My Weekly Screeder

I Can't Watch! It's Just Too Painful!

2011-05-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

While at lunch with Kathy and Keith today, the talk turned to what movies we'd seen lately and whether they'd been worth our time. I tend to give credence to their recommendations because Keith is an accomplished actor and Kathy is a sprite with a delicious sense of whimsy. (They're married to each other, which works out nicely.)

Kathy suggested that if I hadn't seen it, I'd be pleasantly surprised by "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?", a film I've always ignored because the notion of the gorgeous George Clooney as a hillbilly is ludicrous on its face. But I trust the source of the kudos, so I am inclined to give it a go, especially since the local library has a copy and it will cost me nothing to borrow.

Some of those freebies, however, can stay shelved until Vince Vaughn wins an Oscar, for all I care. There is pulp fiction and there is pulp film, and I have no use for either medium.

In case of any confusion, what follows is my personal Bucket List of movies that should have been dropped in the bucket moments after going to DVD:

Any film featuring Lindsay Lohan, Aston Kutcher, Adam Sandler, Nicolas Cage, Matthew McConaughey, Seth Rogen, or any of the three twits in "The Darjeeling Express." (Oh, wait. Didn't Seth Rogen portray two of them?)

Any film starring Meg Ryan, Jack Nicholson, Reese Witherspoon, Molly Ringwald, Billy Bob Thornton, and/or Ben Stiller. Speaking of which, it's time to give Robert DeNiro his Lifetime Achievement Award and get him off the podium if he commits one more episode of the Fockers. Ditto Dustin Hoffman.

Any self-described romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comedic and that headlines one of those interchangeable blondes. I can't tell Kate Hudson from Amanda Seyfried, and it doesn't matter a whit.

Movie versions of long-running TV series, including, but not limited to, "Hannah Montana," "High School Musical," "Sabrina the Teenaged Witch," "Fame," "South Park," and "The Simpsons." If Marge, Homer, and family can make it to the big screen, can "Glee" and "The Office" be far behind? (I don't count the Muppet movies in this prohibition; I still love them.)

Any of the high-testosterone flicks our library was obliged (before RFID tagging)to keep behind the circ desk because they tended to go walk-about with 13- to 15-year-old patrons. High-speed car chases, megaton explosions, bloody gun battles, and extreme potty mouth do not a stimulating, cerebral drama make.

National Lampoon's Anything.

Tyler Perry's Anything.

"Scary Movie 1, 2, OR 3."

"Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz."

Remakes of classic films---"The Women," "The Philadelphia Story," "The Out-of- Towners," "Cheaper by the Dozen." I did indeed appreciate the HBO miniseries, "Mildred Pierce," but the Joan Crawford original on TCM can still reel me in.

Despite the rigid criteria, I am left with more options for home entertainment than one might imagine, not counting animated features, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and all those television series now available on DVD. (The library's CSI collection alone could keep me housebound for months, as could all those episodes of "House" and three seasons of "The Tudors.")

Know what? I'd still rather read a book.

Absolutely Positively Non-Required Reading

2011-04-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

For more decades than I care to count or even to estimate, I have carried around a fat little notebook listing authors and titles I plan to read as a handy reference for off-chance visits to secondhand bookstores and unfamiliar library branches. I know I am not alone in this; most avid readers, like avid birders, keep a lifetime list and are always on the prowl for a specimen they have yet to find. During our Friends of the Library push to tag and digitally encode the collection of our very familiar local branch, though, I began to keep a very different kind of list---authors and titles I have no intention of reading, ever.

Since I believe that life is too short to finish a book that hasn't engaged me by the end of Chapter 3, it's logical to conclude that it will be shorter still unless I cut to the chase in pursuit of my A-List reads. Whilst compiling this list of Don't-Bothers and Please-Spare-Mes, I fantasized about borrowing a leaf from Stacy London and opining What Not to Read, but as both a former library staffer and continuing devotee of the American Library Association's Freedom to Read campaign, I can't be that doctrinaire. All I can do is set forth my personal criteria and let the Nora Roberts paper-backs fall where they may---into the recycle bin, preferably.

So, do not expect to find on my bookshelves nor on my bedside table the following:

Donna Andrews, Susan Wittig Albert, Hannah Alexander, David Baldacci, William Bernhardt, Steve Berry, M.C. Beaton, Maeve Binchy, Rhys Bowen, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Dale Brown, Dan Brown AND Sandra Brown; Meg Cabot, Stella Cameron, Robyn Carr, Diane Chamberlain, Sandra Chastain, Jennifer Chiaverini, Lee Child, Mary Jane Clark, Jane K. Cleland, Blaize Clements, Robin Cook, Stephanie Coonts, Patricia Cornwell, Catherine Coulter, Michael Crichton, Jennifer Cruise.

Also, Janet Dailey, Barbara Delinsky, Nelson DeMille, Jude Devereaux, Janet Evanovich---I wearied of Stephanie Plum long before "Jersey Shores" made her look like Garden State intelligentsia---Richard Paul Evans, Linda Fairstein, Diana Gabaldon, Lisa Gardner, Dorothy Garlock, Julie Garwood, Judith Gould, Heather Graham, Andrew Greeley, Tim Green, Linda Greenlaw, W.E.B. Griffin, James W. Hall, Jack Higgins, Tami Hoag, Kay Hooper, Linda Howard, Greg Iles, Iris Johansen, Karen Kingsbury, John Lescroart, Elizabeth Lowell.

And, Sharyn McCrumb, Judith McNaught, Margaret Maron, Judith Michael, Fern Michaels (!), Linda Lael Miller, Tamar Myers, Tami O'Dell, Robert B. Parker, Ridley Pearson, Carly Phillips, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Jodi Picoult, David Poyer, Douglas Preston (with or without Lincoln Childs), Amanda Quick (who is Jayne Anne Krentz), Kathy Reichs, Anne Rice, Luanne Rice (!!), Emilie Richards, Karen Robards, John Sandford, Lisa Scottoline, Anne Rivers Siddons, Nicholas Sparks, LaVyrle Spencer, Peter Straub, Robert K. Tanenbaum, Penny Vincenzi, Robert James Waller, Jennifer Weiner, Stephen White, Phyllis Whitney, Susan Wiggs, Stuart Woods (!!!).

Ah, but those are by no means all. I will read no book:

By any author whose works constitute their own mini section of Adult Fiction: James Patterson, Harlan Coben, Clive Cussler, Danielle Steel, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Jayne Anne Krentz, Debbie Macomber, Nora Roberts AND her mystery-writing avatar, J.D. Robb, Tess Gerritsen. Truly, every time Patterson does one of those commercials saying that unless I buy his new book, he may have to kill off Alex Cross, my eager response is, "You promise?"

By any author (see above) so prolific that there are three or more of their titles on the 7-day shelves at any given time.

By anyone described above the title as "New York Times Best-Selling Author." The NYT best-seller lists measure is sales; they have nothing to do with quality. If they did, would "The Shack" have stayed at No. 1 all those weeks? Or "Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend?" Or anything by Sarah Palin? Titles recommended by People, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Oprah, or the Today Show don't cut much ice with me either.

By any author earning kudos in the jacket blurbs from any of the authors named above.

Described as "chick-lit." Candace Bushnell, Sophie Kinsella, and Meg Cabot have a lot to answer for.

By the Family Businesses: Faye Kellermann and Jonathan Kellermann and all their heirs and assigns; James Lee Burke and Alafair Burke; Joan and Jackie Collins; Mary Higgins and Carol Higgins Clark. I am willing to cut Stephen and Tabitha King and their son Joe Hill a little slack; only Stephen is all that prolific, and I do like his short fiction. I'm also inclined to grant a waiver to Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini, a married couple who write separate but equally good private-eye series.

By celebrity authors whose apparent sole contribution to their co-authored works is their celebrity: Richard Belzer, Al Roker, Erin Brockovich.

Described as "Christian fiction," whether simpering romances or the apocalyptic gore of Tim LaHaye. Oh, and can we please leave the Amish alone?

Bearing a punnishly cute title, such as "Hell Hath No Curry" or "As the World Churns" (Tamar Myers) or whose amateur sleuth protagonists are cunningly named, like Diane Mott Davidson's Goldy Behr, owner of Goldilocks Catering. Indeed, inclusion of recipes, quilt designs, and knitting patterns has turned the once-respectable whodunnit into a division of Woman's Day.

In which the "detective" is an animal, particularly a cat. I love cats, I love detective novels, I am even fond of detectives who are fond of cats, such as John Harvey's Charlie Resnick, who shares digs with Dizzy, Miles, and Satch; and Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne, whose cat is Elvis. I am, however, decidedly unfond of the distressingly anthropomorphic tales of Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown, Shirley Rousseau Murphy, and Carole Nelson Douglas. Face it, cats are too smart to get mixed up in a murder investigation.

Produced with or without assistance by film, music, or sports stars. If I can resist reading tabloid headlines about "Brangelina" in the checkout line, whyever would I read a 300-page book? No matter how glowing their star power, I have zero interest in their past lives, loves, diets, health problems and/or addictions, household hints, decorating advice, or parenting tips. This goes double for the air-brushed memoirs of political candidates.

Featuring vampires, zombies, werewolves (though I grant Sirius Black a waiver), ghosts, ghouls, and/or Godzilla. I am even less enthralled with pastiches linking Jane Austen to vampires and sea monsters.

Compared to "The DaVinci Code."

Featuring cartoon characters. I don't care that publishers call them graphic novels and put them between hard covers---they're comic books.

Penned by and prominently featuring on the cover such snake-oil sales staff as Sylvia Browne, Dr. Phil, Deepak Chopra, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, various televangelists, each and every one of the Food Network chefs, Suze Orman, and Martha Stewart. I can live happily without Mitch Albom, too, even though his photo doesn't appear on the fronts of "Tuesdays With Morrie" and "Five People You Meet in Heaven."

Now that I've got all that off my chest, my shelves, and my to-read list, guess I'll go read something I really want to...where's my copy of "Treasure Island?"

Booked for Perdition

2011-03-09T08:21:00.000-08:00
The English settlers of my home turf---until the advent of clambakes on the beach, St. Patrick's Day, and the Boston Red Sox---weren't much fun. Given to uttering such grim admonishments as "Virtue is ye own reward" and "Idle hands are ye Devil's tools," they held an even dimmer view of folk who labored or enjoyed themselves on the Sabbath.

Last Sunday, those Bay State sourpusses must have been spinning in their cold, narrow graves because I did both.

Sufficiently obedient to my Puritanical heritage to feel that I must somehow "earn" my collapse on the couch with a book---not the Good One, but a good one---I decided to run barefoot through my bookshelves, weeding my collection for donations for the library book sale. This is no quick-and-easy undertaking: I have caches of books in every room in the house, save the dining room (yet) and the two baths (an oversight). There are books on shelves, in baskets, in crates, on tabletops, stacked on the floor, and I went through them all.

As always, it was a time of rediscoveries and resignations. Why do I own four different editions of "The Canterbury Tales" and two of "The Wind in the Willows?" How did I wind up with two copies of David McCullough's "1776" and have read neither? Do I really want to read this debut novel by a former funeral director which jacket blurbs describe as being in a class with "Six Feet Under?" (No.)

As the fashion gurus advise of clothing not worn for two or three seasons, this was the opportune time to divest myself of all those unread shiny new novels by shiny new novelists that looked appealing when they first came out but aren't really my style.

Some I will hang onto, read or not, because every literate home should have a decent copy of "Madame Bovary" and you never know when you will need a good translation of the "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." Some, like the elderly hardcovers of Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters to his daughter, will have a home in perpetuity on my shelves because they were rescues from previous years' book sales. If it hadn't been for me, their pages would have been torn from their covers and recycled, and the covers thrown in the trash. I just can't consign them to that fate again; it would be like taking the dog you adopted because you felt sorry for him back to the shelter. Besides, I just might read those books some day.

Naturally, to choose which books go and which stay, I had to read a little of each, so my weeding took the best---and I do mean "best"--- part of the afternoon. All of my Kurt Vonnegut will stay, Sarah Waters will go. I guess I can let Murray Kempton's collections of columns go---but not Molly Ivins' or Mike Royko's. Glad I didn't go for that deluxe edition of the collected Wallace Stevens; I already own one. You will have to pry these "Amphigorey" compilations and the All-American Ads series out of my cold, dead fingers.

I am still undecided about the Sir John Fielding series of mysteries by Bruce Alexander and the Marjorie Eccles and Caroline Graham books I accumulated after I had read one novel by each author and decided in my obssessive-compulsive way that I had to have them all. Maybe I'll give them a year's reprieve, as I did with Reginald Hill and Ian Rankin last year. Which worked out: I have actually been dipping into their books this winter.

At the end of the afternoon, my Sabbath-breaking netted the book sale five liquor-store boxes (Nyah-nyah-nyah, Cotton Mather!) packed with some pretty good stuff, and I had had a perfectly marvelous time.

