? Very much there, and then gone. Where are the snows of yesteryear, and all that. Well! There's a piece of verse by William Shakespeare from Love's Labours Lost that you need to read—you'll be tranpsorted to the countryside of Elizabethan England, and as you read it you can almost hear the fire crackling:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepard blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
"Tu-who,
Tu-whit, tu-who," a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
"Tu-who,
Tu-whit, tu-who," a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
Not to go on about it but that's twelve vivid images conjured up by 113 words. I'll leave you with that for today, since I was out hiking in sub-freezing weather yesterday and my own blood was nipp'd to the point that I'm feeling pretty foul myself.
Back again—I was browsing around Wikipedia, just wasting time, after having been checking into Shakespeare, and I found this 100 Greatest Britons list done in 2002. Boy George is number 46, for God's sake. Nothing against him, I even played some of his music in a Top 40 band back in the day, but it seems not quite right to rank him higher than Sir Francis Drake, King Arthur, Edward Elgar, Jane Austen, and Geoffrey Chaucer, among others. He ranks higher than Edward Jenner, the pioneer of vaccination. And don't think its a show-biz thing; he ranks higher than J.K. Rowling, and he ranks 40 points higher than Bono. The Wikipedia entry says "The resulting series, Great Britons, included individual programmes on the top ten, with viewers having further opportunities to vote after each programme. It concluded with a debate." No surprise there.
1/20/07
The Night Time is the Right Time
Well, everyone's favorite Fun Couple was back for another round—at 2 a.m., I don't need to tell you. (I just remembered another verb we used to use for this sort of thing: "porking." Maybe if I were comfortably ensconced in whatever my new life turns out to be workwise, I would just roll over and go back to sleep after being awoken by their amorous yelpings. But life has me stirred up these days, and it doesn't take much to wake me up and once I do wake up, I stay awake. "In the arms of Morpheus," people once said of sleepers, referring to the Greek god of dreams. Well, these days, if I'm woken up, Morpheus flees like a frightened fish.
So you think about things. Here's what I thought about: How earlier in the day I had seen an echelon of geese impossibly high in the sky, just the thinnest "V" made up of barely perceptible points, undulating and floating up there, as if they were seaweed in the tide. If they had been any farther up (geese can fly five miles high) I wouldn't have seen them at all.
Then I thought about how the iconic music for the Sixties, the music they always use under those television sequences that show you the decade in a four-second series of images, is always something like "Purple Haze" or "White Rabbit." But the music that actually might give you a clue what it was like to be a typical druggie back then was far more obscure: Small Faces' "Itchycoo Park." Yes, it's a little more pop-influenced than the aforementioned songs, and it's got the obligatory oboe obbligato we associate with the period, but if you really want to know how stoners felt back then when they took a hit of acid and went bopping around in the park, listen to that song and you'll find out.
And then I thought, not for the first time, about how there was much that was silly back then, many dreams dreamed that would never come true, but boy, there was something in the air and just having caught a whiff of it is something you remember. Many years later, in 1996, to be exact, I was in the French town of Thiers, in the heart of the Auvergne. I was staying in an old-fashioned, inexpensive hotel opposite the train station, and discovered that the café on its ground floor was, every night, the preferred haunt of the kids from the boarding school down the street. Skinny French teenage boys would lounge around, nursing beers, playing foosball. The café manager and de facto den mother to the boys was a woman in her twenties nicknamed Zaza. She moved with the slim, sinister grace of a mink, and she was full of aplomb and effortlessly hip—she'd come in wearing a formal gown and combat boots, and you'd say to yourself, "Well, of course." That was ten years ago, I hadn't started envying people their youth yet, but I was curious about those boys—they seemed stuck, somehow, and bored. I was talking with Zaza about them one time and asked her what they dreamed about. She shrugged. "Getting a job," she said. And I pitied them a little, young as they were; we boomers dreamed all sorts of things, some foolish, some not, but young people ought to dream about more than getting a job, don't you think? Everyone should. But I was often bored that way, when I was their age. By now they have the jobs they dreamed of. And they live in a beautiful place—maybe that's enough.
And so my mind wandered. The god of dreams had deserted me, of course, but I could still lie there like a kid being forced to nap in the afternoon when he didn't really want to, thinking about all sorts of things like that, waiting for the morning to come.
