I can't hear a bloody word you're saying

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My grandma Minnie was mostly deaf. My father got progressively deafer as he grew older.

 

 

Bet you can't guess whose turn it is now!

 

 

It’s called “presbycusis.” It's not a complete insensitivity to sound; it's just a sort of auditory blur.

 

 

Noisy rooms are the worst. I was at a big party the other night, and the din was terrible. It was like sitting inside a tin shack with five hundred people yodeling at once. I could see everyone around me busily talking to everyone else, and I couldn't join in; the most I could do was nod and smile, or scream a few words to the person right next to me and hope I could make out a reply.

 

 

I felt isolated from the group. I felt lonely.

 

 

Partner has been mocking my condition for some years now, with witticisms like “Clean your ears out, grandpa.” Now he's getting deaf too, so we have the most wonderful conversations:

 

 

“We need peanut butter.”

 

 

“My brother called who on the phone?”

 

 

“You can't hear me. Get in here. You know you can't hear me from the next room.”

 

 

“We don’t need salt. What do you want salt for?”

 

 

(I won't tell you who was on which side of the conversation.  You'll have to work that out for yourself.)

 

 

Everything has a bright side, however. Outside noise used to bother me terribly; now I can't even hear it. It's like having a white-noise machine inside my head. And you know how Christmas lights are even prettier when they're a little out-of-focus? Well, conversations can be much more amusing when you hear people saying things like “Please touch my armadillo” and “I think Lucille Ball is the queen of Finland.”

 

 

Now: do we need salt? And how about that armadillo?

 

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Cultural blunders: international edition

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While I was living overseas, I tried very hard not to offend my Tunisian and Moroccan friends and acquaintances. I think I mostly succeeded.

 

 

My cultural blunders, however, provided my friends with lots of innocent merriment.

 

 

For example:

 

 

• While in Tunisia, I bought a cunning little satchel to carry my books, papers, cigarettes, etc., back and forth from home to the office. Finally one day, my friend and coworker Halim rolled his eyes at me. “I've been meaning to tell you,” he said in his unnervingly perfect David Niven-style English. “That's a school bag. It's like something a ten-year-old would carry.”

• I was always anxious to improve my Arabic. Sometimes I did this by copying the pronunciations I heard in the office. I noticed that a lot of the women in the office said “good morning” in Arabic in a very particular way, with a sort of sigh, eliding the final consonants. I figured it was the local accent, and started copying this, thinking that it made me sound sophisticated. Halim again, after a few days of this: “Please stop saying it that way. You sound like a woman.”

• When I left Tunisia, an American friend gave me a lovely white-linen scarf from Djerba as a going-away gift. I still have it. It has blue stripes and long fringe at either ends. I wore it a lot after I got back to the United States, until one of my bosses at Brown asked me in a strained voice if I was aware I was wearing a Jewish prayer shawl.

 

 

But sometimes there was sweet revenge.

 

 

One day in 1985, my American housemate Kathy came back from a trip to the United States with a big jar of pickled jalapenos. We were eating them right out of the jar. A Tunisian friend (whom I won't name, in case he reads this, but he knows who he is) scoffed at these American “hot peppers.” He'd seen me choking and wheezing on lethally hot Tunisian red peppers often enough, and reasoned that he was a lot tougher than I was. So he scooped a jalapeno out of the jar, just as he'd seen us do, and put it in his mouth, and -

 

 

Oh, my dears, it was spectacular. I expected cartoon flames to come out of his ears. He was literally crying, running around the house, flapping his hands.

 

 

It turns out that there are “hot peppers” and “other kinds of hot peppers.”

 

 

Isn't multiculturalism fun?

 

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E-readers

 

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I bought an e-reader a few weeks ago, It's a Literati, made by Sharper Image.  I bought it at Bed Bath & Beyond, on seventy-five percent markdown.  (Is Sharper Image going out of business?  Is Bed Bath & Beyond?)

 

 

It came preloaded with TWENTY-FIVE CLASSICS! “Huckleberry Finn.”  “Moby-Dick.”  “Pride and Prejudice.”  (Not really things I hunger to reread.)  And an offer for as many more public-domain classics as I want: “On the Origin of Species.”  “Tom Sawyer.”  (Big on Mark Twain, aren't they?)  Also “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” and “Grimm's Fairy Tales,” which are more down my alley.

 

 

I can see why it was discounted.  It's slow.  It takes a long time to jump from chapter to chapter.  The battery runs down quickly.  It can't jump to familiar passages, or even to a particular page.

 

 

But I like it. 