Hey, Hey, DMA---How Many Trees Did You Kill Today?

2011-03-01T11:06:00.000-08:00
You will pardon me, I'm sure, while I blow on my fingers and toes to get the circulation going. I am just back from a quick jog to the curb with most of the day's mail, and a pair of flip-flops was the nearest available footwear.

Normally on Tuesdays I wait for the mail lady's delivery before I put out my recycle bins for Wednesday pick-up, but it was late today and chockablock with glossy catalogs, charity appeals, and amazing limited-time-only offers in which I have absolutely no interest. I couldn't wait until next week to get them out of the house, hence the trash run.

The pleas for donations are my own darn fault; give money to save the whales, the children, or the blue-footed booby just once, and the effusive letter of thanks from their champions will come complete with postage-paid envelope and pledge form for an even more generous contribution. A week without letters from the World Wildlife Fund, the ASPCA, and Doctors Without Borders would make me doubt my own existence.

Second to these begging letters in number (but not by much) are the siren songs of merchants hoping to find geezer gold with their products and services for folks of---shall we say---a certain age. All the life insurance policies, guided tours of Alaska, elastic waist pants, and Velcro-fastened sneakers you could hope for, courtesy of AARP's brazen sale of its membership lists. Our local Lions Club puts out a phone directory specifically for East Aurora and environs, which is admittedly handy when I'm writing Christmas cards, but it also serves as a primo mailing list for area businesses, such as the hearing-aid dealer who today sent me an handwritten invitation for a "free" hearing test.

The bulk---and I do mean "bulk"---of my junk mailings, though, are the catalogs that account for at least 90 percent of the paper I discard, well over 500 pounds a year by my extremely conservative estimate.

Some I actually keep, read, and order from: L.L. Bean, Land's End, a few booksellers, garden suppliers, Aerosoles, The Company Store, Dick Blick Studio, and---when they deign to send me one---the annual IKEA catalog.

A few I will keep overnight and at least glance at, if the clothes/home furnishings/paper products look like something I might actually wear/use and the prices aren't too outrageous.

By far the greatest number, however, the ones that make me ponder replacing the mail box with a recycle bin. These are the work of: (a) sellers from whom I have not now nor have ever ordered; (b) merchants from whom I made a single purchase so long ago I don't remember what it was. An example of the former is Wisteria, a supplier of upscale tschotkes, whose taste is not my own. I think they got my address from Better Homes & Gardens, to which I have not subscribed for five years or so.

Examples of the latter include Title 9, a supplier of women's sports gear, from whom I ordered a gift certificate for my younger daughter at least eight years ago, and Chinaberry, purveyor of twee children's books and toys, who provided a costly Christmas gift for my preschool granddaughter. (I don't recall what the gift was, just that it WAS costly.) Since she will officially become a teenager a month hence, you have to admire their dogged pursuit of my custom. I expect that should I live long enough to become a great-grandmother, I'll still be on their mailing list.

Yes, I am aware that there are purported remedies for the receipt of unwanted catalogs: the above-mentioned Direct Marketing Association, with whom I have had absolutely no luck; www.catalogchoice.org, and others that might get me out from under the avalanche of paper.
I am not, however, optimistic, just resigned to a life of carting four-color junk to the curb.

As my sister remarks of the magazines that plague her to renew at even lower rates just months after a new term starts, her subscriptions will likely outlast her and the post office will be delivering Good Housekeeping and Woman's Day to her plot in St. Mary's Cemetery forever.

As for me, I may be getting a perpetual flame.

Summer Went Swimmingly

2010-08-30T06:17:00.000-07:00

Summer is over for me, no matter what my calendar says.

Oh sure, Labor Day is seven days away, and the first day of fall, not to mention the autumnal equinox, are weeks hence, but I've thrown in the beach towel. The Community Pool closed for the season yesterday at 6 p.m.

No matter that we are expecting a hot, sunny week with temperatures in the 90's; I'll be cooling off in the shower. As of this moment, the aforementioned towels, my bathing suits, and cover-ups are tumbling in the washer, soon to be packed away.

Time was, Labor Day Weekend was the pool's swan dive, but since many of the lifeguards are college students who are already heading back to campus and the few high school staffers are athletes whose fall practice sessions have begun, there's nobody left to mind the swimmers.

If I am desperate for a swim in the coming months, I am not totally without resources: the town rec department has a Friday night family swim at the middle school pool from September to December, but face it, at my age I'd rather be going out for a fish fry between 6 and 8:30 on Friday night. My knowledge of the venue, besides, leads me to believe I'd be dodging screeching, cannonballing tweens in a cavernous, echoing space half the size of the outdoor pool.

Also at the middle school pool I can take twice-weekly water aerobics classes taught by the same instructor who led the sessions I never missed at the Community Pool. I took a similar class a few years ago, and while the initial classes in the fall weren't so bad, I didn't crave the scent of chlorine enough to throw sweats over a bathing suit at 4:30 on a dark winter afternoon and slog home afterward with wet hair tucked up under my ski hat.

Alternatively, I can join the Southtowns "Y," a 20-minute drive away. My HMO, in fact, will pick up the tab for my senior membership, which includes pool privileges. As above, however, few circumstances make me feel less like swimming than a brisk westerly wind bearing snow showers. I am a summer swimmer, a sunshine paddler. Anything else is too much like deliberate exercise.

For me, who was sent to camp and spent family vacations at cabins in the Berkshires, dawdled away teen-aged afternoons at the Canoe Club pool, and earned tuition with babysitting gigs at the shore, going into the water is something you do for fun and to cool off. I swim for comfort, not for speed.

Back in the days of our mountain lake vacations, swimming and otherwise fooling around in the water was the reason we were there, the be-all and the end-all of our days. We swam in the morning, as soon as we could get in the water without incurring blue extremities, and stayed till lunchtime, never changing out of our drying suits. Why bother? After the obligatory hour hiatus---an old wives' tale, but who knew?---we'd be down at the water again, usually with books and magazines for the long afternoon haul. Parents arriving from the sweltering city in the early evening had no trouble coaxing us in once more.

We swam in the the rain, wondering at how warm the lake waters could be and how thrilling, when storm winds churned them into real waves. We swam in the dark, guided only by the stars, a sickle moon, and our sonar-like familiarity with the more prominent rocks.

There was always something to do in the water: find a good diving rock, take turns diving through a chorus line of legs, take out the rowboat to jump off of, see how far across the little cove we could swim in one go, master front and back somersaults, attempt a solo handstand, play Monkey-in-the-Middle with a tennis ball, see who could stay underwater the longest, catch minnows in the shallows and throw them back. If we brought along a bar of Ivory soap, we could have a shampoo and a bath and wash our underwear. Not a minute nor a drop was wasted. Savored, yes; wasted, never!

These days, without a lake at my disposal, the Community Pool is my summer oasis, although I'm not much for Monkey-in-the-Middle anymore---or Marco Polo either. Shaded by huge maples, surrounded by vine-covered fencing, and scented with pine, chlorine, and shampoo from the women's showers, it's a haven in a hot and hectic world, just five minutes from home.

I favor the 5 to 6 p.m. slot, when mothers are rounding up the kids to go home for dinner and the staff haven't yet cordoned off the diving area for the lap swimmers. To me, laps are the aquatic equivalent of calisthenics, maybe good for you, but ultimately mind-numbing. I prefer the meditative approach: a quick, not especially stylish dive into the deep end, then half an hour or so of Zen freestyling, mindful of the water and the body's hole in it, doing a lackadaisical crawl, a languid breaststroke, an indolent surface dive just from the solitude of it. It is as contemplative as yoga.

Getting out is Phase Two of the experience: the warm towel, the book waiting in my pool bag, enough sun left to dry my miracle-fiber swimsuit almost instantaneously. Now I will read until thoughts of dinner ingredients and white wine chilling in the fridge lure me home. (Back in my smoking days, the best cigarette of a summer day was the first one after a swim. These days, a few chapters of a good detective story is an almost-substitute---and better for my underwater endurance.)

But I'm hanging up my pool bag for the season, leaving inside the packet of tissues, the comb, the shampoo, the tube of sunblock. The towels are dry and folded and put away on the bottom shelf of the linen closet. It's been a glorious summer; for me, it's over.

Letter to My Favorite Pest

2010-08-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

To: Miss Ramona Geraldine Quimby
Klickitat Street
Portland, Oregon
USA

Dear Ramona:

I thought I saw you at the Community Pool the other day, but I wasn't sure. The little girl---sorry!---the young lady had sort of short dark hair and was wearing a striped two-piece bathing suit that could in no way be described as a bikini. I noticed her because she was trying very hard to do a perfect cannonball off the diving board. She climbed out as soon as she could and ran to get back into line for another turn until Lyle, the nicest of the lifeguards, had to blow his whistle and yell, "No running!"

(Trust me about Lyle being nice; three years ago, before he grew up and went to college, he used to mow my lawn. Think of him as an older version of Henry Huggins.)

It was good to see that all the to-do of having a Walt Disney movie made about you and your sister Beezus hasn't gone to your head. By the way, how does Beezus feel about getting second billing? After all, the very first of the books Beverly Cleary wrote about your family was called "Beezus and Ramona." Of course, the scriptwriters for the movie took bits and pieces from all the books---"Ramona the Pest," "Ramona the Brave," "Ramona and Her Father," "Ramona and Her Mother," Ramona Quimby, Age 8," "Ramona Forever," and "Ramona's World"---so I guess putting your name first on the marquee is only fair.

One result of the movie that must make both you and Mrs. Cleary, the former children's librarian, very happy is that all summer your books have been very hard to find at all the public libraries. I know this because I wanted to read them myself, never having had the pleasure many years ago, when my two daughters were your age. By the time they could read chapter books, they chose their own at the library and didn't ask me to read to them, so they've known you lots longer than I have.

I must say, I am charmed to make your acquaintance.

You are nothing if not an original, yet so very familiar. Before I read the books, I heard an interview on NPR with Elizabeth Allen, the movie's director, who said Mrs. Cleary still gets countless letters from children and adults alike who tell her, "I am Ramona!" What they mean is they remember making tin-can stilts, they remember the irresistable impulse to wiggle a loose tooth with their tongue, they remember how awful it felt to throw up in school, they remember worrying that their kindergarten teacher didn't like them and that they'd never be as perfect as their big sister. (Ah, the secret is out: I was a pesty little sister, too!)

In their own lives there were Yard Apes and corkscrew-curled prissy little girls like Susan Kushner and rings on the playground and library books and boxes of crayons and the unfairness of having to go to bed before the eight o'clock movie was over. There were family cats like Picky-Picky, spoiled neighborhood brats like Willa Jean and her friend, "Bruce who doesn't wee-wee in the sandbox," as well as nasty old ladies like Mrs. Pitt, who was always sweeping her front walk and making sure kids didn't throw candy wrappers on her lawn. (Just for the record, I rarely sweep my front walk and I don't yell at small children.)

They also had good friends like Howie Kemp, who were willing to let them ride their new two-wheelers and knew the thrill of getting a pair of brand-new red rubber boots. Like you, it impelled them to make "a joyful noise until the Lord."

Like you, too, their biggest worry was that their parents wouldn't love them or each other. Their biggest happiness was being "warm and snug and loved like little bears and bunnies" in the books your mother read to you at bedtime when you were little.

Dear girl, whether you think of yourself as "just plain old messy Ramona" or "Blunderful, wonderful me," for children everywhere---and those of us who forgot we grew up---you are the "roll modle" you aspired to be for your baby sister, Roberta. Don't ever change, not even on your tenth birthday, when you become a "zeroteen."

Retirement by the book

2010-07-21T08:27:00.000-07:00
A friend recently told me she is thinking about taking the latest retirement incentive but isn't sure what she'd do with herself all day if she didn't have the job to go to. She didn't ask my opinion, but I am claiming Retiree's Privilege to tell her what I think anyway. (Said privilege is like a senior discount that never expires.)

Kiddo, heed my advice: take the incentive and run!

From the vantage point of being blissfully unemployed for almost five years now, I can assure you, you will soon become one of those tiresome people who are so busy after they leave the workforce, they wonder---often at length and vociferously---how they ever found time to hold a job.

Naturally, this takes planning, so get yourself a nice, new day planner, preferably large and leatherbound. (If you hint broadly enough, your staff may give you one as a going-away present.) Enter every single appointment, social engagement, upcoming trip, and holiday you know of for the foreseeable future. See? You're busy already.

Bear in mind, you will still have to pay bills, balance your checkbook, take the car in for service, buy groceries and presents for people's birthdays, mow the lawn, do the laundry, and clean the occasional toilet, so you really won't be doing much thumb-twiddling.