1/19/07
The Many Splendored Thing
"Boink" is one way to describe it. "Boff" is another. Scrumping. Mashing. Tearing off a piece. At any rate, I've gotten used to it, since this weekend marks the end of my second year here in my small-town pied à terre. I live in a row house, and the people on either side of me in the row share their lives with me, I've found. The walls are thick masonry and plaster, and seem like they'd absorb a cannonball with aplomb. But they also seem like paper, like Japanese house walls, in that they seem to have a preternatural ability to transmit sound. If someone in the next house over shuffles cards vehemently, I hear it. Click a pen? I hear that too. So it's only natural that the act of love intrudes on my living space as if the actors were in the same room. That's how I feel, actually: We all live together, like in some Amazon village. No secrets, no modesty.
Which is OK, except that my neighbors to the south have a habit of getting it on at 2 in the morning. I've never heard them express their affection at any other time. It's 2 a.m. when Eros awakes, and that's fine with me. I'm impressed with them, really. It's very straightforward, I don't hear anything to suggest that they're getting freaky. Meat and potatoes, and what's wrong with that? Some of us want more variety, spontaneity, but these folks have a pattern established and it works for them, that's clear. He's not very vocal, and she basically emits the classic vocalizations, but who of us can judge? They're getting the job done in a way that works for them, and far be it from me to complain. I could bang on the walls, if I were a disagreeable person, or run the vacuum cleaner—after all, it's always and invariably at 2 a.m. that they commence to express their affections—but it's a cold enough world, no? I only worry when they aren't carrying on. They hadn't carried on for a couple of weeks, but they carried on last night. I was glad, I suppose—I want them to be happy. But do they always have to be happy at 2 a.m.? I mean, always always? It's impressive on one level, a triumph of consistency, a Cal Ripken sort of thing. But quite frankly, when people wake you up because you hear their lovemaking after two years of the same through those paper-plaster walls, it's not annoying—I mean, you can't begrudge people their amour—but it's not especially provocative either. It's just noise. And I couldn't get back to sleep, and I was groggy all day. Maybe I'll buy some earplugs. Or a ball gag to hang on their doorknob. A bit forward? No, we're all good friends on this block, believe me.
1/18/07
Me Want Kill
People who call me a curmudgeon—that is, people who know me—don't always realize how often I bite my tongue in the interest of peace and harmony. Like last night, f'rinstance. I attended a local meeting of a national environmental organization, and this woman bustled in late and plumped down her voluminous appurtenances—bags, books, note paper, reading glasses, lots of stuff. Then she started talking and doodling. It turns out she's very much against hunting. I told her the organization was not actually an anti-hunting group, but I'm afraid that when I'm telling someone something they don't want to hear I can phrase it too tentatively—"I'm not entirely sure," you know, that kind of thing. Her expression suggested, and not at all tentatively, that I was a pitiably ignorant fool. "I don't see how anyone who loves the natural world could kill animals," she said. End of discussion. I leaned back, tongue firmly bitten.
She nattered on and on. She claimed that the hunters in her township had teamed up with burglars, and there was a string of break-ins in the neighborhood that were somehow hunting-related, I didn't quite understand how the connection worked. She said bowhunters were even more dangerous to have around than those who used firearms, which is roughly the same as saying bicyclists are more dangerous than automobile drivers. I bit my tongue harder and harder.
But I can have my say here, can't I? Ha! First of all, yes, of course there are irresponsible hunters. They are properly condemned, and most strongly by their responsible fellow hunters who are vastly in the majority. But there are also irresponsible drivers. There are irresponsible pilots, surgeons, politicians, cops, teachers, reactor technicians, crossing guards, civil engineers, clergypersons—need I go on? Anyone whose actions affect other sentient beings—and that's you and I and everyone else who ever lived or will live—is obliged to be responsible and some of us aren't working up to potential that way.
But the people who reflexively condemn hunters make assumptions without evidence. First of all, it's a cultural thing—they don't know any hunters. Not any. None. But they can somehow see into the hunters' souls, despite that, and what they see horrifies them, because it only stands to reason that hunters like to kill things. And that makes them bad people.
But it's not that simple.
