Sunday Sundries, 279

1. HBOTW: The two winners this week were both students I had back in the 1970s--one at Harmon School in Aurora, the other at Western Reserve Academy (during my brief stint there, 1979-81). The latter, Reza Rais, wrote some very kind paragraphs about me on Facebook. And the former, Diane Novak Herbert, having read some of my posts about missing my daily sojourns in Open Door Coffee Co., assembled some mementos of the place for me, including the wonderful--what? montage?--that you see pictured below. I've put it on our coffee table so I can glance at it while I'm reading. Both Reza and Diane switched on the lights for me in a world that seems ever more dark.

2. I remained stunned by how many people I see around who are not wearing masks--especially, yesterday, hordes of youngsters who were out riding bikes, hanging out in close groups. (We saw them on our way to the grocery store to pick up our order--and on the way back.)

3. I finished one book this week--Christopher Moore's new one, Shakespeare for Squirrels (2020), a sequel to his Fool (2009) and The Serpent of Venice (2014). (I will finish the former this week, and I've ordered the latter.)

Like the others, this is narrated by Pocket (the fool in Shakespeare's King Lear) and concerns the involvement of Pocket (and his dim--and huge--apprentice, Drool) in the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream. (And, like Fool, it's divided into five acts--as all the Bard's plays are.)

The two of them have been adrift at sea for more than a week, when they land in Greece, wander into the woods, meet the mechanicals (who are rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe), and away we go.

Pocket is a horny little fellow, and there is a bit of romping in the novel (as there is in Fool, by the way), and he and Drool do a pretty good job of messing up the Bard's plot. Some characters die. They decide not to do Pyramus but another play. The fairies are squirrels during the daylight. And on and on.

At the end there's a big confrontation, which I will not tell you about.

Moore is playful with the text--inserting lines from other Bard plays (he does this in Fool, as well)--e.g., "past is prologue" (107, from The Tempest), "the play's the thing" (196, from Hamlet), and from Midsummer itself "the course of true love never did run smooth" (142), and numerous others.

He's also quite, uh, inventive with curses and crude language (as the Bard himself could be, of course). How about this one? "Death was a darkling dollop of dog wank" (29)?

The novel is fun on a variety of levels--the silliness of the plot and the narrator, the plot surprises, the allusions to Shakespeare's other plays, the, uh, naughtiness. I'm enjoying Fool right now--many of the same things will I say about it next Sunday!

4. Speaking of the Bard, Joyce and I finished streaming the wonderful Globe production of The Winter's Tale via YouTube this week. (Our son had told us about it.) Although I toured the Globe back in the 1990s when it was about ready to open, I've not seen a production there--and, sadly, probably never will. Our son and his family, though, were in London last summer and saw part of The Comedy of Errors before the heavens opened (Steve, et al. were among the groundlings--and the Globe is open to the sky, so ...).

Anyway, I love that play (and, of course, it has the most famous stage direction in the history of theater, I think: Exit, pursued by a bear). It is the story of Leontes, the jealous King of Sicily, a king who comes to believe that his wife, Hermione, has been having an affair with his long-time best friend, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, who is there at the beginning for a friendly visit. Leontes will not listen to reason, and does some things that nearly destroy his life--and the lives of others. (Some of these destructions are not "nearly.")

Well, the story winds on, and his newborn baby daughter (Leontes believes she is the product of his wife's affair), abandoned by his decree in the wilderness, does not die there, and ...

Ain't tellin'.

We just loved the performances, the actors (the minor characters played multiple parts), the vast capacity of the Globe stage to accommodate so much.

Joyce and I have seen the play several times before--but those productions were not even close to this one.

It was free on YouTube through this weekend. Don't know what's up with it now.

5. We finished streaming the final episode of the most recent season of Death in Paradise, a formulaic Caribbean whodunit that we both still enjoy--in fact, its adherence to its predictable format is one of the reasons we like it so much. Hard to tell if the whole thing is over now--there were some hints in the final few episodes. I hope not. 

(I just checked online: There will be a new season, but with some changes ... ain't sayin'.)

We're now also streaming, via Acorn, season 2 of Blood, a tense story about a death in the family. Did the father murder his wife, the mother of three of the other characters? We're still not certain.

6. I finished streaming another Robert Altman film, California Split (1974), with Elliot Gould and George Segal. We saw it back in 1974--and I don't think I've seen it since. But it was a pleasure to watch. Younger Gould ... such a talent. It was fun to see him--in a scene I remembered--get involved in a pickup basketball game and take some arrogant kids for all the money they have on them.

And the story has a gentle arc--so natural you think that it wasn't even scripted (Altman did improvise a bit, I've read--and allowed the actors lots of freedom). It's about a couple of gambling addicts who go to Reno to see if they can score big-time.

The story of a friendship, too, and how the demands upon one can crush it.

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

     - from wordsmith.org (I didn't know this word--but figured it out from the roots)

heterography (het-uh-ROG-ruh-fee)

noun:

1. A spelling different from the one in current use.

2. Use of the same letter(s) to convey different sounds, for example, gh in rough and ghost.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Greek hetero- (different) + -graphy (writing). Earliest documented use: 1783.

NOTES:

The idea of heterography is a recent phenomenon, relatively speaking. Earlier, when English was mainly a spoken language, it was a free-for-all, spelling-wise. Any spelling was fine as long as you could make yourself understood. Each writer spelled words in his own way, trying to spell them phonetically. Shakespeare spelled his own name in various ways (Shaxspear, Shakespear, and so on).

