Sort Quench, & Dump

Magic Pink über-stylish Onion-Chopping goggles

2012-01-26T08:06:00.006-05:00

It has come to SQD's attention that we don't do enough for the economy, which is to say that we rarely pitch products. In fact, we have never pitched a product because we don't like any products unless they were grown in the ground, emitted by a chicken, dropped from a tree or miraculously created by a saint.
But that is about to change.
SQD hereby endorses the Magic Pink über-stylish Onion-Chopping goggles. I don't need to explain the paramount attractiveness of the goggles, because you see that plainly in the above picture. But what the picture doesn't show - because there are none - are the tears not wept on the occasion of chopping all those onions. For the first time in a lifetime of lacrimose onion-chopping, your blogger did not blubber and her eyes did not sting and still the onions were chopped.

And yes, I had hitherto tried all sorts of other putative tear-prevention techniques, such as burning a candle or chopping under water or naked, or standing on one foot while listening to Wagner. Nothing worked like the Magic Pink über-stylish Onion-Chopping goggles.

Downton Abbey and H.G.Wells

2012-01-23T11:52:00.006-05:00

Did you, like 99% of the civilized world, and 100% of the uncivilized world, watch the latest installment of Downton Abbey last night? No? Is it possible that you, like CSB and one or two other misguided souls, watched football instead? Or perhaps you played mah-jongg with your mother-in-law, or practiced Estonian irregular verbs, or prepared for that super-fun colonoscopy? Or perhaps you shoveled out the chicken coop because your chickens do not like getting their feet cold in the snow? Or perhaps you counted the ballast stones in the basement, for historical purposes, and found ossuary remains?
But if you did watch Downton Abbey chances are very good you are wondering: what would H. G. Wells have thought about this? What exactly was H.G. doing while the Crawleys are trying to hang on to their estate while remaining ignorant about the machinations of the wicked O’Brien and Thomas downstairs? (How can Cora, the American heiress, be so clueless about the nasty intriguing of her lady’s maid? Are we meant to think that because she is an American, she is less likely to be a good judge of the downstairs character?)
To begin:
DOWNton Abbey is a squarish pile of bricks and stone that is said to reside in Yorkshire, but is really Highclere Castle, seat of the Earls of Carnarvon, which is in Hampshire.

UPpark, where H.G.’s mother was housekeeper and where he sometimes stayed as a child, is a similarly squarish pile in Sussex. It is still there.
The grounds of Highclere Castle were designed by Capability Brown
The grounds of Uppark were landscaped by Humphry Repton.
The 5th Earl of Carnarvon was a passionate Egyptologist and colleague of Howard Carter; together they discovered the tomb of King Tut in 1922, spawning the Boy-King mega franchise responsible for chicken-like dance moves, a spike in gold paint sales and Disney’s Vinylmation 9” King Tut with mouse ears. My grandmother did not know Howard Carter, but she frequently visited digs around Cairo and I have a picture of her jauntily holding a 4000 year-old vase beside a tomb, which gives you an idea of how lax security was in those halcyon days of archeology.
Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh (pronounced “fa-ha”), who inherited Uppark in 1760, was a Regency buck and gave all indications of being a lifelong bachelor. Until the age of 70 when he married his 20-year old dairymaid, Mary Ann Bullock. Sir Harry sent her to Paris to learn some graces and lose her Sussex accent. She taught him everything she knew about milking cows and making butter. They lived happily together for 22 years, with Mary Ann’s sister Fanny as companion. Sir Harry died at 96. His much younger wife, Lady Fetherstonhaugh, stayed on at Uppark with her sister, keeping everything exactly as it was in Sir Harry’s time. She survived him by 29 years; Fanny lived until 1895. Fanny Bullock first hired Sarah Neal, mother of the not yet world famous H.G. Wells, as her maid. They were the same age and of similar backgrounds. Then in 1880 Fanny asked Sarah Neal to return to Uppark as housekeeper. Just like Mrs. Hughes. And that is how H.G. Wells came spend part of his childhood, downstairs at Uppark.

But the comparisons do not stop there, not at all.
For instance, on August 4th, 1914, the Crawley family is hosting an elegant garden party on the grounds of Downton, when the Earl receives a telegram informing him that Britain has gone to war.
On that same day, H.G. Wells and his family and houseguests walked to the annual fete hosted by Lady Warwick. Also on that same day, H.G.’s son by Rebecca West (26 years younger* and not his wife) is born.
There is more.
At Downton Abbey Lady Mary’s lover, the Turkish attaché Mr. Pamuk, dies in her bed, and scandal hovers in the air.
In London, Hedwig Gatternigg, a past lover of H.G.’s, bursts into his flat, throws open her coat to reveal that she is naked beneath, and brandishes a knife. She threatens to kill herself if H.G. does not make love to her immediately. Scandal hovers in the air.
Both H.G. and Lady Mary are saved by quick-thinking servants.

The Earl of Grantham marries an American heiress in order to save his family’s estate.
H.G. Wells has an affair with Margaret Sanger, the American pioneer of birth control.

It is a crisis at Downton Abbey when, because of the war, there is not an available footman to serve at dinner. And we all know how tacky it is to have dinner served by a female of the species.
In his novel Kipps, H.G. Wells writes of the young Mr. and Mrs. Kipps who want to build a house that is efficient and servant-friendly, that is, in which the housemaid needn’t run up and down stairs all day long. Their good intentions are thwarted.

The driving force of Downton Abbey’s plot is the desire to retain ownership of the family pile despite the entail.
H.G. Wells was a member of the Fabians for many years, a friend of Maxim Gorky, and a lifelong Socialist.
So if the question is: How would H.G. Wells have liked "Downton Abbey"? The answer is: he would have loved it.

*Rebecca West was born in 1892, the same year my other grandmother was born, not the one holding 4000 year old vases, but the one who read H.G. Wells and only H.G. Wells over and over for the last three decades of her life.

Rollerskating in the cloisters

2012-01-20T16:15:00.005-05:00

In the annals of unwanted gifts mothers give their sons, this is hardly the worst. My son would probably rank it several notches above the desktop croquet set or lifetime membership to the Hagiographers Club or the plaid vest with antler buttons. Still, it is disconcerting to read the inscription: To Phil, Christmas 1949, love Mother, on the flyleaf of this book, filled with vignettes of the paranormal, the weird, the impossible, and the miraculous. It is hard to imagine what would interest Phil, the man who was not yet my father, less than the paranormal, weird and miraculous tales contained therein, except perhaps his horoscope or membership in his local Theosophical Society. It speaks volumes of the gap between mother and son.
But ill-considered gifts are not the true topic of this particular screed. The true topic may well be the same old topic, which is: It is a Good Idea to Keep Books, no matter how weird and random and useless they appear. (And yes, there are always exceptions.) As in this book, which has probably been in the basement since that Christmas of 1949. This time it is Patrick Mahony’s Out of the Silence, (1948 edition, Storm Publishers). If the generic title does not intrigue you, continue on to the subtitle: A Book of Factual Fantasies.
Given my fondness for lives of the paranormal, weird, impossible and miraculous saints, it seems logical that I would be compelled. Equally compelling, the introduction was written by Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), the Belgian writer who was also a beekeeper and wrote the exquisite The Life of the Bee, in which he goes into raptures about the sexual adventures of the queen bee. It is true that MM is probably better known for his plays, particularly, Pelléas and Mélisande, and receiving the Nobel Prize, but think it is The Life of the Bee that will endure. So I sat among the dusty pages and read Out of the Silence.*
I read about the Vennums of Watseka, Illinois and how their daughter Lurancy had a cataleptic fit and then turned into the dead daughter of a family across town, the Roffs. Her transformation was so absolute that all agreed she should move in with the Roffs. They were happy to have their dead daughter back. Then a year later Lurancy, now Mary Roff, had another cataleptic fit and turned back into Lurancy Vennum.
I read about the French teacher in Latvia whose astral projection picked flowers while she was teaching irregular verbs in the classroom.
I read about the brother-in-law’s ghost spelling the word F-O-R-E-V-E-R in the sand.
But this is where it all came together: Mahony relates how when Maeterlinck and his lover Georgette LeBlanc lived at the Abbey of St Wandrille, they encountered the ghost of a monk Bernard who had died in 1693, and how they discovered his bones inside a secret room. (That’s the “factual fantasy”.)
It so happens that I had read about Maeterlinck’s stay in that monastery when I was reading his Life of the Bee.
[Saints will now be mentioned, but very little.It is really just one saint, and more about architecture.] Saint Wandrille or Wandregisilus (d. 668) was born near Verdun and from his earliest years was determined to be a monk. However, to please his parents he married, but went to on to have a chaste marriage. (Depending on the version: it is also said that Wandrille and his bride were the parents of St Landrada, which implies they were not entirely chaste.) The bride is heard from no more, and Wandrille went into a monastery. Around 657 he built the Abbey and a basilica in the Carolingian style. The church burned to the ground in 756 but was later rebuilt in another style. In the 9th century the abbey was the frequent target of Viking raids, and was burned again. This time the monks grabbed St Wandrille’s bones and fled the flames. The church and abbey were restored in the 10th century and proceeded to have several good centuries; it was the heyday of monasteries. One of the many privileges afforded to the good monks was an exemption from river tolls on the Seine.
Then, in 1631, the central tower fell with no warning and crushed large sections of the abbey. During the Revolution the abbey was suppressed, and sold for auction in 1791. Several more bad years followed when it was used as a factory. But then George Stacpoole, a quirky Irishman hoping to ingratiate himself with the pope, bought the abbey and lived there until 1896. On his death, he gave the property to the French Benedictines, but they were expelled by the French government in 1901 and had to seek exile in Belgium. Then – and this is the time that especially concerns us – Maurice Maeterlinck rented the abbey from 1907 to 1914, and lived there with his lover Georgette LeBlanc.** According to Mahony they entertained lavishly and rehearsed many of his plays. This is Georgette when she is not dressed as a nun.
Mahony does not mention Maurice and Georgette dressing up as monks and nuns and roller-skating through the vast courtyards and cloisters and halls of St Wandrille. Nor does he mention Maeterlinck’s bees.
In 1931 the Benedictines got the monastery back and they are still there, praying in silence and being hospitable to visitors, but given the history of the abbey, we hope that the monks have a plan B.

