After watching Jennifer Saunders's series The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle, my friend proposed Dacko's Corollary to Poe's Law*: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of television talk shows that most people won't mistake for the real thing.
*Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
In which I see dumb people
Some idiot's idea of clothingThere are approximately fifty-three things wrong with this article, from concept to execution, including the one dude's apparently having learned his approach to modeling from the 1974 J.C. Penney catalog. I couldn't do a better job of pointing most of them out than Virginia Montanez in her brilliant take on it.
It is purely spit-worthily hilarious, in the first place, that this was even in the Post-Gazette at all. We yinzers may be only slightly more fashion-forward than Cincinnati or Indianapolis, but please. Please. Really, please.
Why am I so certain that Ayn Rand would've loved this outfit?
I do love laughing at the rich. And the rich had better be grateful when they hear us laughing at them. Because when we stop laughing at them, it will only be because our mouths are full of them.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
In which he does it again
A few days ago I gave my boss a hand when she had flat. I carry an air compressor in my car (would it surprise anyone to learn that both of my parents were scout leaders?) and it was no skin off my nose to grab it and fill the tire for her. After all, I am trying to reverse a massive karma deficit here, so I cannot afford to pass up even the smallest opportunity to pick up a point or two.
I hadn't talked to Dad in a few days so yesterday I stopped in at the VFW for a beer and to see how his appointment with the retina specialist went. We got on the subject of his truck inspection being due, and I mentioned the earlier tire incident.
A scrawny arm reached back. Out came the wallet. The bony fingers poked around inside it for a moment (during which I listened very carefully -- but unsuccessfully -- for any mumbled incantation or spell that I'd somehow been missing for all these years), then emerged clutching a slick tri-fold full-color pamphlet put out by some tire company, titled Inspect, Inflate, Evaluate.
Not quite as impressive as the milk board incident, but pretty damn good nevertheless. I held back the urge to applaud.
"Here, give her this," he said, tossing it onto the bar. "But make a copy; I want that back."
Why, I have no idea, since he's been driving around with one of his front tires at about 14 psi for as long as I can remember. He's not big on practicing what he preaches. "Do as I say, not as I do," was possibly the most frequently uttered phrase I heard from him while growing up. But that's for another story.
I hadn't talked to Dad in a few days so yesterday I stopped in at the VFW for a beer and to see how his appointment with the retina specialist went. We got on the subject of his truck inspection being due, and I mentioned the earlier tire incident.
A scrawny arm reached back. Out came the wallet. The bony fingers poked around inside it for a moment (during which I listened very carefully -- but unsuccessfully -- for any mumbled incantation or spell that I'd somehow been missing for all these years), then emerged clutching a slick tri-fold full-color pamphlet put out by some tire company, titled Inspect, Inflate, Evaluate.
Not quite as impressive as the milk board incident, but pretty damn good nevertheless. I held back the urge to applaud.
"Here, give her this," he said, tossing it onto the bar. "But make a copy; I want that back."
Why, I have no idea, since he's been driving around with one of his front tires at about 14 psi for as long as I can remember. He's not big on practicing what he preaches. "Do as I say, not as I do," was possibly the most frequently uttered phrase I heard from him while growing up. But that's for another story.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
In which I briefly explain an old beef
Joann has always been exceptionally generous in treating me to a show on just about my every visit to NYC. This has included great one-woman shows by Ellen DeGeneres and Bebe Neuwirth; Kate Burton and Michael Emerson in Hedda Gabler; and Julianna Margulies off-Broadway, sitting close enough to bask in the impossible luminosity of her skin. Pretty damn nice.
I truly have no right to complain.
But...
A few years ago, my visit coincided with Dame Helen Mirren and Sir Ian McKellen appearing in their acclaimed run of Strindberg's Dance of Death. As the date of my trip approached, for some reason Joann was seized with an impulse to inform me that she'd wanted to get us tickets for this production, and in fact had had the chance.
But she didn't. Because the only seats available were behind a pole.
This is rather like your friend having the chance to procure seats for the Sermon on the Mount but telling you she didn't think you'd be comfortable sitting on a rock out in the sun all afternoon.
She thought I wouldn't want the chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in the same room, to breathe the same air, as Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, because I would've had to sit behind a pole.