If you read old manuscripts, you can find different spellings of a word on the same page, and sometimes even in the same sentence. Spelling wasn’t something sacrosanct: if a line was too long to fit, a typesetter might simply squeeze or expand the word by altering the spelling.

If the idea of to-each-one’s-own spelling for the same word sounds bizarre, consider how we practice it even today, in the only place we can: in our names. Look around you and you might find a Christina and a Cristina and a Kristina and many other permutations and combinations.

With the advent of printing in the 15th century, spelling began to become standardized. By the 19th century, most words had a single “official” spelling, as a consensus, not by the diktat of a committee.

Today if you write “definately” and someone points out that you’ve misspelled the word, just tell them you’re a practitioner of heterography.

USAGE: “Rather than a note on orthography, this might better be characterized as an explanation of unavoidable heterography. ... Where alternate spellings might be more familiar to some readers, I have listed them in parentheses.” Carolyn J Dean; A Culture of Stone; Duke University Press; 2010.

A Farrago of Contradiction

I had to look that word up once upon a time--farrago ("a mixture"; it comes from  a Latin word meaning "mixed fodder for cattle"--thank you, Merriam-Webster; oh, and it kind of rhymes with Chicago).

Anyway, as I look at what I've done this past week, I feel, more than ever, that, when they coined the word, the Romans must have been thinking not of cattle food but of the Future Me. They could be prescient, those Romans--but not, of course, as the Empire began to implode. (Not that ours could ever implode, right? Cuz we're uh-MARE-uh-kuns!)

I find myself, even at my, uh, advanced age, ping-ponging back and forth between high and low culture--in what I stream, in what I read, in what I do. I think I understand more clearly now why my parents seemed, at times, to think of me as a Lost Cause.

Let's take the streaming first (since it's easiest to do). This week Joyce and I streamed a Globe production of The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's hopeless and hopeful play about human failure and human forgiveness, about our sometimes insidious minds, about the miracle of love.

As followers of this blog know, Joyce and I have seen all of the Bard's plays onstage--some of them many times (hey, you can always find Romeo and Juliet somewhere--or A Midsummer Night's Dream or Hamlet or Macbeth; some of the others, King John, Henry VIII, and, oh Henry VI, Part II, are a bit harder to find).

So ... watching The Winter's Tale (a play I love, by the way) is powerful evidence for my Intellectual Loftiness, right?

Well ...

The last couple of weeks I have also streamed (while waiting in the evening for Joyce to wrap up her work and join me in bed) both The Hangover and Hangover 2. And two nights ago I started The Change-Up, a raunchy 2011 comedy about Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, two long-time but very different friends (Bateman has a family and is a rising lawyer; Reynolds is a disorganized hedonist who gets parts in porno films); the two, miraculously, change personalities (I won't get into how--okay, it involves urinating in a public fountain and wishing they could trade places). Link to some video.

I do not keep this secret from Joyce (she's far too clever for me), but I do stop it the second I hear her heading toward our bedroom.

All right--what about the reading I do?

Each night I read a bit from each book in my bedside pile (and on my Kindle). I try not to let the pile grow beyond seven: That way I can still see our clock and am less likely to knock the pile over in the night and am able to do a (pretty) good job of remembering what's going on in each of the seven books.

Among the seven are some very admirable titles. Right now, for example, I'm reading a late novel by Wilkie Collins ("I Say No") and Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, her conclusion to her wonderful trilogy about Henry VIII and advisor Thomas Cromwell (the other two were Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies).

Impressive, eh?

Among the others, I fear, are some titles a bit less ... weighty--violent mystery novels (Ken Bruen is a favorite) and some others I refuse to mention, for I don't want to lose every ounce of whatever respect you have (or had) for me.

Now, as for what I do (our third category). I spend most of my days--even before the lockdown--reading and writing and cooking and baking. All noble, eh?

I do write some ... serious ... things (as some of you know), but I also spend some energy every day writing, well, drivel (Merriam-Webster: a word that once meant "saliva trickling from the mouth" but now means "inarticulate or foolish utterance").

Pretty much ever day I write what I kindly call "doggerel," silly (okay, even stupid) "poems" about all sorts of things; some of it I post on Facebook; some I don't (some of my Friends do have standards!). Oh, and each morning I write and text to my son and his family a doggerel based on the word-of-the-day on the tear-off daily calendar I give them every year for Christmas.

Example: today's word was sotto voce, and here's what I came up with--and texted to all of them:

He spoke—but SOTTO VOCE—so

I wasn’t all that clear

If he was speaking softly due

To privacy—or fear.

Then I saw Mordred.

See what I mean?

You can talk about all of this--and me--but, please: do so sotto voce!

Faces in the Trees

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett

Last night--our reading done, our hour of streaming done--we lay in bed waiting for Morpheus to arrive. It was early--about 8:15 (I know, I know: dotage)--and the sun had not yet surrendered.

As I lay there (our bedroom is upstairs--in the front of the house), I could see through a front window the branches of our trees--and of a tree across the street.

You probably know that human beings are hard-wired to see faces everywhere--in clouds, in random scrawls on a men's room wall, and, of course, in tree branches. A few years ago there were some configurations in one of our trees that looked, in leafless months, like my face--glasses and all. (Joyce can confirm: She saw it, too.)

But last night, a new one for me. In the top of the tree across the road I saw, very clearly, the head of Davy Crockett, complete with coonskin cap, its tail reaching around his right shoulder a little.