This block of 1951 stamps of St Wandrille Abbey sold on eBay for $13.00 on the last day of last year.

*Not to be confused with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence, in which he describes his stay with the monks of St Wandrille Abbey.

**I can highly recommend Georgette’s memoir, Souvenirs: My Life with Maeterlinck, in which she recounts how she stalked and seduced and landed Maeterlinck as her lover.

Bread

2012-01-09T19:07:00.004-05:00

This past Christmas two very dear friends – who perhaps have a rosier notion of my technical abilities than is warranted – gave me a breadmaker. Not a baker, as in a person who makes bread, but a squat stainless steel machine that makes bread. It would not exactly be true to say that I have always wanted a breadmaker, but I do love bread, and in particular, I think a French baguette is one of the most perfect foods on the planet. This breadmaker does not make baguettes, but we will not discuss that.
My first loaf – Artisan white – was perfectly fine. So fine that instead of recognizing it for beginners luck, I became cocky and decided to try for a rye bread, CSB’s favorite. The recipe called for Vital Wheat Gluten. I had never heard of Vital Wheat Gluten and had no idea what it was. But I had heard of Wheat Germ, and while I don’t know what wheat germ is either, I had some in my refrigerator. I have since learned that Vital Wheat Gluten and Wheat Germ are not the same thing. Which would explain why they are known by different names. The substitution of Wheat Germ for Vital Wheat Gluten in the rye bread recipe may not be the only reason for the pathetic failure of that bread. I say that because my attempted oatmeal bread also turned into a lumpy, messy, hardened and unmixed lump. And Vital Wheat Gluten was not called for in the oatmeal bread recipe. I did however substitute honey for maple syrup. You may think that my creative substitutions are the reason for my failures. But I used the exact ingredients listed for the rosemary bread, and still, it deflated like one of those hideous inflatable Christmas dwarfs in front yards.

Hagio-alert: saints will now be mentioned. It has occurred to me to consult with various of the patron saints of bakers. One of the more interesting of these patrons – though his patronage does seem unintelligible & random – is St Meingold. He was born in Huy, which is in Belgium now but was not then because Belgium did not exist then; it wasn’t even imagined back in 850 CE. Meingold was adopted by the childless Emperor Arnulf of (somewhere in) England, and so he crossed over to meet his new family. His first mistake was to marry Geyla, whose brother Albrecht was hostile, violent, and plagued with persistent shingles. Albrecht besieged the newlyweds and tried to set fire to their castle, but managed to drown in the moat instead. The emperor fished him out. Following that debacle, Meingold and Geyla gave up their estates and silken robes, dressed badly, and wandered for seven years from shrine to shrine, admiring finger bones and skulls and even some very special vials of saintly blood. Meingold was killed by some old enemies while he was praying, and there is nothing in the story about him ever having anything to do with bakers or baking or even ovens, though it seems safe to assume that he ate bread. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary is a far more obvious candidate for Patron Saint of Bakers, as the bread she was carrying to the poor turned into roses when she was rudely questioned.
The bread I tried to make just turned into an unappetizing lump, though the chickens were delighted with it.
As I read it, the subtext of his tale is that Honorius of Amiens was not a particularly saintly person. When she heard that he had been made a bishop, Honorius’ old nursemaid was baking bread and said, “That brat is no more likely to be a bishop than this peel (shovel/spatula) is about to turn back into a tree.” I don’t need to tell you what happened next. Her baker’s peel sprouted roots and instantly grew into a blackberry tree.Nine hundred years later gullible pilgrims were still visiting it, and Honorius got to be a patron of bakers. There is a chain of cake-shops in Hong Kong named for him.
If the above is possible, then it should be possible for me to produce an edible loaf of bread with a state-of-the-art breadmaker.

The Life and Times of Paco Underhill, with apologies

2012-01-06T09:26:00.006-05:00

Let’s start at the beginning. 1951.
What happened in 1951?
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, was published, and disaffected preppies were never the same again.
Maggie Roberts married Dennis Thatcher and turned over night into Magaret Thatcher.
But the big news came on December 23rd, when the last Belgian towns finally got electricity and Frances Stoneback Underhill was born to his delighted parents, Francis and Savi.

In 1952 the little Underhill family moved abroad to (Poland?) where the hairless & precocious one-year celebrated his first birthday. And though Christine Jorgenson became the 1st person to undergo a sex-change operation, Underhill Ma & Pa kept the disturbing news from your Paco.

On the occasion of his second birthday in 1953, Paco announced that he wanted to redesign the public space in the Warsaw playground. He said he did not care a fig when General Electric announced all Communist employees would be fired.

Paco had to share the limelight on his 3rd birthday in 1954, with the first human kidney transplant. He has had an ambivalent relationship with kidneys ever since.

I don’t know where Paco was living in 1955 but I feel sure it was another exotic country, where it probably was not featured on the evening news that the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York was opened to traffic. For his birthday, Paco requested a copy of “Blue Suede Shoes.”

On the very day before Paco’s 5th birthday, in 1956, Colo, the gorilla was born – he was the first gorilla bred in captivity. Paco sympathized.

1957: Paco celebrated his 6th birthday in the Philippines (Other country?) by organizing all his friends into a field team and following around shopper in the Manila Food Market. That same month, Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown, while he was still married to his 1st wife.

In 1958 Paco sang along with the Number one hit: “The Chipmunk Song”, at his birthday party. The Embassy staff were amazed and suggested he look into a career in diplomacy. Meanwhile, French franc was devalued. His sister Lisa entered the world with great fanfare; Paco felt compelled to point that that she was “only” a baby sister.

Who knows where Paco & the Underhill clan found themselves in 1959? We can only hope that there was decent television reception so that he could watch the debut "Rocky & His Friends".

IN 1960 Paco was busy learning the multiplication tables & as was proper for a nine-year old, he kept a menagerie of crickets and stinkbugs in his pockets. He was delighted when. King Baudouin of Belgium married dona Fabiola de Mora y Aragon, because they would look so lovely on stamps.

1961: Unfortunately for the Museum of Modern Art, they hung Matisse's “Le Bateau” upside down for 47 days. At age 10, Paco was not yet active on their advisory committee.

In 1963 Paco turned 12, and Bell Telephone introduced push button telephone; Paco, the budding shopping guru immediately saw the possibilities for touch-tone dialing and keeping people waiting endlessly on the phone.

