Sleepy Sands and Pink Vacations

Whilst gamboling through the leafy glades of Roy Blount, Jr.'s, "Alphabet Juice" a while back, I came upon an entry for "familese," which the author defines as the private language of kith and kin, those made-up words and odd expressions that have to be explained to newcomers. There's always a story attached.

Blount was not the first to mine this rich vein of language. Paul Dickson's "Family Words" (Marion Street Press, 2007) is a compendium of such, all contributed by honest-to-God families. To use one example, the book is a real giggler. (Technically, a "giggler" is an antonym of a poker face and comes about when a player is dealt a very good hand of cards. It is so called because two little girls being taught to play gin rummy couldn't keep the luck of the draw to themselves.)

Another family is the source of the No-thank-you helping, a.k.a. the obligatory five green peas or teaspoon of squash one must eat to qualify for dessert.

Coming as I do from a clan that enjoys a brisk game of cards, loves to eat, and loves to talk, I did not have to rummage too deeply through my pantry of familial phrases to find these:

Roast beast, which usage in our house predated "How The Grinch Stole Christmas," was a special meal. When watching the grocery budget, we made do with creamed chipped beast, sometimes accompanied with a side of grin bims. A company dinner might be Beef Strongenough, served with trees (broccoli) or Popeye (spinach), both named to hoodwink diners under the age of five.

Monday leftovers might Chicken a la Queen in deference to the Askew household's 3-to-1 gender ratio or pasquetti. If the girls didn't like the menu, they could always fix themselves a sangvich.

(Among my younger daughter's in-laws, said sangvich might well be a cheeser---the Kimmerle variant of grilled cheese---served with kepitch. By the way, when preparing cheesers, you must remember to pick up and switch, that is, flip 'em with a spatula.)

It's not surprising that so many family words relate to family meals---like the gofer seat, where the occupant has to go for things left in the kitchen. Nor is it astonishing that so much in-house code comes from close physical proximity. My husband liked to tell the story of his family's car trip to California in the days before interstate highways, when the roadside amenities were often marked simply EAT-BEER-GAS, leading Pete's father to remark that if you indulged in the first two, you'd have the third as a natural consequence.

Nonchalance in matters physical may be an Askew family trait. "Keep your seat, Pidge" is credited to Fred I. Askew, Pete's grandfather, who reportedly barged into a bathroom occupied by one of his daughters-in-law. (Given the aforementioned predominance of females at our house, Pete often had occasion to use it himself.) Some decades later, upon committing a faux pas at a family dinner, Stacey commented blandly, "Sorry for farting," and continued with her meal.

In my extended Massachusetts family, youngsters were customarily asked before setting out in the car, "Do you have to make a tinkle?" (My British-born college roommate called it "spending a penny.") The "tinkle" usage rang hollow, so to speak, when we summered in the Berkshires at a camp with no indoor plumbing... just overnight conveniences called thunder mugs.

The toilet euphemisms Chez Askew even extend to the cats' facilities, where cleaning the litter box is known as panning for gold.

We were not, I hasten to add, totally scatological. When I was growing up in Holyoke, it was common at family gatherings for little ones on their way to bed to be taken into the living room or wherever the grownups were gathered and told to give everyone a love. "Don't I get a love?" asks Auntie Mary. "Now you have to give me two."

The same youngster in the morning might be told she had sleepy sands in the corners of her eyes, where The Sandman had left his mark.

My sister Connie invented the term pink vacation when she was three years old and sometimes left for a night or so with one grandmother or the other. She had a pair of pink pajamas that she often packed for her trips, so in family lore a pink vacation came to mean a short, pleasant trip.

Once you know its origins, family shorthand really cuts through the verbiage. When Pete and I were first going together, I happened to remark on a Sunday drive that the ramshackle house coming up on our right was a real Monster Rally. It was a Victorian in dire need of repair that looked amazingly like the residence of Gomez and Morticia Addams which had been prominently featured on the cover of a cartoon collection by Charles Addams entitled---you guessed it---"Monster Rally."Ever after, it came to mean a big, rambling house of a certain vintage and state of decrepitude.

I hope this recital has stirred you to recall your own family language, and I hope you will share your words with me---and with Paul Dickson, who is soliciting contributions for Family Words Redux or Part II. You can either mail them to Dickson at P.O. Box 280, Garrett Park, MD 20896 or e-mail them to pauldicksonbooks.com.

In the meantime, I wish you many sleepy sands, lots of pink vacations, and your full share of gigglers.