As a kid I loved Davy Crockett when it was on that TV show Disneyland (1954-55), part of their "Frontierland" sequence. I turned ten in 1954, just the right age to play Davy in the little woods--we called it Gibsons' Woods (the Gibsons owned it)--across from our house at 1706 E. Elm Ave. in Enid, Oklahoma.

Kids were carrying Davy Crockett lunch pails to school--wearing coonskin caps and frontier fringed shirts. Not I, though. My parents, both teachers, had no surplus cash to throw away on such things. (Too bad: I could sell them now for a chunk of change on eBay.)

The final episode (at the Alamo) does not actually show Davy die, but he is swinging his rifle like a club as members of Santa Anna's army swarm around him and the theme music swells. I'm sure that was the first time I ever saw a TV hero of mine buy the farm.

I watched those episodes over and over when Disney re-ran them (which was often), and I became addicted to the story of the Alamo--especially the story of Jim Bowie (he of the famous knife; he got his own TV show for a while, The Adventures of Jim Bowie, 1956-58; link to some video--many episodes on YouTube). Gradually, though, I learned the actual histories of these characters (Bowie was a slave-owner and -dealer), and my fondness faded.

As did the tree-image of Crockett last night. A breeze stirred the limbs, and for a moment I saw another face there--the face of Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker hat and all.

Yet another obsession before my eyes. Years ago I read all of the Holmes stories--and have re-read many of them since. I've seen the movies, the various TV series, read many books about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his great creation (Doyle always credited Edgar Poe, whose stories about C. Auguste Dupin set the standard for detective tales). I've even read numerous contemporary novels that employ Holmes. (Here's a link to a list of them supplied by the Seattle Public Library.)

But Davy soon returned to the tree just as the sun was surrendering.

Meanwhile, Joyce and I were singing the theme song from Davy--though we couldn't quite get the third line. But--thanks to Google--here it is: link to the theme song--with that 3rd line: "Raised in the woods so he knew ev'ry tree ...."

And, soon, Morpheus arrived, and darkness fell.

"It was a miracle."

poet Donald Hall

Nearly four years ago--on June 22, 2016--Writer's Almanac posted a poem by Donald Hall (1928-2018), a poem called "Summer Kitchen."

That poem captured me, and I've been in its thrall ever since. I memorized it, and now I mumble it a few times a week so I don't forget it.

Here it is ...

Summer Kitchen

In June’s high light she stood at the sink

            With a glass of wine,

And listened for the bobolink,

And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.

            She pressed her lips

Together, reached for kitchenware,

And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.

            “You light the candle.”

We ate, and talked, and went to bed,

And slept. It was a miracle.

“Summer Kitchen” by Donald Hall from The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015

Lately, for a variety of reasons, this poem has had a haunting effect on me. It's really a simple thing, isn't it? A man is watching a woman prepare supper. We get a few details about what she's doing. She finishes the preparation; she tells him to light the candle.

And then the last two lines, which stun me with all that's unsaid. We ate, and talked, and went to bed, / And slept. It was a miracle.

Before the final four words, the portion of those lines dealing with a list of what they did during and after supper is almost crushingly mundane, isn't it? We know very little about what they ate (something with sauce), what they talked about, or what they did in bed, or who went to sleep first, or ... anything.

And then that final sentence hits you like a rock from David's sling: It was a miracle.

Yes, the mundane, the quotidian, is a miracle. The moments with your partner--the quiet routines--the safety in the normal--the realization (implied here) that it's all evanescent--that the miracle is that it's happening at all.

We know that it's impermanent, of course. We know that things will fall apart--we know the truth of what Auden said in another poem I love ("As I Walked Out One Evening"), "O let not Time deceive you, / You cannot conquer Time." As Hall himself says (see video link below), he wrote the poem after the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon.

Shakespeare has more than one sonnet about this--but in Sonnet 73 he says it succinctly in the final couplet: "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

And in these lockdown days, I have found I understand even more acutely the increasing poignancy of Hall's words, of Auden's, of Shakespeare's--of the piercing pain of mortality. Being with Joyce--doing our routines--reading, writing, cooking, talking, laughing, streaming--all of this, I've realized more than ever, is miraculous. And horrifyingly brief.

Link to Donald Hall reading his poem.

SIN-o-NYMS ... soon available

As I just posted on Facebook, I have uploaded to Kindle Direct my latest collection of silly verse, SIN-o-NYMS, lines based on our many synonyms for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Also included, some ordinary doggerel on a variety of subjects--plus some lines I call "wolferel," a word I made up to describe lines that are a bit more serious than doggerel.

Anyway, it will be available later today on Amazon (for $2.99, the lowest price they allow!), and you can download it to any smart device--the Kindle App is free.

Below is the Preface from the volume + some front matter ...

SIN-o-NYMS

And Other Doggerel and Wolferel

(February 12–May 14, 2020)

by

Daniel Dyer

Dedication

For Joyce Dyer

“‘For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages, and

The first love of the world.’”

—W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening,” 1937

Preface

I’m not at all sure why I decided to write a doggerel series based on the seven deadly sins—it’s not the most uplifting of topics, is it? Perhaps I was feeling especially guilty that day? And needed some kind of expiation?

Probably, I was just tickled by the title I was thinking about: SIN-o-NYMS. It fits perfectly. Every day, I decided, I would write a doggerel, each one devoted to a single synonym for the sin whose turn it was in the sequence. (In the table of contents you can see exactly what that sequence is.)

So—without much further thought (as usual)—off I went.

