Sorting

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When you're recuperating from an illness, you find yourself with time on your hands. If you're like me, you begin to clean and organize things. Photos and receipts and greeting cards pile up over the months and years, and it's nice to go through them once in a while.

Receipts and greeting cards are easy to throw away, but photos are a little more difficult. I find that I've taken too many overexposed photos of Beautiful Scenery over the years, and it's easy to toss most of them in the trash. When there are people in the photos, however, I hesitate, as if they exert some magical hold on me. Might some hypothetical future descendant muse over these photos, wondering at how distant and mysterious we were?

Well, hm. First of all: what descendants? Apart from a few mangy stuffed animals, I have no kids. I keep in touch with a few members of the next generation of my family, but none of them seems impassioned about family history.

Also, the sad truth is that objects like photos are not generally magical. I pull out old theater stubs and concert programs, examine them with regret, and toss them in the trash. They may have been magical for a little when then they were new, but time has taken their magic away. Photos are a little different, but even they lose their immediacy after a few decades.

How do you react when you see a photo of a distant ancestor? Curiosity, maybe; regret that you will never get to know them; sadness that things pass and people die. I think always of those family-reunion photos in which the kids are lying on the floor up front, clowning for the camera, and the older generations stand ranked behind them, with the oldest of all scrunched against the wall in back. I realized some years ago that (without ever quite realizing it) I had suddenly become one of those pale oldsters in the back of the photo - some forgotten great-uncle, what's-his-name, the one who moved to Rhode Island and lived with another man and had no kids.

Forgotten.

Well, hm.

Get to work sorting and labeling those photos, kids!

Maybe someone will remember you after you're gone.

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Ukulele

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I wrote not long ago about my stupid notion that I might learn to play the acoustic guitar. Listen, if teenage rockers can do it, why not an old fart like me? But upon consideration, I had an even better idea. Why not the ukulele instead?
 

Reasons:

·        Ukuleles are smaller than acoustic guitars.

·        Ukuleles are cheaper than acoustic guitars.

·        Ukuleles have only four strings compared to six on an acoustic guitar, which ought to make them 33% easier to play.

·        Ukuleles are cuter than acoustic guitars.

·        The sound of a ukulele has far less carrying power than that of an acoustic guitar, which means you irritate less people if you play it badly.

And so forth.
 

So I shopped around online. Being a cheapskate, I bought one from Amazon for thirty-five dollars. It’s adorable. Everyone online warned me that cheap ukuleles go out of tune easily, which has turned out to be true, but it’s shiny and playable, and tuning it is good practice.

In a few days I learned half-a-dozen chords. I am relieved that the instrument has a soft voice; I can go in my room and close the door and strum away – out of tune or not – and not bother a soul, not even Partner in the next room. My arthritic old fingers still refuse to dance up and down the strings, but – with time – who knows?

 

(Now - would anyone like to hear a nice spirited rendition of 'Hawaiian War Chant'?)

(No one?)

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Death threat

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My doctor talked recently about the shock of receiving a cancer diagnosis. "One of my other patients," she said, "compared it to peacefully mowing the lawn on a summer day and then suddenly being hit by a garbage truck that runs off the road. Where did that come from?" (Amen, amen.) "But it's not like a murder, or a death sentence. It's a death threat. Keep that in mind. Nothing can ever be the same afterward, but it's only a threat, not a sure thing."

Once more: amen, amen.

To be sure, life itself is a death sentence, last I looked. But most of us manage to keep ourselves blinkered, blissfully looking the other way. Once the word 'cancer' enters the conversation, however, things become altogether more serious, and more real. Life becomes far more precious. Those we love become far more precious. Death is a curtain with something mysterious on the other side - maybe something nice, maybe something nasty, maybe nothing at all - but all of a sudden I have very little interest in finding out. I'm far more interested in exploring the things Partner and I haven't done and seen, the places we still want to go. We used to joke that we'd better travel while we're both still ambulatory. Now the joke isn't quite so funny anymore.

Hunger, they say, makes food taste better. Maybe the awareness of mortality makes us realize how sweet the things of daily life are.

And I am lucky: lucky to have had a life full of beautiful things, lucky to have known so many crazy difficult wonderful people, lucky to have traveled to so many places, lucky to have found Partner, lucky to have him with me at this awful time.

Most of all I am lucky to have Partner in my life. I am lucky to have someone to love who loves me back.

How could I ever want to give up so many lovely things?

From A. A. Milne:

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

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Thinking, fast and slow; or, Nancy Grace and Dan Abrams

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In his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Daniel Kahneman posits that we humans, as mammals/primates, have two different decision-making systems in our brains. There’s a “fast” system, which does quick evaluations on the basis of likelihood and present evidence, and makes a quick decision. There is also a “slow” system, which takes time and evaluates more carefully.