You Can't Get There From Here...Without a Map

At a recent librarians' conference I happened to bring to the lunch table a copy of Geraldine Brooks's excellent novel, "The People of the Book," a fascinating tale that imagines the individuals who, over the centuries, preserved and protected the noted Sarajevo Haggadah.

It is, in its way, a detective story, although the "detective," an Australian expert in the conservation of old books and manuscripts, never learns what the clues mean.

As I might have expected of a book about a book and dedicated by the author "for the librarians," a few of my colleagues had already read and had high praise for it. One, flipping open the cover to the endpapers illustrated with a map showing the travels of the Haggadah, remarked, "Ooh, I just love a book with a map!"

Me too.

I suspect my penchant for maps of imaginary places began with Ernest H. Shepard's depictions of the worlds of Winnie the Pooh and Mr Toad. How much easier to envision the location of Pooh's house in relation to the Bee Tree, the Hundred Aker Wood, and Where the Wozzle Wasn't! How helpful to see Toad Hall and Badger's house in The Willows!

Later on, I pored over the map of The Shire in "The Hobbit" and the simple diagrams of English country villages that used to be standard frontispieces in the Pocket Book editions of Agatha Christie's detective novels. Was there a map of the Hispaniola's voyage in "Treasure Island?" There must have been, but I no longer have a copy. I think there was one of Robinson Crusoe's island but none I can recall of Lemuel Gulliver's travels.

The comment about books with maps stuck with me when I got home from the conference, and one night after I'd crawled into bed to finish the Brooks novel, I began to wonder about all the books in my book-lined bedroom: which of them contained maps? I crawled back out of bed, and with notebook at hand, did some random browsing.

Most of the histories, for obvious reasons, have one or more maps; a map is surely the easiest way to illustrate a battlefield, a voyage of discovery, or the extent of an empire, and a quick trip through the volumes on my shelves bore this out: David McCullough's "1776," Peter L. Bernstein's "Wedding of the Waters," Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower," Brian Hicks's "Ghost Ship," Thomas Cahill's Hinges of History series, Karen Armstrong's histories of religion.

Among the non-fiction titles, Claire Tomalin's definitive "Jane Austen: a life" comes with a delightfully illustrated map of Steventon and the houses of the Austens' Hampshire neighbors.

What I sought were fabricated guides to places peopled by fictitious characters, and the ones I found were surprising.

Thanks, apparently, to the detailed engineering and architectural records of the Roman Empire, novelists dealing with ancient Rome and surrounds---Robert Harris's "Imperium" and "Pompeii," the detective novels of Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor---are able to put the reader in the picture, literally. Likewise, the spy novels of Francine Mathews set in World War II Paris and Patrick O'Brian's swashbuckling "The Road to Samarkand" make use of factual topography.

Peter Robinson's "First Cut" provides a minimalist plan of the British coast, and Cathi Unsworth's compilation, "London Noir," shows, on a stylized map of the metropolis, where the bodies were found, if not buried. A map of Cold War Europe, necessary for tracking the path of the title character, illuminates the endpapers of "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova.

The biggest challenge to a novelist---and the most fun, it seems to me---is to make up a world that never was and use it as the setting, in some cases, the linchpin, of the story. C.S. Lewis did it with Narnia; J.K. Rowling did it with Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (Remember the Marauders' Map?) Ross Lockridge famously did so with "Raintree County," which, in his own words, "had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange."

It is good to know that the map, as literary device, lives on. James Anderson's retro mystery series set in pre-World War II England ("The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy" et seq.) always features a floor plan of Alderly, the country house of Lord and Lady Burford, identifying the rooms of the house guests. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Clue game board.

I almost missed the last map of my search because I did not expect to find it on the dust jacket, of all places, of Garrison Keillor's "Pontoon." Here at last is the topography of Lake Wobegon, complete with Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, the Sidetrack Tap, the Chatterbox Cafe, Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, the high school... and you know what? It looks pretty much the way I imagined it.

Back Without a Vengeance

The last weekend in June this year was a perfect storm of activity for me as a volunteer: Friends of the Library book sale and a two-day sale (in my side yard) of African jewelry and art for the benefit of a school for AIDS orphans in Kenya.


Both, I am happy to report, were very successful; combined sales of books and raffle tickets, plus memberships, brought in a record $9,600 for the Friends and the yard sale (despite off-and-on rains and high winds) earned nearly $1,000 for the school. In practical terms, this means the Friends will be able to buy the rolling bookcases requested by the children's librarian to make her space more flexible for story time. The school, Crossroads Springs Institute in Hamisi, will be able to keep putting food on the table for the children. (Thirty bucks feeds a child for a month; there are just over 200 pupils enrolled---you do the math.)