Of course, I quickly discovered something quite daunting about such a journey—the realization that I am more or less guilty of all of them. (You are, too, so don’t go all superior on me!) At times in my life I have been envious, gluttonous, greedy, lustful, proud, slothful, angry. Hell, I was every one of those things in ninth grade! Pick any day. Pick any lunch period!

So, this realization added a new piquancy to the effort of writing the lines—though piquancy is a little generous—a little too positive, even frail. Maybe a little bite would be a better way to put it. I have to admit that every day as I was writing some nonsense lines about a sin-o-nym, I remembered something from my boyhood-youth-adulthood that made me simultaneously smile and cringe—and sometimes cringe, not smile.

And I am not going to tell you about a single damn one of them. (I can’t afford blackmail payments.)

Here’s another thought: Until I started working on this project, I had no idea that English supplies so many synonyms for our sins. But that, of course, just reveals how much we think about them—how much we talk and write about them in various ways. Each synonym provides a sort of variation on the sin—a softening, a hardening, a fresh perspective.

So … it’s been quite a journey for me. I hope you’ve felt the same. (I’m sure we share considerable relief that it’s over!)

Now, the other sections of this volume. Under the heading “Desultory Doggerel” are some general lines I wrote principally to post on Facebook to delight (!?!?) my Friends. These generally deal with quotidian matters—like, oh, accidentally dropping my wedding ring down the drain of the kitchen sink (I got it back!).

Within  “Desultory Doggerel” are also three sections I call “Jingles That Jangle.” These are other daily nonsense I wrote, and all of it began when I thought of a title—“A Rooster in a Roadster.” I enjoyed writing that one so much that soon I was consulting online lists of animals and creating silly lines about them.

And I have to confess that I’ll be sad when I run out of animals to write about. A series on plants just doesn’t seem as exciting.

Finally, what about this “wolferel” stuff at the end? Some years ago I coined that term to refer to lines that are not really doggerel, lines that aspire to be a little more, lines that achieve a little more—but not a lot more. In other words, they are not canine but lupine lines—not quite leonine—i.e., poetry. No, they’re something in between, something a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder of language.

So … as you launch your vessel and sail among these odd islands I have imagined, I hope you are surprised by some of what you see—amused by some. I don’t think you will run out to nominate me for a Pulitzer—Ha!—but I do hope that, now and then, some smiles will form on your face. And you’ll descend to your cabin, where you’ll pull the cork on yet another bottle of champagne. And try, simultaneously, to enjoy and forget …

—   Daniel Dyer

     May 14, 2020

Things Change ...

I used to listen in awe when my dad would tell me that he sometimes rode a horse to school in rural Oregon. As a kid, I longed to be a cowboy--an ambition fed, no doubt, by the countless TV shows and movies about the West in the 1950s.

I just checked a reference book--and online: In 1954 (I was ten) the following Westerns were on TV: Annie Oakley, The Lone Ranger, Death Valley Days, The Roy Rogers Show, The Cisco Kid, Gene Autry, The Adventures of Kit Carson, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Hopalong Cassidy.

And this doesn't count the Western movies and re-runs on Saturdays. Among the movies in the theaters that year were Johnny Guitar and River of No Return. And, again, this does not count what were called the "B movies"--cheap things they threw together to entertain little boys like me--movies featuring, oh, Whip Wilson, Lash LaRue, Johnny Mack Brown, The Three Mesquiteers, Bob Steele, and countless others.

Life was simple for me then--good and evil were easy to identify: black hat = bad; white hat = good.

And other things were simpler--and more difficult--too.

In Enid, Okla., where I grew up there was one TV station--another in Oklahoma City that we could draw in with our rooftop TV aerial. (In the nearly two years we lived in Amarillo, Tex.--1952-3--we had no TV signal--had to listen to radio drama.)

There were, of course, no computers, no cell phones, no portable phones. When the phone rang, you went to where the phone was, answered it, and, if it was for you, you sat down in the chair (always by the phone) and talked.

My grandmother Osborn wrote a newsy family letter every week--using carbon copies on her typewriter (mechanical, not electric) to send to her son, daughter (my mom), and, later, her grandsons. I saved some of them--and realizing now that I did not save them all is a horrible feeling.

Snail-mail (a term not yet coined) was really the only way to communicate--except for long-distance calls (which cost $$) and telegrams (which cost $$).

There was no such thing as self-serve at the gas stations. A guy (almost always a guy) came out and filled your tank, cleaned your windshield--and the back window.

No such thing as self-serve at the grocery store.

Old-fashioned mechanical cash registers.

At school, no videos--just filmstrips and 16mm films shown on a projector.

Power lawnmowers were a novelty. Snowblowers were unknown. Leafblowers were unknown.

Alexa and Siri were silent.

There were no 24-hour news services--just the national news at 6:30 on the three major networks (NBC, CBS, ABC). Local news was a half-hour earlier--and at 11:00 p.m.

Newspapers ruled. Pic shows a commuter train ...

Not many people on our street subscribe to a daily newspaper now--though we, retro to the core, take three (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Akron Beacon-Journal, New York Times).

I could go on, but I'm getting weary (as I'm sure you are).

My father died late in 1999, and he was already feeling estranged from the New World. As I've mentioned here before, the last piece of technology he learned to use was a TV remote (a device that did not exist in my boyhood--want to change the channel, or turn the TV on or off?--walk over to it and use the buttons on the set). He never used a computer, self-serve gas, a cell phone ...