In 1964 entered that glorious time in one’s life known as teenager-hood, and Ringo Starr had his tonsils removed.

It is no coincidence that Paco entered high school in 1965, the very year in which the director Kenneth Tynan said the word "fuck" on BBC. The world has never been the same again.

Since the records have been sealed, we will gloss over Paco’s illustrious high school career at Milton Academy Boys School. Outside of academia, a few important world events did grab his attention: in 1966 LSD was declared illegal in the United States. The following year, Jimi Hendrix recorded “purple Haze”, and in 1968 Evel Knievel failed in his attempt to jump Caesar's Palace Fountain. That did not stop Julie Nixon from marrying David Eisenhower a mere one day before the first American case of motion sickness in space. In 1969, John Lennon's "2 Virgins" album was declared pornographic. Later that year, John Lennon was offered role of Jesus Christ in Jesus Christ Superstar. Woodstock took place in upstate New York, in the rain. Where was Paco Underhill, rock star?

And then came 1970, the year of Paco’s infamous valedictory address to the assembled throng at Milton Academy, and John Lennon’s historic release of an album containing the word "fuck". Milton Academy was never the same again.

Paco matriculated at Vassar College, yet another institution that will never be the same again. He majored in futuristics, a complex discipline combining the rigor of history with the creativity of origami with the lab work of gene-splicing with the vision of optometry. Much is shrouded in secrecy, but we do know that while Paco pursued higher education, Howard Hughes declared Clifford Irving's bio to be a fake, John Cleese's final episode on "Monty Python's Flying Circus," aired on BBC, and the timeless classic, "Young & Restless" premiered on network TV.
(Sometime in here Paco learns how to make kimchi while studying in Seoul, Korea where his father is the Deputy Ambassador.)

In 1974, Paco graduated from Vassar just in time for Richard Nixon to resign the presidency and John Lennon to report seeing a UFO over New York City. Paco immediately moved to New York City, which will never be the same again. He took up palatial quarters over Ear Inn on Spring Street, featuring rooftop access through a broken window.

In 1975, as Paco begins to pursue his lifelong ambition to change the way people use public space, the Kilauea Volcano erupts in Hawaii.

1976: Paco is still living on Spring Street when Playboy reveals that Jimmy Carter lusts for women in his heart. That same year, Paco acts as best man and chief vizier at the marriage of his friends Jeff and Christine.

In 1977 snow fell in Miami, Florida for the first and only time in that city’s history. Paco was busy founding the “first iteration” of Envirosell. If you don’t know what that iteration looked like, think: cheap cameras, seat-of-pants. Paco celebrates Thanksgiving with a bunch of friends at the soon-to-open EAR INN. No one gets ptomaine poisoning.

While babysitting in 1978, Paco removes Reine Wing Hewitt’s pink bootie. He hides it away for a future date when its reappearance will be appropriate. Under the leadership of Rip Hayman, Sari Dienes and the globe-trotting gourmet Paco Underhill, EAR INN becomes a hugely successful bar and eatery for hipsters, artist, bums, bootleggers and two-headed giraffes.

It is 1979, and as Pluto moves closer, making Neptune the outermost planet, Paco Underhill is observing shoppers and formulating the butt-brush factor that will soon take the world of retail by storm.

Paco became a godfather in 1981. Taking seriously his duty to behave so badly that he will make even the parents look good, Paco begins collecting tasteless tee shirts. Meanwhile, Vanuatu becomes a member of the United Nations.

In 1982 Paco spends many long and arduous hours making sure the barstools at EAR INN are solidly affixed to the floor. He is so busy that he doesn’t even look up when the world is stunned to learn that Urbe Blanca, a Cuban cow, cow produces a record 242.5 pounds of milk, in one day.

The 1980’s were so busy for Paco Underhill, supermarket spy, entrepreneur, retail psychologist, and restaurateur that it would be impossible to document his activities. Let us just say that he turned 33, then 34, then 35 and so on, while at Heathrow Airport $38.7 million worth of gold bars were stolen in the world’s biggest ever heist. Also, the Belgian princess Astrid married archduke Otto L van Austrian-Este. Playboy magazine announced the end of stapling centerfolds, and Coca-Cola introduced Cherry Coke to the world. An iceberg twice size of Rhode Island was sighted in Antarctic, but more significantly for Paco in his godfatherly role, the very first condom commercial was aired on BBC TV. Not long after that pivotal event, animal rights terrorists firebombed Harrod's dept. store in London. As the 1980’s drew to a close, the Bulgarian party president Todor Zjikov, resigned his post and moved to New York to start a restaurant called Kidney Kitchen, having heard that body-part-named bars did well with the American crowd. Just in time for Paco’s 38th birthday, Vice-President Quayle sent out 30,000 Xmas cards misspelling the word beacon.

Then came 1990 and the Greyhound Bus strike. Ted Turner & Jane Fonda announced their engagement and Paco started surreptitiously filming shoppers as they picked their collective noses.

In more godparental news, 1991 saw thousands of condoms being handed out free to thousands of NYC high school students. High school will never be the same again.

Only 359 years after the fact, the Catholic Church in 1992 reinstated Galileo Galilei. Paco Underhill. Age 41, advises the pope on Marketing to Sinners in the coming Millennium.

In 1993 Donald Trump wed Marla Maples, but Paco resisted the allure of matrimony. He continued to resist in 1994 when J Paul Getty Jr married Victoria Holdsworth on Barbados. In other news of the nineties, Charles and Diana divorce, Woody Allen marries Soon-Yi and President Clinton reassures the American public that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Betty Rubble finally becomes one of the Flintstone vitamins.
Yet amidst all that nuptial sturm und Drang, around 1994 Paco met the acclaimed flautist (or flutist) Sheryl Henze. She would henceforth be known to the reading public as “Dreamboat”, while she continued to be known to herself as Sheryl. He played her pipes and she stroked his solar sex-panel, otherwise known as a bald head. Love and cohabitation swiftly ensued.

In 1996, the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, in an article entitled The Science of Shopping, describes the ever-debonair Paco as goofy-looking. All over America, young men start to grow Paco’s trademark “goofy-beard”.
Then, in 1999, WHY WE BUY hits the bookstores, the airports, the boardrooms and the used book stalls along the Seine, to rave reviews. It is translated into 47 languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Esperanto and Inuit. The world of retail will never be the same again.

The world does not come to an end in 2000, even when Vermont's civil unions law goes into effect.
Madonna and Guy Ritchie get married in Scotland while Paco Underhill plays bagpipes.

IN 2001 Enron files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens after 11 years and $27,000,000. It still leans. Why We Buy is turned into a mini-series staring Madonna as Mrs. American Shopper and Richard Gere as Paco, Shopping Guru.

Signs of large ice deposits are found on the planet Mars in 2002 and The Wall Street Journal asks Paco to write a column about the potential for discount outlets on other planets.

In 2003 New Hampshire's famous Old Man of the Mountain collapses. Mother Teresa is beatified by Pope John Paul II, and the movie version of Why We Buy grosses $14m in its first weekend. It features Meryl Streep as a K-Mart shopper and George Clooney as Paco.

Things are heating up. In 2004, because of a build-up of gas, a decomposing sperm whale explodes in Taiwan, and K-Mart buys Sears for $11 billion. Call of the Mall is published, in which the acclaimed author of Why We Buy tells us all about The Geography of Shopping. Chapters Include: Major rivers, Mountain Ranges, Climate patterns and Capital cities.

Eris, the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system, is discovered in 2005 and Simon & Schuster names its new wing after Paco Underhill.

In 2006 Western Union discontinues use of its telegram service, and Kazakhstan launches its first space satellite. But the news is not all bad. Paco’s keynote speech at the Caterpillar Convention, “Tractor Lust”, electrifies the world of farm machinery.

The tomb of Herod the Great is discovered in 2007 and Paco Underhill is asked to comment on the prevalence of butt-brush in Roman Empire cemeteries.

In a year in which the Eyak language in Alaska becomes extinct as its last native speaker dies, and gold prices hit $1000 an ounce, and yet another dwarf planet is discovered, the revised edition of Why We Buy is a welcome respite. And yes, the world will never be the same again.

We are almost there. It is 2009 and the gamma ray burst GRB 090423 is observed for 10 seconds and determined to be the most distant and oldest known object in the universe. A Texas mother is hit by lightning while standing at her kitchen sink inside her Texas home. And Tiger Woods announces an indefinite leave from golf to focus on his marriage. Paco is putting the finishing touches on What Woman Want. If he spends much time in drag, we don’t know about it.