Next, arrange to have a major home-improvement project start on your first Monday of official retirement. A few mornings of rolling out of bed at dawn to move your car so the builder and his helpers can park their trucks in your driveway, making them coffee or iced tea, then cleaning up drywall dust at 5 p.m., may make you wonder whether you really are no longer employed.

Besides, going to Lowe's or Home D to look at paint samples and lighting fixtures will get you out of the house for hours at a time.

Don't forget to enter this information in your day planner.

Before some eagle-eyed acquaintance on the lookout for new volunteer talent for his or her pet organization can snap you and your professional management skills up, choose your own favorite places to help. (For me, it's the public library and a local group that raises funds for an AIDS orphans' school in Kenya; for you, well, only you can answer that one.) Enter all the dates you will be a docent or attending planning meetings or setting up for the fund-raiser in your book.

This will be a built-in defense against the aforementioned eagle-eyed acquaintance---unless, of course, you really want to slave over the grill at the fire department pig roast. At all costs, avoid what a friend calls "right arm syndrome," an affliction in which your right arm goes up automatically when someone asks for volunteers.

Find someplace you want to/have to be at a certain time every weekday morning. It could be on the stationary bike at the gym, on a stool at the counter of the local diner, on your own couch watching CNN, or at your computer reading the New York Times. Put those events in your planner, too; after the first time the guys at the diner or the gals in your yoga class ask where you've been the last few days, you won't have to pencil it in anymore.

Get yourself a bicycle, preferably one with fat tires, one speed, and coaster brakes. The idea isn't to do time trials, wind sprints, or pentathlons; you just need to get out and pedal around the neighborhood for a while. Or, go to the local pool for a swim. Walk the dog. Deadhead the fading tulips. You probably don't need to put these events in your book---unless, of course, you find yourself skipping them because something supposedly more important has come up. Then, you do need to write them down and you need to keep the date!

Finally, every day block out time for yourself to indulge in Guilty Pleasures and enter the times in your book with the notation "GP." For me, the sacrosanct hours are after lunch, when I complete at least one Sunday crossword puzzle or logic problem; in the late afternoon, when I ignore the phone and read until visions of what I plan to have for dinner interfere with the print on the page, and Sunday mornings, when I read the papers till noon. I have been known to watch an HBO movie in the middle of the day.

I like to poke around thrift shops, crafts supplies stores, and the local used book store. In the summer my lunch might be an ice cream cone with a book on the bench outside the Red Caboose. On some days I might have a long lunch with friends---or no lunch at all because I'm too absorbed in what I'm doing.

Don't worry; you'll get the hang of it. As the quotation goes, nobody on their deathbed ever said, "I wish I'd spent more time at the office."

Sleepy Sands and Pink Vacations

2009-05-27T14:38:00.000-07:00
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

2008-10-06T06:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T06:08:00.000-07:00
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

2008-06-16T07:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-06-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-23T10:17:00.000-07:00
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!

Virgins, Martyrs, and Wallflowers

2008-05-08T13:11:00.001-07:00

When I visit my favorite consignment shops this time of year, I notice that the displays are all-prom-all-the time. I understand that: Of my long-ago prom days I remember the dresses more clearly that I remember my escorts. Even with pictures as evidence

Tight of bodice and voluminous of skirt, the gowns were typically nylon tulle over taffeta in a demure "ballerina" length, strapless, and complemented by a totally useless net stole that would slip off the back of my chair early in the evening, to be trodden by passing dancers and waitresses bearing trays of Cokes.

I wore them with a tortuously boned strapless brassiere, as many crinoline petticoats as I could pile on while still managing to zip up the dress, and old nylon hosiery because the aforementioned petticoats would make short work of good ones. It sounds perverse today to report that I wore a garter belt; I had to---in the Fifties, pantyhose were a fashionable woman's dream that had not yet come true. The height of my heels---silver for fall and winter, white for spring---depended on the height of my dancing partner. Since I was considered tall in my day, I acquired a large collection of cheap formal flats.

One dress was white, one pale yellow, one orchid with silver spangles worked into the net. It was a hand-me-down from my sister, and the net raised red welts along my neckline. My mother made that one, as well as two of my least favorite gowns, a dark green faille that wasn't at all what I had in mind and a red-and-white striped taffeta that made me look like an oversized candy cane.

I inherited my favorite dress from my stylish cousin Barbara, who attended a private girls' school and had cut quite a social swath among the young men at the boys' school nearby. The dress had a cranberry velvet bodice and net skirt over a satin underlay that was peppered with tiny holes. Moths, my mother pronounced, squinting at the fabric; just what she'd expect of the languid Barbara and Auntie Mary, my mother's oldest sister. "Mary always did think she was a 'lady,' "---my forthright mother's sternest criticism---"and she raised her girls to be the same. I'll bet Barbara threw that dress over a chair and left it for someone else to hang up, but the moths got to it first."

I loved the color and the velvet, though, and when, as my mother did, you had two daughters in high school, you took free dance dresses wherever, whenever, and from whomever you could. She spent several evenings hand-sewing the tiny holes with silk thread, and when she was finished, I couldn't see any imperfections through the clouds of net skirt. As Mother often said of her make-do efforts, "A man riding by on horseback couldn't tell the difference."

Nor would anyone else. With my mother's rhinestone earrings and silver mesh bag, I was all set for the fall semi-formal dance of the Junior Guild of St. Agnes. All I needed now was a date.

The Junior Guild was the offshoot, for high-school girls, of a Catholic women's organization (the Guild of St. Agnes) that did good works and raised money for the Sisters of Providence with card parties and dinner-dances. In the 1950s, in a small city, where the church a family attended was no small factor in its community standing, these young matrons---wives of Catholic doctors, lawyers, businessmen---were becoming a social force to rival the WASPish Junior League.

We, of the Junior Guild, were to be groomed as their successors. We were to become in our turn good Catholic wives and mothers, faithful to spouse and church, charitable, community-minded, and socially accomplished.

In the meantime, until we achieved holy matrimony, we were to take as our model St. Agnes, a poster child for chastity and purity. Depending on which edition of The Lives of the Saints you consult, Agnes---which in Greek translates to "lamb" or "pure one"---at the tender age of 12 (or 13 or 14) chose death over dishonor by pagan Romans. In either 254 or 304 A.D., she was (take your pick) beheaded and burned or tortured and stabbed or stabbed in the throat. Her hagiographers are unclear on those details but united in the notion that she preserved her virginity and won a martyr's crown on the 21st of January. The Roman Catholic Church proclaimed her the patron saint of engaged couples, Girl Scouts, and rape victims, the last designation either ignored or overlooked by our parents seeing us off with our sweaty-palmed adolescent swains.

Despite the high-minded intent of the organization, most of us joined the Junior Guild for one reason and one reason only: the fall and spring dances, held by tradition in the Terrace Room of the Hotel Roger Smith, about as elegant a venue as one could find locally in those days. We circled the polished floor from 8 to 11 p.m. to the music of Ed Novak, the moonlighting high school band director, and his small dance combo. The fall dance was always the night after Thanksgiving, the spring event a Friday night in mid-May.

In all respects, save one, the Junior Guild dances were identical to the high school proms: the former were ladies' choice affairs. If you were dating someone on a regular basis---we didn't go steady much in those days---it was a foregone conclusion that the young man would be your escort, and other girls would keep their hands off. If you didn't date much, you began early in the school year to consider the possibilities---the cute guy in French class, the silent type who stared at you in study hall, the least juvenile of the jokers hanging around their lockers before morning home room---hoping for a presentable male with a dark suit and access to a car.

The trophies to be won included a little tasseled dance car, a drying wrist corsage, a stiffly posed photo with the other couples at your table, and the opportunity to act, for a few hours at least, like a grown-up and practice one's party manners. It was all about See and Be Seen. Resplendent in your wide-skirted gown, steered around the floor by your chosen partner, you couldn't possibly be taken for a wallflower.

Few of these contrived pairings led to lasting romance; they certainly didn't in my case. They might, however, yield an unexpected quid pro quo. After going with me to a couple of Junior Guild dances, Steve invited me to the Junior-Prom that took place over Christmas vacation.

Bill took me to the formal dance sponsored by the high school newspaper in June of our senior year---a lucky break, inasmuch as I was the editor of The Herald, and staying home was not an option. For the occasion, I received my first orchid corsage. My dress was Empire-style white lace over pale blue, and my date wore a white dinner jacket, de rigeur for the last dance before graduation. I don't recall much else about the evening, not even the names of the other couples at our table.

When next I wore the dress, I was in college and dating a young man whom I thought might be The One. He wasn't, but the dance we went to was a lot more fun than those rigid affairs in the Hotel Roger Smith. Eventually, my mother handed on the blue-and-white-lace number to one of my younger cousins, and it went to Junior Guild dances without me. I started wearing little black cocktail dresses when I went out on semi-formal occasions and never thought of it again.

A few years ago, when I attended my 50th high school reunion, it was just for a moment, to quote Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again: white-clothed tables for eight around a hardwood dance floor, but this time I was alone. Blessedly, not for long. One of my old friends, who served on the reunion committee, had arranged to seat me at her table, along with three other singletons, all of whom had attended one or more Junior Guild dances with me---Ruthie, who had not cared to inflict a crowd of reminiscing strangers on her husband; Ann, who had never married after 18 years in the convent and 20 on the high school faculty; Bobbie, who had lost his wife, our good friend Momo, to breast cancer.

Somewhere between the salad course and her third glass of Pinot Noir, Ruthie turned to me and confided, "You know, I only came to this reunion because it's the 50th. I don't know who most of these people are and don't care; I didn't have a very good time in high school...all that pressure to pair off!" I agreed, adding that I'd had a lot more fun in college.

After dinner, the music got louder and it was harder to carry on a conversation. I was driving a rental car and had had about as much as I felt I could safely drink, so I said my goodnights and left, passing confidently through the throng by all by myself. In my little black dress and fuchsia stole I looked fabulous; everybody said so.

The Road (Much) Less Traveled

2008-05-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

I have a love-hate relationship with the New York State Thruway nurtured over decades of traveling it, primarily to Central New York, as both driver and passenger. I appreciate its efficiency, the ease with which I can skirt densely populated areas at high speed, the straight shot that gets me from here to there almost effortlessly with my E-Z Pass, as long as I remember which exit to take. It's a highly engineered process.

It's all process, though, and that's what I hate about it: I am neither here nor there, merely in transition, and while sometimes this in-between state can be conducive to thought, especially when driving alone, it's dangerous to fall too deeply into the rapture of the road. I rush lemming-like along a concrete conveyor in a kind of limbo where I slow down or stop at my peril, and the momentum seems to be out of my control. I have often made a conscious effort to be less lead-footed, to relax and enjoy the drive, but once I enter the slipstream of traffic, my good intentions fall by the wayside, and it becomes a point of honor to pass as many of the other lemmings as possible.

As the years go by, however, my definition of "making good time" has changed considerably, so almost every time I travel to my sister's house in Skaneateles these days, I pick up U.S. Route 20 at Darien Center and turn east with a peaceful sigh. Since Route 20 becomes Genesee Street, the main drag of Skaneateles, all I have to do is follow my nose.

Before the Thruway, which lies north and mostly parallel to it, was built, Route 20 was the main east-west highway across New York State, and in some places the past shows in derelict mom-and-pop motels and abandoned diners. In many others, though, Route 20 is alive and well and catering to the tractor-trailer drivers heading west from Interstate 390.

Although I meet a few of the semis heading toward Buffalo, for the first 20 miles or so out of Darien Center I can generally count on splendid solitude with no reason under the sun to go any faster than the posted limit. I have time to observe, to notice small things---signs along the road, circling redtail hawks, farmstands touting the season's first asparagus, white geese in a front yard which are not lawn ornaments.

When I first started taking Route 20 a couple of years ago, the place names rang only faint bells: Here is Alexander, which I know mainly because the volunteer fire department band always marches in our town's parades, and here is Pavilion Center, familiar from local deejays' lists of school closings.

Along this stretch in the Town of Bethany there's a large barn close to the road, on the door of which, in foot-high letters is the message, "DAVE'S NOT HERE." The letters are always freshly painted, the door always swung back to face the road, leaving me to speculate that "Dave" is NEVER there and making me wonder why he is so sought-after.

Just past Fox River Antiques (a big white barn that I have vowed one day to visit) Route 20 merges with Route 5, and the distinctive blue-and-gold highway markers of Livingston County appear, giving me the fleeting impression that I have strayed into foreign territory. The Village of Avon is the first settlement of size, home to a couple of pottery shops, a Dairy of Distinction, and a mini plaza with Tops Market. (I am holding out for the Wegmans in Canandaigua.) Next is the Village of Lima, a neat, pretty, and prosperous farming community, which recently succeeded in preserving its bucolic character against the onslaught of a proposed Wal-Mart Super Center. Having been there and done that as a resident of East Aurora, I give the denizens of "The Crossroads of Western New York" a drive-by high-five.