Now I can get back to what I consider summering---Monday and Wednesday aquacise classes at the Community Pool, Wednesday morning yoga, fiddling around in the garden, roughing out activities for my 10-year-old granddaughter's coming visit, making cushion covers for the furnishings on my newly enlarged back porch, reading every chance I get.


Before I do, however, I have to confess that both the sales were a blast, and for different reasons.


Along with a dedicated group of volunteers I spent many mornings in advance of the Friends of the Library sale in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church sorting, weeding, and arranging what everyone agreed was a record number of donated books, magazines, and audio-visual materials. (If I never see another book by Danielle Steel, John Grisham, Dean Koonts, or Patricia Cornwell again, it will be too soon.) A fair number of books (not the aforementioned) came from me, enough to cram every inch of space in my little Jetta with the back seat down, including the front passenger seat and the floor well in front of it.


I have a couple of empty book shelves to show for my largesse and this year, for once, I did not buy enough to fill them all again: a few newer mysteries, a few novels, a couple of David McCullough histories in fine (unread) condition, and stuff I wouldn't ordinarily buy but enjoy browsing, like "The Darwin Awards, I and II." Some titles I bought out of pity; I had read most of the stories of Frank O'Connor in earlier collections, but the Collected Stories were in very good condition, and I couldn't stand the thought of the esteemed Irish writer's work winding up in the Dumpster.


As the Designated Weeder, though, I took a perverse pleasure in consigning certain titles and authors to the recycle bin. If you didn't read Arthur Hailey's "Hotel" in the '70s or Mary Roberts Rinehart in the '40s, you are not likely to seek them out today. Early John O'Hara novels will find takers; Frank G. Slaughter, uh-uh.


I have mixed emotions about the Friends of the Libary members' pre-sale on Thursday night. It is dominated by the used book dealers who, for a measly ten dollars, can gain admission to cherry-pick our best selections. Most arrive in teams who actually run when the doors open, fanning out to designated sections, one to hardcover fiction, one to art books, and so on. They amass heaps and piles of books in corners of the room, then go through them at their leisure to decide which ones they'll buy. This year, a new wrinkle: most had camera cell phones and were checking prices of given titles on the Net.


I suppose I shouldn't care who buys the books; we'll get the same ridiculously low price from all comers. The dealers, however, I view with a jaundiced eye because even though they will fork over hundreds of dollars for their boxes upon boxes of books, they will realize profit many times their cost by selling on the Internet.


And, many of them are rude. They elbow actual, local Friends of the Library out of the way, leave their discards dumped wherever. Some, we suspect, steal the occasional specially priced
antique book.


I take much more delight in the extra/ordinary folks whose eyes gleam with pleasure at the sight of so many books. The kids are a particular hoot, falling to their knees to examine the low shelves in the children's section, stacking up their choices, crowing at their finds, and sometimes having to be dragged away by their parents. Who says reading is a dying pastime?


For a mere twelve dollars browsers get all the books they can cram into a large brown grocery bag, and many fill several bags, delighted with their bargains and equally delighted that they're doing something for our town's excellent library. That's my kind of fun!


Which I had more of, on the next two days.

Thanks to me and my big mouth, which suggested to my fellow board members for Crossroads Springs that we should take advantage of the influx of tourists to our town during the annual arts and crafts show by selling African jewelry. The headquarters for the show, which is around the corner from my house, however, is strictly commercial, and the show's organizers don't care to have not-for-profit groups selling goods to compete with their wares. I had even suggested seeing whether we could join the Friends of the Library at the church by selling jewelry in the hallway outside the book sale, but it was too late to get permission from the board of elders. That established, how could I say No when someone suggested my side yard as a venue? We would get all that foot traffic of people walking from their cars to the crafts show, and there would be no cost involved.

Two great-hearted women, Carol and Deb, showed up at 7 a.m. Saturday with a tent, folding tables, display materials, and merchandise. They even brought their own coffee. We were already getting browsers before our 10 a.m. opening and made our first sale at 9:30. Over the two days we were visited by old friends, made a few new ones, planted a few seeds of interest about the school which will be to our benefit when we kick off a building fund campaign in September and conduct our annual Art for Africa sale and auction in November. Between customers I also got to know more about Carol and Deb.

