In A HORSE'S TALE, Guess Who's the Horse's Ass?

Mark Twain wrote a lot.  He loved to, but he also had to (debts, foolish investments, a desire to live beyond his means--how very American of him!).  So many of his titles are famous--from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--that we tend to overlook his other works, many of which are so far off the cultural radar these days as to be invisible.

In the last years of his life, for example, he wrote quite a few titles that I had never heard of until I started reading them a few years ago.  Look at this list from his final decade:

(1901) Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (political satire)
(1902) A Double Barrelled Detective Story (fiction)
(1904) A Dog's Tale (fiction)
(1905) King Leopold's Soliloquy (political satire)
(1905) The War Prayer (fiction)
(1906) The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (fiction)
(1906) What Is Man? (essay)
(1907) Christian Science (non-fiction)
(1907) A Horse's Tale (fiction)
(1907) Is Shakespeare Dead? (non-fiction)
(1909) Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (fiction)

I'm gradually making my way through all of these and just yesterday finished A Horse's Tale, all 153 of its small pages.  It starts off as a silly, mildly amusing story about (and for?) a child.

A horse narrates the first chapter.  Soldier Boy is Buffalo Bill's horse, and he says things like, "I am the best-educated horse outside of the hippodrome ..." (3).  The story progresses in the form of letters among characters and narrations by horses, humans, a dog.

A nine-year-old girl, Cathy, is coming the the Wild West, to a cavalry fort, where she promptly charms everyone and everything.  "You never saw such a winning little devil," writes General Alison to his mother (20).

Cathy prances around the post, learns to ride wonderfully, organizes all the other kids into a quasi-military unit (drills them!).  She is brave, fearless--not shedding a single tear when she must get stitches in a damaged finger.

A black slave--Dorcas--is in the story, a woman loved by all, too.

One chapter is a conversation between Soldier Boy and another horse identified only as the "Mexican plug."  (Plug is slang for an old horse.)  They discuss the character of a dog, Shekels, but the plug says he doesn't understand dogs: "Dogmatics is quite beyond me, quite ..." (75).

For more than half the tale we float along on a shallow narrative stream.  Readers who know Twain's biography know how much he loved his daughters when they were little girls, how two of them died before he did, how he later formed a group of little girls he called his "Angelfish."  (Here's a link to the whole Angelfish thing: Twain's Angelfish.)  So the little-girl-at-the-center-of-the-story has even more autobiographical resonance.

But then--as was often the case in Twain's later years--the skies darken, deeply darken.

Buffalo Bill (who adores the little girl--hmmm: Twain and BB bore a physical resemblance!) is nearly murdered; Cathy rides to help him, falls asleep on the way on her horse, topples to the ground, is nearly killed.

Two humans--two of the sort Twain reviled--are talking about bullfighting and about its gore with great relish.  And Twain ends their chapter with this discussion of the behavior of timid bulls in the ring:

"... it is the funniest thing in the world to see him hobbling around on his severed legs; the whole vast house goes into hurricanes of laughter over it; I have laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks to see it.  When he has furnished all the sport he can, he is not any longer useful, and is killed."

"Well, it is perfectly grand, Antonio, perfectly beautiful.  Burning a nigger don't begin" (128).

Reminds you of that line near the end of Huck Finn when Aunt Sally asks Huck if anyone was injured during a riverboat accident.

"No'm.  Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt."

Once again, Twain shows the banality of racism--and its obscene cruelty.

Near the end of A Horse's Tale, Cathy goes back to Europe (her home), where Soldier Boy (now with her) is promptly stolen and begins a descent through the equine ranks until he is nothing but walking meat for the bull ring.  Years have passed; Cathy has been looking for him.  And in the ring she finds him, sees him as he collapses.  She runs out into the ring to be with him.

And a bull gores her.  "She was never conscious again in life.  We bore her home, all mangled and drenched in blood ..." (151).

The story ends a few pages later with more sappy stuff as Twain slaps our faces repeatedly for our romanticism, for our failures to recognize and remedy the horrors right in front of our eyes.  Twain recognized the marriage between ignorance and cruelty.  And it propelled him into a depression from which he never really emerged.

"I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing!"

There was an Alka-Seltzer commercial a long time ago (1972!): A guy in his pajamas sitting on the edge of his bed, clearly unhappy with himself for all he has eaten.  He groans, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!"  Here's a link to that commercial on YouTube: Alka-Seltzer, 1972.  I know that man--and not just from the commercial.  I see him every day.  In the mirror.