The Bloomfields, East and West, are the next points of interest. Settlements of quirky cottages behind picket fences, gracious stately homes, and country inns, they could have been transported in their entirety from New England and gently dropped among Upstate New York's rolling hills. East Bloomfield (birthplace of the Northern Spy apple) in particular shows its Yankee lineage with not one, but two simple white churches---one of them Congregational---facing each other across a genuine village green.

On the outskirts, so as not to distract from the charm of the village itself, there are strings of antique shops, of which my favorite is the by-appointment-only dealer in old and rare books, who periodically announces on his sign the availability of "literary kittens, free to good homes."

Canandaigua, the first city on the itinerary, welcomes me with all the amenities I might require in a series of strip malls, fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and chain drugstores along a widened, divided Route 20 with turning lanes, stop signs, and strategically placed traffic signals. No need to go through the city center (which is charming), no opportunity to see the lake. "Your money," Canandaigua seems to say, "can stay, but would you please leave? Here, we'll make it easy for you." I can take a hint; I make a quick pit stop at Wegmans, pick up some baked goods to take to my sister's and a Diet Pepsi, and get back on the road.

Contrast that atmosphere with the college town of Geneva, where a thriving business district abuts the fraternity houses and playing fields of the Hobart-William Smith campus with its enviable hilltop view of Seneca Lake. I sweep down the the hill and along the lakeshore, near the Finger Lakes at last.

Although I apparently leave the water behind as I continue toward Waterloo (birthplace of Memorial Day, and don't you forget it!), the most modest homes---even a trailer park---on the south side of the highway boast a dock or a boat slip. They are lucky enough to have frontage on a narrow canal connecting Seneca and Cayuga lakes, and I often weigh the dilapidation of the available real estate against the seasonal pleasures of sitting on my own dock at sunset... Nah!

Waterloo itself would not be much of a change of environment; its sprucely kept mercantile center parallels East Aurora's in vintage, style, and aspiration. East Aurora's Main Street business district is not quite as large, but Waterloo has nothing like Vidler's. So there.

For character, I prefer Seneca Falls, and not merely for its history as the birthplace of the women's rights movement. "Gracious" is the word that leaps to mind as the route swings hard left from a string of one-of-a-kind shops meant for browsing onto a broad, tree-lined avenue of large, lovingly restored Victorian houses set well back on wide lawns. It is a town designed for strolling.

Veering temporarily away from the lakes, I skirt the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge and am pleased to see that the bald eagle's nest, incongruously constructed atop an electrical pylon, is still there. Maybe there are new eaglets...

And now for a touch of Route 20 irony: Red, white, and blue signs surmounted by American flags dotted along both sides of the road, reading "No Sovereign Nation, No Reservation." They mark the boundaries of the Cayuga Indian Land Claim, which comes nearly to the tract dominated by BassPro, purveyor of metal-tipped arrows, nylon tents, and aluminum canoes, in Auburn's Finger Lakes Mall.

Auburn is where my sister goes to shop at Wegmans, Wal-Mart, or Office Max. It has all the big-box stores, fast-food franchises, and auto dealerships deemed necessary for suburban life but distasteful to suburban sensibilities. There are still attractive older neighborhoods in Auburn, though, that are markedly more affordable than the houses further east on Route 20 across the Onondaga County line, so the city is essentially an outer-ring suburb of Syracuse.

It's all downhill from there. Literally.

I slow as I approach the Skaneateles limits marked with the sign, "Gateway to the Eastern Finger Lakes." On the right is the cemetery where my husband's parents' remains are buried under a huge pine tree; on the left is the posh new Mirabeau spa, which purportedly draws beautiful people from Manhattan determined to become more beautiful. Then I pass The Krebs, West Lake Road, and the Sherwood Inn, which faces the lake and the mooring of the lake steamer Judge Ben E. Wiles.

An old hand at this after all these years, I keep to the right at the light beside the Blue Water Grill. Only tourists get stuck in the left lane, where they must turn onto Jordan Street whether they want to or not. I continue up Genesee Street past the ever-so-clever boutiques, an inviting old public library (where the children's room features murals by Skaneateles resident Patience Brewster), lakeside Thayer Park, and St. James Episcopal Church, where I was married on a Thanksgiving weekend 46 years ago. The good women of St. James operate a thrift shop closer to the village center that I never miss visiting, but I'd better not stop now or my sister will wonder what happened to me.

Before losing sight of the lake I say Hi to Pete, whose ashes are out there somewhere under the waves. He doesn't reply, and I don't expect him to because he never does. I have always assumed he is otherwise occupied. As one of his friends wrote me after his passing, "He's in a better place, where it's always a great day to go sailing."

With the Stella Maris retreat house on the right, I hang a left onto Onondaga Street, just the length of a track on the CD player away from my sister's driveway. Now that's what I call a good time!

The XYZ Affair

2008-04-28T08:53:00.000-07:00
I have an algebraic---or perhaps physics---problem to present to you, hoping for a solution but surmising there is none:

Let X = a gray female cat (spayed) who weighs about 10 pounds.

Let Y = an orange-and-white male cat (neutered)who weighs about the same.

Let Z = a human female of a certain age who weighs approximately seven times the combined weight of X and Y.

Let Z's double bed = Z's double bed.

If X sleeps on one side of Z and Y sleeps on the other, why can't Z turn over or otherwise change position during the night, and why does Z have continuing nightmares of being immobilized in leg irons?

Remember Gulliver's voyage to Lilliput, on which he awakes from a deep sleep to find himself tied and pegged to the ground, unable to move? Sleeping with two cats is exactly like that.

It is also like the law of physics that states something-or-other will always rush to fill a vacuum, as I know from rising to go to the bathroom and returning to find two average-sized cats have spread to fill the entire center of the bed. No lie: the exact and entire center. They must have GPS. Or the world's biggest sense of entitlement.

Moreover, I have to let sleeping cats lie; somehow their respective ten pounds becomes a hundred. Each. There must be a law of physics that explains that, too, but I have no idea what it is. Funnily enough, before I put aside my book and turn out the light, they occupy modest little nests down near the foot of the bed. I hardly notice they're there.

Short of moving to another room and barricading the door, I don't know quite what to do about these feline night riders. If you have a suggestion (short of exorcism), please let me know. My back and my hip joints are killing me!

***
This tickled me...
From "Introduction to Poetry" by a personal favorite and New York State's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, who is describing his classes at NYU:
"...I want them to water ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on shore.

"But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it."

May you treat the poems that come your way with the joy they deserve!

Still Life, With Cats

2008-04-21T05:53:00.001-07:00
Kittens, like shoes, should come in pairs, so it was a foregone conclusion that my trip to the SPCA would end in two sets of food bowls in my then catless kitchen.

I had already made the first-round draft pick for Team Askew on the basis of a phot on the SPCA web site: a little charcoal gray female who bore a striking resemblance to Boris and Natasha, a brother-and-sister pair I had found at the same shelter more than a decade ago. Their body conformation, soft, plush coats, and general demeanor strongly suggested that their provenance was more exotic than that of your basic domestic shorthair. Photographs and breed descriptions in reference books led me to conclude that what I had were a couple of rejects from a breeder of Russian Blues.

Boris had a tiny white patch on his chest that looked as though the neckline of his tee shirt was caught in the zipper of his cat suit; Tasha had faintly visible tiger stripes on her tail. Both patch and stripes are considered faults in show cats. Their sweet nature and affectionate temperament, however, made them grand champions in our household.

Could it be, I now wondered, that the aforementioned breeder was still fobbing off kittens that were not quite up to standard on the SPCA? If so, and if my luck was really in, the little female, whom I had already christened Lilith, might have a litter mate, perhaps one of those identified on the web site as "camera-shy."

I got my first cold-water dash of reality upon entering the cat adoption room and finding no gray cats at all.

Where was "my" wee girl? The woman with whom I'd spoken on the phone the day before had assured me that Kitten No. 1428996, shelter name "Sweetie," was still available, yet here it was, only minutes after the shelter opened, and she was nowhere to be seen. There were other kittens, true, but rather commonplace types, not one of which I could conceive of calling Lilith. Maybe the staff had put her aside for me somewhere? Probably not; an SPCA animal is not a piece of merchandise to be hidden under the counter.

I marched out to the desk, introduced myself, and asked for---no, demanded to know---the kitten's whereabouts. The clerk was the same person I had spoken with on the phone, and she assured me that the still unclaimed kitten was in surgery, being spayed. "Come back in an hour and a half," she said, "and you can take her home."

I knew just what to do with the time: there was a pet supply store two Thruway exits away, and Lilith was going to need things. One hour and many dollars later---I opted out of the cat condo at the last minute---I was on my way back to the SPCA. I did remember, when choosing cat dishes, to buy two, but it was only on the return journey that I recalled I had another, more important decision to make, the kitten to eat out of the second dish.

The clerk at the desk was guiding another adoptive "parent" through paperwork, but I interrupted to ask whether there were still kittens in the cage Lilith had shared in the adoption area, thinking it might be wise to go with the devil you know. This is a phrase I have come to rue many times since, especially when a passing animal control officer piped up, "Oh, you mean the pisspots...Yeah, they're all still there."

The clerk turned, unable to resist: "Remember? Yesterday I tried to put one back in the cage and two escaped. When I tried to put them back, the other two got out. It was a regular circus."

Oh. Good. They're spirited. What fun.

My sweet little girl, it turns out, had been bunking with three male kittens, two black, one orange-and-white tiger, and had apparently fit right in with the hell-raising trio. I had been hoping for sedate twin sisters; I was going to have to settle for a Paris Hilton debutante and

her ne'er-do-well foster brother from the wrong side of the barnyard.

The two black ones were handsome, but they were obviously brothers, and I could neither take both nor countenance breaking up a matched set. It was the little tiger's lucky day.

"I'll take the orange one," I said, returning to the desk. The other woman taking a kitten congratulated me on my color sense, remarking that the pair would make a striking complementary picture when curled up together. The clerk concurred, noting that since they were already accustomed to sharing a litter box, I wouldn't have to arrange for separate facilities at home. (The latter observation has turned out to be correct, the former not so much, not since the day they discovered they've gotten too big to fit under the halogen lamp on my computer desk at the same time, Instead, there is usually a shoving match that ends with one basking cat, one sulking cat on the desk chair, and the mouse, keyboard, modem, USB hub, speakers, and assorted office supplies on the floor.)

"What's his name," the clerk asked, of Kitten No. 1460066. (Why didn't I take closer notice of those three sixes?) "Nobody ever gave the poor thing a shelter name, and I have to put something down on the form. It doesn't have to be what you finally call him."

I pondered. He was orange and white, and it wouldn't be forever. "Creamsicle," I replied, cringing inwardly and vowing to spend the drive home coming up with a more fitting name.

Many forms and two hundred bucks on the Visa card later, we were indeed homeward bound, the little guy squealing every mile of the way, trampling on a still-recumbent Lilith, and doing his damndest to claw his way out of the cardboard carrier.

"Why don't I call you Sydney Carton?" I asked. "You act as though I'm taking you to the guillotine in that box. Of course, we'll have to spell it Sidney-with-an-I; I wouldn't want people to think I was naming you after Sydney Greenstreet; you're not that suave." At that point, he didn't care one way or the other what I called him as long as I stopped the car and got him out of that infernal container.

That, by the way, was the first and last time I ever heard him utter what might remotely be considered a Meow. At liberty in his domain---and this is his domain, make no mistake---he purrs loudly and almost nonstop, save for those rare occasions when, like the King of Siam, he finds a person, object, or predicament to be a puzzlement. Then, he trills in a decidedly interrogatory manner.

Released from confinement on that first day of entering into his kingdom---the sunny side sitting room with attached bath and litter box---he swaggered about the room, took its measure, and within the first half-hour was attempting a Tarzan swing on the cords of the Roman shades. Small as he was, getting from the floor to the quilt draped on the back of the day bed in a single bound was not a problem. The little cat in motion was like a melody, the one that goes: "Oh, the most wonderful thing about tiggers is tiggers are wonderful things. Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs!" Oh, yah!

Meanwhile, Lilith (remember her?), still recuperating from her abdominal surgery, found the water bowl and a quiet spot on the couch from which to survey her new digs. Eventually, Sidney did wind down and curl up beside her, suddenly tuckered out. This gave me an opportunity to inspect more closely the puss-in-a-poke I had adopted by process of elimination. The coat, shades of light and dark rust, is both striped and spotted, and it is nattily accessorized with white shirt front and socks. The ears are tufted; the tail, which he carries curved over his back like the handle of a teakettle when awake, is broadly striped like a barber pole. A white stripe runs the length of his nose, as if the artist making his portrait had playfully stroked it with a paint-stained finger. Not a bad-looking little cat despite his plebian origins, I concluded.