The “fast” system is useful for emergencies. The “slow” system is useful for – well, just about everything except emergencies.

Sadly, most of us use the “fast” system for everything, which means that – for us – the obvious reason seems always to be the right reason. Even more sadly, we rationalize these “fast” decisions: we take our quickly-drawn conclusions and try to justify them mock-logically.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s just silly.

Which brings me to Dan Abrams and Nancy Grace.

For whatever reason, ABC’s “Good Morning America” often uses these two as tandem commentators on court cases in the news. Dan is reasoned and careful and takes the law into account. Nancy, on the other hand, always knows immediately who’s to blame and mocks Dan for not following her lead.

See? Dan is slow-thinking. Nancy is fast-thinking.

It’s sickening to watch, sometimes. Dan is reasoning through a case, and Nancy will accuse him of “sitting in his ivory tower.” Obviously (for Nancy), the guiltiest-looking person in the room must be the perpetrator. Right?

No, Nancy. Not right. Lots of innocent people are in jail right now because of thinking like yours.

Nancy used to be a real court prosecutor. Now she’s just an imaginary prosecutor, allowed by ABC to pontificate on cases about which she (and the rest of us) know next to nothing. I’m glad she’s not in the real legal system. She’d do a lot of harm there. I’m sorry, however, that ABC gives her a platform on “Good Morning America” to hold forth on these “he looks guilty, so he must be guilty” views. I’m sure there are viewers who consider her an authority, and think: if Nancy Grace says/believes it, it must be true!

But it ain’t.

She’s a dimwit in love with her own opinions who has forgotten how the law works. She wants opinion to be law.

That’s a creepy thought.

“Good Morning America” really shouldn’t give her this kind of exposure. Except, I’m sure, that she’s good for ratings, because fast-thinking quick-judging viewers like to hear her expound on her ill-judged beliefs, which agree with their own.

(Sigh.)

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Domenico Scarlatti

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I love complete sets of the music of my favorite composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach.  A clever little company, appropriately called Brilliant, has discovered a formula for marketing these: license low-cost but serviceable performers (mostly European), pull everything together, put it all in low-cost but serviceable packaging. It's hard for a natural collector like me to resist these. Sometimes I browse their website and find myself drawn to seventeen-CD sets of the music of people I never heard of.

Most recently I bought the complete keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Mister Scarlatti was the son of a prolific Italian opera composer; Scarlatti Junior moved to Spain where he concentrated on keyboards, writing nearly six hundred tiny sonatas. (I fondly remember Peter Schickele's comment about giving someone the complete Scarlatti sonatas "recorded on convenient 45RPM records and sent out one a week over a period of thirty-five years.")

These sonatas, if you don't know them, are lovely. Each one is a perfect little jeu d'esprit, turning perfectly ordinary scales and arpeggii into something different and new. Some of the sonatas are jumping-bean sprightly; others are grave thoughtful little quasi-marches. Some die away into series of melancholy chords, and others tromp all over the place.

Keyboard players (even sub-amateurs like me) know the pleasures and perils of these sonatas; they run up and down the keyboard, often forcing the player to cross hands so that the left hand is playing on the right-hand keys and vice versa. Scarlatti famously said that he had ten fingers and saw no reason not to keep all of them busy.

Five hundred fifty-five sonatas is a lot, as Schickele reminded us. If you listen to more than half a dozen of these sonatas in succession, your ear will get a wee bit numb. But taken a few at a time, they are wonderful.

This is the soulful B minor sonata, K. 27, played by the late Russian pianist Emil Gilels. It’s one of the slow ballad-like ones; Gilels plays it on a modern piano rather than the more traditional harpsichord, which makes it even richer and more mournful.

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Tumblr for the Lipitor generation

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Here’s how I feel about the different social media sites and their uses:

·        Facebook, for the young, is for connecting and gossiping and embarrassing one another.

·        Facebook, for those of us who are no longer young, is for keeping in touch and swapping recipes and Simplicity patterns and posting pictures from thirty years ago and embarrassing one another.

·        Twitter is about branding and advertisement and being stupid in fifteen words or less. If you are not consistently very witty, you shouldn't really bother posting, unless you're Katy Perry or Justin Bieber, in which case it doesn't matter.

·        Pinterest is for those who like to post and share pictures of fashion and decorating and jewelry and cute boys. Much though I like all these things, I decided after a few months that Pinterest was not for me.

·        WordPress is a nice stable blog website, full of people with all kinds of interests. I have made some very nice Internet friendships on WordPress.

·        Blogger / Blogspot ditto.