An Icelandic Volcano with the unpronounceable name (Eyjafjallajökull) erupted in 2010 and disrupted traffic all over the world. But nothing could stop the appearance of Paco Underhill’s latest must-have book, What Woman Want, the book that is famously not a sex manual. And so while you may not learn new positions to keep your spouse entertained, you will learn the important of curved shower curtain rods in hotel rooms.

All of which brings us to 2011, a year replete with natural disasters, political faux-pas, embarrassing sexual entanglements by people who should know better, Law & Order reruns, snow before Halloween, the apotheosis of the color orange and finally, just as the year is winding down, Paco’s 60th birthday.
Happy Birthday dear Paco and may you have many many more.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and the author takes no responsibility for mistakes, offenses, egregious lies, calumnies, ludicrous statements or typos.

2011-12-31T18:09:00.006-05:00

What can I say about the Christmas that is passed? (Just this one. Not all past.)
That I approached it with dread.
That for 24 days I opened the doors of the advent calendar with trepidation, dreading what would be revealed behind each snowy scene of family happiness: guilt, death, destroyed hopes, lost trust.
That it was the second Christmas without Jeff, the father of my children.
That it was the first Christmas since 2001 that did not require delicate negotiations over where the grown children would be for what celebrations.
That it was Iggy’s first Christmas and he discovered the bliss of a head massage while dressed as a candy cane.
That fake noses and fake teeth provided much needed amusement at Christmas dinner. There are few occasions that would not be enlivened by faux proboscii. Perhaps none.
That it did not snow and was in fact unseasonably warm for those of us not in Bethlehem, which is most of us. When it was 48˚ in Hastings it was 50˚ in Jerusalem. But it was not raining in Jerusalem.
That we received a moderate amount of bee-themed gifts and the ones we did receive were remarkably tasteful. The hands-down best was the bee bling-ring, which will soon be making appearances in select locations around the rivertowns.
Ditto chicken-themed gifts.
That CSB slash Santa chose exceptionally well with this year’s stocking gifts. The ergonomic salad dressing delivery system was my favorite. There was also an IOU for an ergonomic egg poacher.
That Leda discovered her vocation is to be an angel in the Christmas pageant, so long as she gets to wear that marvelous wide belt made of silver sequins.
That it is over.

The Hands of Hartford, and occasional other body parts

2011-12-31T15:52:00.002-05:00

Waxing Rhapsodic re the Wood Chipper

2011-12-12T10:07:00.004-05:00

What can I say about a wood chipper that hasn’t been said before?
They are quiet? I could say that but it would not be true.
Midday through our day of wood chipping I slipped out for a visit to our chiropractor where we discussed the merits of wood chipping, determining that the only thing that could improve the wood chipping experience would be if the machines were silent. That said, our chiropractor pointed out that for certain people (men, boys, half the human race?) one of the pleasures of heavy machinery is the noise factor. Think of ATV’s, motorcycles and anything with its muffler removed. We do wear earplugs when we employ the wood chipper, but they can only do so much and mostly what I cannot hear is anything CSB says to me, such as, Watch out for the huge branch coming your way.
The wood chipper we rented is made by Vermeer, a heavy machinery company named for the Flemish painter of exquisite – and quiet – luminous 17th century interiors. Even when he paints a music lesson, we feel certain that the notes played were soft and that no-one’s eardrums were assaulted.
And then there are the simple pleasures wood chipping: feeding the tree limbs into the hopper; pushing them towards the maw of the grinders (which are very similar to the molinos in a sugar mill, except they do not squeeze out sugar juice); watching the inexorable crushing and shredding of the woody pulp between the grinders; standing back to admire the arc of the finely chipped wood spew from the chute.
I will not mention CSB’s tired and aching limbs the following day.
A few facts to astound friends at your next party:
1. The wood chipper was invented in Germany in 1884 by Peter Jensen, who may or may not be related to the silversmith George Jensen who designed what I think are the loveliest cutlery patterns. Probably not, because Georg was Danish.
2. Between 1992 and 2005 there were 33 deaths by wood chipper in the USA. That statistic does not include the 2007 death of a Los Angeles man. As with the struggle of St Christina of Stommeln against the Devil, the details of death by wood chipper are “of so repulsive a nature that no particulars of it can be given here.”

And then there is the satisfaction of woods that look like woods and not a tornado zone.

Agreeable Men

2011-12-07T11:39:00.005-05:00

I must be blessed with agreeable men. Sometimes. Well, two of them last week in Chicago in not dissimilar ways.
It was a chilly day in Chicago. Even CSB saw the wisdom of wearing a hat. But we had no hats. It was so raw and chilly that on our walk north from Number One Son’s residence, we ducked into a Walgreen’s and acquired two faux fur, faux wool, faux hats with faux ear flaps and dangling strings, presumably to tie the ear flaps under one’s chin, but in truth their only function is decorative & I use that word generously. They were not expensive but I feel confident that whatever we paid for them was larger than the cost of producing them by a factor of at least 50. Luckily there were no mirrors in that particular Walgreen’s, so we were spared the reflection of ourselves in these faux hats, which because of their rather special shape had room for a family of ferrets between the top of my head and the top of the hat. But they kept our heads and ears, all four of them, warm.
Having acquired the hats we comfortably admired several architectural wonders of Chicago, and walked past a newly opened museum: The Loyola U. Museum of Art, so new that it was not listed in my 4 year-old guidebook. And on the sandwich board outside the LUMA (nice acronym, doncha think?) was an announcement that their current exhibit featured crèches. Yes, an entire exhibit devoted to those adorable nativity scenes, of which I have several and CSB has seen more in our time together than he thought necessary for several lifetimes. Even so, he agreeably agreed to go inside. Noting the admission fee, he agreeably volunteered to sit in the lobby with the newspaper while I viewed the crèches. His thoughtfulness so impressed the ticket-seller that she said she would waive the admission fee for both of us, because she couldn’t bear the idea that he would be unable to accompany me to see the crèches. CSB demurred. But the ticket-seller would not be denied. She said she would not feel right if he could not accompany me to see the crèches just beyond the double doors, and he had not the heart to tell her just how much he would prefer to sit quietly n the lobby and read about the depravity of British tabloids.
But here is the good part, while I viewed the crèches and counted how many shepherds the Italian ones had relative to the Philippine ones, and noted the llamas in the Peruvian retable crèches made of potato flour, and admired the iguanas made of tortillas in the Mexican crèches, CSB went upstairs to the permanent collection of LUMA and found this lovely house altar containing the relic of a Saint Christina, but which Saint Christina?
The tag→ refers to Christina of Tyre and Christina of Bolsena, who were probably conflated in some way, given that they share a remarkable litany of tortures on their way to martyrdom: They both survived burning at the stake; having their breasts cut off (milk then flowed); having their tongues cut out (they kept preaching); and drowning (rescued by Michael the Archangel). The end came with an arrow through the heart. Could that all be coincidence? The third Christina referred to is of course Christina the Astonishing, a favorite with hipsters and now diagnosed as an epileptic. But there are other possibilities, such as Christina of Markgate (d.1160) who was forced into marriage but then refused to consummate the union; she later managed to fulfill her dream and became a nun and embroidered pointy hats for bishops.
And for this great find, I am grateful to CSB.
Next I will tell you of the agreeableness of Number One Son when we spent a full two hours touring the Clarke and Glessner Houses in the Prairie Historical District.

2011-11-30T08:43:00.001-05:00

Yes I know smoking is bad for you, but it must be admitted that as a habit it engendered some rather clever and elegant accoutrements. Who would not like a pair of these gloves?