But he did ride a horse to school--and that is awesome!

Sunday Sundries, 278

1. HBsOTW: The Human Beings of the Week--not too hard to select in these COVID days: all those delivery people I see on the streets and sidewalks of our neighborhood--bringing mail, packages, hope. The infection risk is very real for them, but there they are--doing what needs to be done in critical times.

2. I finished one book this week ...

     - I charged through the new collection of short stories (though a couple are not short!) by Richard Ford, Sorry for Your Trouble (2020).

Two were so long, in fact, that they nudged up against Novella and begged for admission, but Novella curtly dismissed them, calling them "Shorty."

A few years ago I went on a Ford Freakout and read all of his books (in the order he wrote them) and was, well, dazzled. So now I must wait around until he comes out with new ones. This one was worth the wait.

They deal with love--developing, broken, remembered--and with relationships in general between men and women. He uses flashbacks continually: older men (mostly men) think about their earlier lives, their relationships, some crushing moments (one guy remembers a boy hit and killed by a bus).

Literary allusions are here and there, A. Trollope and V. Woolf among them.

These stories--unlike many of his earlier ones--deal with people who apparently have no financial concerns. (Not the only way he resembles Henry James!)

And, of course, those sentences that make you sit upright:

     - from "The Run of Yourself": "Out of sight of water, Maine was Michigan with no sense of humor" (122).

     - from "A Free Day": "There was so much time to be alive; then you weren't anymore" (201).

3. Via YouTube we have been streaming a production of Shakespeare's The Winter' Tale (at Shakespeare's Globe in London, from 2018 ). It was one of the last plays in our let's-see-them-all journey years ago--no one was mounting it. Then, suddenly, lots of companies were--and we ended up seeing it several times. (It's available on YouTube only till through this coming Saturday--but free!)

In many ways, it's another dark tale of jealousy--a king begins to believe his wife has been having an affair with a boyhood friend of his (now the King of Bohemia), and no one can dissuade him. He even thinks his young son--and his wife's not-yet-delivered child—are not his own. Soon, he is fully mad and does some things that wreak havoc in his kingdom, in his life, in the lives of others.

He sends his newborn daughter off with some aides and commands them to abandon her in the wilderness. They do. But then ...

And, oh, the ending of this one has dissolved me every time I've seen it.

Link to some video.

On a personal note: When I was in London in the mid-90s, I toured the facility (which they were still preparing)--saw them painting the columns, etc. Then, last summer, our son and his family were there for a production (was it The Comedy of Errors?), but the rain sent them scurrying for safety.

4. Last week we watched the first episode of the new season of Hasan Minhaj's Netflix series, Patriot Act, and it was a disturbing one about evictions. I learned a lot--raged a lot.

Link to some YouTube video.

5. Freedom is not doing exactly what you want whenever you want; it's not license. Freedom is a shared set of agreements among us to live by the Constitution and the law. You are not free to endanger me--nor I you. (That's why we have, among other things, traffic laws and many others whose intent is to keep us all safe.) In moments of crisis, our government will restrict and restrain us--not to become authoritarian--but to keep us all safe. (Think of the airline restrictions post-9/11.)

Meanwhile, about 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.

Think of this: If you lined 100,000 people up on a highway, single file, socially distanced, the line would extend for about 113 miles--the approximate distance from Cleveland to Toledo. You would have to drive nearly two solid hours at 60 mph, nonstop, to reach the end of the line.

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

     - from The Oxford English Dictionary

plutodemocracy, n.

Origin: Formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: pluto- comb. form, democracy n.

Etymology: < pluto- comb. form + democracy n.

 1. Rule or government by formal democratic processes but with only the wealthy having any real power.

1895   I. K. Funk et al. Standard Dict. Eng. Lang.   Pluto-democracy, government through the influence of money under the forms of a democracy.

1941   D. Wilson Germany's ‘New Order’ 24   German gibes at pluto-democracy.

1970   H. Arendt On Violence 72   A new system, which he [sc. Pareto] called ‘Pluto-democracy’—a mixed form of government, plutocracy being the bourgeois regime and democracy the regime of the workers.

1979   Afr. Stud. Rev. 22 100   Party politics leads not to popular democracy but to ‘plutodemocracy’.

(Hide quotations)

 2. A democratic state in which power lies in fact only with the wealthy.

1902   19th Cent. & After July 119   If England be allowed to become a Plutodemocracy, then she has the tragic example of Venice to chasten and admonish her.

1948   W. S. Churchill Second World War I. xx. 287   The German Government ceased to define its foreign policy as anti-Bolshevism, and turned its abuse upon the ‘pluto-Democracies’.

1988   Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 94 663   The classical elite theorists thought that egalitarianism..is one of the principal myths on which elites rely in mobilizing and controlling the mass publics of modern ‘plutodemocracies’.

About Those Older Folks ...

We know that many of the COVID-19 deaths have occurred in nursing and other elder-care facilities. The old and the frail and very vulnerable to this heartless virus. (Kind of superfluous to say "heartless virus," I know.)

On Facebook and even on the news I have read/seen people talking about how, you know, old people are going to die anyway (as if the rest of us aren't!), so we might as well just open up the economy again and let the Grim Reaper reap away.

Well ...

My grandmother Dyer, Pearl Dyer, died in a nursing home on January 5, 1960; she was only 67 years old; I was in 9th grade. I'd seen her only a few times (she lived and died in Oregon), but I remember visiting her in her nursing home, where she told a story about a man hit in the head by lightning. I laughed myself sick. She was a kind, generous woman--had nearly a dozen children--her husband died when the oldest of those children was a teenager--dealt with the Depression (they lost their farm)--and somehow managed to raise an amazing group of kids, one of whom, of course, was my dad.