 

 

I’ve been reluctant to buy one before.  I was afraid that it’d be just one more technotoy to play with and discard.  Now, however, I’m sold on the concept.

 

 

I've been loading it up with free stuff from Project Gutenberg.  If you don't know the site, go check it out.  (Also, send them some money.)  They have tons of stuff.  James Joyce (Gutenberg has everything but “Finnegans Wake,” damn it).  “Palgrave's Golden Treasury.”  “Fathers and Sons.”  “Anna Karenina.”  “A Hero of Our Time.”  (Russian classics rule, right?)   Dryden.  Dickens.  L. Frank Baum.  Woolf.   Verlaine.   Dante.  Andrew Lang.  Confucius, and Mencius, and the Koran, and the Apocrypha, and the Rig Veda.  I’ve got almost four hundred books in it so far, and it’s barely half-full. 

 

 

I still like real paper-and-ink books.  I have a whole roomful of them, so evidently I must think they’re okay.  But I like to travel with reading material, which (as any reader will tell you) can be pretty tedious, especially for long trips, and especially if (like me) you like to read a little of this and a little of that.  The e-reader solves this problem very elegantly.  I can skip from President Grant’s autobiography to the Prajna-Paramita-Hridaya Sutra to “The Phoenix and the Turtle” at my whim.  It’s also ideal for bedtime, as it doesn’t weigh a ton and won’t conk me in the head if I fall asleep while reading it (as has happened more than once with Thomas Pynchon novels and forty-pound histories of the Thirty Years War).

 

 

It’s just big enough to whap someone in the back of the head with, too, just like a real book.

 

 

I am now prepared for any reading emergency.

 

 

Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson, anyone?

 

 

 

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Beatle John vs. Beatle Paul

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My sister Susan, ten years older than me, was a huge Beatles fan in the early 1960s. She especially liked Paul.

 

Later, when I was in college and discovered the Beatles myself, I bought a copy of the White Album, which contained four terrible cheesecake photos of the Fab Four. I had the bright idea of mailing the dewy-eyed picture of Paul to Susan, who was then a farm housewife in Pasco, Washington. She sent it back to me hidden in a box of cookies. I sent it back to her in something else. We kept the back-and-forth up for years and years, right up to the time she passed away in 1995. She sent it to me one last time, and told me on the phone that evening: “I win!” She died soon after.

 

Like Susan, I love the Beatles. I have absorbed all kinds of abstruse Beatles lore over the years. (White Album quiz! Who was “Martha”? Who was “Julia”? Who was “Sexy Sadie”?)

 

Paul and John wrote together, of course. They critiqued each other's work, very sarcastically sometimes, and ended up writing brilliant songs.

 

But sometimes you can tell who was in charge on any particular day.

 

Paul was (and is) a showman with vaudevillian inclinations. He likes broad gestures, peppy tunes, bright lyrics. Listen to “Martha My Dear” for an extreme (but very likeable) example.

 

John was moody. He liked slow, bluesy, simple tunes. His lyrics are darker. (EXPERT TEXPERT CHOKING SMOKERS DON'T YOU THINK THE JOKER LAUGHS AT YOU HO HO HO HEE HEE HEE HA HA HA!) Listen to “I Want You” for a polar/extreme example.

 

And then, of course, there is “A Day In The Life.”

 

The story goes like this: John had a poignant melody and some moody mysterious lyrics. Paul had a bouncy little riff and some chirpy little lyrics. Neither could make any headway. So they just jammed the two into one another. John's sad quasi-pentatonic lament - “I heard the news today, oh boy” – is the opening and ending. Paul's cute piano-driven tune - “Woke up, fell out of bed” – is the bridge. George Martin, their very smart producer, introduced echoes of either in the other. Those sighing riffs in the bridge passage are echoes of John's melody; the piano chords in the opening and closing sections, that begin so quietly and become more and more pronounced, are Paul's contribution. And then there's that huge dissonant orchestral crescendo that ends both sections: George Martin's own creation.

 

I am still amazed at the creativity of the Beatles. Even fifty years later (fifty years!), they still sound fresh and new and interesting.

 

Susan would be pleased.

 

And, Susan, if you're listening: Paul's a jerk. I always liked George better.

 

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Sunday blog: Senor Wences and Cecilia Chicken

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Senor Wences was a huge part of my childhood. Even the bits and pieces of his routines that can still be found on YouTube make me laugh until I cry.

 

 

And he accomplished it all, mind you, with his hand, and some lipstick, and a big red wig, and some google eyes. Oh, and a head in a box, and sometimes (as in this clip) a nice lady chicken with glasses named Cecilia.

 

 

Is good?

 

 

Is good.