Plebian or not, Sidney was born with the conviction that dogs have owners, cats have staff, and so it has been since the day he suffered himself to be brought to East Aurora as consort to an aristocratic pretender. He plays second string to no feline---no cat gut jokes, please! In the short time he has been regnant, he has made clear his rules of engagement:

Me first, always.
Run like hell at all times.
All doors shall be open to me, no matter what Mom's doing behind them.
If that wussy Lilith has found a cozy place, whether on Mom's lap or the shelf of the linen closet, push her out of it.
All the cat toys belong to me.
Window treatments are made for climbing and, where possible, destruction.
If it's on a shelf and possibly breakable, nudge it off and find out.
I need to keep a firm paw on my realm, so I will stick my nose in the paint, the cake batter, the butter dish, the printer.
Morning starts when I say it does.
I'll come in when I damn well please.
I will never, ever take No! for an answer, a command, a comment, or even a suggestion.
I am the Alpha and Omega cat, the once and future Sidney!
##
Lilith, on the other hand, is a tattletale, a crybaby, and a diva.
One morning, shortly after I had introduced the kittens to the fun of those realistic-looking fur mice, she came to find me, loudly (for her) proclaiming a grievance: Apparently, Sidney had stuffed his mouse way under the refrigerator, then commandeered hers. "It's not fair!" she complained; "Sidney stole my mouse, and you have to make him give it back!"
Yeah, right. Like that would last for five seconds...
"Me...me...me..." she continued in her tiny voice. (Never finishes a sentence, that girl.) "Well, can I have a snack, then?" She was born with a clock in her stomach, one that requires feeding her every five hours on the dot of 7 a.m., noon, and 5 p.m., a clock, furthermore, that adjusts automatically for Daylight Saving Time. (Hell hath no fury like Lilith in front of an empty food dish at 12:10 p.m.)
Yet, for all her apparent anxiety to eat, many's the time she will sniff at the dish, gaze at me reproachfully as if to say, "That isn't what I ordered; take it back," then stroll off as if food was the least of her concerns. She has also been known to gobble down her meal and promptly upchuck it (on the rug, usually), just like certain bulimic tabloid stars. Got to watch the girlish figure, you know.
When Sidney's away, Lilith will play, which usually entails rolling at my feet, delicate paws in the air, stretching and fawning. "Admire me, praise me... Aren't I the softest, prettiest cat you've ever seen? Rub my tummy... Ooh, isn't that nice?"
It is a one-cat show for a one-woman audience. Lilith is customarily so reclusive I call her the Belle of East Aurora, the Emily Dickinson of the cat world. I've had weekend guests who have never glimpsed her for more than 10 seconds at a time, and my gentle, soft-voiced cat sitter has never managed to pet her. Yet, like Dickinson, she is a keen observer of her small, circumscribed world and will sit for hours at the window, making tiny cries at birds and leaves swirling off the trees. For Lilith, "the thing with feathers" isn't Hope, it's entertainment.
On days like these of warming spring, when all the world and his cat seem to be outdoors, she gets wistful and tries to overcome her agoraphobia. Twice now she has made it out the front door and onto the walk (under supervision), but there is always something out there to spook her. Bugs outside are more menacing than the ones in the house; grackles scare her; squirrels petrify her. There are fewer things less funny than a declawed cat trying to claw through an aluminum storm door.
I will still, however, need to be wary: Sidney and I went out onto the front steps last Friday midnight to admire the full moon, and Lilith decided she'd risk it. What a revelation! No bugs, no birds, no squirrels---just warm, sweet breezes, shadows, and moonlight. "A girl could get used to this," she suggested, edging further away. This time I was the one who panicked; poet or no poet, a gray cat is easy to lose in the shadows and will not come when called away from the allure of scented breezes and moonlight.
I scooped her up and plopped her inside the screen door, then went back out to fetch Sidney. They make a handsome composition, just as the woman at the SPCA suggested, but I need to keep them in the framework of this still and peaceful household.

A blast from my past

2008-04-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

As a sometime columnist myself, I've always been an admirer of Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen's opinion pieces, first in The New York Times and nowadays in Newsweek magazine, but never more so than for her recent "Because It's Right," a call to revamp the venerable GI Bill to provide a college education for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Quindlen notes, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, when signed into law in 1944, had dual purposes: Not only did a grateful nation feel such assistance was due to those who had sacrificed so much; the nation's leaders short-circuited the economic and social problems that might have arisen with the return of millions of unemployed, untrained men to the workforce. By calling for the draft of able-bodied young men to fight in World War II, the U.S. gave "employment," in a manner of speaking, to many who had been out of work since the Depression. One of my uncles was among that number.

Instead, some 5 million veterans went to college, even to law school and other professional graduate schools, on Uncle Sam's dime and paid him back many times over with the growth of the middle class and an era of unprecedented prosperity. (Two recipients of government largesse after World War II, let it be noted, were U.S. Senators John Warner and Frank Lautenberg, both of whom are enthusiastic supporters of legislation to increase GI Bill benefits that was drafted by Sen. James Webb, Vietnam vet.)

That era of prosperity was the 1950s, when I attended the local junior college with veterans of the Korean War, so I know firsthand what the GI Bill can do. I got an education in more ways than one.

Part of the credit goes to the institution itself, Holyoke (Mass.) Junior College, founded in 1946 precisely to address the overflow of local vets wanting to take their best shot, at last, at the American Dream. (Bear in mind that before the war, most of them wouldn't have been considered "college material;" higher education was for the well-to-do and the well-connected. The best they might achieve, helped along by a night-school business course, would be a white-collar clerical job.)

For returning vets, there were housing shortages and there were shortages of space in state university classrooms as well, so HJC was born under the aegis of the Holyoke Public Schools and its classes were housed in the high school during the afternoon and evening, after the high school kids had gone home. The odd hours were a real boon to veterans, many of whom were married, had children, and held down jobs while going to school.

The odd hours also meant that the college could draw its faculty from nearby colleges and universities in the Connecticut Valley. Ivy League or not, most professors were not averse to picking up a little extra money for teaching in the evening. As a result, I was instructed by faculty from Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, UMass, Springfield College, and the State Teachers College at Westfield. (I mention the latter because of one of my favorite teachers, Mr. Welch, who made us forget that History of Civilization 101-102 was a requirement. The vets loved him not only for his teaching style, but for his speech impediment---the result, it was said, of his having mouthed off to a German prison guard when he himself was in the Army.)

The relationship of our older classmates with the instructors was a revelation to those of us who were newly graduated from high school. Class discussions were discussions among equals; the vets came fully equipped with what we would now call "credit for life experience," and they did not blindly accept faculty pontification. Moreover, they came to college to work, and they worked hard, eyes on the prize. The teachers respected that, and in a couple of cases of professors from the elite women's colleges, I truly believe they preferred the rough-and-tumble of their junior college classes to the more sedate surroundings of their ivied campuses.

Make no mistake: the vets played hard, too, when they could. The word would go around the day the government checks arrived, and the beer would flow---but never enough to make the celebrants miss class the next day. They were not averse to taking some of us younger students out with them and knew all the places in town where the bartender never checked the ages of everyone who shared the pitcher of beer. They were courtly with us younger females, watched their language and the color of their jokes, and taught us how to jitterbug but otherwise kept their hands to themselves.

They ran the social organizations, held most of the student offices, and comprised most of the sports teams. Most importantly, they showed us youngsters how to grow up and what real maturity looks like. Chronologically, there's not much distance between 18 and 24 or 25, but when the elder person has been stationed in Thule, Greenland, or anchored off Inchon, and the younger person has not, the younger owes the elder some serious respect. Attention must and should be paid.

That is absolutely true today, when the 25-year-old may have been stationed in Kabul or Fallujah. We still owe them big time.

Miss Lucy: a love story

2008-04-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, when I worked for a living, I walked to the bus stop around the corner every weekday morning in all weathers---rain, snow, sleet, icy pavements underfoot, dark winter mornings indistinguishable from midnight, summer mornings already hazy with humidity. I learned to take small comforts and small pleasures where I could, whether it was the prospect of a half hour's reading on the bus or the realization that 6:45 a.m. today is marginally lighter than 6:45 a.m. yesterday.
Beginning in late February, one of my greatest pleasures was the return of the birds, those who migrate from the South and those who winter over but rise with the sun. A cardinal's call can cheer a frosty morning, and the skeins of Canada geese flying purposefully to outlying fields for a day's feeding, honking encouragement---or "Hurry up!"---to each other, were company: fellow commuters. One amazing summer morning I turned the corner to the bus stop in time to see a Great Blue Heron, long neck hunched between its wings and long legs trailing behind, sailing over a silent Main Street.
The geese, however, crossed my path most often, veering southwest as I headed north; they became as familiar a sight as the unknown but familiar people I passed at the same time every morning in downtown Buffalo.
One morning I noticed that one leg of the 'V' of geese was shorter than the other, while a solitary bird, honking loudly, flapped in mad pursuit several yards behind. I could hear the desperation in the call, which sounded amazingly like "Wait for me! Wait for me!"
It happened again the next morning. And the next. Always one goose lagged behind the group and strove madly to catch up. It looked like the same bird every time, although who can really distinguish between one Branta canadensis and another? I surmised---no offense intended to my gender---that the slugabed was a young, unattached female fresh out of flight school and unused to the obligations of a workaday existence. I believed I could make out a travel mug under one wing and a stylish briefcase under the other.
"Miss Lucy," I decided, was a recent graduate, cum laude, of the Royal Ontario College of Aeronautics, who had come across the border in search of greener pastures and the gander of her dreams. As most waterfowl do, Canada geese mate for life, so Miss Lucy---hoping for a long mated life---determined to find her special someone in the protected environs of East Aurora's Sinking Ponds Wildlife Refuge. So far, though, she was a small goose in a small pond and was growing desperate as the spring days lengthened. After the day's gleaning in the fields south of East Aurora was done, she took to hanging around with the unattached ganders in the parking lots of local watering-holes, cadging corn chips and trading insults with the birds who were just passing through.
Silly Miss Lucy, silly goose! You'll never find your gander that way!
At dawn the next day she would rise alone from her single nest, to find her skein taking wing without her. Late again!
I did not see Miss Lucy (or the singleton I took to be Miss Lucy) for a few days. Either she was pining in the seclusion of the reeds at Sinking Ponds OR she had decided to straighten up and fly right. In the latter case, she was a full-fledged member of the group, tardy no longer, and therefore inconspicuous among her fellows, a career goose.
That could have been what happened; I don't know.
I DO know that one morning a short time later, the geese flew over as usual, honking on their way to the fields. Trailing them by several yards were a pair of geese, silent save for the rush of air under their wings. The symmetry of their flight was breathtaking, each mirroring the form of the other effortlessly. Envision the world's greatest figure-skating pairs, and you'll get a rough idea of how the birds flowed in tandem without a sound.
I believed that morning, and I believe to this day, Miss Lucy had at long last found her mate.

Rabbit, Rabbit!

2008-03-31T07:43:00.000-07:00

If you are reading this on the day I am posting it, I wish to remind you to greet the morrow with the phrase "Rabbit, rabbit!" so that you will have good luck in the new month.

Ordinarily, I don't remember to do this myself, inasmuch as I often don't know we're no longer in the old month until I have to write a check. (One of the joys of retirement is not always knowing what day it is---and not caring. "Oh, is it April now? Whoa!")

I also fail to utter the magical words because they are supposed to be the first ones out of your mouth on the first day of the month, and my first words of any day are commonly addressed to one of the cats sharing the bed, as in "Sidney, get off my face!" or "Shut up, Lilith---it's only 6:30!"

According to the purists at Wikipedia, the phrase is "Rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit," meaning the little brown babies at right may not be efficacious in bringing you good fortune. Phooey, I say; rabbits of any hue symbolize April as fittingly as a black cat symbolizes Halloween. Hoppy Spring!