I guess it's time to write about the Balrog of my life--my Voldemort--my Smaug: food.

We Dyer men have the metabolism of a rock.  We burn little, store much.  (A trait, biologists know, that enabled my simian ancestors to survive in lean times.)  My dad's many brothers (and my dad) had mighty, alpha-male sea lion bellies, inflated by years of meat and potatoes and pie and peanuts and beer and ... pie and pie and pie (oh, did my dad love pie!).  Even without the pie, we Dyers put on weight easily.  Our bodies can transform a single graham cracker into a rope of flesh encircling our waists.  A dear colleague of mine from Aurora, Mrs. Shirkey, once told me years ago: "What you eat in private shows up in public."  True with me--and quickly, too.

Throughout my school years, I ate with impunity.  I was very active, and testosterone was surging in torrents through my body, consuming everything in sight--including those parts of my brain that were supposed to be observing some sort of moral code.

But when I got to college, I began to notice that eating was having consequences.  I was not as active as I'd been before (though I was on the tennis team), and my body chemistry was changing again.  My waistline became a storage warehouse for unused calories.  My pants sizes, uh, changed.

My first few years of teaching I didn't have much of a weight problem--mostly because I had no money and couldn't afford food.  (I'm not kidding.)  Often, those first few years, I ate no breakfast or lunch (no money) and then ate a lean supper (no money)--never went to restaurants (no money), had virtually no dates (no money).  I looked at women with a variety of hungers in those days.

When I got married in 1969, my income soared (Joyce had a $2500 teaching assistantship at KSU, and that meant FOOD!).  Suddenly, I was eating more once again.  My body celebrated by storing virtually all of it, and my weight soared to over 190 lbs.  I didn't help matters by (a) smoking, (b) drinking beer, (c) not exercising--at all.

Once I topped 190 and was moving swiftly toward 200, I, in 1970-71, for the first time in my life, went on a diet.  I cut calories to 1000/day and in a matter of months was back to 150.  And feeling really, really, really virtuous and superior.

It didn't last.

Since 1970 it's been up and down and up again--mostly up, though rarely into the 190 range again (though I've been there--and was near there a month ago).  Exercise helps, I guess, though it alone is not sufficient.  If I eat what I want and burn 1000 calories a day exercising, I will put on weight--presumably indefinitely, eventually exploding like that guy Mr. Creosote in that Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life.  Here's a link to that supremely disgusting scene: Monty Python: Exploding Man!

And what foods do me in?  I don't eat dessert (except at Christmas and Thanksgiving), but it's bread products (bread, crackers, the like) that KILL.  I love them.  I desire them.  I am hot for them.  I have affairs with them.  If they're in the house, I eat them.  All.  I eat them all.  Granola is especially dangerous, especially good granola (though, for me, all granola is good).  I can eat mountain ranges of granola.  And have. 

Right now, for the past week or so, I've been "watching it"--i.e., keeping away from the granola, with one disastrous falling-off-the-wagon event last Friday night.

Saturday morning, I woke up, sat up, swung my legs over the side of the bed, slumped over in an archetypal posture of profound self-loathing, and grunted, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!"

Field of Dreams

Once upon a time, in another life, I was a tick.

One of the Amarillo Ticks, to be exact.  That was the name of my first baseball team, the summer after I'd completed second grade, 1954.  We were living in Amarillo because of the Korean War.  Dad had been called back to active duty, had been scheduled to go to Korea, but then the Air Force decided to re-open its base in Amarillo, and so to the Texas Panhandle we went for a couple of years.  MapQuest says it's 265.76 mi from Enid, OK, to Amarillo--4 hours, 36 minutes.  Sounds about right.  We drove it quite a few times, back to see our grandparents.  And once--this would be unthinkable now--brother Dickie, only about 10, took the Greyhound, by himself, back and forth.  I remember we had to cross the Canadian River (near Canadian, Texas) on a rickety bridge that always frightened me, though the mighty Canadian was not too mighty in those dry days.

We lived at 4242 West Thirteenth Street in Amarillo, not far from Avondale Elementary School, where I learned how to use the monkey bars, how to lose a playground fight, how to get a crush on a teacher (Miss Flewelling: I couldn't take my eyes off of her), how to picnic in Palo Duro Canyon, not far away.  (Here's the canyon website--and, like everyone and everything else today, it also has a FB page!: Palo Duro Canyon.)