Not a column, not a wall, not a cruise ship. A piddly little pole.
Please. I've had worse seats in church.
Somehow it never occurred to Joann that I could, you know, lean. And not mind it a damn bit.
Or even that I could be quite content merely to hear the two deities doing their thing a mere matter of meters away, in real time.
I could snipe about jaded New Yorkers here. After all, this is a woman who has breathed the same cigarette smoke as Catherine Deneuve. Who let Isabella Rossellini walk past her on the sidewalk without accosting her to tell her that her friend in Pittsburgh would jump in front of a train for her. But I won't. I wasn't raised there; I can't claim to grasp that part of the culture.
So call me a bumpkin, a hick, a rube. But please consider this: if you're concerned that your companion won't appreciate those Stanley Cup tickets because they're in a corner behind the glass, or that they'll scoff at your offer to treat them to opening night at La Scala because they won't want to sit in the gods, get over it. Believe me, we'll be grateful. Thrilled, in fact. Even with a pole.
I truly have no right to complain.
But...
A few years ago, my visit coincided with Dame Helen Mirren and Sir Ian McKellen appearing in their acclaimed run of Strindberg's Dance of Death. As the date of my trip approached, for some reason Joann was seized with an impulse to inform me that she'd wanted to get us tickets for this production, and in fact had had the chance.
But she didn't. Because the only seats available were behind a pole.
This is rather like your friend having the chance to procure seats for the Sermon on the Mount but telling you she didn't think you'd be comfortable sitting on a rock out in the sun all afternoon.
She thought I wouldn't want the chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in the same room, to breathe the same air, as Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen, because I would've had to sit behind a pole.
Not a column, not a wall, not a cruise ship. A piddly little pole.
Please. I've had worse seats in church.
Somehow it never occurred to Joann that I could, you know, lean. And not mind it a damn bit.
Or even that I could be quite content merely to hear the two deities doing their thing a mere matter of meters away, in real time.
I could snipe about jaded New Yorkers here. After all, this is a woman who has breathed the same cigarette smoke as Catherine Deneuve. Who let Isabella Rossellini walk past her on the sidewalk without accosting her to tell her that her friend in Pittsburgh would jump in front of a train for her. But I won't. I wasn't raised there; I can't claim to grasp that part of the culture.
So call me a bumpkin, a hick, a rube. But please consider this: if you're concerned that your companion won't appreciate those Stanley Cup tickets because they're in a corner behind the glass, or that they'll scoff at your offer to treat them to opening night at La Scala because they won't want to sit in the gods, get over it. Believe me, we'll be grateful. Thrilled, in fact. Even with a pole.
Monday, November 16, 2009
In which my dad makes an appearance
Since I've been having a pretty hard time with my father of late -- not the worst time I've ever had with him by a long shot, but a challenging stretch nonetheless -- it occurred to me that this would be a good time to focus on some good things about him and our relationship, since there are quite a few.
There's no particular chronology here, and I'll get around to providing background as needed. For a start, my dad's 80. His employment history is as follows: age 12, pin boy at the bowling alley; age 16, started in the steel mill; Korean War, volunteered for combat but spent the war at Fort Dix in the Signal Corps; postwar, left the mills for the phone company at half the pay; went from lineman to installer to switchman, met my mom in the process, and thirty years later still had a job while all the mills were shutting down. He has lived in exactly two houses: the one in Duquesne that he grew up in, and the one he moved into when he married at age 34. He can best be described as a David Cronenberg-esque genetic mashup between Fred Rogers and Don Knotts, about a 30%/70% ratio. Fortunately for me, I got my mother's eyes; otherwise I'd be doomed.
I've spent a lot of time on a barstool next to him at the VFW (Hilltopper Post 8430, with a phone number I've had memorized since I was ten). From the day I was old enough to sit at the bar, we were partners in crime, tormenting George the bartender, who made Coach from Cheers look like Bertrand Fucking Russell. My dad's favorite technique was flummoxing him with half dollars and $2 bills, while I preferred bringing the TV remote from home and surreptitiously changing the channels on the bar TV. He never caught on.