R.I.P. Bump

2011-11-28T17:19:00.004-05:00

It seems like too classic a henhouse story. The fox swoops in and nabs the hen, then trots off gaily as the other hens cluck and squawk.
And we thought we had been so careful. Each evening around 4 pm we’ve put the dogs inside the house, in a room with no view of the backyard and henhouse, and then we’ve opened the gate so that all the chickens can roam free and pluck grubs and bugs from virgin grass and generally behave like animals in a farmyard. Then as it gets dark they head back to their cozy henhouse and gather for their nightcaps. We come in and count, and shut the door for the evening.
But not today. Around 4:30 I heard a squawking of a different tenor. It was agitated, staccato, and distressed. I dashed out the door and directly in front of me, just as perfect as an illustration from Aesop’s*, was a gorgeous red fox with Bump between his foxy jaws. Of all the chickens, why did it have to be poor Bump? She was our very first hatchling from the exotic eggs Anne Farrell gave us. We didn’t know what we were getting. She could have been anything and she was a Crevecoeur, all black and with a perfect Mohawk/Fro. She was the matriarch of them all.
And now, fox fodder.
Meanwhile all the chickens are back in the henhouse and we have counted them countless times to assure ourselves that it was only Bump we lost. Have you ever tried counting agitated chickens? It is challenging, but on the other hand I am glad that in my life I have on several occasions counted chickens, and I actually think I am getting better at it.
This is what the fox looked like:

And this was Bump last fall, in her youth:
*As far as I recall, in Aesop's Fables you will find a fox and grapes, a fox and a crow, and a fox with a hedgehog, but nothing about a fox trotting off with a hen between his jaws. Why is this? My guess: there is no moral to the tale.

On feral artichokes

2011-11-14T12:24:00.004-05:00

It has come to my attention that in 1832, when Darwin visited Argentina and Uruguay, he found hundreds of square miles of pampas overrun with feral artichokes. And he lamented this fact - pointing out that the feral artichoke precluded anything else from growing, say feral clover, or feral dahlias, or feral lavender.
Unlike our garden in Hastings.
A couple of years ago CSB noted that Jefferson had artichokes in his garden. In Virginia, 315 miles southwest of here. Not to mention an altogether different growing zone.
CSB loves artichokes and his father was a Virginian, two very good reasons for us to grow them here. He acquired heirloom Jeffersonian seeds and planted them. We got leaves but no artichokes. The next year he did some research, found seeds for northern artichokes and started them in February in a cold frame constructed with glass doors salvaged from a historic home that was being demolished in order to built a Pilates studio. The seedlings grew. In late spring he planted all fifty seedlings in our garden, in various places in the garden. He planted seedlings in several urns. They grew. V e r y s l o w l y. We harvested eleven artichokes this past summer. We savored them. We admired swaths of artichoke foliage with no fruit.
Darwin does not say if he ever ate any feral artichokes. How does a feral artichoke differ from a cultivated artichoke? Are its leaves sharper and pointier? Does its heart beat more savagely?

Today we celebrate the feast of Bd John Liccio. (1400-1511). After his mother died in childbirth his father fed the infant crushed pomegranate arils. Pomegranates are another plant not native to the Americas; they came from Persia and spread to the Mediterranean early enough to be an integral part of the Persephone myth; they were introduced to South America by Spanish settlers in the 18th century. I have yet to hear anything about feral pomegranates. As for John Liccio, the busybody neighbor objected to this diet for an infant. But John’s father persisted, and the saint went on to have a very long life full of miracles, such as curing people whose heads were crushed, and causing paralysis in the hand of a would-be thief. He lived for 111 years.
If the next time you see Cherished & Superlative-in-all-Ways Grandson and note how pink his cherubic infant lips are, perhaps that will be a result of pomegranate juice.

A dialectic

2011-11-11T12:48:00.012-05:00

This is what I found in the used copy of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy: a page torn from Bon Appetit with the recipes for two fruit smoothies. What can these simple instructions (Combine fruits; blend; serve) tell us about the dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian? One smoothie combines berries (Black & blue) best grown in northern and temperate regions, while the other is a medley of tropical fruits: mango, pineapple and banana. Was the former reader/owner of this book thinking that, like the perfect Attic drama, the best smoothie would involve a flavored counterpoint between the warmth of the tropics and the chilly nights of the north? Or did the reader think that a diet with more fresh fruit might have kept poor Nietzsche from going mad on a street in Turin? (as far as I know he had tertiary syphilis, not scurvy, but fresh fruit can cure a myriad of ills.)

Yesterday was 11.11.11. Twice yesterday the time read 11.11. That is all I can tell you about that.
But I can tell you that it was the feast of St Theodore the Studite,a 9th century abbot who was significantly saner than many of his monastic confreres. He told his hermits: "Don't cultivate a self-satisfied austerity. Eat bread, drink wine occasionally, wear shoes, especially in winter, and take meat when you need it." Excellent advice in any century. Yet this admirable man had many run-ins with authority, both secular and religious. His iconoclastic bishop sent an officer to cut off Theodore's head, or at least cut out his tongue. But Theodore got a reprieve when Michael the Stammerer took over as Emperor. Theodore then wrote him a thank-you letter.

Beeing bees

2011-11-08T09:45:00.003-05:00

So Sunday being a beautiful autumnal day and not snowing, and it being the putative day of rest, and also being the feast of the remarkable and remarkably weird Blessed Christina of Stommeln*, CSB and I went to Wave Hill to see Hive Culture.
To be honest, CSB did not initially see the point of going to an art exhibit about bees when we have so many bees right here. He softened a little when faced with this lovely bee wallpaper, not that he gave much thought to actually wallpapering the powder room with it (my idea). **
Nor did he think flowers sculpted from beeswax were the best use of beeswax, but I thought they were lovely in a cloying Victorian kind of way.

But our favorite by far was a video of a young woman dressed in a white sheath uncannily like a straitjacket who turns herself as a bee. This transformation includes spitting into an array of hexagonal jars while flapping her arms, and wending her way through a maze-like pattern of piled up fleece balls (pollen), moving them from pile to pile. It is true that I have, by popular demand, been known to perform the waggle dance, but this young woman took the concept and ran with it.
Why didn’t I think of this?

*Christina (1242-1312) lived in a village near Cologne in the 14th century. Clearly she was precocious, or something. At the age of 10 she announced that she was engaged to Jesus, and then she ran away to the convent where she experienced many hallucinations, including Satan disguised at St Bartholomew urging her to commit suicide. In her twenties she became friendly with a Dominican called Father Peter, and he was lucky enough to witness her being tossed around the room, pierced and stabbed, all by an invisible satanic presence. It is thanks to his excellent note-taking that we know the gruesome details of Christina’s holiness; Butler’s Live of the Saints is more squeamish: “But the manifestation of which Father Peter gives the most careful and detailed account was of so repulsive a nature that no particulars can of it can be given here.” Since Butler does feel comfortable relating how Christina found herself buried in a mud pit on one occasion and had hot stones attached to her body by Satan on another, I am afraid that for someone like me to read something like that is an invitation to imagine all sorts of kinky and disgusting torments.

**(Bee Wallpaper by Rob Keller, 2007) It wasn't until I got home and really stared at the bee wallpaper on the brochure that I realized what felt uncanny about it: my late, ex-husband, the late-lamented Jeff,being obsessive about many things, went through a period of obsessively digitally multiplying photographic images to produce patterns similar to this bee wallpaper. Being vociferously anti-Catholic, one of his stranger images featured a stained glass Jesus Christ kaleidoscopically repeated. It was very colorful.

2011-10-26T09:37:00.003-04:00

There are many good reasons to go to your local library’s book sale, such as supporting a good cause and taking note of how many copies of the Da Vinci Code have been discarded by your fellow citizens. I stopped counting at 18.

Here is another: find out what you have in common with John Steinbeck. But first, I must tell you that I thought I had read or was at least cognizant of all the books of Steinbeck. I was wrong. I had never heard of or read The Short Reign of Pippin IV, and there it was for $1 at the book sale.
So here it is: not only have both John Steinbeck and yours truly engaged in the most amusing pastime of inventing necessary saints, but we both invented female saints who would be sacred to manicurists. (See SQD of April 1 – St Digitassa of Phalangeville)
In The Short Reign of Pippin IV we make the acquaintance of St Hannah, patron saint of feet. She founded an order of nuns “dedicated to silence, black bread and pedicures for the poor.”
Don’t laugh too hard – I think we could really use this saint. Has anyone seen CSB’s toes lately?

2011-10-22T18:53:00.003-04:00

I was taking the shortcut through the Grace Church glebe, and decided to see if there was a signature or plaque to tell me who was David's sculptor. There was not.

This is what I saw on the back side (backside) of David.