I also, for the first time, played on an organized baseball team.  Actually, it was softball.  Little kids began with softball in those days--which seems odd for a couple of reasons: (1) a softball is not soft (just ask my face); (2) little kids' hands can not grip the ball properly--it's too big.  But softball it was.  We had no uniforms, just T-shirts.  The Ticks' shirt was bright green--grass-green--and featured a big fuzzy white tick on the front, as big as my (puny) chest.  Subsequent trips through the washing machine with Tide and company soon cracked and unfuzzed the tick.  By the end of the season, poor Tick looked like chunks of sea salt spread out on my (puny) chest.

I don't remember our team record.  I just remember my own (more later).  I played center field, a glamor position that held no glamor.  Exactly one ball came to me the entire season, mostly because seven-year-olds had a hard time hitting a softball out of the infield.  But one Amarillo evening, one kid got hold of one and hit a towering fly ball.  I didn't have to move a step--which is a good thing.  For in those dark days of youth, I had no idea how to track a fly ball.  So I just stood there, my glove extended, and the ball fell right into it.

And then out.

I didn't think to cover the ball with my other hand, and my "glove" had no pocket whatsoever--I think we bought it at a local hardware store.  It was flat and hard--more like a bicycle seat than a ball glove.

I looked down at the ball and started crying.  Coaches were yelling things.  So I picked up the ball and threw a rainbow back in the general vicinity of the infield while the kid was running around the bases with astonishing speed.  By the time the ball landed somewhere around the pitcher's mound, he was streaking for home and slid in a magnificent cloud of Panhandle dust.  A pointless slide.  No one had thrown the ball home.

Dad got me a new glove the next day.

As for my plate appearances?  I believe that coaches pitched to us--tossed underhand--but I'm not clear on that.  What I am clear on is this: I did not swing at a pitch all summer.  I was too afraid.  I was small then (unlike my imposing, towering Self of today), so I scrunched down, laid the bat on my shoulder, and kept it there throughout the summer.  I either walked or struck out, every plate appearance.  So my batting average was easy to remember: .000.

Dad would always cheer from the sidelines: "Pick out a good one, Doodlebug! [We'll get into that nickname another day.]  Give it a ride!"

But I never gave one a ride.  I never even offered one a lift.

And, later, Dad would toss balls to me in the back yard, and I'd swing and hit them (I eventually got pretty good at it).  But on that Avondale field?  I waited for the walk.  Cried every time I struck out.  Dreamed of greater things.

"What-If?"

A week ago, Writer's Almanac offered this poem for the day (13 May):

Wherever You Are
...
by Jeffrey Harrison

When I kissed you in the hall
of the youth hostel we fell
into the linen closet laughing
twenty years ago and I still
remember though not very often
the taste of cheap wine in your mouth
like raspberries the freckle
between your breasts and the next day
when we went to Versailles I hardly
saw anything because I was looking
at you the whole time your face I can't
quite remember then I kissed you
good-bye and you got on a train
and I never saw you again just
one day and one letter long gone
explaining never mind but sometimes
I wonder where you are probably
married with children like me happy
with a new last name a whole life
having nothing to do with that day
but everybody has something like it
a small thing they can't help
going back to and it's not even about
choices and where your life might
have gone but just that it's there
far enough away so it can be seen
as just something that happened almost
to someone else an episode from
a movie we walk out of blinded
back into our lives

"Wherever You Are" by Jeffrey Harrison, from Feeding the Fire. © Sarabande Books, 2001.


It's a poem about a "what-if" moment--a meeting between a young man and woman, a meeting with intimacy, of poignancy, a meeting that led, ultimately, to nothing but, years later, a sweet memory.

I posted that day on FB about this poem--thinking what a good idea it would be for a literary collection of some sort (stories, poems, essays?) about what-if? moments.

I have one.

Schroon Lake

In the summer of 1963--the summer after my freshman year at Hiram College--I had taken a job as a tennis counselor at a boys' camp in the Adirondacks.  Camp Idylwold, near Schroon Lake, NY.  (The mailing address, as I recall, was "South Schroon, NY.")