·        Tumblr is a friggin' zoo.

 Let me expand upon this last statement.

Tumblr is something for everyone and no mistake: lots of beautiful photography and art, lots of underdone cheesy humor, lots of selfies. Also lots of bizarre political thought and amateur porn. It's a more freewheeling version of Facebook in which you don't need to friend anyone, and in which most people use handles and aliases. Nothing comes to you automatically on Tumblr: you have to shop around for it. Once you find something with which you feel comfortable, those people will be reblogging from other similarly-oriented Tumblr blogs, and you can follow those in turn, and - within a month or two of careful tending - you will have a beautiful Tumblr garden / dashboard full of lovely and amusing images and texts to enjoy!

Let me give you a head start. Let's say you're a mature person, a little literary, a little artsy, with a taste for kitch and a goofy sense of humor. You might like to look at the following Tumblr blogs, just for entertainment's sake. (And if you’re reading this on Tumblr, look these folks up; you won’t be sorry.)

  

·        Diane Duane. Diane (who blogs under her real name) is a successful author, mostly sci-fi and young adult. She lives in Ireland and posts wonderful pictures and texts, and she is very responsive to her fans and readers. She is very likeable, and I recommend her highly.

·        Devilduck. This is the ultra-kitschy Tumblr blog of one of the guys associated with the well-known Archie McPhee joke shop in Seattle. If you like pictures of people wearing horse masks and Christmas trees decorated with Cthulhu tentacles, this is the site for you.

·        Bad Postcards. What it says. Mostly 1950s and 1960s; mostly cute, some poignantly nostalgic, and almost all in brilliant Kodacolor.

·        1950s Unlimited. Like Devilduck, but a little more on the sentimental side. If you get misty-eyed over black and white photos of people using cigarette machines, you'll feel very at home here.

·        Well, That’s Just Great. The drily amusing / often hilarious daily chronicle of a man named Anthony Giffen who lives in central Florida with a dog named Ducky and a partner named Gizmo. Highly recommended.

There: I have sanitized Tumblr for you. I guarantee no porn, no dangerous radicals, no homicidal lunatics.

Now get in there and explore Tumblr and stomp around a bit.

You might just have fun.

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The eve of Saint Blaise

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Today is Candlemas, when the Catholic Church blesses the candles to be used during its liturgy. Tomorrow is the feast-day of Saint Blaise, patron of ailments of the throat. Some churches still do the Blessing of the Throat, in which the priest uses the newly-blessed candles to bless the throats of congregants.

Saints become patrons in peculiar ways. Clare had a vision on the wall in front of her and became the patroness of television. Joseph of Cupertino levitated helplessly, yelping and crying, and became the patron of aviators. Blaise miraculously made a child cough up a fishbone, thus making him Mister Throat.

The Church asks and answers the question: Why doesn’t God always cure ailments of the throat, even if you pray for it? Why doesn’t he cure everything, while he’s at it? It’s a mystery.

Mystery schmystery. It’s still a pretty good question.

Disclosure: Partner gave a Saint Blaise medal last year, which I carry with me religiously, you should pardon the expression.

What could it hurt?

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Grandma Lottie

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Years ago I came to terms with looking like my father's mother, Grandma Minnie. I have her pallor and her blue eyes, as well as (naturally) her inner sweetness.

Now the page has turned.

I posted a photo of myself on Facebook not long ago, posing in a pink knit hat, as follows:

Very nice, everyone said. Then my cousin Linda piped up with: "Did you know that, with that scowl, you look just like Grandma Lottie?"

When I peeled myself off the ceiling, I wrote back to her immediately to acknowledge that she was right. I even dug out an ancient photo of me in 1970, posing with Grandma Lottie in front of her house, which further proved the point:

Grandma Lottie was my mother's mother. She was consistently dour and seldom wore her teeth unless absolutely necessary, which makes two of us. Despite her forbidding look, however, she was always sweet and kind to me; I remember the smell of food cooking in her little kitchen, and I remember walking with her in her garden (where she often gave me plants and cuttings). The photo at the head of this piece, probably taken in the 1920s, is nice: she’s almost smiling in a Mona Lisa way.

Grandma Lottie married three times, which is enough to make anyone look dour and forbidding. My grandfather was her second husband; he died in a mine cave-in around 1926, so I never got to meet him. My mother, who was only six or so when he died, always said he was a very nice man; I wish I could have known him.

Anyway, back to Grandma Lottie. It’s plain that she wasn’t a smiler. But what's wrong with that? I think smiling is overrated. It's supposed to make you feel good, right? It's supposed to make other people feel kindly toward you? I wonder. Greeting a stranger with a wintry glare can be a very bracing experience, and it's strangely productive: it sets people back on their heels and makes them wonder what they've done wrong.

