Sunday Sundries, 211

1. HBOTW [Human Beings of the Week]: Two former students got the Old Man's eyes watering this week: One, from Harmon Middle School years ago, arranged for a gift card for me at Open Door Coffee Co.; the other--from the penultimate year of my career at Western Reserve Academy--came into the coffee shop with the young man she's going to marry and talked with me so kindly. I am a fortunate man ...

2. I finished just one book this week, the latest by Joyce Carol Oates, Hazards of Time Travel (2018), a futuristic (in some ways) dystopian tale about a young woman living in a future time when questioning the government is a fell crime: Perps can be permanently "erased." She, a high school valedictorian, raises questions in her valedictory address, and she never gets to read it: She's banished to the past (teleported--think: Star Trek), to 1959, where she finds herself at a (fictional) university in Wisconsin.

She has a new name, a new biography, and she must obey the rules strictly, or all will be over. She gets a crush on a psych prof named Wolfman (yeah, I know), and that doesn't turn out well. And then ... aw, read it for yourself!

I love Joyce Carol Oates, have been reading her since the late 1960s--have read pretty much all her novels (she is prolific in a Trollopean sense). I reviewed some of her work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and have said there (and elsewhere) that she deserves the Nobel Prize. Novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays ... She's just great at all of it. But we'll see if the Stockholm folks agree.

This, I fear, is not one of Oates' stronger books. (I see that today's New York Times Book Review agrees with me--link to review.) But all that means is that it is not superior, just damn good.

3. We didn't go to the movies this week (nothing we were crazy to see, though the reviews of the new Mary Poppins' film are so good, we might have to check it out). We still are streaming some favorite shows, Blood in the Wire and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries with the wonderful Nathaniel Parker* (actually, we're watching them again), and, as always, I stream and re-stream and re-stream The Rockford Files ... sad.

I like Sharon Small in the series, too.

4: Whatever side of the Trump Line you find yourself, you must still find amusing this week's New Yorker cover:

5. We will enjoy spending Christmas Eve with our son, daughter-in-law, two grandsons, who are coming over for dinner & gifts & whatnot. Among our traditions:

• Christmas tree bread (a sweet bread shaped like a Christmas tree)
• White fruitcake (from my grandmother Osborn's recipe)--a treat I've had every Christmas of my life
• Steamed pudding (also a Grandma Osborn recipe)--so sweet you can feel your teeth decaying in your mouth as you eat the pudding!
• We will also, together (taking turns on stanzas), recite "A Visit from St. Nicholas" ("The Night before Christmas")--a poem I first memorized at Adams Elementary School; Enid, Okla.; about, oh, 1954?

I'll post pix of these goodies tomorrow ... or the next day ...

6. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers.

     - from dictionary.com

turtledove [TUR-tl-duhv] noun

1. a sweetheart or beloved mate.

2. any of several small to medium-sized Old World doves of the genus Streptopelia, especially S. turtur, of Europe, having a long, graduated tail: noted for its soft, cooing call.

QUOTES: You look anything but miserable, my turtledove. In fact, I never saw you look so well.

-- E. F. Harkins, The Schemers, 1903

ORIGIN: The turtle in turtledove has nothing to do with the aquatic and terrestrial reptile whose trunk is enclosed in a shell. The ultimate derivation of the reptilian turtle is Greek Tartaroûchos “controlling Tartarus, holding the nether world”; the word turtle entered English in the 17th century. Turtledove is a compound of Old English turtla, from Latin turtur “turtledove,” imitating the call of the bird. Dove comes from Old English dufe, dūfe and is related to the verb dive. Similar forms are found in other Germanic languages. Turtledove entered English in the 14th century.

Shakespeare, by the way, sometimes used only turtle to refer to the turtledove--and this can sometimes bring some (unintended?) humor, as in the exchange between Petruchio and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew: He calls her a "slow-wing'd turtle" (2.1).

*Remember when Parker played Laertes in the Franco Zeffirelli Hamlet with Mel Gibson? The deadly fencing match at the end with Hamlet?