My most special memories of the VFW, though, aren't of the super-cheap drinks, the Jukebox of Misery, the Tijuana Mama pickled sausages, the mesmerizing displays of military insignia patches, or even of harassing George. The best memories are of my dad's supernatural wallet.
Stupendously fat wallets aren't uncommon. Witness George Costanza's, thick enough - thanks to his sugar packets and receipts for everything he's ever bought - to throw his spine out of whack. The world is full of old men carting around billfolds that haven't been cleaned out since the Eisenhower administration, full of expired membership cards and school photos of grandchildren.
But I promise you, my father's is in a class by itself.
To begin with, it is a testament to the absolute indestructibility of kangaroo leather. It is the only wallet I've ever known him to have, and shows no sign of giving out anytime soon. Contributing to this somewhat may be the fact that, as my father has no ass whatsoever, the wallet when in his back pocket sort of floats in space, suspended by the cloth but not wearing against any surface. This absence of abrasion has surely contributed to its lifespan.
A large part of the sheer mass of stuff he keeps in there is of an arguably practical nature. Since he belongs to about seventy-three different lodges, veterans' groups, and fraternal organizations, and since each issues both a membership card and a key card, that accounts for many ounces of wallet-weight. Then there are the usual stuff that any normal person carries: AAA, owner's card, health insurance cards, PBS and NPR station donor discount cards, appointment cards from a cadre of doctors, lottery tickets....okay, now we're approaching the periphery of the normal range. A few Sunday donation envelopes for the church he hasn't set foot in for over thirty years. A spare house key that fit the lock two doorknob changes ago. Hmm.
That would make for a slightly chubby wallet, but my dad's doesn't stop there or anywhere near there. VFW drink chips are crammed in there, lists of prescriptions, the phone numbers of everyone he knows on individual slips of paper. He has an emery board folded in half in there. This is a wallet one of the Collyer brothers would have had. Have you ever heard the old joke about the guy with a wallet made from an elephant's foreskin? Punchline: rub it and it turns into a suitcase. You're getting the picture.
Dad's wallet defies the laws of time and space as we know them. H.P. Lovecraft would have envied his wallet. I exaggerate not a whit when I tell you that it contains an extensive reference library, right there in his pants pocket.
In 1989, when Ford was in talks to purchase Jaguar, Dad and I were at the bar, tormenting George, and the network news was on. When Dan Rather or whoever the hell it was started talking about the proposed deal, and a few of the geezers started murmuring about it, my dad said, "Yeah, there was something in the paper this morning..." and reached for the wallet and extracted a newspaper article about that very deal. Hand to god. Wait, it gets better. In 2000, when Ford bought Land Rover -- exact same thing.
Better example, with psychic overtones: No television this time, just a couple of the old farts jawing about how in the motherfucking fuck does the state milk board set the milk prices anyway. (How or why this topic arose is something that hurts my brain too much to consider.) By this time I should have been used to this, but no, my jaw still hit the bar when my dad announced that he had "something about that right here," and from the Twilight Zone of his wallet produced a clipping about the milk board.
Remember on Let's Make A Deal, how Monty Hall used to go into the audience and issue challenges like "$50 to anybody with a fountain pen!" My dad would have been so on top of that. "$500 for anyone who's got an egg!" I am completely confident that my dad could have promptly stuck his spindly fingers into the creases of his wallet and pulled out an egg, be it raw, hard-boiled, poached, or ostrich.
I prefer to keep my own wallet as trim as possible, although all of my pockets are usually full up with stuff (see post above). But whenever I see Dad's multidimensional wallet I can't help but admire it, even as I shudder at the thought of shlepping it around.
There's no particular chronology here, and I'll get around to providing background as needed. For a start, my dad's 80. His employment history is as follows: age 12, pin boy at the bowling alley; age 16, started in the steel mill; Korean War, volunteered for combat but spent the war at Fort Dix in the Signal Corps; postwar, left the mills for the phone company at half the pay; went from lineman to installer to switchman, met my mom in the process, and thirty years later still had a job while all the mills were shutting down. He has lived in exactly two houses: the one in Duquesne that he grew up in, and the one he moved into when he married at age 34. He can best be described as a David Cronenberg-esque genetic mashup between Fred Rogers and Don Knotts, about a 30%/70% ratio. Fortunately for me, I got my mother's eyes; otherwise I'd be doomed.