It gives you the advantage.

As I told cousin Linda: I'm proud to carry Grandma Lottie's scowl and black-framed glasses into the new generation.

Somebody's gotta do it.

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Gunnera

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A friend recently posted a picture on Facebook of her Washington-state yard. Like most Washington-state yards at this time of year, it was mostly under two inches of water. Off to one side, however, was the most spectacularly huge-leaved plant:

I mistook it for a Philodendron selloum, which was unlikely, even in warm wet Washington, but my friend quickly corrected me. It is, in fact, a Gunnera manicata.

 

  

Gunnera's glory is its foliage. The leaves, as you can see, are comically gigantic. It's sometimes called "wild rhubarb," as the leaves very much resemble those of rhubarb, and some gardeners call it "dinosaur plant," for obvious reasons. Can't you just picture a brontosaurus peacefully chomping on it?

The more I studied the picture, the more I knew I'd seen it before. I went through some old photos and found it in Adare, a picturesque Irish village Partner and I visited in 2007; it was growing at the boggy end of a public park, and its leaves were so spectacular that I had to take a picture of it. I discovered online that it's a moderately common garden plant in Ireland; locals sometimes pick the leaves and use them as umbrellas.

 
Gardens should always be a mix of old and new, common and unexpected, big and small. We love to see a hundred daffodils in bloom, but we need the darkness of tall ominous pine trees behind them to make them shine. We cherish our one-blossom-at-a-time borders, but we need something big and splashy to give them drama.

Gunnera, with its rich green tablecloth-sized leaves, will give your garden all the drama it needs.

 

Just don't blame me if you start attracting dinosaurs.

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Attention whore

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Way back in the 1990s, my mother had her own adventure with cancer. Along the way, she managed to get herself dehydrated, and ended up in the hospital. To my surprise and that of my siblings, she seemed to love the experience. "I call the nurses 'the girls,'"she told me over the phone. "They are so sweet to me. They know I'm not supposed to have coffee, but oh, I wanted it so much, and one of them brought me a little cup of coffee, and - oh, Loren! - it was so good! And I asked her for one more little cup, and she brought it for me, and - oh, Loren! - it was so good!"

I listened to this story with a thin-lipped expression. Later I repeated it to my sister Susan, who grimaced. "I know," she said. "The nurses fell for it. Mom can be so damned cute when she wants to be. But you just wait: once the nurses catch on, it won't be so much fun for Mom any longer."

Which, in fact, happened a day or two later. "I don't know what happened all of a sudden," my mother groused on the phone. "The nurses don't seem to pay attention anymore. Sometimes I press the call switch and it's a couple of minutes before anyone shows up. It's like a whole new staff. I can't wait to go home."

This whole thing seemed very strange to me. Mom was normally the soul of staunch individualism; she lived all by herself at the end of a dead-end road, and most days she didn't see a living soul. Why should it be so much fun for her to be the center of attention all of a sudden -

  

Aha.

She finally had center stage with a whole retinue dancing around her, and she was loving it.

She had become an attention whore.

Flash forward to the other day. I'm in recovery, which means I spend days at home alone watching TCM and waiting for the mail. So then I have a doctor's appointment, and the doctor says, "You could use some fluids. We can give them to you today, in the chemo ward - "

I nearly knocked her down, I was so eager to get to that chemo ward.

"Chemo ward" doesn't sound appealing, but it’s nicer and more comfortable than you think. The chairs are all recliners. There's a TV in every little nook. There are chairs for visitors. The nurses are funny and make light conversation as they poke and prod you and stick needles into you. Snacks and beverages and warm blankets are available upon demand. In short, the staff waits on you hand and foot.

Does this sound familiar?

Ah, but I learned from my mother's experience. Her mistake was that she overdid it.

I will not overdo it.

I have another fluids day soon, back in the chemo ward with those nice kind attentive nurses. I hope I can maintain my composure.

I don't want the girls to know what an attention whore I am.

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Guitar

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I was pillaging through my stacks of books at home when I found a neat little collection of folk songs edited by Tom Glazer. It's got all the classics - "Crawdad" (which I know as "Froggy Went a-Courting" and also because of a 1940s MGM cartoon, as "Crambone"), as well as "Barbara Allen," and "Shenandoah" - as well as some I'd never heard of, like "The Dodger" (with lyrics like "The lover is a dodger / he'll hug you and he'll kiss you / but look out girls, he's a-telling you a lie").