We exchanged e-mail addresses with one gentleman, a professor at SUNY Brockport, who volunteered information about a student African drumming and dance company that might be willing to entertain at our events. How cool will THAT be?

My main contributions to all this fun were yard space, a convenient bathroom, string, duct tape, and a bottle of wine at day's end. The rewards were many times what I gave. But isn't that lavishness what summer is all about?

Steel Lilacs

Several years ago during my madcap middle age, I edited the local weekly newspaper and in lieu of a munificent salary was given space to write an editorial column that was in many ways like this blog. That's to say, I could choose my topics and point of view; the editorial discretion exercised was mine alone. The name of the column was "I Was Just Thinking...," and usually what I wrote was about that random.

A year ago today (June 16), one of the short pieces published in the column was the following, and it's worth revisiting:

I am a charter member of a group whose meetings will never appear in The Digest [the newspaper's community events calendar]. We have no bylaws, no officers, no stated purposes.

In organization we are as amorphous as a floating crap game.

One of our number, in jest (I think), dubbed us the Worthwhile Women, probably because what we do individually is more worthwhile than anything we could do collectively.

What we do do is get together at haphazard intervals for lunch and talk, which is often enlightening, frequently absorbing, always hilarious. Essentially, we are like-minded people, who also like each other, keeping in touch.

Some of us work full time, some part time, some keep the home fires burning, one is a college student. We are all, in one way or another, involved. "Committed" sounds a trifle grim, but I guess we're that, too.

The last time we got together, one of the group came late to our lunch table at the far end of the restaurant. She excused her tardiness this way: "I asked the waitress up front if there was a group of ladies---a term I never use---having lunch here, and she said No."

Where our tardy colleague went wrong was in neglecting to ask, "Is there a bunch of women here whooping, hooting, and having a high old time?" The waitress could have pointed us out in no time.

I was reminded of that piece when, two weeks ago, I met the Worthwhiles for lunch, and our waitress seated us on the second floor of the restaurant in a far corner.

There's been a lot of water under our respective bridges in the 30-plus years since the lunch of which I wrote: one of our founding members died of lung cancer some 20 years ago; another is, as I write, gravely ill; three of us are widows; two of us are divorced and living with new partners; one is married. Some of us have divorced children; one child is transgendered. Almost all of us are grandmothers.

Since the time I wrote that "Some keep the home fires burning," all of us have been in the work force and now most of us have retired from it.

This is not to say that we have any more leisure for bridge games (which most of us never played anyway) or protracted lunches than we used to. Just getting six of us together at the same time and in the same place still takes a little doing and a lot of calendar juggling.

Louise takes frequent care of her 90-plus-year-old mother, as well as of an ageing friend who suffers from Alzheimer's. She walks everywhere in the village and is one of the few people I know who walks to the gym to do her daily workout. Her youngest is getting married next month.

Dorothy, a docent at one of the local museums, is a leading light of the historical society and served on the board of the adult daycare center. Mother of six and grandmother of 13, she and her husband take a six-week spring journey to the homes of their various offspring, most of them scattered along the Eastern Seaboard.

Nan, retired as a special-education teacher, still teaches English as a Second Language evenings and often pulls overnight duty at an inner-city food pantry. She is also the principal caregiver for her two-year-old granddaughter. Her sport of choice is kayaking in the Adirondacks.

Judy, one of our younger members, is a college library director and has no immediate plans to retire. She was, as we sometime Catholics used to say, a late vocation to librarianship and is having too much fun with it to quit. She is---surprise! surprise!---the Worthwhiles' archivist.

Kathy, our free spirit, is a certified yoga instructor and a published poet. Indeed, when we had lunch recently, ostensibly to celebrate our collective birthdays, she presented each of us with a copy of "InnerSessions," a collection of her verse and that of two other woman poets published by Aventine Press.

Then, there's Yours Truly, still writing (and still crazy) after all these years. I have a couple of pet community service projects, including fundraising for an AIDS orphanage in Kenya and for the local public library; take a weekly yoga class; garden when I can; read every chance I get. Sometimes, when I find myself hopelessly enmeshed in yet another home-improvement project, I fear that I am not the boss of me.

Yet, despite the life changes, we are all, to paraphrase The Eagles, still the same old girls we used to be, whooping and hooting included, still Worthwhile Women.

There is, in fact, an alternate history to the origin of the group's name. When we first started getting together on a more-or-less regular basis, what, if anything, we should call ourselves became a frequent topic of lunch-table banter. At length, Jeanne (now deceased) proposed Worthwhile Women because, she said, her husband had often declared that we were the only women he knew in the village who were worth the powder to blow themselves to Hell.