I've spent a lot of time on a barstool next to him at the VFW (Hilltopper Post 8430, with a phone number I've had memorized since I was ten). From the day I was old enough to sit at the bar, we were partners in crime, tormenting George the bartender, who made Coach from Cheers look like Bertrand Fucking Russell. My dad's favorite technique was flummoxing him with half dollars and $2 bills, while I preferred bringing the TV remote from home and surreptitiously changing the channels on the bar TV. He never caught on.
My most special memories of the VFW, though, aren't of the super-cheap drinks, the Jukebox of Misery, the Tijuana Mama pickled sausages, the mesmerizing displays of military insignia patches, or even of harassing George. The best memories are of my dad's supernatural wallet.
Stupendously fat wallets aren't uncommon. Witness George Costanza's, thick enough - thanks to his sugar packets and receipts for everything he's ever bought - to throw his spine out of whack. The world is full of old men carting around billfolds that haven't been cleaned out since the Eisenhower administration, full of expired membership cards and school photos of grandchildren.
But I promise you, my father's is in a class by itself.
To begin with, it is a testament to the absolute indestructibility of kangaroo leather. It is the only wallet I've ever known him to have, and shows no sign of giving out anytime soon. Contributing to this somewhat may be the fact that, as my father has no ass whatsoever, the wallet when in his back pocket sort of floats in space, suspended by the cloth but not wearing against any surface. This absence of abrasion has surely contributed to its lifespan.
A large part of the sheer mass of stuff he keeps in there is of an arguably practical nature. Since he belongs to about seventy-three different lodges, veterans' groups, and fraternal organizations, and since each issues both a membership card and a key card, that accounts for many ounces of wallet-weight. Then there are the usual stuff that any normal person carries: AAA, owner's card, health insurance cards, PBS and NPR station donor discount cards, appointment cards from a cadre of doctors, lottery tickets....okay, now we're approaching the periphery of the normal range. A few Sunday donation envelopes for the church he hasn't set foot in for over thirty years. A spare house key that fit the lock two doorknob changes ago. Hmm.
That would make for a slightly chubby wallet, but my dad's doesn't stop there or anywhere near there. VFW drink chips are crammed in there, lists of prescriptions, the phone numbers of everyone he knows on individual slips of paper. He has an emery board folded in half in there. This is a wallet one of the Collyer brothers would have had. Have you ever heard the old joke about the guy with a wallet made from an elephant's foreskin? Punchline: rub it and it turns into a suitcase. You're getting the picture.
Dad's wallet defies the laws of time and space as we know them. H.P. Lovecraft would have envied his wallet. I exaggerate not a whit when I tell you that it contains an extensive reference library, right there in his pants pocket.
In 1989, when Ford was in talks to purchase Jaguar, Dad and I were at the bar, tormenting George, and the network news was on. When Dan Rather or whoever the hell it was started talking about the proposed deal, and a few of the geezers started murmuring about it, my dad said, "Yeah, there was something in the paper this morning..." and reached for the wallet and extracted a newspaper article about that very deal. Hand to god. Wait, it gets better. In 2000, when Ford bought Land Rover -- exact same thing.
Better example, with psychic overtones: No television this time, just a couple of the old farts jawing about how in the motherfucking fuck does the state milk board set the milk prices anyway. (How or why this topic arose is something that hurts my brain too much to consider.) By this time I should have been used to this, but no, my jaw still hit the bar when my dad announced that he had "something about that right here," and from the Twilight Zone of his wallet produced a clipping about the milk board.
Remember on Let's Make A Deal, how Monty Hall used to go into the audience and issue challenges like "$50 to anybody with a fountain pen!" My dad would have been so on top of that. "$500 for anyone who's got an egg!" I am completely confident that my dad could have promptly stuck his spindly fingers into the creases of his wallet and pulled out an egg, be it raw, hard-boiled, poached, or ostrich.
I prefer to keep my own wallet as trim as possible, although all of my pockets are usually full up with stuff (see post above). But whenever I see Dad's multidimensional wallet I can't help but admire it, even as I shudder at the thought of shlepping it around.