These are great tunes, simple and straightforward. Some are no doubt European (as "I Know Where I'm Going," which I only knew before as the Scottish-flavored theme song of a movie of the same name starring Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesey); others are more Americanish (is that a word? If not, it is now), as in "The Midnight Special." And there are some others, weirdly cheerful, that might have come from anywhere, like "The Sow's Got The Measles (And She Died Last Spring)."

But, best of all, this book has an appendix called "The Beginner Folk-Guitarist."

If you are as old as me, you will remember that there was a time in the late 1950s / early 1960s during which folk songs and folk singing were Hot Stuff. Groups like the Kingston Trio were all over the radio, singing sweet harmony to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars. Everyone played and sang in those days. A lot of early rock-and-roll singers and guitarists came out of that era. (Donovan, anyone?)

But I never learned to play the guitar.

Tom Glazer, in fifteen short pages, makes it look easy. He gives you the fingering for sixteen chords, and describes three ways to strum. And that's it.

Me for that!

I just saw a commercial for the Guitar Center in which they show a $29 ukulele, and similarly low-priced acoustic guitars. Can you imagine how very irritating I might become if I could strum a few silly chords?

Let's go for it.

All together now:

Oh, Froggy went a-courtin', and he did ride, crambone . . . .

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Helene Hanff and "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street"

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I had a big stack of books all set to read once I reached this point of my treatment / recovery: textbooks, novels, history, Latin, et bleeding cetera.

Yes, let's have a good big laugh at my planning.

I am not much in the mood for new books. The idea of cracking "De bello gallico," or Thomas Pynchon's new novel, or the pre-calc book my student assistant very thoughtfully provided for me, makes me utterly apathetic. I managed to read a science-fiction novel, and the first half of "Little Dorrit," and I am afraid that's about it.

But rereading  - !

I was fumbling around the shelves the other week and my hand fell upon Helene Hanff's "84, Charing Cross Road." I devoured it, for the thirty-fifth time. It's a charming little epistolary (!) novel in which Helene enters into correspondence with a little London bookstore back in the early 1950s. Her style is chatty and wise-guyish, and the bookseller's letters are starchy and informational. They get to know one another. She gets to know everyone in the bookstore. She sends gifts of food (rationing was a grim fact of life in England in those days), and talks about Isaak Walton and John Donne as if she knows them personally, and the bookstore staff send her snapshots and tablecloths and - upon occasion - the books she orders.

If you haven't read it - well, it's a gem.

In the sequel, "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street,"  Helene finally goes to London (in 1971) and stays for about six weeks, and keeps a detailed travel diary. This book was never so much a favorite of mine as “84 Charing Cross”; it seemed perfunctory, tacked-on.

Now I have read it twice more, and I have changed my mind.

This book is a minor masterpiece of travel literature. It works under one simple premise: if you dream of visiting a place for long enough, the place you dream of will be there waiting for you when you finally get there. There will be all kinds of U-turns and surprises, but at the end of the day, you will have discovered your dream.

Helene's descriptions of London are peachy. Her observations are wry. She is unexpectedly wise. (She notes, for example, that you could take any block of a London suburb and plop it down into Queens or Brooklyn, and no one would be the wiser. You could never, however, get away with substituting a block of downtown London with a block of downtown New York.) Her descriptions of her traveling companions are poifect. She is irascible and sometimes unhappy and disappointed. It’s one of the truest travel books I’ve ever read.

Put this on your reading list, kids.

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Westerns

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I was born into a shit-kickin' family. My father's parents were Eastern Washington farmers, and my sister Susan married into a local dairy family, and - well, what more do you need?

Evidently it’s in our DNA. My brother Leonard worked in grocery stores his whole life, and yet he talks like Walter Brennan. He was, for a fact, born on my parents' farm, during a brief period in their early married life during which they were farming, but still!

Anyway, everyone in my family loves Westerns, and the whole Old West folklore thing. (When Leonard found out I was doing our family history, he drawled: "Are we descended from any horse thieves?" Evidently that would have been perfectly delicious. The reality - some Polish peasants, some Italian peasants, some English hooligans and riffraff - just isn't colorful enough, in a six-guns-and-Randolph-Scott way.)

Every once in a while I try to reassociate myself with my Boot Hill roots and watch a few Westerns on TMC. Sometimes they're harmless enough that they sort of wash over me. But - you know? - a lot of them - most of them - just aren't very good.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know that there are some classics, like "Cimarron" and "Stagecoach" and "Red River." I have seen at least ten minutes of each of these - more of "Cimarron," because it has Irene Dunne in it – and they are all lovely. I stick by my original point, however. Read on:)

·        Westerns are all depressingly similar. I will spare you a recitation of plot points, cliches, situations, etc. I will only say that I recently fell asleep during a Jimmy Stewart western, woke up about ninety minutes later during another Jimmy Stewart Western, and was uncertain for a few minutes if it was the same movie.

