Sunday Sundries, 264

1. HBOTW [Human Being of the Week]: Our neighbor, who, without our asking, uses his snowblower up and down our block--even the little walk connecting the sidewalk to our front porch. In these Latter Days of mine--with my, uh, steadiness-of-foot in decline--this is a great and thoughtful gift to us.

2. I finished just one book this week--Ian McEwan's third novel, The Child in Time (1987). (I've been slowly reading my way, in chronological order, through his novels I've never read.)

our copy

This is a painful book to read--especially if you are a parent. The protagonist, Stephen Lewis, is a writer of children's books (a very successful one), a man whose daughter, a three-year-old, was abducted from his grocery cart in a busy market. Two years have passed without any news, and, as McEwan writes, "He was the father of an invisible child" (2).

His marriage has fractured--his wife has left him--and he finds that he can do little but suffer.

He is also part of a government project to make recommendations on the teaching of reading in England (he daydreams throughout the meetings). The committee chair--the man who got Lewis to serve--was the editor who'd first recognized Lewis' talents and published his first book.

Throughout, Lewis remembers his daughter, and in one painful scene he sees her on the street. But does he?

Meanwhile, other things happen: He sees his wife a couple of times (can they possibly reconcile?), and he visits the committee chair, who resigns about halfway through, and appears to be suffering from dementia.

So ... does he ever get news of his daughter? Do he and his wife reconcile? Does he somehow learn to manage his grief?

I guess you'll need to read the book to find out, cuz I ain't tellin'!

3. Last night Joyce and I went to our local Hudson Regal Cinema to see Parasite, the South Korean film that recently won the Oscar for Best Picture.

It's the story of a struggling family, living in a sorry basement apartment: a father, mother, son, daughter. A friend of the son's offers the son a gig tutoring a local very wealthy high-school girl in English. The son agrees--and here we go!

Soon, the son and the three others in his family are all employed by the wealthy family: the dad as a driver, the mom as a housekeeper, the sister as an art therapy consultant for the rich family's somewhat troubled young son.

The problem? They're all pretending that they're not related--that they just happen to know of one another--and they all connive to get the current holders of their job removed. Fired.

So--although you want to root for the poor family, you're also disturbed at how they're deceiving and betraying others.

The title Parasite applies to lots of people in the film. The poor family--and an even poorer couple we learn about later on the story. The rich family--for they are, in a way, living off of the poor.

Near the end, things grow really dark, but I'll not get into that.

Suffice to say: This film very starkly (though sometimes with humor) shows our Darwinian nature. Survival of the fittest--and in this case "fittest" has more than one meaning.

The theater was pretty full (though it was not a large auditorium).

Link to film trailer.

4. We still cannot bring ourselves to finish the final episode of Upstart Crow--a Christmas episode that borrows very heavily from A Christmas Carol, written more than two centuries after the Bard's death. Some very funny stuff so far in the episode that we are crawling rather than streaming.

5. Tonight we go out to dinner with our family to celebrate the 15th birthday of our older grandson, Logan Thomas Dyer, who's a frosh this year at nearby Walsh Jesuit HS. It remains stunning to me that he's now older than his father was when I taught him in 8th grade in 1985-86 at Aurora's Harmon (Middle) School. And our son, Steve, 47, is now older than I was (42) when I taught him in 8th grade! Lordy.

I texted Logan on his birthday (yesterday) and told him that I'd turned 15 in November 1959. Eisenhower was President. JFK would be elected the following year.

Impossible.

Anyway, Logan is a terrific young man, a better golfer than I ever was, and a kind, kind soul. He thinks of others--not because he should but because that's who he is.

6. We're slowly streaming the latest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David's very funny (and uncomfortable!) show about, in a sense, himself. Joyce has a personal connection: One of the writers for the show--and someone who occasionally directs--is a former WRA student of hers back in the 1980s--Jeff Schaffer. If you’re a fan of the show, wait for the credits and look for Jeff's name.

7. Final Word: A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from wordsmith.org

interdigitate: (in-tuhr-DIJ-i-tayt)

MEANING: verb tr., intr.: To interlock like the fingers of two hands.

ETYMOLOGY: From Latin inter- (between, together) + digitus (finger, toe). Ultimately from the Indo-European root deik- (to show, to pronounce solemnly), which also gave us judge, verdict, vendetta, revenge, indicate, dictate, paradigm, diktat, dictatress, dittohead, fatidic, hoosegow, and interdict. Earliest documented use: 1847.

NOTES: To interdigitate is to hold hands together. Also, to hold toes of two feet together. Also, hand and foot. Also, hand and paw. Or foot and paw. Think of other combinations. Show us what you come up with. Write to us at words@wordsmith.org.

USAGE:

“‘Oh, by the way, do you only interdigitate once a day?’

“She stopped and looked up at me. She was mentally replaying what I had just said to her. ‘What did you say?’ she said indignantly -- wondering if I just had been incredibly rude to her. She was getting ready to be really ticked off. Short fuse was a side to Mia I had only guessed at.

“’I asked you if you only interdigitate once a day?’ I replied innocently working hard to keep the grin off my face. She obviously did not know what the hell I was talking about, but she was not ready to let me know it. I started walking again. She stood still for a moment and then scurried up beside me. We walked for another few yards before I asked again.

“She hesitated and then grudgingly -- as if she had committed some major sin -- quietly replied, ‘No, I’ve not set any limit on that. Should I?’

“’Oh no,’ I replied, ‘I kind of enjoyed holding your hand earlier, but when you didn’t take mine a minute or so ago, I wasn’t sure if you had set some sort of personal daily limit.’

“She started to giggle and then punched my shoulder -- hard. ‘You are truly nuts -- one of your oars is clearly out of the water -- and that’s a fact.’ And she took my hand. ‘Where did you get that word? What was it?’

“’Interdigitate,’ I replied. ‘The first time I heard the word was when a kid in my Sex-Ed class -- his name was Jerry Piels, I think -- asked our female Sex-Ed teacher if she thought interdigitation before marriage was morally wrong.”

Al Rennie; Clearwater Journals; Smashwords; 2011.

“So the days would have passed, literary labour interdigitating with agricultural.”

V.S. Naipaul; The Mimic Men; Andre Deutsch; 1967.