Friday, November 13, 2009
In which I consider the poem in my pocket
I've always been one of those fellows who needs pockets. Lots of them, and roomy. Cargo pants were invented with me in mind. The carpenter jeans fad of the 70s turned out to be prescient, as the ruler pocket is now ideal for one's mobile phone.
I was that boy whose pockets were always bulging with interesting stones and a key to my grandpap's attic and a cool-looking bottlecap I found there, acorns and an old square iron nail from my cousin's farm and my lucky arrowhead and...all my treasures nestled securely as I toted them around. When something held meaning for me, or merely pleased me by the way it looked or felt, it would take on a talismanic aura, and I would always want it with me. It was comforting and helped me feel connected to the places or people or experiences I associated with these objects. Keeping my little items safe made me feel both protected and capable of protecting something dear.
Now the morning or evening ritual of filling or emptying my pockets involves many items of a far more practical nature rather than a whimsical one. There are still echoes of the little boy's wondering senses in the way I pause to enjoy the heft and texture of my pocket knife*, still the tinge of mystical fascination while I choose a favorite coin** to carry as a worry stone. The pen and mechanical pencil I slip into my shirt pocket are ones that the 8-year-old me would have selected if he'd had a larger allowance, and I enjoy the tactile pleasure of a wallet made of mellow baseball-glove leather***.
But the keys I now carry no longer open the treasure room-cum-museum of Grandpap Cooney's attic, the musty playland where, undisturbed, I could don an itchy Eisenhower jacket and look for titties in the National Geographic. The keys I used today are for keeping people out as much as letting them in, for making things go rather than allowing time to stop. And where before a penny in my pocket was to me a richly textured disc of copper bearing intriguing symbols that hinted at great leaders and vast empires and bold ideas, today what my wallet holds are tokens of obligation, responsibility, conformity. It is stuffed with tatty, ugly, germ- and drug-laden small bills for which I slowly trade my soul and with which I can barely sustain my body. The driver's license that functions as my identification confers not one bit of truth about my identity. And the AAA card tucked in there states that I belong to that organization, but I don't feel any sense of belonging, and touching the plastic card that confers this belonging upon me doesn't make me feel anything at all. It isn't an artifact of me.
I could touch that square nail in my pocket and feel that I belonged somewhere, came from somewhere. Touching it, I could smell the cows' warm exhalations, hear my Aunt Peg talking in Slovak to her pet chicken Veronica as they sat side by side on the sofa watching Walter Cronkite, feel the venom of the wasp that stung my ear beside the pond. Rolling that 200-year-old piece of iron that I'd scavenged from the delapidated carriage house between my fingers, I could hear the echo of the rifle from the woods the afternoon my cousin shot my favorite dog, Lonesome, for killing chickens, even though I tried to tell him that Lonesome had been with me all day and that it was his wealthy wife's horrid, pampered, bug-eyed Boston Terrier that had run down the hill past us with feathers and blood all over its face.
Science tells us that the olfactory sense is the one that calls up our most deeply-buried and evocative memories. Many has been the time, walking past the circulation desk in the library, that I've been seized by a sudden and inexplicable flashback to the heavenly warm aroma of Mrs Engel's fluffy golden egg buns filling the cafeteria of St Robert Bellarmine Elementary. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the inside of my mother's purse smelled like pennies, gumbands, and Dentyne gum, with a subtle undertone of tobacco and the pre-moistened towelettes that Kentucky Fried Chicken used to provide. So I have no argument with that assertion.
My most powerful sensations, though, are visual and tactile. The world enters me through my eyes and my skin far ahead of the other organs. Sight and touch are how we experience solid objects, and solid objects are the things that both contain and retrieve my memories.
What would happen if I lost one of those things? Those things that bear my memories?
I have. I've lost so many things - in moving house, in chaotic breakups, in the depths of a lake when the canoe tipped, in the mail, in my girlfriend's dog****, in a box of stuff dropped off at Goodwill - things that I had prized and protected. I remember them all, like the beautifully crafted leather pouch that I'd bartered for in exchange for some licorice root***** at a music festival on the first long trip I ever took by myself. That's long gone. Or the small woodcut print of a woman's face that Ginny Acklin gave me after I tried to kiss her but she turned me down. I hope someone somewhere has found it and wondered about it and hung it on their wall. My dysfunctional horses Rosebud and Spirit, the former a perpetually pissed-off equine Jeep, the latter a singularly gorgeous leopard Appaloosa who was too terrified to venture more than 100 yards from the barn (he came around eventually, after lots of unconditional patience and a lot of my walking home through the woods without my shoes). I lost my horses and my brilliant three-legged dog and I tried to die.