·        They certainly save money on costumes and sets. I'm sure there was a kind of Studio Western Kit, containing things like 1) one chuck wagon 2) three dance hall girl dresses 3) two fancy saddles 4) one fancy lamp with a fringed shade, for indoor / city-slicker  / bawdy house scenes.

·        Scenery. Magnificent, right? HDTV has killed that illusion. In Movie #2 the other day, J. Stewart and company were riding along a dangerous mountain ridge with all kinds of mountains and forests and valleys in the distance, except that, um, no they weren't. The foreground was perfectly clear and in focus; the scenic background looked like Jackson Pollock's hick cousin Vernton Pollock had blooped and blopped together some green and blue and white paint to produce Western Background #14.

And so forth.

I am sure, as we say, that for people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like. I like all kinds of silly / stupid / sub-par things, especially in the movie category. (Next time you hear me warbling on about how wonderful "Shack Out On 101" is, give me a real hard whack on the back of my head.) But, bafflingly, I was born without the mental toolkit required to make sense of these verkakte Westerns, even though genetically I should be right in there with my relatives.

Sigh.

Okay. Now: anybody want to see "Shack Out On 101" one more time?

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Alphonse Allais

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I was avid to visit the town of Honfleur, up on the damp coast of Normandy, when Partner and I visited France in 2012, because one of my favorite composers - Erik Satie - was born there. (I should note that, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin, Satie left Honfleur as soon as he realized where he was.)

Honfleur is a dour little fishing port with boggy streets and old sad-looking houses. Satie's childhood home has been converted into a very neato little museum, good enough to be featured by Rick Steves on his excellent European travel TV show, but once you've seen the museum - as Partner and I quickly realized - you've seen the shank of the town, and the best thing you can do is bid Honfleur a modest au revoir.

Except that one little detail caught my attention: a life-sized plastic cow in the visitor center, with a bande dessinee painted on the side. (Two Rick Steves-type comments: Normandy is a farm region, so the cow motif is everywhere, and Partner begs me to remind everyone that the restroom in the Honfleur visitor center was the most toxically horrible he ever came across in Europe.) Anyway, the comic strip on the side of the cow depicted Erik Satie and Honfleur's other favorite son, humorist Alphonse Allais, grabbing one another's chin and singing a little children's song. Then one slaps the other on the cheek, very hard (I have no idea if this is part of the children's song or not) and runs away, leaving the other in tears. I was so baffled by this that I don't even remember which one does the slapping and which one runs away.

This led me to Alphonse Allais, whose "oeuvres anthumes" I purchased on an appropriately soggy day in Paris about a week later. (“Anthumes” is meant to be a cute parallel to “posthumes,” meaning “posthumous” – see, I bought the stuff he published while he was still alive, get it?) It turns out that Allais was an essayist / journalist / humorist in a way that no longer really much exists. (If you can imagine the New York Times's Gail Collins without the politics, or "CBS Sunday Morning"'s Bill Geist without the peripatetic folksiness, you've almost got it.) Allais created characters and situations and wrote about them for a page or two. Generally there's a punch line. If the characters or the situations amused Allais, he revisited them.

He was, in a word, a feuilletonist.

Do they exist in American literature? Did they ever? Most assuredly. It was a late 19th / early 20th-century thing to be and do. Mencken was a feuilletonist, as were Don Marquis and H. Allen Smith and Harry Golden. See? You haven't been reading those guys recently, have you? But it's not because they're not entertaining or that they don't write well; it's only that the style has fallen out of fashion.

Allais had the famous dry Norman sense of humor, the "pince-sans-rire" ("pinch without laughing" - basically, "tell a joke all the way to the punch line, but tell it so seriously and drily that no one is sure if you're joking or not." Isn't French neat to be able to put all of that in three words?) Satie used pince-sans-rire all the time in his music, writing pieces of fantaisiste music with titles like "Dried Embryos," and ending them with long strings of Beethovian tonic-dominant-tonic chords.

Allais needs to be translated for a modern American readership.

Now who could do something like that?

Hmm.

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Resolutions 2014

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If you want to know how I feel about New Year’s resolutions in general, please see the above illustration. “Foo” says it all.

But I love the idea of resolutions. What could be nicer than making a fresh start? Suddenly “next year” becomes “this year,” and we have an entire nice expanse of time before us, like a yardful of untrodden snow.

So let’s make us some resolutions!

1)    Stop complaining. Foo. No chance.