****

Not-So-Funny-Business

Mentally riffling through my reading materials of the past week or so, I can only plead, Spare us, O Lord, from the candidate for public office who pledges to "run government like a business." Out of the depths of a tanking economy I cry unto Thee, What is wrong with running government like government? Preferably an open, transparent government of, by, and for the people from whom its powers are derived...
The usual mantra of those who would turn the halls of government into an executive boardroom, the adherents of the "What's good for General Motors is good for the country" philosophy, is the claim that those from the loftiest echelons of commerce are the fittest to root out ineffiency and waste, thereby enabling lower taxes for captains of industry such as themselves. Taxpayers are not citizens, they are shareholders, and naturally, those who own the most shares get the biggest dividends.
Let's hear it, fellas, just like Calvin Coolidge taught you in 1925: "The chief business of the
American people is business."
Oh? And what business would that be? Bear Stearns? Enron? Countrywide Financial?
Which CEO should the elected official take as his model? Jack Welch of General Electric? E. Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch? Robert Nardelli, who was booted from Home Depot for rewarding himself handsomely while the company came near to circling the drain, yet who now heads Chrysler Corporation? Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco International? Surely you recall the $60,000 shower curtain and the ice sculptures peeing vodka at his wife's 40th birthday party in Crete?
To be fair, these spiritual defendants of Gordon "Greed is good" Gecko are yesteryear's news.
According to the past week's news reports, however, their spirit lives on. To wit:
Efraim Diveroli, a 22-year-old entrepreneur, whose AEY Inc. managed to score a nearly $300 million Defense Department -contract to supply munitions to the Afghanistan army and police. The ammunition was more than 40 years old, much of it useless, and manufactured in China, which is a possible violation of U.S. law.
Gary M. Milby, president of Mid-America Energy, Inc., who is under SEC investigation for peddling more than $19 million in bogus gas and oil limited partnerships, some $12 million of which wound up in offshore accounts and family trusts.
ICF International, a Fairfax, VA, private contractor, which ran the $11 billion Road Home housing grant program for Hurricane Katrina victims, and which now says it wants the government to hire a collections agency to get back several millions in overpayments to people who weren't entitled to get any payment at all, while others who qualified for grants got nothing. (Heckuva job, Brownie!)
Blackwater Worldwide, which along with its Halliburton and KBR cronies has taken the U.S. taxpayer for billions in no-bid war contracts. Most recently, Blackwater has tried to claim that its 850 operatives in Iraq are independent contractors, not employees. This claim would enable them to avoid paying more than $50 million in U.S. payroll taxes.
Not all of my reading has been in the daily press, however. This being annual meeting/annual report season, I have found highly interesting reading in the proxy materials I receive, particularly those shareholder proposals that the board of directors recommend a vote against. Almost to a corporation, the directors get prickly when shareholders show inconvenient curiosity about executive compensation and stock options, global warming and environmental policies, political contributions, and human rights in countries with which the corporation does business. This lack of transparency is strangely familiar.
Oh, wait... there's an M.B.A. in the White House.

Membership hath its privileges

2008-03-24T08:27:00.000-07:00
What a deal! What a break! What a boon!

It's the bargain of this or any other century!

Imagine it: A bazillion books, books bound in limp leather and in faded buckram, books in glossy jackets, some with tight, razor-sharp pages, more with brown, well-fingered edges; books with such names on the spines: Jane Austen and the Brontes, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, T.H. White, J.R.R. Tolkien, Patrick O'Brian, William Trevor, Muriel Spark.

And J.K. Rowling.

You have the North Americans: Anne Tyler; Alice Munro; Johns Cheever, Updike, and O'Hara; Russell Banks and Richard Russo; Ernest Hemingway, if you like, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Dorothy Parker. Consider the Southerners Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Gilchrist, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, and Bobbie Ann Mason. (Barbara Kingsolver is only a part-time Southerner, but consider her, too.) Did I mention Amy Tan? And E.Annie Proulx?

Dame Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell (and her alter ego Barbara Vine), Denise Mina, John Harvey, and Ian Rankin are extra added attractions. Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, and Tony Hillerman come at no cost, along with Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Daniel Pinkwater.

[Feel free to pencil in any of your own favorites here.]

For a change of pace, you may opt for the historians, the newspaper columnists, the humorists, and the personal essayists, from Will and Ariel Durant to Gary Wills and Karen Armstrong; from Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin to Murray Kempton and Carl Hiassen; from Bruce Catton, David McCullough, and Kevin Phillips to Robert Benchley, David Sedaris, Bailey White, Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, Dave Barry, and the two Annies, Dillard and Lamott. By the way, what's the news from Lake Wobegon?

But that's not all! You get all the comedy and drama you'll ever need: William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Robert Sherwood, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, George S. Kaufmann, Philip Barry, Thornton Wilder, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, Mary Chase and Joseph Kesselring, A.R. Gurney and David Mamet, to name just a few.

You get all the lyrics, too: Noel Coward, Gilbert---or was it Sullivan?---Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Hal David, John Lennon, and Ogden Nash, whose verse twisted language and rhyme schemes as if he was making balloon animals.

Speaking of poets, you get the aforementioned Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Billy Collins, Dana Gioia, not to leave out the immortal "O Holy Cow: the selected verse of Phil Rizzuto."

In the privacy of your own home you can tune into NPR and the BBC World Service, Air America, even Dr. Laura, Dr. Ruth, and Dr. Phil, for all I care. (I prefer Dr. Seuss.) You can get your political spin from Fox News. Myself, I favor "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report," and "Real Time with Bill Maher." For hard news, there are The New York Times and The Washington Post---and The Onion, America's finest news source.

At your leisure and in your jammies you can revel in unforgettable lines from classic movies on cable---"Play it for me, Sam...Play 'As Time Goes By.'" "Merry Christmas, you old Bailey Savings & Loan!" "Leave the gun; take the cannoli." "Fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy night!" And, as Mel Brooks points out, "It's Franken-steen." You can kick back with memorable episodes of "M.A.S.H." or "Seinfeld" or "Star Trek." You can numb you overactive brain and your posterior with back-to-back episodes of "Law and Order."

As added bonuses, you get The New Yorker, the Times crossword puzzle, much truly creative advertising copy ("Volkswagen. Think small."), and some ancient Anglo-Saxon exclamations that still get the job done today.

Here's the clincher, the piece---as Archie Bunker used to say---of resistance: You get to play with all the toys yourself. You can sit in the driver's seat and steer, play with all the bells and whistles. You get to stand sentences on their heads, stretch them out to see how far they'll go, then let them snap back. You can color outside the lines, write outside the box. You've got the motive, means, and opportunity to tinker with language all the live-long day.

You "get" all of these marvels free, gratis, absolutely nothing down and nothing to pay, no PIN, no plastic card, no ID required, as members of the group Winston Churchill---whose written and spoken language is in a class of benefits all its own---described as "the English-speaking peoples." (He also quipped that Great Britain and the United States were "two nations divided by a common language," but I'm sure you get the joke. Of course, you do; to paraphrase the noted linguist Chris Tucker, you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth.)

If your parents were English-speakers, you're a legacy. If English is your second language or even your third, congratulations! You've been accepted on your merits and are entitled to full member benefits even if you don't speak the Queen's English as well as Helen Mirren does. ('Struth, the Queen doesn't speak the language as well as Helen Mirren does.)

However you qualified for membership in the group, if you understand, speak, read, and write English, thank a teacher, then thank your god, your muse, and your lucky stars for the privilege. All these riches of the language---priceless!

An Easter invitation to walk awhile in my shoes

2008-03-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

Gracie---who is all togged out for it---and I---who am not---wish you a very Happy Easter and hope that all your eggs will be chocolate creams.

Much as I love them, however, it is neither chocolate nor spice jelly beans nor potted white lilies that revives memories of Easters Past so clearly. No; as I waded through the advertising supplements in the yesterday's papers, I realized that the holiday is vividly tied up, so to speak, with getting new shoes, typically a pair of black patent leather Mary Janes.

Given my family's circumstances and my place in 20th century chronology, it's not surprising that such a mundane purchase could mean so much. To begin with, World War II loomed large over my early child-hood, and even after V-J Day, consumer goods of all kinds---but especially those like shoes, made of leather and rubber---were rationed. In addition, money was tight, particularly for a family of five in wartime New England.

Keeping shoes on our feet was no small accomplishment (I almost said "feat"), as my sister and brother and I persisted in growing and requiring larger sizes. Since my sister, who is older by two years, inherited the petite frame of our Polish grandmother and I the heftier build of our Irish forebears, hand-me-downs were not an option; my feet were bigger than hers from second grade on.

Hand-me-ups were not an option either, since I was blithely and unthinkingly hard on shoes. I well recall our mother's fury when she caught me deliberately scuffing my toes on the sidewalk because I liked the sound it made and because it was the easiest way to brake my tricycle.

Although we did not make it easy for them, our parents did manage to keep us in footwear---three pairs of shoes per kid per year. As noted above, the dress-up shoes arrived at Easter and were meant to last the year for special occasions, wearable to school ONLY if we were taking part in an assembly program OR if our school shoes were at the cobbler's being repaired. (In those days, sneakers were not allowed in school---even assuming the previous summer's pair was still intact.)

We got our sneakers---basic white Keds for my sister and me, PF Flyers for my brother---the day school got out, and woe betide the kid who ruined them before it was time to go back-to-school shopping the day after Labor Day. ("Pleasepleaseplease, Mom, can I have saddle shoes or strap shoes instead of those ugly brown oxfords?") I didn't manage to talk her into letting me have penny loafers until I was in junior high, and that was only because I bought them myself with my babysitting savings. They were red, and I loved them---the beginning of a lifelong passion for cute shoes. (Just ask my daughters, who refer to me as "our very own Imelda.")

In retrospect, it seems that, for me, Memory Lane is paved---I should say "soled"---with the shoes I wore:the dressy flats for the ballroom-dancing class in which we learned to execute the box step; the ballerina flats we wore on first dates; my first heels, which were purchased for Easter, red, what we now call a "kitten heel" and was then known as a "baby Louis heel;" evening shoes with heels calibrated to the height of my prom escort; dirty white bucks for those of us in the college prep program; white pumps for Class Day and graduation.

In college I wore black cotton strappy China doll shoes and spent horrendous Syracuse winters slogging up to campus in Keds and knee socks. Boots? Are you kidding? When the sneaks got too impossibly soggy, I went to Manny's on Marshall Street and got another pair for ten bucks. (My parents never knew this and also never knew I lost almost a week of classes with nearly-pneumonia.)

In most of my professional life I spent five days a week in mid-height heels. To my dubious credit, I did not give in to the hideous fashion of wearing running shoes with a business suit when commuting or going out to lunch. (I did wear floppy silk bow ties, however.)

It was a great day when I started working in the court law library and could wear flats again. (It is a little-known fact, according to my younger daughter, that Aerosoles are the official shoe of the American Library Association.) Low-heeled shoes, in addition to being newly chic and available in myriad attractive styles, are really the only practical choice for one who must frequently leave the circulation desk to help a patron or clear a copier paper jam. Indeed, given some of the contretemps I've had with book carts, steel-toed boots might not have been a bad idea.

These days, I wear whatever feels good on my feet---your basic white Keds, ancient moosehide moccasins I've had since forever, flip-flops (despite my ugly toes), or, for yoga practice, nothing at all. My latest love are suede thong sandals lined with faux fleece; not only do they keep my feet warm, they're cute!

Not as cute as black patent leather Mary Janes, I suppose, but I can't find those in my size anymore.

In defense of 'stupidity'

2008-03-10T07:46:00.000-07:00
This past weekend, when a late winter storm dumped nearly two feet of snow in my driveway, I spent a cozy and happy couple of days in my upstairs studio/workshop playing with paints and reading on the daybed. I wasn't entirely alone.

The two cats, Lilith and Sidney, were glad to share a soft place to stretch out; Aretha Franklin belted her way through her greatest hits on the CD player, and the south-facing windows were crowded with lushly blooming plants. These last, commonly known as geraniums, are more correctly known as Pelargonium, as one of the garden catalogs I received the other day rather sniffily insisted: The "true Geranium" is a different variety altogether, a noble addition to the herbaceous border, and perennial to boot.

At more than a hundred dollars for six plants, they'd better last more than one season!

Funny... Nobody told my geraniums they had to shrivel up and die at the end of last summer. Or the summer before either. I have a white one and a couple of coral ones that have been wintering indoors with me for a couple of seasons now and cheerfully blossoming year round. All I have to do in May is repot them, give them their spring haircuts, and
they're good to go back outdoors.

A large part of my affection for Pelargonium is the way the species thrives on neglect and drought conditions. Indeed, I first started buying the plants for the hanging baskets on my garage because they were the only ones that could take
the full brunt of summer sun from late morning until sundown. They are undemanding, unassuming, dependable, sturdy, generous, carefree, and inexpensive. Some of the more lyrical prose from a catalog less exclusive than the one aforementioned says of the putative "false geranium" that it "stands up to the worst weather," exhibits "great vigor and weather tolerance," and "flowers forever."

Think "domestic goddess" or Cinderella before the fairy godmother, at home in cottage window boxes and on kitchen window sills with the potted herbs, affable and eager to please, with nothing of the prima donna aspect of more exotic flowers. Unperfumed, both flowers and leaves have a clean, soap-and-water scent.

Yet, the tight flower heads that call to mind elderly ladies with new perms come in a gorgeous array of vibrant colors: scarlet, baby pink, rose, lavender, plum, white, peach, bi-colored red and white, magenta with a reddish-orange center. They make a pretty, unexpected addition to a bouquet of mixed summer flowers.

Surely, I thought, admiring the contrast of tropically colored blooms with outdoor snowscape, Pelargonium, in the Victorian language of flowers, must have a meaning that recognizes all of these excellent qualities.

Unfortunately, no.