And I lost my mother.
And I lost the little boy with the pockets full of treasure.
And I may lose a woman I was born to love.
Loss terrifies me to the marrow of my bones. The nucleus of every cell shrivels and hides at the merest hint of it. It is unbearable. Unbearable, and inescapable. I've fought against it since forever, to utter exhaustion, even though no one has ever won that battle or ever will.
One day Elizabeth Bishop saved me. She confronted me, poked me in the chest, asked me, What if it didn't have to be a battle? Can the meaning, the truth, of the lost thing itself be replaced by the meaning and truth of the memory of the thing?
It seemed worth a try. Now I carry this poem in my indestructible wallet, in my snug pocket, along with my other talismans and dully useful objects. I would hate to lose my knife, or my keys, or my cash. I'm certain I couldn't bear losing my beloved. But I know I'll never lose this perfect poem, because at long last I am beginning to understand it and perhaps, someday, I'll learn how to live it.
*Schatt & Morgan Series XVIII bare-end English jack
**presently the marvelously hefty 1985 $100 Mexican peso with Venustiano Carranza obverse
***J. Peterman. No, really.
****18th century family heirloom nativity set
*****Glycyrrhiza glabra
_______
One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
- Elizabeth Bishop
I was that boy whose pockets were always bulging with interesting stones and a key to my grandpap's attic and a cool-looking bottlecap I found there, acorns and an old square iron nail from my cousin's farm and my lucky arrowhead and...all my treasures nestled securely as I toted them around. When something held meaning for me, or merely pleased me by the way it looked or felt, it would take on a talismanic aura, and I would always want it with me. It was comforting and helped me feel connected to the places or people or experiences I associated with these objects. Keeping my little items safe made me feel both protected and capable of protecting something dear.
Now the morning or evening ritual of filling or emptying my pockets involves many items of a far more practical nature rather than a whimsical one. There are still echoes of the little boy's wondering senses in the way I pause to enjoy the heft and texture of my pocket knife*, still the tinge of mystical fascination while I choose a favorite coin** to carry as a worry stone. The pen and mechanical pencil I slip into my shirt pocket are ones that the 8-year-old me would have selected if he'd had a larger allowance, and I enjoy the tactile pleasure of a wallet made of mellow baseball-glove leather***.
But the keys I now carry no longer open the treasure room-cum-museum of Grandpap Cooney's attic, the musty playland where, undisturbed, I could don an itchy Eisenhower jacket and look for titties in the National Geographic. The keys I used today are for keeping people out as much as letting them in, for making things go rather than allowing time to stop. And where before a penny in my pocket was to me a richly textured disc of copper bearing intriguing symbols that hinted at great leaders and vast empires and bold ideas, today what my wallet holds are tokens of obligation, responsibility, conformity. It is stuffed with tatty, ugly, germ- and drug-laden small bills for which I slowly trade my soul and with which I can barely sustain my body. The driver's license that functions as my identification confers not one bit of truth about my identity. And the AAA card tucked in there states that I belong to that organization, but I don't feel any sense of belonging, and touching the plastic card that confers this belonging upon me doesn't make me feel anything at all. It isn't an artifact of me.
I could touch that square nail in my pocket and feel that I belonged somewhere, came from somewhere. Touching it, I could smell the cows' warm exhalations, hear my Aunt Peg talking in Slovak to her pet chicken Veronica as they sat side by side on the sofa watching Walter Cronkite, feel the venom of the wasp that stung my ear beside the pond. Rolling that 200-year-old piece of iron that I'd scavenged from the delapidated carriage house between my fingers, I could hear the echo of the rifle from the woods the afternoon my cousin shot my favorite dog, Lonesome, for killing chickens, even though I tried to tell him that Lonesome had been with me all day and that it was his wealthy wife's horrid, pampered, bug-eyed Boston Terrier that had run down the hill past us with feathers and blood all over its face.