Let's imagine a band of Homo sapiens huddled around a fire some 30,000 years ago. Their home is a cave, because they don't know how to build. Their plant-based food comes from roots, nuts, and berries, because they haven't yet discovered agriculture. But out there, spread out in the forests and grasslands of Magdalenian France, Spain, Italy, are generous sources of protein—wary, skilled at evasion and dangerous if cornered. Every time they catch one of these animals, they stave off starvation for weeks. They'll eat the meat, crack the bones for marrow, use the skins to stay warm. Catching those animals makes the difference between life and death, between a full belly and starvation. Starvation! I don't think the woman sitting across from me had ever experienced physical hunger for two hours in a row. The band of hunter-gatherers faced starvation all the time. So does every wild animal today. If you're equipped to get protein from other animals, you damn well take advantage of it, or you die. And the human beings who survived and passed on their genetic material were the ones who hunted most successfully, and the ones who hunted most successfully were the ones who went at it hard, who stalked their prey relentlessly. And at night they thought about those animals all the time. They went into special chambers, and drew pictures of them. We believe today that the pictures were used as magic, meant to help the hunt. Because remember, it was life and death. But the pictures were magnificent, too, far more so than they needed to be if simple representation was all that mattered. Many are shockingly detailed:
And many, if not most, have a grace and realism, a vivid life to them, a playful, touching charm, even. It's timeless art, amazing when you think about the level of culture otherwise. And I think it says something about the artist's feelings for the subject.
"I don't see" is how she phrased it, and it was the one accurate statement she made. She didn't, I agree. Those first humans killed any animal they could with not a trace of guilt—it was that or starve to death. (I'm getting hungry for breakfast myself, but don't worry, I'm winding this up.) So kill they did. But how could they possibly have made the kind of paintings they did, if they didn't have some sort of feeling for those animals? Some sort of feeling like awe, like awareness of beauty and grace and power? Might they not have imagined the other animals to be their equals in many ways? Not inferiors to be protected, but fellow travelers in a vast, magnificent, morning of the world, with a fierce ball of fire overhead in the day and a mysterious silver one at night, with purple evening skies and dark forests and grassy plains that went on forever? They were out there, the bison and oxen and horses and deer, and to kill them was life extended, to kill them was to live yourself for a few more weeks, but they were magnificent and beautiful too and maybe you loved them.
I don't know, I can't say, I can't speak for those early humans, I can't look into their minds and spirits. But I can see how you can admire a creature, find it marvelous and magnificent, and still kill it. Some people can't see that, but others can. I don't hunt myself, but I might if I had more time and money. I've seen it done. I eat meat myself, so I can't condemn it. See, you have to try to imagine a decent human being who doesn't, in fact, enjoy killing per se, but finds that hunting is the response to a deep, ancient, insistent call. I've talked to hunters, and they talk of the mixed feeling when the deer goes down. A thing that was alive now isn't. But the tribe eats tonight. The impulse is part of us, and I think the day we've all forgotten it will be a sad diminishment.
I could have said all that to her, if she'd held still for it, which I doubt. Or I could have just smirked and said, "So the Native Americans didn't love the natural world?" Or I could have told her about the mix of emotions I've had on the rare occasions I've killed fish I've caught. I caught a large barracuda once on an island off Belize. I'll never forget how hard it struck, its vicious strength or unbelievable speed. And when I landed it, I figured we'd have to be careful releasing it if we didn't want nasty injuries. But the Belizean guide had no releasing in mind—this was a good-sized fish, and the Belizeans prize the flavor. "Nice cuda," he kept repeating. "Nice cuda. Drag it up on the beach here. We'll have it tonight." And we did. I and my friends and the guides and everyone at the fishing camp that evening had barracuda fingers, fried, with a dipping sauce. I sat at the picnic table with the stars overhead, savoring the humid breeze, and we all ate the fish I had caught. You see, madam, it happens that I love the natural world. I really do. But few things in the world are really as simple as bad thinking can make them seem. All I know is that I look at that picture sometimes, and marvel at the steely, dangerous beauty of that animal. That I killed. Go figure.
By the way, I just discovered in the course of my researching this that the German word for "cave" is "hoehle," which made me smile.
1/17/07
Schlocked! Schlocked!