I sucked at tennis--this I quickly discovered at the camp, where Michael Fishbach, the nine-year-old son of the camp's tennis pro, Joe Fishbach, could have easily beaten me.  All the other tennis instructors were better than I, as well.  Before the campers arrived, Joe played all of us, beating everyone 6-0 very quickly.  Just to show us.  But he didn't beat me 6-0.  He beat me 6-1.  I hit the four best shots of my life--before, afterwards, in my dreams and fantasies--and took that game to wild cheering from the other instructors.  Joe was not cheering.  I barely touched another ball he hit.  It was over in minutes.

Anyway, I was still eighteen years old (would not be nineteen until November), and I did not have my own car.  So my parents bought me a Greyhound ticket--Cleveland to S. Schroon--and off I went with too much stuff to a world I knew nothing about.

The ride was long, hot, boring (though I did have a book--wish I could remember what it was), and crowded.  I changed buses in Albany for a post-midnight ride to S. Schroon.  The bus was actually going to Montreal, and when I boarded late that night, there was only a single seat remaining.  It was next to a young African American woman.  I slumped into it gratefully (I'd feared being next to a screaming child, a talkative someone in sales), pulled out my book to read.

The young woman was reading, too, our overhead lights sending golden cones into our laps.  Much of the rest of the bus was dark.

A moment of intimate background ...

I was romantically unattached at the time.  My long-time high school girlfriend (who'd gone to a different college) had dismissed me over spring break a few months before my bus ride.  I was fragile.  Heartbroken.  I was everything every Country singer ever sang about ...

A few minutes after we got underway, I thought the silence between the young woman and me was getting a little uncomfortable, so I lowered my book, asked her where she was headed.

"Montreal.  To visit my sister and her family."

"I have two brothers."  (See how well I listen?  How well I can connect?)

But soon we were chatting amiably about families and books and friends.  And the miles were unspooling from some colorful ribbon I hoped would not end. 

She was about my age, attended a college whose name I can't recall.  We were a lot alike.

And I started to have ... thoughts.  What if I just stayed on the bus?  Went to Montreal with her?  What if I got a hotel room in the city?  What if she took me to her sister's?  What if ... ?

But, of course, none of that happened.  I got off the bus at S. Schroon, early--early--in the morning.  She wished me good luck.  I, the same.  I saw her face in the window as the bus groaned back out onto the highway.  She was smiling.  Waving.  And I realized I didn't have her address.  And so that was the end.  I sat at the little country store there, waiting for it to open so I could call the camp to pick me up.  I was sadder than I'd been in a long, long time.  As I sit here, typing, I cannot remember her name and have only the vaguest memory of how she looked.  (Glasses?  I think so.)

Six more years would pass before I found myself in a Kent State summer school classroom, found myself noticing an attractive, very bright young woman.  I listened hard when Professor Pringle called the roll.  Heard her name.  Joyce.

20 July 2008.

Joyce and I have driven up into the Adirondacks for her research on John Brown.  His final home and his grave are near Lake Placid.  I tell her I'd like to look at Camp Idylwold.  It's right on the way.

But, of course, it's no longer there.  The camp is gone.  Some private homes now overlook Schroon Lake instead.  I can barely see where things once were.  The docks.  Tennis courts.  Cabins.  Dining hall.  Basketball court.  Baseball diamond.  (In a counselor pick-up game that long-ago summer I hit a triple.  Someone said, "Dynamite comes in small packages!"  A big guy next to him countered--very quickly: "It comes in big ones, too.")

In South Schroon, a stop sign.  We wait for traffic to clear out on the main road.  I look over at the old store.  And remember the young man sitting there, forty-five years ago--the young man wondering What if?  The young man whom I could comfort now. Whom I could tell: Just wait ... it won't be long ... a summer class at KSU ... and then, young man, you'll never again--never again--wonder.  Or have to ask, "What if?"

Baking Bread

Sunday morning, I bake bread.

This has been a routine for many years--decades, now--a weekend routine I originally developed because, well, I had a job during the week--insufficient hours then to mix-let rise-shape-let rise-bake-cool-EAT.  It's part of my week now, a routine I will greatly miss when time's winged chariot hurries too near and invites me aboard--not an invitation one can generally ignore, or decline.

I got to thinking about bread-baking recently when I was reading The Weird Sisters, the 2011 Eleanor Brown novel.  The story concerns three adult (young) daughters of an English professor in a small Ohio college.  All three have issues (see: title); all three try to find ways to create a life that will make sense to them.  (One of the things I loved about the novel: The father taught his children to quote Shakespeare in all sorts of quotidian situations--from taking a walk to fixing dinner.  I got ticked off when I didn't recognize the quotation!  Childish, I know.)