Science tells us that the olfactory sense is the one that calls up our most deeply-buried and evocative memories. Many has been the time, walking past the circulation desk in the library, that I've been seized by a sudden and inexplicable flashback to the heavenly warm aroma of Mrs Engel's fluffy golden egg buns filling the cafeteria of St Robert Bellarmine Elementary. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the inside of my mother's purse smelled like pennies, gumbands, and Dentyne gum, with a subtle undertone of tobacco and the pre-moistened towelettes that Kentucky Fried Chicken used to provide. So I have no argument with that assertion.
My most powerful sensations, though, are visual and tactile. The world enters me through my eyes and my skin far ahead of the other organs. Sight and touch are how we experience solid objects, and solid objects are the things that both contain and retrieve my memories.
What would happen if I lost one of those things? Those things that bear my memories?
I have. I've lost so many things - in moving house, in chaotic breakups, in the depths of a lake when the canoe tipped, in the mail, in my girlfriend's dog****, in a box of stuff dropped off at Goodwill - things that I had prized and protected. I remember them all, like the beautifully crafted leather pouch that I'd bartered for in exchange for some licorice root***** at a music festival on the first long trip I ever took by myself. That's long gone. Or the small woodcut print of a woman's face that Ginny Acklin gave me after I tried to kiss her but she turned me down. I hope someone somewhere has found it and wondered about it and hung it on their wall. My dysfunctional horses Rosebud and Spirit, the former a perpetually pissed-off equine Jeep, the latter a singularly gorgeous leopard Appaloosa who was too terrified to venture more than 100 yards from the barn (he came around eventually, after lots of unconditional patience and a lot of my walking home through the woods without my shoes). I lost my horses and my brilliant three-legged dog and I tried to die.
And I lost my mother.
And I lost the little boy with the pockets full of treasure.
And I may lose a woman I was born to love.
Loss terrifies me to the marrow of my bones. The nucleus of every cell shrivels and hides at the merest hint of it. It is unbearable. Unbearable, and inescapable. I've fought against it since forever, to utter exhaustion, even though no one has ever won that battle or ever will.
One day Elizabeth Bishop saved me. She confronted me, poked me in the chest, asked me, What if it didn't have to be a battle? Can the meaning, the truth, of the lost thing itself be replaced by the meaning and truth of the memory of the thing?
It seemed worth a try. Now I carry this poem in my indestructible wallet, in my snug pocket, along with my other talismans and dully useful objects. I would hate to lose my knife, or my keys, or my cash. I'm certain I couldn't bear losing my beloved. But I know I'll never lose this perfect poem, because at long last I am beginning to understand it and perhaps, someday, I'll learn how to live it.
*Schatt & Morgan Series XVIII bare-end English jack
**presently the marvelously hefty 1985 $100 Mexican peso with Venustiano Carranza obverse
***J. Peterman. No, really.
****18th century family heirloom nativity set
*****Glycyrrhiza glabra
_______
One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
- Elizabeth Bishop
In which I do not have one of those days
No, this day has been absolutely singular thus far, and it's barely past lunchtime.
So far I have:
- reconnected with two different people from my ancient past, and been thoroughly tossed around by the consequent whirlwind of emotion and memory.
- inadvertantly insulted the pharmacist, then only apologized myself into an even deeper and stupider hole, and now I'm afraid he's going to spike my next refill.
- had a meltdown in the soup aisle. They really should not be allowed to play Carmen McRae in the supermarket. I hate crying while I shop. It smears my list and gets the coupons all wet.
- proposed an elopement, only partly in jest, to the woman who bagged my groceries perfectly. What's that? Do I have control issues around my groceries and their arrangement in the bag? Whatever would make you think such a thing?
- was relieved when she rejected my offer, because I'm already the international poster boy for Poor Verbal Impulse Control and don't need any more regrets in that department, thanks very much.
- and besides, really, I did most of the work for her. I always arrange everything on the belt in the order it should be packed. Cold & frozen together, fragile stuff at the end, all that. So unless she's really into Stargate Universe or Japanese bondage or Turkmen cuisine, and doesn't have any extra toes, it was probably a doomed relationship from the start.
- flipped off and hollered at the woman-hating pro-forced-childbirth protesters at the corner of 30 & 148 on my way home.