I do know better. I've been known to repeat the phrase, "It's the cheap guy who pays the most," and I usually buy the best quality I can afford. The Toyota, for instance. You go out to the curb, get in, turn the key, and it goes "vroom" every time. The thought that it might not really doesn't cross your mind. My old Nikon F3—one time it got caught as I was carrying it in such a way that it swung around and hit the plaster wall hard. The screw-on glass filter over the lens shattered, but the lens and body were fine. I've never had a problem with any one of my Macintosh computers. Need I go on? But then, there's the Wal-Mart down the road. That's a different story.
I don't want to sneer at Wal-Mart. I'm a middle-class guy in every way that matters, especially in the matter of income, and I don't want to pay more for things than I have to. But nothing I buy from that damn store works well or for long. I got a lamp there that stood beside my desk for six or eight months, and then the switch went bad on it. It's standing in my living room now, waiting for me to get out the instruction book for living in this borough so I can sort out the rules about when you can put out "bulk trash" and what sorts of bulky trash are outputable.
The thing cost, say, fifteen bucks. Well and good. It doesn't owe me a lifetime of service. But what do I do? Do I learn anything from this? You're right—I wouldn't be writing this way if I had, would I? No, I went back to Wal-Mart and got an architect's lamp, the kind that has double arms and hinges and springs and looks all retro. Less than ten bucks, this time. Good deal? Well, I had the damn thing maybe four days, and one afternoon there's a noise and the cat goes tearing out of the room, but I look around and can't see what's happened. Then yesterday I look and see there's a spring missing from one side of the lamp. And the spring is missing because a piece holding it just snapped off under the spring's tension. The lamp, in other words, is literally flying apart. It's like some starlet in a Jacqueline Susann novel, a lamp that's eating amphetamines out of one fist and downers from the other, drinking and chucking bottles around at people because it's so full of inner conflicts and it just can't take it any more! That's how this lamp is acting. It just won't do. So I'm going to save my pennies and do some research. I'll find out when when bulk trash day is, and then I'll find out the equivalent among lamp makers of a Toyota, a Nikon, a Macintosh. And then I'll go out and buy one. It'll cost at least $89.99, of that I'm sure. But it'll turn on and off every day, steady, reliable, one less thing to think about. It will contribute to the peace and satisfaction of my life. Randomly flying springs will not strike me in the eye. It'll cost more, yes, but it'll be worth it.
1/16/07
Sunlight, Soup, and Spoonbills
At this very moment a patch of sunlight is fading on my wall. Most photography books mention how light works this way; a particular effect may only be there for minutes or seconds, so you'd better know your camera's controls well enough to capture it immediately, and you'd better have a camera with you in the first place. (I saw a similar idea in a self-defense book one time; it said the first rule of gunfighting was "Bring a gun.") But the really curious thing about this is that the sun is shining from the western side of town, and it's morning. I first noticed this effect in August of 2005: The sun hits a window in your neighborhood and ricochets back toward you from the opposite direction. I was in my bedroom, which faces east, looking at a patch of sunlight that seemed to be defying the laws of astronomy. It was pretty weird, for a moment at least, until I figured it out. (For a long time before I had been living in the country, where the sunlight usually came from the general direction of the sun.) But this morning, the sun was shining in the wrong direction again and I just sort of yawned—yep, I thought, happens all the time. Got up, pulled down one of the vanes of the Venetian blind like a busybody peering at the neighbors. A window in a house on the next street was on fire with orange sunlight. Aha! Just as I suspected. Fooled me once, shame on you etc.
Not that the sun will warm things much today. It won't get much above freezing. For southeastern Pennsylvania, that's a chilly day. I'm actually glad about that; it feels like winter, instead of a weird new season. (I saw forsythia blooming on Saturday, about four months too early.) Yesterday, knowing it'd be cold, I made a giant pot of lentil soup, quarts and quarts of it. This gives me a sense of security, on a winter's day, because I know I can sustain myself for a good while on it. Yes, I'm a middle-class American, my danger of literal starvation is quite low, but still, I have the soup and I'm all set, and it feels pleasant. I imagine some people get the same happy feeling from driving a business competitor into bankruptcy. That's not me; I don't have much need to vanquish and subdue, to conquer and rule. If I'm pushed I'll push back and all, but mostly I'm happy just to have soup.