Both my Osborn grandparents died in a retirement community in Columbia, Missouri--Grandpa on September 30, 1965 (he was 68), Grandma in 1978 (at age 81). I knew them both very well--we were living with them when I was born (1944)--Dad was overseas with the U. S. Army--and for most of my childhood years in Enid, Oklahoma, we never lived more than a couple of blocks away from them. I attended both funerals.

My father died in a nursing home in November 1999 (he was 86); my mother died in a nursing home in March 2018 (she was 98),. They were both fantastic people--the older I've grown, the more I've come to appreciate them--what they did for their three sons--how they lived their lives.

My great teaching colleague and dear friend, Andy Kmetz, died in a nursing home in Stow, Ohio, on July 19, 2018 (he was 87). Joyce and I visited him the night before he died: He was lucid and loving--still the "Kmetz" I'd known for about fifty years.

Here's the point--if it's not already stunningly obvious: I loved all of those people. I saw them not as "old people" but as people--people who'd had enormous influence on me and on many others--people who'd loved being alive, right to their final seconds--people whose deaths were not a convenience but a great rip in the fabric of many, many others' lives.

I'm now 75 years old--and am probably not all that distant from a nursing home myself. I have so much to live for--my wife, our son and his wife, our two wonderful grandsons, the books I want to read, the writing I want to do, the ...

You know.

And so I find heartless and callous--and, okay, even ignorant--the cruel memes I've seen about letting our elders catch the next train. As Dickens once wrote, we're all "fellow passengers to the grave"--and most of the time we pretend we don't know it.*

And today, I fear, such pretending is rampant.


*In the early pages of the story Bob Cratchit, talking with Scrooge, says this:

But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

Weight in the Time of COVID-19

I just baked a batch of blueberry-almond scones--the smell has been pervading and permeating the house--I could eat them all--all eight of them--right now (burning my mouth in the process--they're just out of the oven), but I will ... restrain myself.

(I hope.)

I've been trying to keep my waistline under control since this lockdown commenced. The Dyer men apparently share a gene (I should say GENE) that allows fat to accumulate with impressive speed in very visible places.

My dad and his ten brothers (or so--I lost count) all had, uh, weight problems. My brothers and I also do battle, more or less.

Since my marriage in 1969, my own weight has fluctuated from nearly 200 to 150 lbs. My waist size on my jeans has been as high as 36, as low as 30. Right now I'm 33 and holding pretty well. Oh, and unlike the pic above, I don't weigh myself anymore; instead, I go by the hole in the belt I'm using. It's in a good place right now. No movement since mid-March when we started staying at home.

The weight goes on so easily, comes off only with great difficulty--especially these days: I'm on an anti-cancer med (Trelstar) that has a number of odious side effects--one of which is the shocking ease with which I can add pounds. As if I needed more of that!

Since we're pretty much housebound now (both of us are in vulnerable categories, so we are taking no chances--especially when so many out there are ignoring safety protocols), and that means less exercise.

I used to go to the local health club 5-6 times/week, each time burning about 500 calories (exercise bike, walking laps, rowing machine, hand weights), but I somehow lost my stability--my balance--and am not safe doing such things any longer (I fell out there a few times). I also used to walk back and forth to Open Door Coffee Company twice a day--a total of about a mile (with a heavy backpack). But I haven't been there in a couple of months--though I am eagerly anticipating the day when I feel it's safe for me to do so.

So ... Joyce and I were walking about a mile a day--but we encountered too many careless people while doing so. Now, we both ride the Airdyne exercise bike we've had in the house for a number of years. I ride only ten minutes (I don't want to break a full sweat--have to change clothes, shower, etc.) and burn about 110 calories in the process. Not a lot. But better than nothing.

Joyce has no problem with weight--and never has. I've envied (but never resented) that. Each of us has genetic gifts--and curses. Right?

I am eating very little these days. Here's a very typical day (I am nothing if not a Creature of Habit):

BREAKFAST: a cup of black coffee, a homemade scone (nonfat, no cholesterol).

LUNCH: a piece of toasted sourdough bread--light swab of organic jam; a cup of lowfat yogurt with  some fresh blueberries and strawberries mixed in; 8 oz of pomegranate juice (a cancer-fighter)

SUPPER: some modest amount of protein (fish, chicken, or sliced turkey); a veggie; some potato/rice/pasta (no butter or sour cream or other Evils on top); a piece of sourdough bread (plain)

And that's it.

Well ... almost. Joyce and I also have a sugar-free Popsicle as we're streaming some shows before Lights Out--30 calories, total, for me. (Except when I eat another stick--then it's 45.)

So far ... I'm Holding the Fort--and the Fort has not grown. Though it very much wants to! I would love to dive into a jar of crunchy peanut butter, bake something gorgeous and sugary and buttery, eat a half-pint of ice cream, bake and eat a Pie of Fat, etc.

But I don't dare ...

And I'm definitely avoiding those scones now cooling in the kitchen.

When Ideas Dovetail

Some ideas have been folding together in my head these days. Dovetailing. Let me see if I can explain ...

This morning, reading Richard Ford's latest, a collection of stories called Sorry for Your Trouble (2020), I came across this reference to novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-82):

He'd read that line of Trollope's many times over .... "There is an unhappiness so great that the very fear of it is an alloy to happiness" (87--in Ford's story "The Run of Yourself).