2011-10-21T12:40:00.005-04:00

If you are having a bad day, say your pet tiger just escaped and was shot by the local sheriff, or your basement flooded and the 100 pounds of Jasmine rice that you were saving for a rainy day cooked itself and expanded so much that it burst though the walls of your closet and oozed all over the basement and now every mouse in the county has moved in, or perhaps it is the sixtieth birthday of your ex-husband, or it would have been his 60th, had he lived, and you are miserable and overwhelmed by sadness and intimations of mortality, well there is only one thing I can suggest to alleviate the problem: reorganize out your medicine cabinet.
Perhaps this is not the first thing that occurred to you.
But I can vouch for its efficacy.
I found it impossible to weep while I figuring out the difference between witch hazel and hydrogen peroxide, and then memorizing their many hitherto-unknown-to-me uses, such as: Hydrogen peroxide for whitening animal bones, removing fresh blood stains, controlling fish fungus, and removing skunk odor.
Witch hazel for pimples, hemorrhoids & after shave.
And in order to count how many packages of dental floss (more than 8, all freebies from the dentist) you have, you must concentrate and that means you are not obsessing about birthday presents you might have given your ex-husband when he was not your ex, and alive. It is impossible to simultaneously calculate the total length of dental floss and regret that you never found him a first edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
[Since reading the expiration dates of all the OTC medications is sure to remind you of mortality, I would not recommend that route.]
Instead, organize all your tubes and bottles of sunscreen and arrange them in ascending order of SPF strength (Bain de Soleil 8 to Neutrogena 70).
And if the above is not enough distraction from your misery, you can tackle the mystery of why you have so many tubes of Neosporin (Original and Maximum Strength), Bacitracin, Hydrocortisone cream and Benadryl anti-itch cream.
And please, let me know what you figure out.
As a last resort: paint the inside of the medicine cabinet bright blue or green.

Travel tips for NOLA

2011-10-18T17:23:00.004-04:00

It is true that I have been to Axum and Kerala, Tierra del Fuego and Caratunk, but never before had I been to New Orleans. And now I am in love.
An abbreviated list of the things to love about New Orleans:
• Street names in French and Spanish
• Wooden shutters and balconies
• Beignets, which are basically fried dough covered with sugar but since the word is French they have NO calories. Don’t ask me how this is possible.
• Oysters
Abbreviated list of what to avoid:
• Mimes

While my sister was busy studying how to alleviate the rising of the waters and the sinking of the city, I wandered the French Quarter and discovered the home of Frances Parkinson Keyes, a writer I had never even heard of. But now I am one of her fans, or I will be as soon as I read her biography of Saints Rose of Lima and Mariana of Quito.
Prior to being the home of the prolific Mrs. Keyes, it was the home of Paul Morphy the chess prodigy, and before that, the home of Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, civil war general and engineer of whom I shall write more later.
Frances Parkinson was born in Virginia in 1885. As a girl she went to Miss Windsor’s School in Boston. (Much later, Windsor - having dropped the ‘Miss’ - was an athletic rival of MAGUS, that is, Milton Academy Girls Upper School. I did not participate in any of those athletics as they all involved hurling balls, and some of them even involved sticks. ) Later Frances married Henry Keyes, who would go on to be the Governor of New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die”) and a U.S. Senator. Then he died in 1938.
So in 1950 Mrs. Keyes moved to New Orleans and bought a derelict old house across the street from the Ursuline Convent. Already a successful writer, Mrs. Keyes had to crank up her production to earn the kind of money needed to restore the historic house, and collect her porcelain veilleuses and dolls. A veilleuse is a very small teapot kept warm by resting atop a porcelain stand containing a votive candle, and in my humble opinion is rendered quite useless by the very small size of the teapot. Utility, however, is doubtless not the point of such a collection. Among her many veilleuses, Mrs. Keyes had examples in the shape of classical buildings, Persian dancers, a city in flames, and Joan of Arc. The tour guide told us,sadly, that this collection was not the largest in the US. That honor belongs to the collection of Dr. Frederick Freed in Trenton, Tennessee (“A tea-rrific place to live!”). Certainly Mrs. Keyes had the largest collection I have ever seen of dolls dressed as nuns; there were very many, in various habits, with some quite spectacular wimples. I am sorry photography was forbidden.
Meanwhile, my sister was discussing environmental justice in the 9th Ward.

2011-10-10T11:30:00.001-04:00

The winner of The Ladies Hatchet Competition.(I couldn't type with those nails, never mind wield a hatchet. I am in awe.)
From the Morning Sentinel, Somerset County, Maine.

Walking the Wallace S. Walk

2011-10-05T09:46:00.005-04:00

Wallace Stevens may not be the most widely read poet in America, but he is probably the most-widely read poet from Hartford who was also the Vice-President of a major insurance company and also has a walk through Asylum Hill in his honor. And because of that singular distinction, two dear friends and I gathered at The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company* Parking Lot last week to walk the Wallace Stevens Walk. Each of the thirteen stops along the way is marked by a stone inscribed with one of the thirteen inscrutable verses of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. As we walked we parsed one friend’s protracted divorce proceedings, focusing (of course) on the bizarre, and delusional behavior of her soon-to-be–ex-husband.
Our second stop (“ I was of three minds, /Like a tree/In which there are three blackbirds.”) was in front of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church and their Thrift Shop was open. This is very handy if you want to thriftily acquire items you don’t need. We went inside and B found a blue tea tin for 10¢ while M-A and I ate the free tootsie rolls on the counter.
The fifth stanza (“I do not know which to prefer/The beauty of inflections/Or the beauty of innuendoes/The blackbird whistling/Or just after.”) was engraved in a stone directly in front of the St. Francis Hospital, the birthplace of M-A. I do believe she preferred inflections.
Stuck in the ground right next to the ninth stanza (“When the blackbird flew out of sight/ It marked the edge/ Of one of many circles.”) was a bright yellow sign alerting us that PESTICIDES had just been applied. The record is eerily silent about Wallace Stevens’ opinions about pesticide use and GMO’s.
And here we are in front of Wallace Stevens’ (former) house, enjoying the suburban susurrus of blasting leaf-blowers while reading the thirteenth stanza (“It was evening all afternoon/It was snowing/ And it was going to snow./ The blackbird sat/ In the cedar-limbs.”)

*You may be pleased to know that both Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln had homeowners’ insurance with The Hartford. I find that reassuring. Re-insuring.

What St Francis and the animals don't mind

2011-10-04T12:19:00.004-04:00

The whole point of a temporary tattoo is that it is temporary. That would make sense to me. But it is not that simple. Temporary tattoos are temporary if you happen to have make-up remover in the house. If you do not, and you are unwilling to scrub your granddaughter’s arm with a pumice stone or an SOS pad, then you must consider the tattoos as temporarily permanent.

It was the feast of St. Francis, and I thought it would be a good idea to remove beloved granddaughter’s faux tattoos before we went to church for The Blessing of the Animals. Which probably shows you how shallow I am. Would God or the rector mind that a five-year-old is sporting faux tattoos? Not at all. Nor should they. Would St Francis or the animals? Ditto.
But I really wanted those tattoos off her soft little arm. Perhaps now is not the time to explore my feelings about tattoos, almost entirely a result of my daughter’s tattoos, each and every one of which I consider to be far less beautiful than the skin it currently mars. Maybe all mothers think this is the case, but in my case it is an absolute fact, that my daughter had and has the most beautiful pale and soft skin imaginable. What is not imaginable – to me – is why she would willingly allow herself to be pricked, dyed and scarified by some random tattoo “artist” who may be suffering from any number of infectious diseases and is surely suffering from a good-taste-deficiency. No, it does not matter to me in the least if her tattoos are ‘interesting’ or ‘tasteful’ (the alphabet in Czech modernist font?). What matters to me is her skin. No matter how much I love Moby Dick, the fact that Queequeg was covered with tattoos does not strike me as a good reason for my child to get a tattoo. She is not a South Sea Island whaler, nor is she a cannibal.