 

 

You like?

 

 

I like.

 

 

 

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My life and prophecies

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I've been a student of the occult for a long time. I read cards; I read palms; I even used to cast and interpret horoscopes.

 

 

I'm not sure if I believe in it myself anymore.

 

 

But my predictions and interpretations are eerily accurate.

 

 

I started a very long time ago, in the mid-1960s. It was a brain-bursting undertaking in those days to cast a horoscope. We used enormous phonebook-sized guides called ephemerides, which give the positions of the planets day by day, and we used real honest-to-god math to calculate the planets' positions at a particular moment. We calculated the angles between the planets in the chart, and the sniffier among us factored in the distance of said planets above/below the celestial equator.

 

 

All by hand, with a pencil, on a big piece of paper, yet.

 

 

And then we drew a beautiful mandala-style chart and filled it with arcane medieval symbols and numbers.

 

 

Computers have made the job easier. I have always been a little bit mistrustful of computers, though. How do you check their math?

 

 

I can still draw my own natal horoscope by heart: Sun and Mercury in Cancer, Leo rising, Moon in Capricorn. Four planets in Leo, including Venus, Uranus, and Mars, all close enough together to ignite one another. Pluto glaring at me from the first house, in the last degrees of Leo. Jupiter in Virgo in the second house. Saturn in Sagittarius in the fourth. Neptune in Libra, moping gloomily down at the nadir, in the third house.

 

 

Now you know all about me.

 

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The five widdle Peppers and how they gwew

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I recently bought an e-reader, and I am loving it. While vacuuming up free ebooks on the Project Gutenberg website, I noticed Margaret Sidney's “Five Little Peppers” books, and downloaded them, and am rereading them. If you have not read these -

 

 

Well, they defy description. But here goes anyway.

 

 

Their author, whose real name was Harriet Stone Lothrop, co-managed her husband's publishing firm in the late 1800s. The Lothrops lived in “The Wayside,” a house in Concord, Massachusetts where the Alcotts (and the Hawthornes before them!) had lived. Harriet was evidently determined to outdo Louisa May Alcott in every category. There were four March girls; there are five Peppers. The March family is shabby genteel; the Peppers are destitute.

 

The March girls are energetic and personable and interesting. The Pepper children are little Pod People.

 

 

The boys – Ben, Joel, and Davie – are a little featureless; I always had a hard time distinguishing them. But the two girls – brrr.

 

 

Polly, the older Pepper girl, is especially fascinating in a horrible way. She mothers the other four children (which is odd, as they presumably already have a mother in residence). Polly cooks, and tends to everything, and even disciplines her brothers and sisters. She weeps over the old black kitchen stove, which fills the kitchen with smoke and drives her to despair. At the end of the first Peppers book, the kind local doctor surprises Polly with – can you guess? A pretty frock? A trip to Europe? No, a new stove! Polly nurses the other children when they get the measles, and when she catches the measles herself, she cries and cries, because she can't keep house anymore!

 

Don't you just want to kill her?

 

Then there's the other Pepper daughter, Phronsie. (Yes, Phronsie. It's short for “Sophronia.” The others all have Biblical names, but this one has the name of a Greek courtesan. Go figure.) Phronsie is a living Kewpie Doll. She charms everyone, from the Stepin Fetchit-type black servants to old Mister King, the grouchy millionaire. She lisps adorably. She often screams with excitement. (“'Oh! Oh! Oh!' Phronsie screamed. 'Take us to the little brown house, do!'”)

 

Don't you just want to kill Phronsie too?

 

 

However:

 

 

About five years ago, Partner and I were up in Concord. We strolled around Walden Pond, and felt transcendentally uplifted.

 

And then we visited “The Wayside.” And we came in through the kitchen, and I saw the old black stove, the one Harriet Lothrop wrote about, the one Polly suffered over for so long.

 

And, just like Phronsie, I screamed with joy.

 

 

Children: be careful what books you read. Good or bad, they will mark you for life.

 

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Sheen and Deen

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Revolution and upheaval in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Oman, Iraq.  Labor protests in Wisconsin. Budget battles in Washington.

And who gets all the attention on all the TV news shows?

You know who I'm talking about.

Well, it's hard to ignore someone who says things like “I have Adonis DNA and tiger blood.” Also that he has an “army of assassins.” Also that he has “the brain of a 10,000-year-old and the boogers of a seven-year-old.” It's like trying to ignore a naked man riding a unicycle. It's just impossible.