I think he's referring to the definition of alloy that means, says Merriam-Webster, an admixture that lessens value or detracts from quality.

But as I just checked my copy of the Autography, it seems more likely that the fear of unhappiness can strengthen happiness.*

I didn't recognize the source of that Trollope quotation--and Ford does not provide it. Enter Google, which found it in a second: It's from Chapter 4 of Trollope's Autobiography (which I've read, by the way), published posthumously in 1883.

I smiled at the Trollope allusion because just yesterday, on Facebook, I'd shared a "Memory" from eight years ago: our table-top showing all forty-seven of Trollope's novels, which I'd read over a ten-year period (1997-2007).

Reading those books has been one of the great adventures of my life--most of it done in the evening, in bed, a chapter a night.

And all of this Trollope stuff dovetailed with a thought I've been having about COVID-19. We know that many of those who have died have been the elderly--many of them in nursing homes or other facilities. And circulating out there have been some ideas--implicit and explicit--that, you know, old people die anyway--so why not open up the country?

I think I qualify now for membership in "old people," so I find this idea a bit more repellent than I would have in, oh, my thirties.

Anyway, this led me to another Trollope-connected thought. One of his last novels was The Fixed Period (1882), a short one involving a group of immigrants who arrive in a place called "Brittanula," near New Zealand, where they endeavor to set up an ideal sort of society. They all agree that there should be a "fixed period" to life--that getting old is uncomfortable, is inconvenient for the younger. So, they decide that 67 is a life long enough.

When you reach that exalted age (eight years ago for me!), you enter a facility where they prepare you for a painless death.

All goes well in Brittanula...

Until, of course, the first settlers begin to approach the "fixed period." Then, amazingly, it doesn't seem to them like such a great idea, you know?

Trollope knew us--knew us very well. And if he were living now, I'm sure he would be recommending his book to those who seem prepared to sacrifice their elders for their own convenience, those who don't appear to comprehend that they will one day be older and will cling to life like the rest of us.

Not that too many of our current cruel folks could comprehend ... Besides, the noise overhead is distracting: A dove is winging away.

Link to the novel online.

*With thanks for this thought from old high-school friend Ralph Green, who responded to this post.

Sunday Sundries, 277

1: HBsOTW: Those who are still being careful--practicing social distancing and wearing masks in places where other people are. I was amazed yesterday at the local grocery store (we were waiting in our car for our pick-up delivery) to see swarms of people who must believe the virus is gone and/or they are immune and/or immortal--and who don't really care if they sicken others.

2. I finished two books this week.

     - The first was Little Women (1868-69), a novel I've heard about all my life but, until now, have never read. I decided to after we saw the 2019 film (which we both really liked), and so I pulled off the shelf an old paperback (see below) that Joyce had read previously, and I got to enjoy not only Alcott's story but seeing Joyce's comments in the margins, seeing what she'd underlined. I loved it--very moving.

I read portions of this book at night (in bed) over a few months (hey, it ain't short!), and I really had a good time--and was surprised at how closely the recent film followed the arc of the book.

I guess, at its core, it's a book about hopes and dreams--and about making graceful adjustments when it's clear that those dreams are not going to come true. In other words, it's about us. All of us, throughout our lives, must learn to accept who and what we are--and what we're capable of (and not). It's not usually very easy, is it? (It wasn't for me.)

Yes, there is some goo in the book (the Marches are a magical family beyond belief in some very human ways), but for the most part it is what I've said, I think--a powerful story about dreams--and adjustments--and acceptance. And, as in every truly human story, we see the presence--and the effects--of love, of death, of grief, of loss, of disappointment, of ...

     - The second book I finished was the final Ian McEwan novel I'd never read--The Children Act (2014). The title comes from an act of Parliament in 1989. McEwan focuses on a woman judge--a high-ranking, respected judge--who deals with family court issues.

She has problems of her own--most prominently, a husband frustrated by her loss of interest in intimacy and sex. He decides to do something about it.

But the legal case that dominates the novel concerns a 17-year-old boy/man, who is dying of leukemia and whose family refuses to permit a potentially life-saving blood transfusion: They are Jehovah's Witnesses and believe such procedures are abhorred by God. The young man himself is very devout--and very bright--and would rather die than pollute his body.

Fiona (the judge) goes to visit Adam (the young man) in the hospital before issuing her decision in the case.

And from then on, the plot takes some surprising twists.

My heart went pitter-patter, by the way, when she and the young man talk about--and sing--"Down by the Salley Gardens," the poem/song by W. B. Yeats (one that I have memorized). (Link to the poem.)

I did a swift Facebook post about the book last week, and our friend Chris messaged me to let me know there was a very fine 2017 film based on the book (directed by Richard Eyre, screenplay by McEwan himself)--and starring Emma Thompson (judge) and Stanley Tucci (husband).

We streamed (via Amazon Prime) the first half of it last night--and Chris was right (as usual): a powerful film--very close to the novel. (Link to film trailer.)