I do think the little things—sunlight and soup, for starters—are the things that mostly make you happy. But for a long time I've heard about the parlous straits that whooping cranes were in. Well, I'm pleased to report they're doing better. I'd always sort of wondered what they sounded like, but as of this morning I know that they're called whooping cranes for a reason. The roseate spoonbills are doing better too. Spoon...spoon...oh, right! I forgot to eat breakfast! Talk to you later.
1/15/07
What You Read In Books
I used to read a lot, as a kid, and people would tell me, "You know, there's more to life than what you read in books." But most of us who read books know that, thank you very much. Often what we're reading about are things we don't want to experience directly. People have actually been to the moon, and I'm sure that's quite a rush and I'd like to go too. But the people who've gone so far took a lot of trig and calculus and all that stuff in high school and college—and probably back in kindergarten too—and that's just not me, OK? If I have to take all those math courses I think I'd rather just stay home.
Then, of course, there's Love. Love in the real world occupies all your attention and is quite interesting for a couple of months. Then it either settles into a pattern or goes wrong somehow. Those first few months, sure, that's pretty cool. But reading about love is less wear and tear than experiencing it, I think we can all agree on that. Or maybe bears? I was ambling through a forest years ago and I came very near to falling over a bear. It ran off a few yards. I froze. It stopped, turned, and stood up to look at me. I had to crane my head back a bit to see it. The greatest writer in the world could not do justice to the range of thoughts and emotions I had in the next 20 seconds or so as I backed away. And in those seconds there was, yes, more to life than what you read in books.
The fact is that no piece of writing can convey even the most mundane moments in all their real-life richness of detail, or catalog the layers of thought possible while just waiting in the line for a driver's license or something. But check it out: Every Tuesday morning, the trash guys come down the alley and take the bags out of the trash cans. Then they sling the cans down, just fling them about willy-nilly. You go out and they're lying on their side. I could get annoyed about that, or I could think nothing at all about it, just go out like a zombie and pick them up again.
Or I could remember the scene in Hamlet, the one where a jolly, clowning gravedigger throws a skull out of a grave he's digging. "That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murder!" says Hamlet, noticing it. They joke around for a while, and then the gravedigger mentions that the skull belonged to—all together, now—Yorick! Which makes Hamlet pensive, and he makes some fairly trenchant observations, and then the burial party happens along and a whole bunch more interesting stuff happens.
And I was reminded of this for some reason when the garbage knaves jowled my trash cans to the ground. It made picking the cans back up a much more interesting moment, just running that clip in my mind. Which strongly suggests to me that often there's quite a bit less to life than what you read in books. Books have to be interesting the whole way through. Life is under no such obligation. At least mine doesn't seem to be.
1/14/07
Go West
Years ago I heard about a woman who was talking with a young boy, 7 or 8. They were watching some birds on a telephone line, and the birds decided to fly away. The woman asked the boy where he thought they might be going, and he considered it. "To the mall?" he asked.
I thought about that yesterday, chuckling ruefully. A friend of mine who was possibly moving from Pennsylvania to Montana is now definitely moving from Pennsylvania to Montana. And he's not even moving to one of Montana's so-called cities, either, he's moving to a rural area and in Montana that's saying something. Some people are shocked that he would leave the suburban comforts of the Philadelphia suburbs to go to such a place. "Is there a mall there?" they ask him. This attitude interests me. I'm guessing that in some people's minds having a mall nearby is a necessity, like medical care, and in rural Montana your intake levels of upscale consumer goods could fall so low that you'd slip into a coma and they'd have to get a medevac chopper to rush you to the nearest Pottery Barn.
The thing is, for some people, Montana offers consolations for the lack of malls. This friend is an avid angler, and he'll be surrounded by world-class trout streams. He's not an object-oriented person anyway; he typically spends his time acquiring skills, not things. And he loves the outdoors—when he's not fishing he'll be hiking, or cross-country skiing, or something similar.
And then there's the fact that he's one of those people who go to the Rocky Mountains, look around themselves, and say, "I was meant to be here." Personally I think it's magnificent and soul-swelling country, but I know where I belong, where home is, and it's right here, in Penn's Woods. I love the undulating hills, the stone barns, the trees and birds I've grown up with. There was a time when I wanted to be other places, thought I'd be happier in them, so I know the feeling of being called away. I imagine it's like what the birds feel, when they get the urge to go. For my friend, Montana's pull is stronger than the call of the mall. Many people don't understand that, but that's where my friend wants to go, and all his other fishing friends will miss him but they understand. And they'll be out to visit him as often as they can manage, of that you should have no doubt at all.