We still are. And the price of powder has gone up.

Gardening Ain't For Sissies---Or Pessimists Either

"The damage," said the garden center clerk, "is $158.14."

I think she expected me to flinch. Instead, I whipped out my bank card, inwardly congratulating myself that my cartful of impatiens, lobelia, vinca, ground-cover ivy, and assorted bulbs hadn't set me back another fifty bucks or so.

But then, I'm being conservative this year; construction of an expanded back porch enclosed with lattice to encourage morning glory and clematis vines, and a new front entry that will feature flower boxes on the facade and railings means I must hold my lust to wallow in the dirt in check. At some point, I will be bringing a landscaper into the project, so planting annuals is akin to whipping up the icing before you assemble the ingredients for the cake.

I have, however, permitted myself this splurge, arguing to my inner grownup that I can at least fill the flower boxes and have them ready to be mounted in their brackets. What harm will it do to have a hanging basket beside the front door until the builder actually breaks ground for the piers? (He just started at the back on Saturday.)

As I reflected earlier this spring while pruning rose bushes and tidying up last year's debris in the perennial beds, flower gardening is perhaps the most hopeful of occupations, the triumph of optimism over experience. Maybe this year the young lilac that has never produced anything but foliage will blossom. Maybe this year I'll crack the code of growing ornamental grasses. Maybe this year I'll harvest more of my John F. Kennedy roses than the Japanese beetles do. And, as my newest garden ornament depicts, maybe this year pigs will fly.

For those of us who toil in the soil, moreover, the dark clouds not only have silver linings, our plants needed a good soaking anyway. Speaking of rain, when a wild winter wind removed and absconded with the lid to the 40-gallon bin in which I store my peat moss, I discovered that the "peat tea" brewed in the open bin makes a nice tonic for newly planted containers. When I got too close to a peony with the Weed-Eater, I concluded that it really needed pruning and being reduced in area by a third would doubtless make it flower all the better next year. (Ah, the magic phrase "next year!" I wonder how many gardeners are closet Chicago Cubs fans.) My incredibly filthy hands and fingernails are an opportunity to try that lovely new lavender soap; my wicked thirst makes the sun-brewed tea positively ambrosial.

Like the sundial which records only the sunny hours, we gardeners are indefatigably cheerful and sociable creatures, never averse to leaning on our rakes to chat awhile. This conviviality begins in the nursery and garden center, where it is perfectly appropriate to survey the contents of the carts ahead and behind in the checkout line, and to inquire of the purchasers about growing conditions and what luck they've had with that species. Once home and out in the front patch, digging and delving are perfect opportunities to catch up on local affairs with the neighbors, garner the occasional compliment from passing strangers, swap pruning tips with the mail carrier and the Pennysaver deliveryman, remark on the birds, and converse with the cat, who is always keen to chase away the killer butterflies. (He is not so lethal with Japanese beetles or aphids, sadly.)

These distractions stem in part from a delightful malady known as Gardeners' Attention Deficit Disorder (GADD), which affliction manifests itself in the urgent need to fetch for a different implement because, gosh, I didn't realize that branch needed to be lopped or to unreel the hose because, golly, the plants in that container are all but gasping for a drink. Sometimes I stop dead in my tracks to ponder how well the vinca is spreading or to wonder where that purple coneflower came from. Look at the way the violets cover that patch---how did I get so lucky?

Lawn care, by the way, is not gardening because I can neither meander behind a mower nor carry on a conversation. Raking, mowing, picking up twigs---I just want to get it done so I can play in the dirt. Which is where I'm going now, probably to hunt for four-leaf clovers

Flag-Waving and Flag-Waiving

A week ago, on the official observance of Memorial Day, I crept early out the front door to hang my American flag. I knew if I didn't do it then, the day might pass without this gesture, the very least I could do to mark its meaning.

I assumed I was simply the first homeowner on the block to show my colors, but when I went out to bring in the flag before dark---proper flag etiquette, I was taught---I was startled to note that I was apparently the only homeowner on the block to bother. Not even the Republican town com-
mitteeman two doors down, who rarely misses the opportunity to plant political candidates' signs all over his front lawn, had put out a flag. The couple across the street, who used to hang a humongous American flag from the second-floor balcony over their front door, did not hang one of any size this year. They are, like me, vehemently opposed to the war in Iraq, and only their Tibetan peace banner waved from their porch.