Anyway, one of the sisters finds peace in bread-baking.  And here's one of the quotations I liked:

"There is nothing not beautiful about bread.  The way it grows, from tiny grains, from bowls on the counter, from yeast blooming in a measuring cup like swampy islands.  The way it fills a room, a house, a building, with its inimitable smells at every stage of the process.  The way it swells, submits to a firmly applied fist and contracts, swells again; the way it stretches and expands upon kneading, the warm, supple feel of it against skin.  The sight of a warm roll on a table, the taste--sweet, sour, yeasty on the tongue" (286).

On Saturday night, I feed my sourdough starter (which has been with me since the summer of 1986): three cups flour, 2 cups warm water.  Cover.  Let stand all night in draft-free place.  Over the years, I've used flour from a number of places that mean something to me.  Lanterman Mill in Youngstown--my great-grandfather, Warren A. Lanterman, was related to the Lantermans who ran the mill in ... Mill Creek Park.  The mill in Garrettsville.  Three miles from Hiram, where I went to school and college, where my wife, until a week ago, adorned the faculty.  Garrettsville--where my mother was a stellar English teacher for ten years.  Where my little brother, Davi (no one calls him that now), graduated from James A. Garfield High School.  I've mixed in flour from Washington state--near when my father grew up.  I want to get some from West Virginia, where my great-grandfather grew up in a family of millers in Braxton County, where he, for a time, was sheriff, and where--much to my horror--I discovered that some Dyers, direct ancestors, had owned slaves.

bread rising: 20 May 2012

On Sunday morning, about 7:30, I return two cups of the starter to its crockery home in the fridge, then mix the remaining dough--all cholesterol-free ingredients these days.  Unbleached white flour.  Some oat flour.  Some whole wheat.  (On some ambitious Sundays I add a dozen other flours, too, and some flax seeds.) Knead, knead, knead until it's so elastic I could make a raincoat of it.  Then--in a covered crockery bowl it lies, warming, growing, waiting for some further abuse in a couple of hours (longer in the winter).  I throw it out onto the bread board when it's doubled.  The books all say to punch it down; I don't.  How can I punch a child of mine?  Besides, when it hits the board, it sighs, collapses.  Submits.

Usually, I make two loaves--a round loaf, a traditional sandwich bread loaf.  But I'll make rolls, too.  A long loaf now and then.  The round loaf sits in an earthenware baking bowl; the other, in a Pyrex dish (I like to watch the sides brown while it's baking).  Once again: warming, rising, readying.  Anywhere from one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours.  Depends on some things I understand, some things I don't.  Just like everything else.

Carson with a sourdough wad.

And then--pop into the preheated oven!  And enjoy the smell the rest of the day.  Out to cool on wooden racks that Joyce bought for me in Appalachia somewhere.  Cool and bag and store and eat all week.

My grandsons (7 and 3) love the round loaf: They pick off handfuls from it, wad them in their happy faces, their chubby cheeks swollen like a squirrel's.

I eat a piece every lunch, every dinner.  Joyce likes it best right out of the oven--who doesn't?  Her cheeks puff like a grandson's.

We haven't bought bread in probably forty years.  The baking began as a financial necessity (impecunious public school teacher and grad student); now it's a psychological--no, a spiritual one.

Pronounce!

Enid, Oklahoma.  Any random summer day.  1954.

DANNY (age 9): I'm goin' outside.
DICKIE (older brother, 12): Pronounce the participial -g!

This is the sort of home I grew up in.  Words had hardly passed by my teeth when someone was there, pouncing, correcting.  My mother, an English teacher (foul breed), was more gentle about it.  Generally, she would just repeat what I'd said, but correctly.

DANNY: I feel like I need a Coke.
MOTHER: You feel as if you need a Coke.

The slight emphasis--the soft oral italics--communicated all.

My dad, bless his soul, rarely bothered.  But I'm guessing that he--an Oregon farm boy--had experienced a bit of the old oral italics as well.  He knew what I was feeling.

Dickie was not so gentle.  He would correct abruptly, peremptorily.

DANNY: I wanna go to the park.
DICKIE: You want to go to the park.  Don't talk like a cretin!

In those days--and for many afterwards, I thought a cretin lived on Crete.  So I was never too sure what on earth he was trying to tell me.