After checking several lists of the meanings of flowers online I learned that your basic, common, or garden, variety geranium most often denotes "stupidity" or "folly"---although the denoters don't say whose, the donor's or the recipient's. I'm guessing the former: A gentleman would have to be pretty dense to give his lady-love a plant in a heavy clay pot without assuring her it meant "How could I have been so stupid..." Or, "If loving you is wrong, I don't wanna be right!"

Possibly, the garden purists deem the plant itself not terribly bright for giving so much of itself for so little in return. If the geranium's generosity is dumb, then I'm with ---> Stupid!

__________________________________________________

Bumper Sticker of the Week, spotted in the Orchard Park (NY) Public Library parking lot:

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

Out with the old, out with the good?

2008-03-03T08:16:00.000-08:00
Last week, when pundits on all gradients of the political spectrum mourned the demise of William F. Buckley, Jr., several lauded the consistently high quality of his talk show, "Firing Line." One columnist, in fact, noted that the erudite and conservative Buckley managed to draw quite a respectable number of viewers to PBS on Friday nights and in so doing racked up a tenure as host that was two years longer than Johnny Carson's on the "Tonight Show."

Obviously, this fun fact was intended to be a tribute to Buckley's on-air persona, but I wonder, in the light of a recent essay by Charles McGrath, whether some of the credit shouldn't accrue to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I say this because the The New York Times piece, "Is PBS Still Necessary?," (Sunday, February 17) argues that it may be time to pull the plug on publicly funded television programming and hand off Ken Burns to cable. After all, McGrath points out, these days there is a cable channel devoted entirely to everything viewers used to love about PBS: history, science documentaries, classic movies, cooking shows, home improvement, and Britcom reruns.

(Public radio, McGrath concedes, is a different matter altogether, a medium that has managed to survive, thrive, and multiply its listening audience exponentially.)

As my checkbook shows, I am a loyal supporter of public broadcasting---two local public radio stations and the Buffalo-Toronto PBS channel---as well as a subscriber to cable television with an extra movie package, and I have to say that any idea that PBS's long-running programs can simply be parceled out to new homes on cable makes my remote shoot red death rays. The problem is, if PBS's glory days are behind it, so are cable's, as ratings have become all.

Take the case of A&E, formerly known by its full title, Arts & Entertainment: It was supposed to be cable's version of PBS, and indeed in the beginning its scheduling was chock-a-block with reruns of PBS's "Mystery!" and "Masterpiece Theater." Nowadays, its primetime log is rife with true-crime shows and back-to-back episodes of "Intervention." (While Jane Austen's "Emma" did her share of intervening, I don't believe she would be comfortable on A&E these days.)

Bravo was initially a haven for viewers who enjoy movies outside the mainstream and arts programming. About all that's left of that promising beginning is "Inside Actors Studio." The rest are mean-spirited "reality" competitions like "Top Chef," "Project Runway," "Make Me a Supermodel," and "Real Housewives of...(fill in the blank)." Bravo's movie lineup has become the Independent Film Channel---for which movie buffs must pay a surcharge.

One must also pay extra for BBC America, to which I subscribed briefly in hopes of being able to watch series like "Prime Suspect;" what I got was "How Clean Is Your House?," the transatlantic version of "Antiques Roadshow," "Torchwood," and "Hotel Babylon"---dreck with a British accent.

"Flip This House" is not in a class with "This Old House;" for all his "Bams!" Emeril Lagasse can't beat "America's Test Kitchen." How do you suppose "Dora the Explorer" and "Arthur" would stack up against "Sponge Bob Square Pants" in kiddie prime time on the Cartoon Network? Could the Disney Channel lay claim to "Sesame Street" and the Children's Television Workshop without preschool educators' firing a shot? What news and public affairs channel would willingly take on "Frontline" but agree to give its producers a free hand? Does a cable channel even exist that would run "Great Performances?" The idea of live theater, classical music, and opera as pay-per-view is ludicrous; that kind of programming was why public television was created, to air the kinds of programs that commercial television would not.

Please note that I said "would not," not "could not."

I'm old enough to remember TV's so-called Golden Age, the black-and-white days of "General Electric Theater," "Playhouse 90," "The Twilight Zone," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "See It Now," Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, not to mention all those marvelous half-hour comedies and Steve Allen's "Tonight Show." Just as bad money drives out good, bad shows drive out good---why should cable be any different?

Do you imagine (to return to where I started) that if William F. Buckley was still here, his "Firing Line" would survive a smack-down with Hannity-Colmes on Fox? I don't think so, either!

Not just a pretty face...

2008-02-25T09:20:00.000-08:00

"I hate to use an ugly word like 'hypocrite,' so picture it in a lovely floral typeface."

Randy Cohen, "The Ethicist," The New York Times Magazine
I don't recall what thorny dilemma evoked this comment; I was too captivated by the notion that changing the size, shape, and color of a word or phrase might render it less objectionable.
I figured it was worth a try, so I opened my word processing program with its many, many fonts and typed a few words, including proper names, that get on my personal wick.
It's kind of fun: highlight the word, scroll through the typefaces, look for the least apposite to its real meaning, and pick an inappropriate color. The last entry in the list above, for instance, is a face called "Jokerman." (In retrospect, I should have used Bankers Gothic for "poverty" and colored it the green of newly printed currency.)
Originally, I had planned to see what George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on the Radio" would look like in the aforementioned "lovely floral typeface," but I can't remember what they are. Although I'm sure they're out there on the Net someplace, don't look for them here anytime soon.
Of course, there are many varieties of distasteful language, many words that make our individual toes curl, whether they are universally deemed unpleasant or not, and they aren't the same for each of us. I invite you, therefore, to give it a try with your own list. (Considerately, I have left "Rush Limbaugh" and "Ann Coulter" up for grabs...)

What 'City of No Illusions?'
This past Sunday's Buffalo News business section brought me an absurdly cheering bit of information: the city often called "The Buckle on the Rust Belt" and by other depressing monickers is the home of Milk-Bone dog biscuits, America's No. 1 doggie treat, and the company is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary.
That got me thinking about the businesses that haven't decamped from Western New York: a whole lot of them make people (and their pets) happy, or at least give them a whole lot of enjoyment. Consider these:
Cheerios (General Mills)
Perry's Ice Cream
Anchor Bar chicken wing sauce
the kummelwick roll
Righteous Babe Records
Rich Products frozen eclairs (and other goodies)
Fisher-Price toys
Ford gum balls
kazoos
New Era baseball caps
QRS piano rolls
the Sunday comics pages (Quebecor)
Harlequin romance novels (U.S. distributor)
Dyngus Day (Poles in most other parts of the country never heard of it.)
and last but not least, the new headquarters of Labatt's USA
Say what you want about our lack of illusions---we know how to have a good time!

Notes from Hamada, Hamada, Hamada, CPAs

2008-02-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

Every fiscal year, when at last I sit down with the many-paged questionnaire provided by the accountant who prepares my taxes, I feel as though I have been taken over by the spirit of Ed Norton. Not the actor Edward Norton, the unforgettable character Ed Norton portrayed on "The Honeymooners" by the equally unforgettable Art Carney.

A classic "Norton" schtick involved his elaborate preparations to sign a document---typically an agreement into which Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) was attempting to inveigle him. Shooting non-existent cuffs and adjusting equally invisible lapels, he stretched his fingers, cracked his knuckles, squared the paper just so, picked up the pen, and made several passes and flourishes in the air before getting it anywhere close to the dotted line, ultimately driving the short-fused Ralph beserk.

As a writer, I know all about procrastination and its uses, and believe me, I've used it. There is something about those official numbered forms, receipts, and year-end statements, however, that bring my inner Norton to full, fluttering flower.

(Please note: Norton and I are both clients of the noted Wall Street firm, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Ziggy.)

First, I select an auspicious day and clear my calendar, opting always to begin in the forenoon. I like to think my mind is fresher then, particularly if I've greeted the sun with yoga stretches. A nutritious but light breakfast ensues. (Hmm, will coffee make me more alert or just twitchy?)

Now I assemble the materials: legal pad, mechanical pencil with eraser (which I should fill with leads and replace the eraser, if I can find any), a pen (which could also use a refill), mini binder clips bought specially to attach documents to pertinent pages, color-coded file folders, solar-powered calculator (which needs charging, so put it on the window sill), and the bulging folder into which I have been tossing receipts for charitable contributions, property tax bills, and all those envelopes marked "Important Tax Documents Enclosed" that I never bothered to open. Sticky notes! Where's the stapler?

Now I need my checkbooks and registers for the past year. Wow, this file box is a mess! It would take just a sec to put these registers in order---where are the rubber bands? Oh, and look here, it's time to re-order checks.

As long as I have the checkbooks out, might as well take care of some bills; the mail carrier will be here soon. Speaking of whom---I probably should shovel the front walk and put down some ice-melter; the walk looked slippery this morning.

Okay, I'm back. I fed the cats, moved the wet laundry to the dryer, started the dishwasher, and wound the grandfather clock. I've earned a Diet Pepsi; if I'm working at the dining room table, I need a coaster. And I need music. Who is more conducive to financial computation---Oscar Peterson, Tony Bennett, or P.D.Q. Bach?

I'm getting awfully hungry; I can't think on an empty stomach. Do this after lunch? Or start fresh tomorrow? Norton was always up for a nosh; he'd understand.

Light my fire, but don't Kindle my books!

2008-02-10T12:23:00.000-08:00

In my last post I wrote of some reading I'd recently enjoyed and am now impelled add that a good part of the enjoyment came from the fact that I had done it the old-fashioned way: sitting, sometimes reclining, in a comfy chair or on the couch, holding an ancient but ever-marvelous object called a "book."

I point this out because lately every time I go to Amazon.com in search of more such objects, Jeff Bezos tries to sell me something he thinks I'll like a whole lot better. The Kindle, "a wireless reading device," weighs a bit more than half a pound and measures a tad smaller all around than your basic trade paperback. It has a screen, a keyboard, and a button that allows you to move from page to page. The text appears as black on white, and you can change the size but not the font. There is no color capability yet, so forget art books, graphic novels, and Martha Stewart Living.

In short, it's a oversized GameBoy with boring graphics.

The big deal about the Kindle, which some digital gurus have called "the iPod for books," is that it holds up to 200 titles and can deliver The New York Times and other major newspapers, as well as magazines, via a high-speed data network, which is also how you download the books from Amazon's Kindle Store. Reportedly, if you find yourself wide awake at midnight and have nothing to read, you can download Sue Grafton's latest mystery (or any other author's) in less than a minute. And you don't even have to get out of bed to do it.

Given my oft-repeated experiences of running for a plane with a cumbersome bag of books banging against my hip, the Kindle could be the answer to a reader's prayer. Except...

Like all electronic marvels, the price tag for the Kindle and its peripherals is almost as big as the device itself: $399 plus another $100 or so for memory cards, power adapter, reading light, battery, USB cable, and a cover (to protect the screen and to prevent your seatmate from peeking at the racy passages).
Oh, and then there are the costs of the contents, something to consider if, like me, you're fearful of getting marooned on a desert island or in Cleveland. Most books are $9.99 a pop, so if you want to take the full complement, that would be nearly $2,000; The Times will cost you $13.99 a month, almost as much as a month of Sunday editions on the newsstand, not to mention you can't do the crossword puzzle. Such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, and Time will run $1.99 a month. Each. Ouch!

For a person who believes a day without reading is a day without sunshine, fresh air, food and drink, it might almost make economic sense. But not to me. Call me a literary Luddite, for I can get neither my head nor my senses around a book that is not a "book" in the traditional form. You may indeed be able to absorb yourself in "Pride and Prejudice" by scrolling and clicking; I prefer the richer experience of settling myself with my gently used copy (hardcover, illustrated) and leafing quietly through the story of Elizabeth Bennet's romance.

I love the look and smell and feel of books, old and new, used and fresh from the book club; I love the seemingly infinite variety of typefaces and the way they subtly enhance the words on the page. I love the color of the paper: whitest white, browned around the edges, speckled with foxing, and (in the case of "Pride and Prejudice") an antique ivory. I love the varicolored bindings and slipcovers on shelves, stacked on the floor, lying on tabletops, arranged spines-up in a wooden crate. I love the inner walls of books I have built in most of the rooms of my house. (The crowded shelves in my bedroom give it an unofficial R-30 rating.) I love the perfume of paper, ink, glue, binding, and---often---the faint whiff of mildew that tantalizes with the hint of an old and wonderful tale to be discovered.

Most of all, I love the feel of a book in my hands, its binding tight from the bookbinders or comfortably loosened by long and familiar use, its weight, the texture of the cover or the slipcover under my fingers. And the pages---oh, the pages, smooth as silk, rough as linen, thin as tissue, thick as parchment! With all the senses engaged the pages become a part of the story, one with it, in a way text on a screen never can.

I remain devoted to this "wireless reading device," this time-honored creation of ink, paper, hardboard, glue, and thread.