2)    Be healthy. Easier said than done, but there’s no way 2014 could be worse than 2013 from a health point of view. If I can manage to keep my organs from actually dropping out of my body this year, I will be doing okay

3)    Appreciate the good things more. This might actually be doable. Today’s bitterly cold in Providence, for example, but the sky is a lovely blue. Why not appreciate the lovely blue sky, even while cursing the weather?

4)    Maximize the love in the world. As a deeply flawed person, it amazes me that people actually like me, and I try whenever I can to return the favor. I already tell Partner several times a day how much I love him. I am also lucky enough to have friends – Patricia and Apollonia – whom I truly love, and who express their love for me in various oddball ways. I have always appreciated this, and after my illness I appreciate it even more.

5)    Work on the family history. This has been going on for over twenty years; I leave it and come back to it, mostly assembling records and keeping track of marriages and deaths. It’s fun and instructional, which brings me back to it, and incredibly tedious, which drives me away again.

6)    Practice my ukulele chords. Every day. I promise.

And finally:

7)    Be a better person.

Foo.

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Movie review: "The More the Merrier" (1943)

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“The More the Merrier” is one of those movies that seems very ordinary until it sneaks up on you and bites you on the butt.

It sounds unremarkable in synopsis: Washington DC working woman Jean Arthur decides (for patriotic reasons) to rent out half her apartment, because there’s a housing shortage. She (reluctantly) ends up with grandfatherly wiseguy Charles Coburn as a roommate. He almost instantly rents half of his half-apartment to handsome young Joel McCrea, who’s doing some kind of mysterious government work.

And, as they say, hijinks ensue.

Unpromising, right? But it’s full of delights.

First of all: Jean Arthur. She’s almost forgotten now, but she was a great comedienne with a voice that was husky and squeaky at the same time, and she had terrific comic timing and a very expressive face.

Second: Charles Coburn. He’s sly and sympathetic, and is obviously plotting to get Joel and Jean together from the very outset. (He won an Academy Award for this performance, by the way.)

Third (and not least): Joel McCrea. You know how I feel about him. He’s not traditionally handsome – his nose is a little pointy – but he’s intensely masculine without being threatening or boorish, and he has the best smile.

Some of my favorite scenes:

-         McCrea and Coburn charge around the apartment making choo-choo-train noises, pretending to keep up with Jean Arthur’s ridiculously precise morning schedule.

-         McCrea and Coburn lie on the roof, on their stomachs, reading the Dick Tracy comic strip from the paper, while Jean Arthur watches them with bemusement. (Coburn reads Tracy; McCrea does the voice of the Leopard Lady.)

-         Jean Arthur, in her room, turns on some Latin dance music, and dances to it, all by herself. (She even turns her head to check out her own butt). In the next room over, Joel McCrea (in bathrobe) slowly begins to do the same step, also all by himself. And in the next room over from that, Charles Coburn does a few steps too.

-         Joel McCrea jumps into the shower, removes his bathrobe (after getting it soaking wet!), and proceeds to slap himself all over and bark like a seal, while Jean Arthur listens in astonishment from her bedroom.

-         An astonishing scene in which Jean Arthur describes her engagement to her “fiancé Mr. Pendergast,” while Joel McCrea makes love to her and kisses her. This scene is hotter than Hades, kids! And this is something Joel McCrea does very well; he did a similar scene in “The Palm Beach Story.” The message he communicates is: “I know you think you love someone else. But I love you, and I know you love me too.” It’s a very powerful message, and he communicates it better than any actor I’ve ever seen.

This is a classic movie. It’s small, but perfect in its way. It reminds me of Jane Austen’s remark about carving her “two inches of ivory.”

“The More the Merrier” is two inches of perfectly carved ivory. And (as Jane reminds us) two inches of perfectly-carved ivory can be very lovely.

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DIY religion

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Back during chemotherapy, while I was lounging in my recliner imbibing toxins through a tube in my arm and Partner was watching "Let's Make A Deal" on the retractable TV, a young hospital chaplain named Meredith came around to check on our spiritual needs. We politely let her know that we were all set, thanks very much, but she (like chaplains through the ages) was stubborn enough to chat with us for a while. She complimented us on being such a close couple, and quoted something I'd heard once before about "for better and for worse." She left before she became too obnoxious, so I liked her. "Did you notice," I said to Partner after she left, "that she never quite mentioned any one religion? Very non-committal and non-denominational."

"I like that," Partner said. "I could get behind a religion like that."

"I think," I said," that there is a religion like that."

So, a few weeks later, we both got ourselves ordained as ministers in the Universal Life Church.

Ordination is free; you need only provide name and email address. For a couple of bucks, they will send you gewgaws like a wallet card and an ordination certificate and a press pass (evidently for when I'm interviewing the Metropolitan of Constantinople). After that, you need only follow the church's one dictum, which is "do only that which is right." (They further define that you must peacefully determine what's right in every case; no gunplay and no rassling allowed.)