And as for the participial -g thing?  I didn't know what a participle was, so, again, his information was less than useful.  I have a theory that all this correction hurt me learning English grammar.  I didn't bother to study for grammar and usage tests in school; I just put down what I'd heard Mom or Dickie say.  That worked up into high school.  And Latin I.  Then I was in deep trouble and wished I'd long ago asked Dickie what a participle is.   I'd figured it just had something or other to do with Crete.  And dangling participle?  Well, that just sounded plain filthy.

Anyway, with all this correction of my speech ... is it any wonder that I stuttered?  Badly?  When I was a poor little oppressed kid?  (I'm not really over it, either.  There are certain words I must avoid--e.g., statistics--when I'm speaking.  For it takes me, oh, three to four minutes to get them all the way out.)

My mother became concerned enough about my stuttering that she sent me to the speech therapist in the Enid schools.  Apparently, the exchange went something like this.

TEACHER: Danny, do you know why you're here?
DANNY: N-n-n-n-n-n-o.
TEACHER: You can't think of any reason you would need to see a speech teacher?
DANNY: N-n-n-n-n-n-o.  I c-c-c-c-c-an't th-th-th-th-th-th-think of one.
TEACHER: Okay, Danny, go on back to class.

Later, it seems, the teacher told my mom that I didn't appear to be worried about it, and that the stuttering, like my soprano voice, would soon go away.  It pretty much did.  Except for statistics and some others I won't mention because the next time I see some of you, you'll try to get me to say "statistics."  I know my "friends" very, very well.

I have no independent memory of any of that elementary-school encounter.  All family lore.  But I like the story and used to tell it in class to students who were eager to talk about anything as long as it wasn't Melville.

Quick: name one of the most famous stutterers in American literature ..

Yes, Billy Budd.

In a story by ...  I f-f-f-f-f-orget.

Shut Up!

We weren't allowed to say "Shut up!" in my parents' home.  "Please be quiet" was the preferred locution.  My parents were concerned about how we said things--how we presented ourselves--so they were careful to prepare scripts for us in common social situations.

When I answered the phone, I had to say, "Dyers' residence.  Danny speaking."  Of course this was long before Caller  ID, so when the caller happened to be one of my friends, I invariably took some crap--both on the phone and later.  The crap generally involved some questions about my virility, though, of course, none of us knew the word at the time.  Just the concept.

Our parents also taught us to address all adults--all--as "Mr." or "Mrs." or "Miss."  (Ms. lay far in the future.)  At Hiram College nowadays the students call the professors by their first names.  Unthinkable when I was a student there.  Revolutionary.  Probably Communist.  I still have deep problems calling my former professors by their first names.  I hardly ever do it, and when I do, I feel as if I've just violated a Commandment.  Oh, and throughout my college years, all our professors called us "Mr." and "Miss."  Except my dad.  Why I took his summer school course, he called everyone else in the class "Mr." or "Miss" Whatever.  But when he called on me, he would just look my way, point, and say "Yes?"  Or "Hmmm?"  There was just no way my dad was going to call me "Mr. Dyer"!

I mention all this politeness and "shut-up" stuff because of the fairly recent use of the term.  As below:

PERSON 1: I got this iPad for $300 off the list price.
PERSON 2: Shut up!

I first noticed this while eavesdropping at the Hudson Starbucks.  Some local high school kids were shut-upping one another at a table nearby.  And it took me a while--Dense Old Man that I am--to realize I was hearing a new way of saying You're kidding!  Or No way!

Both of those responses, by the way, are also vaguely offensive, aren't they.

PERSON 1: I finished the homework early last night.
PERSON 2: No way!

Isn't Person 2 accusing Person 1 of lying?  (No way!)

Anyway, the first time a student told me to shut up in class, I was a little alarmed.  I felt my BP spike, my brain stem light up, my simian self consider some chest-thumping.  Then I remembered the high school kids in Starbucks.  And all the needles on all my emotional gauges dropped back out of the red zone into the green.

But I'm still not used to it.

Yesterday, at the Cleveland Clinic in Twinsburg I had to jump through a number of hoops with my insurance to see if they would pay for a shingles vaccine that my physician had recommended.  It took about an hour.  (But we don't need health-care reform!)

Anyway, I told the insurance adviser at the Clinic that my carrier was going to pay the entire amount for the shot.

"Shut up!" she said.

I almost punched her in her snotty fat fac--  Oops.  Just the changing times.  Which beget changing words.