As I carefully rolled up the Stars and Stripes to store in the corner of the front-hall closet until the Fourth of July (I never remember Flag Day until June 15th), I wondered whether flying the flag on national holidays has become too politicized or possibly too banal. Am I becoming a knee-jerk patriot---a type of creature I detest---because I still do it?

I pondered whether my neighbors were simply more judicious than I in their choice of ways to observe the occasion; might I even see a profusion of flags on May 30th, the "official" Memorial Day? Well, no, I didn't. I didn't put mine out last Friday myself; I forgot.

To be sure, "flag-waving" has become a synonym for the type of patriotism that Samuel Johnson defined as "the last resort of a scoundrel" and that Ambrose Bierce maintained was such a jingoist's first resort. We've seen more than enough of that in the right-wing blogosphere's denunication of Barack Obama for not always wearing a flag lapel pin. During the Vietnam war, when anti-war protesters burned the flag and mistreated it in every way they could think of to symbolize their frustration with the government, legislators of conservative stripe attempted to make such "desecration" a federal crime punishable by a prison term.

The real desecration comes at the hands of those whose causes are in direct contravention of the ideals the Stars and Stripes stands for, yet who wrap themselves in its folds. It is easy enough to find photographs of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen marching in public with an American flag at the head of their column or of German-American Bund meetings where an American flag and a Nazi swastika flank the speaker's podium. The book jacket photo above, which is the subject of the book itself, was taken during America's Bicentennial Year, 1976, in Boston, the nation's self-described "Cradle of Liberty." The controversy was over busing to achieve racial balance in the public schools, where all students were presumably expected to pledge allegiance to the same flag. How's that for star-spangled irony?

Of Sam Johnson's often-quoted definition of patriotism, his biographer, James Boswell, felt obliged to explain, "...Let it be considered that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."

"A real and generous love of our country..." That would be any of us, all of us, and reason enough to fly our colors for all to see. Naturally, my reasons for loving the United States of America and taking pride in her with a flourish of Old Glory may not be the same as yours---or my neighbors'---so some days I will put out my flag and some days not. For instance, I am sure I baffled the entire block the day Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. If I'd thought of it last fall, I'd have flown the flag when the Red Sox won the World Series...again.

Why not unfurl the flag for family birthdays---or Mark Twain's? Election Day, of course---and Inauguration Day, if your candidate wins. A couple I know hang the flag on the mailbox of their summer retreat to show, like the Queen of England, that they're in residence.

Pick your own special reason, run the Red, White, and Blue up the flagpole, and I'll be happy to salute it! This is, after all, the society of which Thoreau wrote, "Any man [person] more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one," and his birthday...well, I'll just have to look that up!

Speak For Yourself, John!

According to several news outlets, Senator McCain has released his medical records, apparently demonstrating his physical readiness to take on the run for the Oval Office and presumably laying to rest any speculation that he may be too old for the job. As both The New York Times and NPR pointed out, McCain, at 71, if elected, would be the oldest president in U.S. history to begin a first term.

Acutely aware of the concerns about their guy's age, the McCain camp recently decided to show that the candidate is not some sour old geezer by having him appear on "Saturday Night Live" and poke fun at his advanced years by declaring himself to be "older than dirt."

As someone who just completed her 70th year and is now officially a septuagenarian, I'd like to know what that makes me. Am I now compelled to compare myself to the soil in my garden---a good bit of which predates me by quite a lot?

Granted, McCain was attempting to score points with the SNL audience, many of whom are in that coveted demographic which has so far favored Barack Obama. I can't imagine him making a similar crack in front of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. You know---his base?

Of course, the word got out, as surely his supporters must have known it would, so I can't help wondering how other older Americans feel about having one of their own generation hoke it up for the sake of a few unlikely votes. How about a little decorum, a modicum of dignity?

Don't get me wrong: I am not one of those people of a certain age who start calling themselves "70 years young;" neither am I of the Gloria Steinem persuasion that "70 is the new 50"---unless, of course, you're having industrial-strength plastic surgery. I leave my haleness, heartiness, and vigor to the eye of the beholder. I have no wish, however, to be lumped in with a candidate who is not only old in years but faltering in ideas and imagination.

What disturbs me about McCain's old-fart schtick is that he appears to think that by making jokes about his chronological age, voters will overlook the artheroscelosis of his politics, particularly his devotion to the tried-and-failed policies of the past seven years.

Not me---I may indeed be older than dirt, but I refuse to stick in the mud!