3. Books on my nightstand right now (I read a bit in each pretty much every night before Streaming Time arrives):

• Wilkie Collins: "I Say No" (1882)
• Hilary Mantel: The Mirror and the Light (2020)--3rd volume in her award-winning series about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII
• Amy Rose Capetta & Cori McCarthy (the latter attended the Aurora Schools, where I taught for 30 years--did get to have Cori ... sigh): The Sword in the Stars (2020)--the 2nd in their YA series about King Arthur, Merlin, et al., mixed with the authors' love of Star Wars, Tolkien, and others
• Stacey O'Brien: Wesley the Owl (2008)
• Val McDermid: Beneath the Bleeding (2007)--part of her Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series--via Kindle
• Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica (1929--via Kindle)
• Ken Bruen: Taming the Alien (2000)--via Kindle

4. My hair and beard are getting ridiculous. I would post a pic--but I don't wish to frighten anyone to death. I look like some deranged old guy who wandered out of the woods after having been lost for twenty years: think: Rip Van Winkle.

5. Something I learned in Wesley the Owl (see list above): barn owls don't have great eyesight--but great hearing. They dine almost exclusively on mice, and at night they can hear a mouse's heartbeat.

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

     - from The Oxford English Dictionary--not a phrase I've encountered very much lately--though I long ago learned it (and don't remember how/why)

Peck's bad boy, n. (and adj.)

An unruly or mischievous child; (hence) a man who does not conform to expected or approved standards of conduct. (Also attributive or as adj.)

Etymology: < Peck's bad boy, the name of a mischievous fictional character created by George Wilbur Peck (1840–1916) for a serial in his newspaper Peck's Sun (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), which was first published in book form in 1883.

U.S. slang.

1883   Peck's Sun 14 July 1/6   The [cuff] buttons are..gold..and on the back they are engraved ‘Geo. W. Peck, Milwaukee, from his newsboy friends of Chicago’, and on top of the Russia leather case are the words, ‘From Peck's Bad Boys’.

1933   E. O'Neill Ah, Wilderness! i. 19   Sid Davis..is..short and fat, bald-headed, with the Puckish face of a Peck's Bad Boy who has never grown up.

1970   Time 22 June 78/2   The book is an earnest effort by Della Femina to buttress his reputation as the Peck's Bad Boy of Advertising.

2003   N.Y. Post (Nexis) 6 May 54   He visibly delights in a ‘Peck's Bad Boy’ image.

English 101: Summer 1962

my textbook that summer

In the summer of 1962, my parents thought it would be a good idea if I got kind of a "head start" on Hiram College. I had just graduated from Hiram High School, and they urged (forced?) me to enroll in English 101, Freshman English, that summer.

Why not? I didn't have a job--didn't want a job.

I was living at home--as I would throughout my freshman year--and every day walked up Hiram's north hill to class--a half a mile?

The first day the room was fairly full in that classroom in old Hinsdale Hall (razed long ago by fools). I already knew the teacher: We lived in Hiram; my dad was head of the Division of Education; my older brother (by three years) had been in this prof's class, too. Dr. Charles F. McKinley, a small, dapper man with a resonant voice, a wee mustache, an ironic sense of humor, a deep affection for literature.

The class was formal. I was still seventeen years old (would not turn eighteen until November), and so it was very odd to me when Dr. McKinley called all of us "Mr." or "Miss." Mr. Dyer was my dad!

We read stories and poems in Interpreting Literature--and, sadly for me, Macbeth, which I had not been able to manage in high school (what is it with this Shakespeare?!?), and now here it was again--Thanes and ghosts and the murder of a child and witches and words I didn't understand--lots of words I didn't understand.

We wrote some essays. The subject of the only one I remember was this: "The Artist's Concern for Human Values."

I had no idea what that meant--but asked my mom (an English teacher at nearby James A. Garfield High School in Garrettsville). She explained it in words I could understand (i.e., one-syllable words), and I wrote the thing but had no idea what I was writing about.

But what I want to talk briefly about here is one poem we read in that book--a short one by Emily Dickinson--"A Bird Came Down the Walk." Here's the whole thing the way it appears on p. 321 in that book (not the way Miss Emily had originally capitalized and punctuated, by the way):

A bird came down the walk:

He did not know I saw:

He bit an angle worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a dew

From a convenient grass,

And then hopped sidewise to the wall

To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes,

That hurried all abroad,--

They looked like frightened beads, I thought,

He stirred his velvet head.

Like one in danger, cautious,

I offered him a crumb,

And he unrolled his feathers,

And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or butterflies, off banks of noon,

Leap, plashless, as they swim.

I couldn't believe that Dr. McKinley could spend a half an hour on this little poem, which, in some ways, I saw as amazingly simple: a bird's walking around, gets startled, flies off.

I didn't get the unrolling of feathers and rowing; and plashless--could that even be a real word? (It is.) Too silver for a seam? What ...?!?

I got a B in that class (probably something of a gift--though I learned later that Dr. McKinley did not give a lot of A's). And I would later take a few other courses from him--courses which I loved--courses in which, invariably, I got a B.

(I learned partway through the course, by the way, that quite a few of my classmates were repeating English 101!)

Even later, we became friends. He lived in Hudson (he died in his 90s), and we saw him now and then--especially at the library. Went to dinner with him. Went to his home, where, on the wall, he had a signed note from Yeats that he'd acquired in Ireland.

And that poem has stayed with me. I memorized it some years ago and mumble it several mornings a week so that I don't forget it.

And, oh, do I love those last six lines now. I see a butterfly, not on the bank of a stream, but of noon, leaping--making no splash (no water!)--and swimming off into the summer air.

Oh my.

And I cannot read that poem--cannot recite that poem--without seeing the eyes of Dr. McKinley on me, hearing his lovely voice ask me. "Well, Mr. Dyer, what do you see here?"

Then, I saw nothing. Now ... a magical moment in a classroom in 1962.