- realized that the woman I was yelling at was my Confirmation* sponsor 30 years ago, Mrs B. What's really interesting about this is, she was the RN who cared for my mother at home as she was dying, and -- well, there's no point being delicate about this -- when it was time, she pushed her enough morphine to ease her out of her pain and out of this world.
- felt terrible, because that one good deed way more than balances out her miniscule contribution to the anti-choice asshattery, and I'll flatten anyone who says it doesn't. In this case, compassion trumps hypocrisy.
- and to be fair, she was holding the least offensive sign out of the group: "Adoption is the Loving Choice." Change that the to an a and you'll get no argument from me there.
- learned why it's not a good idea to hold a 2-liter bottle of coke between your knees while you attempt to slam the tailgate shut with your arms full.
- as a direct result of the item immediately above, eneded up with a raggedy splinter in my palm, and a rock salt rash on my elbow.
And that's just the first half of the day. Where it may go from there, I dare not consider.
*It's Stephen, in case you care. And I know I can't be the only person who wishes in retrospect that he'd hit the bishop back.
So far I have:
- reconnected with two different people from my ancient past, and been thoroughly tossed around by the consequent whirlwind of emotion and memory.
- inadvertantly insulted the pharmacist, then only apologized myself into an even deeper and stupider hole, and now I'm afraid he's going to spike my next refill.
- had a meltdown in the soup aisle. They really should not be allowed to play Carmen McRae in the supermarket. I hate crying while I shop. It smears my list and gets the coupons all wet.
- proposed an elopement, only partly in jest, to the woman who bagged my groceries perfectly. What's that? Do I have control issues around my groceries and their arrangement in the bag? Whatever would make you think such a thing?
- was relieved when she rejected my offer, because I'm already the international poster boy for Poor Verbal Impulse Control and don't need any more regrets in that department, thanks very much.
- and besides, really, I did most of the work for her. I always arrange everything on the belt in the order it should be packed. Cold & frozen together, fragile stuff at the end, all that. So unless she's really into Stargate Universe or Japanese bondage or Turkmen cuisine, and doesn't have any extra toes, it was probably a doomed relationship from the start.
- flipped off and hollered at the woman-hating pro-forced-childbirth protesters at the corner of 30 & 148 on my way home.
- realized that the woman I was yelling at was my Confirmation* sponsor 30 years ago, Mrs B. What's really interesting about this is, she was the RN who cared for my mother at home as she was dying, and -- well, there's no point being delicate about this -- when it was time, she pushed her enough morphine to ease her out of her pain and out of this world.
- felt terrible, because that one good deed way more than balances out her miniscule contribution to the anti-choice asshattery, and I'll flatten anyone who says it doesn't. In this case, compassion trumps hypocrisy.
- and to be fair, she was holding the least offensive sign out of the group: "Adoption is the Loving Choice." Change that the to an a and you'll get no argument from me there.
- learned why it's not a good idea to hold a 2-liter bottle of coke between your knees while you attempt to slam the tailgate shut with your arms full.
- as a direct result of the item immediately above, eneded up with a raggedy splinter in my palm, and a rock salt rash on my elbow.
And that's just the first half of the day. Where it may go from there, I dare not consider.
*It's Stephen, in case you care. And I know I can't be the only person who wishes in retrospect that he'd hit the bishop back.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
In which I set Emily Dickinson spinning in her grave
In light of the recent CMU study suggesting that hope is mentally unhealthy, I hereby offer a rebuttal to Emily Dickinson.
___________________________________
Hope is the thing that slithers
And creeps throughout the brain,
And whispers things we long to hear --
To fool us yet again,
And tempting are the words it speaks;
And weakness it can find,
The better to entice us with
And play tricks on the mind.
It keeps that closure out of reach
Which would cold heartbreak salve;
It taunts us with enduring want
For what we ne'er may have.
___________________________________
Hope is the thing that slithers
And creeps throughout the brain,
And whispers things we long to hear --
To fool us yet again,
And tempting are the words it speaks;
And weakness it can find,
The better to entice us with
And play tricks on the mind.
It keeps that closure out of reach
Which would cold heartbreak salve;
It taunts us with enduring want
For what we ne'er may have.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