I thought I was not going to rant about tattoos. And lest anyone get the idea that I an prejudiced or narrow-minded, you should know that last week CSB and I went to the opening of Tattoo Flash at the very cool Lift Truck Project in Croton Falls. To be honest, I went because it was curated by my friend the poet Pam Hart and not because of an intrinsic fascination with the subject, because I do not have such an intrinsic fascination. But I discovered the wonderful stories of the early tattooists and their close connection to seaports and circuses. Of the tattoo flashes, I especially liked the buxom dames with Indian headdresses.
There were no wolves at our little church’s Blessing of the Animals, but we did have 1 rabbit in a hamper, 2 gerbils, at least 4 hermit crabs, a white cockatoo, a green and yellow parakeet (or parrot, I can’t tell the difference), 1 live cat, 2 photographs of cats too fearful to come out and play with all the dogs, and many dogs of all sizes and ilks, including one of ours. Bruno had to absorb the blessing for his rowdier sister in absentia. There were also about 12 honeybees, in a small jar in my pocket, and they too had to stand in for their thousands of sisters. Cherished granddaughter held the cockatoo’s cage for much of the service.
Should I tell her that on most Sundays there are not so many animals at church?

2011-10-04T09:47:00.002-04:00

The new chickens (born April 22nd to be exact)are starting to lay, and notice how much smaller their eggs are. The Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons are laying brown,buff and mottled white eggs, while the Araucanas are laying sky blue eggs. Numero Uno granddaughter continues to expect a green yolk inside a blue egg. One day I hope to oblige.

Travel notes

2011-09-27T12:37:00.005-04:00

PHILADELPHIA is where best-beloved daughter and Michael Brownstein recently celebrated their marriage, which in fact occurred one year ago, but they have their own version of chronology.

Philadelphia is where my ophidiophobic* sister and I were strolling beside the river when we saw a pudgy man striding along with a fat yellowish snake, about 8 feet long, wrapped around his waist and draped over his shoulder. He would periodically stop, look around to see who was watching, and then stroke his snake, call her a “lovely girl” and a “pretty missy” and then kiss her on the lips. Or the mouth. I don’t actually know if snakes have lips. My poor sister ran ahead in a state of profound misery. Instead of following to hold her hand, as a good sister would have done, I stayed behind to learn that the snake in question was an albino reticulated python, and that she had a very mellow temperament. I asked how one could discern a snake’s temperament. Her pudgy keeper told me that she liked to sit on the couch and watch reality television with him. As if that proved his point. I would like to say for the record that kissing your snake in public is not a good idea.

This is what an albino reticulated python looks like when she is not being kissed.

Philadelphia is also home to the Hyrtl Skull Collection, in the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians. The collection was amassed by Joseph Hyrtl. He was born in 1810 in Austria, where his father played the oboe in Count Esterhazy’s band. In university Hyrtl studied the osseous systems of fish and later collected over 800 fish skeletons. He also collected organs of hearing. But it is The Skulls for which he is best remembered. There are 139 skulls, mostly from Central and Eastern Europeans. And each one has a hand-written placard giving the nationality, the name, age, religion if known, occupation, means of death, and a description of any skeletal anomaly. In his collection there are 16 suicides and 11 executions. Here is a small sample of his captions:

Szigeth (Hungary or Romania)
Geza Uirenyi, 81; Reformist, herdsman. At age 70 attempted suicide by cutting his throat. Wound not fatal because of ossified larynx; laryngeal fistula remained. Lived until 80 without melancholy.

Prague
Araschtan Gottlieb, 19
Suicide by potassium cyanide because of suspected unfaithfulness of his mistress.

Magyar (Hungarian)
Jaska Soltesz, age 28
Reformist, soldier. Died of pneumonia.
Everted Gonial angles (bilateral); dental caries, potential abscessing.

Magyar (Hungary) from Transylvania
Ladislau Pal
Reformist, guerilla and deserter
Executed by hanging, 1861.
Bilateral flare of gonial angles.

North Hungary
Julius Farkas, 28
Protestant, soldier
Suicide by gunshot wound to the heart because of weariness of life.
Depressed nasal root.

*this is not the only thing she has in common with Indiana Jones.

Notes from the Animal Kingdom

2011-09-26T18:57:00.004-04:00

In 3289 BCE, more or less, Ötzi was hunting in the Italian Alps when he was shot in the back with an arrow. He died immediately of hemorrhagic shock. Soon after his body froze and mummified naturally, and stayed that way for more than 5000 years until hikers found Iceman in 1991.
But only recently have x-rays of his stomach shown us that his last meal consisted of wild goat, or Ibex, an animal well known to crossword puzzlers and also to Copper Age mountain dwellers.

In 1539 CE Hernando de Soto arrived in Florida with 600 Spanish soldiers, 200 horses and 300 pigs. It was not de Soto’s first voyage to the New World. In 1514 Hernando sailed west with Pedrarias Dávila, the governor of Panama. De Soto was 18 years old. Dávila was 74 and did not expect to die in his homeland; so he brought with him an iron coffin. He did indeed die in León, Nicaragua (later a Sandinista stronghold) but the coffin’s whereabouts have remained a mystery all these years.
While the diseases (smallpox, typhus, measles, and more) the Spaniards carried wiped out vast numbers of the natives; it was the swine, their ambulatory meat locker, that destroyed much of the lush landscape and became the progenitors of the razorback hogs now so beloved of -- actually I have no idea if razorbacks are beloved by anyone at all. But they have given their name to several sports teams. Don’t ask me which ones.
It is entirely possible that one of Hamlette’s distant ancestors came to the New World with Hernando de Soto.

In the 20th century Chrysler produced a line of De Soto vehicles, each one surmounted by a stylized bust of a helmeted conquistador. Some of the De Soto’s of the 1950’s were the Firedome, the Fireflite and the Firesweep.

As I write these words there are eight stinkbugs perched on the outside of the window screen. Periodically I flick the screen with my finger and they bounce off and fly away, but soon they will return. Halyomorpha halys or the brown marmorated stink bud is native to the Far East. It was accidentally ‘introduced’ (nice euphemism there) into the US in 1998 and since then has been wending its way through the orchards and gardens of Pennsylvania up to New York. In case you care to check, the stink glands can be found under the thorax, between the first and second pair of legs. I read somewhere that the stink of the stinkbug resembles “the pungent odor of cilantro”; I have to assume that aspersion was written by someone who does not like cilantro, and would probably loathe my guacamole.

Three fat Rhode Island Reds are lined up on the ridgeline of the A-frame CSB built in their yard. It is either remarkable or completely obvious how chickens like to stand on bars and peaked things.

A Tale of Two Irenes

2011-09-05T17:39:00.002-04:00

So how did Irene-the-downgraded-hurricane measure up against her saintly namesake? While Tropical Storm Irene may have done significant damage up and down the coast, and flooded towns far away from the coast, and washed away wooden bridges, will she be remembered in 2000 years?

In the year 3372 (2011 + 1361, the number of years after the martyrdom of St Sebastian that George de la Tour painted his St Irene) will a tenebrist artist paint T.S. Irene by candlelight – as she surely was experienced by many – as Georges de la Tour painted Saint Irene tending the wounds of St Sebastian?
If you know of St Sebastian at all, you probably think of him as the naked young man with six-pack abs and a come-hither look, loosely tied to a tree and pierced with arrows. Sebastian had the misfortune to be Christian in the era of Diocletian, the 3rd century emperor who considered a day ill-spent if it did not include a nubile young Christian being eaten alive by wild beasts, or boiled in oil, or nailed upside down. If you know of St Sebastian at all, you probably assume he expired as a result of all those arrows piercing his handsome body.
But you would be wrong. Hearing of his torments, Irene, the widow of St Castulus (stretched on the rack, buried alive), went to bury Sebastian’s punctured body. But he was not dead. So she took him home with her, nursed him, tended his wounds with raw honey, and he recovered nicely. Still, Sebastian refused to stay out of trouble, and when he next saw Diocletian he repeated his creed. This time Diocletian ordered that poor Sebastian be cudgeled and then tossed into the sewer. He did not survive.

All the Irenic drama (yes, something of a paradox) chez Let it Bee Farm happened on the front end. We battened the hatches, the eternal hatches. We closed the Palladian windows that grace the hen house and fluffed up the nesting boxes. We encouraged (the late) Hamlette to stay inside her comfy quarters and not venture out to be bonked by a falling tree, and she complied. We picked all the sunflowers, anticipating that they would be flattened by the 80 mph winds. Now a fine layer of vivid yellow pollen coats every surface in the house; I’ve been wiping it up and eating it with my morning cereal and on my peanut butter sandwiches. We gathered bushels of tomatoes, and then we had to figure out what to do with that many tomatoes. (Guess.)
Then the winds fizzled out before they got here. The Saw Mill Parkway flooded, but the Saw Mill Parkway always floods– living proof of the merits of building a road alongside a river. We could have left the sunflowers standing.