But it palls after a while, and becomes sad and sickening. Yesterday I was reading yet another Charlie interview, in which he was asked to react to his father's very measured appeal for reason. Charlie called it “bollocks.” He's tired of being labeled an addict, he says. Also, he was angry that his father called addiction a disease. Charlie challenged his father to (I paraphrase) “walk through a cancer ward and find anybody who looks as good as me.”

Well, that's that.

I'm as morbidly curious as anyone else. But I keep thinking of the Hogarth print of sophisticated Londoners giggling at the lunatics in Bedlam Hospital.

I'd like to think that I'm a better person than they were.

Let us move on to something more pleasant.

Paula Deen, about whom I have written before, made a stage appearance recently, during which she went on and on about her “britches fallin' down.” (It's much cuter with a Georgia accent.)

Then a big guy came up on stage, pulled up his shirt, and smeared butter on his abs.

And Paula knelt down and licked the butter off.  (Watch the clip if you don't believe me.)

And then the guy got down on all fours, and Paula rode him around the stage, while Paula's big bearded husband watched with a big goofy smile on his face.

Okay. Fine. These are the end days. I admit it now. I surrender. I will worship any deity who will rescue me from this insanity.

(Oh, Paula, Paula, Paula.)

(Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.)

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Battle Ground, Washington

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The town closest to where I grew up was Battle Ground, Washington. I still remember the sign in the early 1960s:

 

 

ENTERING

BATTLE GROUND

POP. 996

 

 

There has been a (modest) boom in the decades since. Battle Ground is now a sprawling shapeless town/city, with the old town's dowdy buildings sitting uncomfortably off to the eastern side of town. The newer developments – housing tracts, mini-malls, supermarkets – have grown like fungi to the north and west and south.

 

In the 1960s, Battle Ground was mostly just Main Street. The town's two banks (First Federal and First Independent) were directly across the street from one another. The Catholic church, the Church of the Nazarene, the Methodist church, and the funeral home where my father's funeral took place were clustered close together. Al & Ernie's Foodliner (also a feed and grain store) anchored the eastern end of Main Street; the Agco Thriftway was right in the middle of town; Bea & Don's Market and the '76 station were at the western end.

 

 

The liquor store was one street over.

 

 

The school was at the western edge of town. When Partner and I visited Battle Ground in 2008, my old grade school was still standing. (How small it seems now! It seemed so big in those days!) It's terribly dilapidated; the roof is covered with moss. It's probably been torn down by now. We played on the swings for a while, and then we walked to the high-school stadium and sat for a while. The view was exactly the same as it had been in 1973: football field, fence, houses just beyond, and (in good weather) Mount St. Helens off in the distance. (See that white smudge over the horizon in the photo above, about two-thirds of the way across? That's it.)

 

 

My dear old town: goodbye, goodbye.

 

 

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Growing old with CBS

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All the reporters and correspondents on “CBS Sunday Morning” speak with the ponderous gravity of Captain Kangaroo reading “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” aloud. Why? I ask myself. Well, maybe:

 

 

• It's early, and they assume we're not quite awake yet, so they have to speak distinctly.

• Their viewership is, hmm, a little on the elderly side, and we older folks don't hear so well anymore, so they have to speak distinctly.

• They think we're a bunch of idiots, so they have to speak distinctly.

  
  

 

I lean toward a combination of explanation #2 and explanation #3.

 

This is interesting, because CBS poses as Hipsterville during the week. You have funny-young-people sitcoms like “How I Met Your Mother” and “The Big Bang Theory,” and shoot-shoot law-enforcement stuff like the various incarnations of “CSI” and “NCIS,” and weepy dramas like “The Good Wife.” (I do not speak of “Two and a Half Men,” for obvious reasons; we used to think it was a family sitcom, and now we've discovered it was reality television all along.)

 

 

But it's mostly toothless, isn't it? The sitcoms are harmless, like cartoons. The cop shows are all good guy / bad guy stuff, like old Westerns. “Good Wife” is tough-working-girl stuff, like “Kitty Foyle.”

 

Put them all together, and what have I just described?

 

A day at the movies in 1940.

 

 

The geriatric hesitancy of “CBS Sunday Morning” is mirrored by “60 Minutes.” Their stories are narrated with strange intensity, and difficult concepts like “Internet” and “Facebook” and “cellphone” are carefully explained to us, so that we won’t be frightened and spit our dentures across the room.

 

 

Let us not even speak of Andy Rooney, the last surviving cave dweller. (“I like soup. Soup comes in cans now. I don't understand the cans. Cans are hard to open.”)

 

 

So: CBS has become the geezer network.

 

 

But guess what?  I'm a geezer myself.  Why do you think I was watching "CBS Sunday Morning" in the first place?

 

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