Partner and I are both obnoxiously pleased about this. We are both in the process of determining the dogmas of our new church. Mine is going to involve wearing a lot of pink and purple. (I determined peacefully that I like both, and why not? Pink and purple are perfectly nice devotional colors; just look at the candles in any Advent wreath.) I will use a lot of multidenominational texts involving silence. (Examples: "Let all the earth keep silence before the Lord," from Habakkuk in the Jewish Bible; "Sky says nothing," from the Analects of Confucius; "The way that can be spoken of is not the true way," from the Tao Te Ching; and maybe also "That which we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence," the last line of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.) My services will begin with maybe a piece of music, the reading of a text like one of the above, and then a kind of community silent meditation, the way the Society of Friends does it.

Also, did I mention the pink and purple?

Religion should be fun. It should be participatory, and it should be meaningful to the people who participate. If they crave mystery, well, life is crammed full of mysteries; meditate on a few of those. And if they crave certainty, there are lots of those too. Just think about them quietly, would you?

Partner has thought about his church too. He wants it to welcome all comers, and he would allow them to worship any god they please, and he intends to forbid proselytizing.

(I hope it also involves hats. Partner and I both look good in hats, and I hope he and I can lead some ecumenical programs down the road, once we've established ourselves as pillars of our respective faiths.)

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Patti Page maple syrup

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It’s time to think about holiday giving. People aren’t getting much from me this year; if I have the strength to bake a few Russian teacakes and put them in cute little containers, that’ll be about the size of it.

But some years I do better. There are always catalog gifts (who doesn’t like a cheese wheel?). And sometimes I come up with something absolutely brilliant, which then falls flat.

One year Partner came up with the best gift ever: bottles of Patti Page maple syrup, straight from New Hampshire. Patti Page was a 1950s singer who, upon retirement, moved north, bought a maple orchard, and started bottling her own syrup. The syrup was okay, but the bottle was incredible.  There was a little light-activated mechanism inside the cap; as soon as you opened the bottle, Patti warbled a little sugary-sweet maple-syrup song.

This was absolutely perfect, I thought. So I bought half-a-dozen bottles, and sent them out, and  -

Almost no response. “Thanks for the syrup,” I got from one or two people.

Then, over the next few years, I started getting little messages from those same people. “Did you know that that bottle of syrup sings a song? We just opened it, and –“

Oh yes. It took some of them two years or so to open my gift.

Merry Christmas!

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Doctors and nurses

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I have not since my birth overnighted in a hospital, until this last November. Then my white-cell count crashed and I became neutropenic (no dirty jokes, thank you), and I had to spend seven nights in a nice local hospital.

It really wasn't so bad. I was often sedated, naturally. The noises at night can be a little unearthly, all kinds of hoots and hollers and cries, but if you think of it as an indoor camping trip, you won't be too far from the mark.

I learned a lot. I learned that morphine makes me see handwriting on the wall where there is none, and faces where there are none. I learned that only a qualified medical professional can tie and untie a hospital johnny from the back.

Most interestingly, I learned a lot about the difference between doctors and nurses.

If you want to continue the camping metaphor, you might think of the nurses as the flowers on the forest floor, and the doctors as the trees. Nurses are far more colorful; they can and do wear whatever colors they like. Doctors are monochrome - usually white. Nurses are everywhere; doctors sprout up only here and there. Nurses tend to be bright and cheerful (with a few exceptions); doctors are a little on the stiff-and-somber side.

Nurses fall silent when doctors enter the room. We all of us, patients and nurses and guests, wait for the eighty-five-dollar-a-word advice to fall, pearl by limpid pearl, from those doctors' lips. Nurses try their best not to impede the grave to-and-fro passage of the doctors from ward to ward, floor to floor, room to room. (Questions are met by: "I know they've begun rounds. I'm sure they'll be here shortly." The nurses try very hard not to get your hopes up; they can do just about everything, but they can't say the magic words that will pronounce you cured and get you into a speeding wheelchair headed for the exit.)

I was lucky, in that about every single one of my nurses and doctors was wonderful (with a few tiny aberrations, which you generally have to chalk up to being human). I did see one doctor come close to telling off a nurse for something - I think for using an alternate drug protocol; to be fair, I knew the nurse and know that she would never do anything to endanger the life of a patient, and the doctor looked young and sniffy and full of inferiority complex, so we will leave it at that. I know who I was rooting for.

At any rate, during my week in the hospital, I learned enough about medicine to pass some kind of premed exam.

Too bad I can't stand the sight of blood 'n guts. Otherwise I'd be a whiz of a doctor.

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