1/13/07
Address Unknown
The image here is the blind in my office window. It caught my eye the other day, and pleased me. If you're one of the select group who stop by because you agree with me that there's more to life worth thinking about than celebrity gossip, then I hope you receive the blessings of whatever gods may be. And stay safe! I have enough to worry about!
1/12/07
The Name of the Dog
I was just reading a pretty good book on writing, Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, and one of the essential strategies listed is "Get the name of the dog." Clark means by this that you should ask about and notice seemingly minor details that might prove telling. Good advice, but at times you can't follow it. In my first newspaper job, a call came over the police scanner one day that a dwelling was on fire. This was guaranteed drama in a small town where not much happened as a rule, so the photographer and I jumped up and run out. No need to drive, it was just a few blocks away. We saw fire engines rolling up the street, and people running toward the house. But when we got there, things were strangely undramatic. No flames, no excitement. Soon a large man glared out the door. "Pot of meat!" he said. "Meat got left on the stove and smoked up! Just a pot of meat!" And he continued to glare, as if glare power could push everyone off his block and spare him further annoyance.
It very nearly could; he didn't look like a guy to trifle with at any time and he was having a particularly bad day. But I was a reporter, after all, and I had intuitively absorbed the dog-name concept, and for another thing I saw more humor in the situation than the big guy in the door could at the moment, so I called out, "What kind of meat?" He just turned the full wattage of his glare on me personally, and then turned and went in. Beef? Pork? Ostrich? He wasn't saying. I tried, Roy, what can I say? I do try. I was doing a story a few years ago about a private high school in rural Montana, sort of a prep school situation with horses and fishing and so forth. One kid was standing around a barn one day with her hands together in front of her, holding a hamster. It turned out they'd named it "Godzilla."
1/11/07
Orson, Benjamin, the Others, and Me
Well, I woke up this morning thinking about money—how long the amount I had would last, and how I might get more. And then I thought about all the inspirational biographies I was given when I was a child. There was one about Benjamin Franklin, and it told how he got frustrated with his older brother keeping him down, so he ran away from Boston to Philadelphia at the age of 17. He only had a little money, and when he got to Philadelphia he went into a bakery to buy a "bisket." But the Philly bakeries made different products from the Boston ones, so young Franklin asked for three cents' worth of whatever bread they had. "He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls," Franklin wrote in his autobiography. "I was surpriz'd at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk'd off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other."
I remember my little kiddies' biography saying that a woman in a doorway laughed at him as he went up the street that way, and that he married her. This is not true, it seems—the real story involves commonlaw marriage and illegitimate children by other women and all sorts of fun stuff that's not necessarily inspirational for young people. But surely there have always been plenty of people who set out for foreign shores, or head over the hill, or leave whatever unsatisfactory place they were, and go forward to make their future. It's part of the mythology of the United States, and it guides our thinking. And it's real, you know? People actually do that. They say Orson Welles showed up in the States with a few coins in his pockets. Again, that's probably fanciful, but not so far from the truth. Every day, people get on the boat that will take them wherever destiny has decided they'll go. They take a few pennies and then top their wallets off with optimism.
So before I could get nervous about money, the thought came to me—the morning is something like a shore, isn't it? The night is dark water, the light is the land. You wake up, and you've arrived there on the shore of the day. And yes, I don't have much, but I've got one loaf in hand, another under each arm, and I'm ready to walk off and see what I can make happen.
1/10/07
I Knew Her When
How often does this happen? A couple of years ago I wrote about this powerhouse teacher named Erin Gruwell who was working with a bunch of kids in California who lived in cruddy neighborhoods and dealt with crime and poverty and so forth, very grim. And the thing that really surprised her was how suspicious they were of each other, how different ethnic groups and races would segregate themselves. So she brought in a Holocaust survivor to speak to them, and they started reading things like Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and
At this point a regrettable mishap caused the loss of early January and all of December. Mozart's early death and the burning of the library at Alexandria were greater losses but I regret this one anyway. Sorry. The mishap was caused, I must admit, by me.
"© Copyright 2007 by Matt Freeman. All Rights Reserved.