Fortunately, I am not alone. Writing of the Kindle a couple of Sundays ago in The New York Times, Randal Stross, who reports on digital matters, contradicted alarmist social scientists who say Americans don't read anymore thus, "The book world has always had an invisible asset thatmakes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors, and most frequent customers have to books themselves."

Epilogue: Coincidentally, in the same edition but in a different section of The Times in which Stross reviewed the Kindle, I found a far more elegant solution to the problem of taking your library on the road, Tom Stoppard's book satchel. The British playwright was photographed with his case crafted in bridle leather by Manhattan luggage maker T. Anthony, purveyor to the carriage and Cunard Line trade.

Slightly larger than a bread box, it holds a small shelf of books.

Said Stoppard: "If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I feel like reading. So I bring eight." Me, too.

Yes, you must check it through. No, they don't make them anymore. Sadly.

About this week's picture: it was taken in the stacks of the library at Trinity College, Dublin, and appears in "A Glimpse of Erin: Photographs of John Francis McCarthy and Words of Sean O'Casey." An Irish friend tells me it must have been taken before the windows in the stacks were painted black to protect the bindings from sun-fading.

Giving Just His Due

2008-02-04T07:57:00.000-08:00
I recently and happily made Ward Just's acquaintance while browsing the Nearly New shelf in the public library. It was an introduction long overdue, something like finally meeting the mutual acquaintance whom friends insist you will find charming. Even though his work is not the sort that makes The New York Times best-seller list or merits Book of the Month Club selection, critics consistently praise his fiction and frequently remark that he does not receive the notice he deserves. I kept him on my lifetime list of authors to sample, sometimes adding a mental asterisk or underline when I read yet another glowing review. "Must check out Ward Just," I'd think, then move on to the latest chart-topping novel.

My "handshake" with Just was his latest novel, "Forgiveness," which probes the emotions of an expatriate artist (and sometime CIA operative) after his French wife is left to die in the mountains by a quartet of Middle Eastern men entering the country illegally. This is Just's first novel set in post-9/11 Europe, but the politics are nuanced and underplayed, and the stateside Americans who make brief appearances do not come off as either sympathetic or admirable. Sometimes the view from abroad can be salutary.

Since our first meeting went so well, I wanted to experience more of Just's milieu and decided the quickest way to get the broadest sampling was to lay hands on as many of his short stories as I could. To the best of my knowledge, there is not yet a Collected Stories of... volume, so I requested "Twenty-One: selected stories by Ward Just" and "The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert," a previous compilation, from the library. (There's a fair amount of overlap, but I would have missed a half-dozen good early stories if I hadn't asked for both.)

It was probably the best fifty cents I've spent in a long time.

Just, a former Newsweek editor and war correspondent in Vietnam, tells the tales of journalists and military officers, congressional aides, State Department analysts, CIA apparatchiks, and the occasional elected representative, in pre-Bush-Clinton-Bush Washington and on their assignments overseas. His characters are complex, conflicted, and---a rarity these days---conscience-stricken. (In "Noone," for example, a Roman Catholic congressman agonizes over the wording of a news release announcing a separation from his wife and the obligatory phone call to the archbishop in his home district.)

Many of them are midwesterners educated in the Eastern U.S; they are American to the core, even when (like Just himself) they live abroad a good deal and are well-read, well-spoken, and well-versed in the arts. They smoke, drink whiskey and gin martinis, and are for the most part honorable men.

Lord, how I miss them!

Goosed!

2008-01-28T09:26:00.000-08:00

The moral of this story is, Be careful about what you find funny; it may come back to nip you when (and where) you least expect it.
Although she has been a fixture of Skaneateles village life for some time, I first made "Lucy's" acquaintance last summer at my sister's behest. "You've got to see this," she said, turning up West Lake Road. "You've got to see Lucy; she's famous." A few houses in from Genesee Street she slowed in front of a pretty Victorian house, on the front porch of which stood a life-size white concrete goose of the domestic variety.

Nothing remarkable there, except the goose was wearing a bikini bathing suit, sunglasses, a sun hat, and had a swim tube looped over one wing. I thought she looked hilarious and said so.
My sister went on to explain that since Lucy's costume changes with the seasons and with the holidays, both locals and tourists periodically take the short detour off Route 20, Skaneateles's main drag, to see what she has on now. Teachers at the Belle Waterman Primary School walk their young charges down from State Street to pay calls on Lucy in nice weather. "She even gets fan mail," my sister declared. I thought that was funnier still.

During a later trip to Skaneateles in the fall, my niece and her children arrived at my sister's house to announce with some dismay that Lucy wasn't on the porch and hadn't been for some time. My sister (who knows almost everybody in town) found Lucy's owner's name in the phone directory and called: "We were concerned about Lucy---Is she all right?"

Lucy was just fine, the owner assured her, "but we needed to have the porch painted, so she's indoors for a while. If you look closely, you can see her peeking out the front window." We confirmed this the next day.
As it happened, it was during that trip that my plans to expand my back porch in East Aurora and to redo the front entry were coming to a head, so my sister and I spent a rainy afternoon roughing out alternative floor plans and placements for stairways. I left for home determined to sound out builders about getting an early spring start.
I made a quick trip to Central New York again for Thanksgiving but, because it was quick, I had no opportunity to scope out Lucy's holiday garb. Reportedly, she was dressed as a Pilgrim.

On the Sunday night of Thanksgiving weekend, my front doorbell rang, and I opened the door to find my sister's older son, who lives in Rhode Island but had spent the holiday with his wife's parents in Indiana. All he said was, "Get a jacket and meet me at the back door." When I did, I discovered him wrestling a life-size concrete white goose out of his car. It was stylishly dressed in a red cape with white faux fur collar and hat trimmed with holly berries.
My niece-in-law had been straddling the thing all the way from Ohio and was most relieved to be rid of her seat-mate. Since they were expected in Skaneateles for a late dinner, they stayed only long enough to explain that (a) the goose was a Christmas gift from my sister; (b) because the goose weighs 85 pounds and her neck is fragile, it was easier to pick her up at her place of origin and deliver her directly to me, than to pay to have her shipped. We agreed that what to name the goose would make a promising topic for the Christmas dinner table.

I called my sister after my nephew and his wife left to let her know that they were on their way and to tell her that the goose was a complete surprise. Who expects concrete waterfowl on their back steps on Thanksgiving weekend?
When she managed to stop laughing, she admitted she had been inspired by my plans for a more imposing front entry. What better way to greet guests and itinerant missionaries than with a costumed goose? I would become the talk of East Aurora, the cynosure of all eyes on Oakwood Avenue. For that to happen, I said, I would have to take up sewing again to keep my new companion fashionably attired, and there we left the subject.

Until Christmas.
During the family gift exchange the pile of boxes around my chair kept mounting and was at last topped off with an oddly shaped package. When I started opening them, I discovered that every last present was for the goose. As you see above, she is now dressed for winter, but as spring approaches, I can dress her in her yellow slicker with matching rainhat and umbrella. In more pleasant weather she might prefer her natty straw hat and sailor dress ensemble or her calico dress with apron and sunbonnet. For summer, she has---like Lucy---a bikini and sunglasses, but she also has a life vest and scuba gear.
My personal favorite is her fall outfit: the oddly shaped package turned out to be a mini plastic shotgun with which she can wear her hunting jacket and red cap with earflaps. Although what a goose would go gunning for makes one think...

As if these options were not enough, my sister presented me with the color catalog from Concrete Goodies in Cincinnati, from whence my goose came. For a mere 25 smackers I can get her a faux mink coat and hat; I can dress her as a cow, as an Amish farmer (complete with beard), as a biker babe in black leather, as Rudolph the Reindeer with a red nose that fits over the beak, or as an MD in mask and surgical greens. The permutations are almost endless, the potential price tag staggering.

Concrete Goodies aren't the sole purveyors, by a long shot. I entered "concrete goose" and "costumes" in Google, and came up with many hits. Along the way I learned that dressing up animal figures is apparently a Midwestern phenomenon that is goose-stepping its way across the nation. Lucy in Skaneateles and Gracie---for such is her name---in East Aurora are the opening wedge in the Empire State.
As are my sister's as yet unnamed two. Yes, two.
After we'd all had a good giggle at the goose gear in my packages, she opened hers. My nephew and his wife decided she wasn't to have the last laugh.
They may not, either; he's got a birthday coming up in July...

A Dollar and a Dream

2008-01-21T11:09:00.000-08:00
I got another one of those e-mails the other day.

You know the kind: a favorite format of the conspiracy theorists, it's been forwarded several times to several people, and it purports to tell a tale of how the federal government (an entity never to be trusted) is taking the side of the godless atheists against the majority---we good, God-fearing, patriotic Americans.

The outrage this time? The new presidential dollar coins "were designed" to omit the motto"In God We Trust. " Fumed the anonymous writer, "Here's another way of phasing God out of America."

As usual, the people mindlessly forwarding this claim---which has been making the rounds for a year now, even since the first four coins were issued---never checked the facts. The phrase is there all right; it's inscribed on the edge. (See above.)

And, as per the Consolidated Appropriations Bill of 2008, Congress has instructed the U.S. Mint to move the motto to either the front or the back of future coins in the series, beginning in 2009. What ticks me off is, our elected officials apparently called for the change in response to the pious watchdogs of the Mint who didn't examine the coin the first time out. Your tax dollars and mine at work---and all for a flap over what appears on U.S. money.

Personally, I am far more concerned about how our currency and coinage gets spent, and what it is spent for.

I have a modest suggestion for those have taken offense over the perceived lack of national religious feeling as exhibited by the dollar coins:

Should you be so unfortunate as to receive one of these coins in change, why not simply drop it into your church's collection plate? (In addition to your usual generous offering, of course.) It's legal tender, the usher taking the collection likely won't refuse it, and you might even curry a little favor with the God you insist all of your fellow Americans must honor. (I wouldn't count on the last, though; my recollections of the New Testament---Render unto Caesar, Ye cannot serve both God and mammon, the rich man and the camel and the needle's eye, Jesus and the money-changers---lead me to believe that the Almighty is not best pleased by those who throw money at Him.)

If you wish to demonstrate, before God and everybody, what a faith-filled nation this is, here's another suggestion, less modest:

How about seeing to it that, in this obscenely wealthy country,

no one goes to bed hungry? According to America's Second Harvest, for 35 million Americans---about nine million of whom are children--- hunger is an everyday reality. One of those despised dollar coins would pay for 16 meals.

For me, the choice between putting God's name on a coin or using the coin to do His (or Her) work isn't even a toss-up!

Up, Up, and Away!

2008-01-05T14:34:00.000-08:00
The happy little fellow at the right --- a fountain in the forecourt of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe --- welcomes you with open arms (wings, actually) to my blog. Known as "St. Francis Dancing on Water," he epitomizes the spirit of the Southwest that I found so appealing during a recent visit.

It was also during that visit that my daughter and traveling companion suggested that I write a blog where I could publish some of my personal essays and where, moreover, I could let loose with a rant or two to the world at large.

This, mind you, was just after Election Day, and I had been keening about the ever-increasing use of automated phone solicitations by political candidates which, in essence, turned my answering machine into a bully pulpit. And, I fumed, don't get me started on the "not-for-profit" telethons that mainly profit the telemarketing companies that conduct them. What part of " Do Not Call" does the FCC not understand?

"Blog," said Stacey.

So I'm blogging.

A word (or so) about the title:

I can't find the term "screeder" in any of my dictionaries, so I arbitrarily define it as one who screeds, a person who creates or composes a screed. That would be me.

All clear so far?

"Screed," on the other hand, has several different meanings:

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary gives its derivation as from the Old English screade and Middle English screde meaning "fragment." Webster further defines "screed" as "1a. A lengthy discourse; 1b. An informal piece of writing. 2. A strip (as of plaster of the thickness planned for the coat) laid on as a guide. 3. A leveling device drawn over freshly poured concrete." (Imagine that---I've seen masons screeding sidewalks for years and never knew what to call their activity!)

The Encarta World English Dictionary, not to be outdone, says "screed" is a 14th century variant of "shred" and gives three of its four usages as pertinent to the building trades, as above. Its first definition, however, is "lengthy piece of writing: a long and often tedious piece of writing or speech." God, I sincerely hope not!

Finally, the redoubtable Josepha Heifetz Byrne, compiler of Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, opines that "screed" is both noun and verb, and as such, it may refer variously to: "1. A torn-off fragment. 2. A tirade or diatribe. 3. A drinking bout. 4. A tearing or scraping sound. 5. A tool drawn across fresh concrete to smooth it off." As a verb transitive, it may mean "1. Rip. 2. Say glibly, especially with 'away' or 'off.' 3. Smooth off."
As a verb intransitive it may mean "To make a sound like ripping cloth; to rip."

Somewhere among those many meanings is what I intend to do; indeed, my intent may switch from one to the other from week to week. Let 'er rip, say I, and stay tuned!