The Tragi-Comedy of Hamlette

2011-09-03T12:47:00.004-04:00

Just how ignorantly, blithely, and naively did we embark on this pig adventure?

Here is the fact of it: CSB has always wanted a pig. Did I know this when we first dated? No, I did not. Would it have dissuaded me from continuing the romance? I like to think I am not so shallow; but I might have been daunted. The kind of pig he always wanted was not a small pink frolicking thing, or a pet pig of the pot-belly variety. He wanted a large pig, a farm pig. He wanted many of them. A herd of pigs. A pantheon of pigs.
As a young man he worked on Ruth Sharp’s farm, Cantitoe Corner, in Bedford, under the tutelage of her foreman Will Perry who was wont to exhort his underlings with this classic phrase*: “What’s time to the hogs?” CSB took the words to heart and has made the expression his own.

*Is this in fact a classic phrase? I have never heard it before, and when I try to use it to effect I am generally met with cookie sheet expressions, or mockery. And what does it mean anyway? Only CSB truly knows.

Then he thought it would be a great idea to have a pig roast for our 60th birthdays. Yes, that old.
So, with the help & advice of Annie Farrell we bought a piglet from Millstone Farm in Connecticut. We went up there one afternoon with a dog crate, bought the little piglet weighing about 30 lbs, and drove her home in the back of the car. Ethan, the pig farmer suggested that, since we planned to ultimately eat her, it would be a bad idea to give her a name. Of course that was not going to happen.
Initially, CSB called her Let’s Eat, but I called her Hamlette, and perhaps it has been that dialectic of nomenclature that has led her to the great existential questions. Or perhaps it is in the nature of all Hamlets to question existence.
We installed her in the pigpen CSB made – a nicely shaded outdoor area about 30 x 40, surrounded by a white picket fence and with a little house for shelter and privacy. She gamboled and rooted and oinked in classic porcine fashion. I had assumed she would eat anything and everything she was fed, that being the nature of a pig. I was wrong. Hamlette, it turned out, was a fussy eater. CSB of course gave her organic pig feed, and choice pickings from the garden. She prefers beet greens above all else. Soon the pigpen was living up to its name. When it rained, the sty became a living room entirely of mud, and also, whenever it rained, the manure smell became quite overwhelming. It could not be confused with ammoniac perfume of chicken poop. (And by the way, we frequently cleaned out the manure. But it kept coming.)

Meanwhile, Hamlette grew and grew.

Did we know anything of pig breeds? No.
Did we know of the proper age at which to slaughter a pig for a pig roast? No.
Did we know the correct age to slaughter a pig for anything at all? No.
Did we know how we were going to slaughter the pig? No.
Did we have any idea how to transport the pig to a slaughterhouse? None whatsoever.

And then – suddenly so it seemed - Hamlette was huge, too huge to roast, and we had to find a decent slaughterhouse for her. A humane slaughterhouse. I wanted to fly in Temple Grandin for the task, but she was busy.
CSB did some research and found an FDA-approved slaughterer (And very nice person) in Connecticut, and made Hamlette an appointment with her maker for the last day of August. Then arose the question of how Hamlette would get to the abattoir.
CSB toyed with the idea of asking his sister if one of her Bedford friends had a horse trailer we could borrow, but then decided against it. I thought it was a good plan. But no.
Then he rented a small closed U-haul trailer. He spoke with the man at the slaughterhouse, who said we were insane to think of bringing Hamlette that far in a closed trailer: she would pant, overheat and be DOA. And then we would have a dead pig but NO ham or bacon, because a dead pig cannot be slaughtered, not least because she is already dead.

So Chucker cancelled the U-Haul rental and cancelled the slaughter appointment. The next plan was to build a crate for Hamlette and put that on an open trailer. He remembered that Ned has a trailer and thought that would be a good thing because then he could bring Ned’s trailer over here right away, and build the crate on top of it.
But Ned’s trailer has Quebec license plates, no brake lights, no turn signals, and no lights at all. So we decided against Ned’s trailer.
But the fact of the Quebec plates made us start to worry about crossing state lines. Is it legal to cross state lines with a live pig for the purposes of slaughter? For any purpose? I have no idea. Should it be? Should it be more or less legal than crossing state lines with a minor for the purposes of sexual acts?
Apparently that is illegal.
So Chucker will have to build a subtle crate, a crate that does not have stenciled on it: LIVE PIG WITH NOT LONG TO LIVE. But also a crate with air holes, a comfortable crate Hamlette can travel in without undue stress.
He will build this crate inside her pigpen and start feeding her inside it so she gets comfy, and then we will lure her into it with food.
But how will we then get the crate (which itself won’t exactly be made of balsa wood) filled with a 300 lb pig onto the rented trailer?
With great effort.
CSB built the crate – quite a nice crate – and lined it with fresh wood shavings and made a gap in the fence around the pigpen, and situated the crate right there.
And then without any suggestion from us, Hamlette sauntered in. She likes it in there? All day long we have watched her go happily in and out of the crate that will transport her to the abattoir.
By the time this is over I may well be a vegetarian.
Then CSB went to pick up the rented trailer and drove all over the lawn to bring the trailer to the crate. The trailer has a ramp and we are thinking that we will coat the ramp with Vaseline and push the crate bearing Hamlette up the ramp and onto the trailer.

There is an element of the unknown about how well this process will work, not least because we really don’t know how much Hamlette weighs. In her piglet-hood CSB would pick her up to gauge her weight, as compared to the bale of peat moss. Obviously, the results would not pass FDA muster. She has long since gone past the weight and size to be hoisted, even by CSB. So we are placing bets on what she will prove to weigh once she arrives in Connecticut:
CSB came in the lowest at 225 lbs.
Honorable son bet 300 lbs.
I bet 310 lbs. Big.
Steve (who grew up on a farm in Iowa; probably has a clue) bet 280 lbs.
Mim, (who has a dramatic flair) bet the highest with 350 lbs.
Oscar (who grew up in EL Salvador) bet 250 lbs.

Well, the deed was done. After a sleepless night, CSB was out there this morning. He was a bundle of nerves. Hamlette, however, needed no coaxing to get into her comfy crate lined with wood shavings, with a stylish water bucket installed in the corner. In she went, as if she had known all along this is where it was all headed. CSB flipped up the door, and sealed up the crate. Then we pushed. And pulled. With Oscar’s help and a minimum of cursing (in deference to Hamlette’s sense of propriety) we pushed and pulled the crate onto the trailer, tied it down with ropes, just in case CSB encountered a tornado en route.

CSB just called in from Connecticut. They arrived safely. He sped past the state border weigh stations. (Actually, I have no idea.) Hamlette is fine. She is now in a bucolic pen. The butcher said that he no longer tells customers the weight of the standing pig because once a lady accused him of cheating her when her packages of pork came to less than the standing weight. Then, on seeing our documented bets, he relented and assessed Hamlette’s avoirdupois as around 250 lbs. Several of us (Honorable son, Mim and myself, specifically) were very wrong.

New Knees and Multiple spellings

2011-08-25T10:43:00.004-04:00

As they wheeled her into the operating room where she would have her old decrepit knee removed and a shiny new knee inserted, my mother predicted that Qaddafi (the world leader whose name can be spelled at least 112 different ways, all of them wrong) would be ousted when she woke up from the anesthesia.
Who knew my mother was Cassandra?
A few hours I saw my mother in the PACU (have I mentioned how much I enjoy the hospital acronyms: NICU, SICU, PACU, MICU, FUCU and so on?) formerly known as the Recovery Room and told her that she had nailed this turn of events. (Knowing that she was unlikely to check on the actual facts, I fudged it a bit. Yes, the rebels were in Tripoli, but Qaddafi’s whereabouts were unknown and he had not quite gracefully ceded power.) This news triggered some fond childhood memories.
“Benghazi used to be a popular weekend spot,” she said, referring to happy pre-war days in Egypt. “The best nightclubs were there.”
“So did you go to Libya?” I asked.
“No, my father didn’t like the Libyans. He preferred the Ethiopians, and the Sudanese. He always went in that direction.” Then she fell asleep.

Several hours later found us in her room up on the fourth floor of the hospital, a floor lamentably without any CU’s at all. Her nurse – the charming Mike who wears different colored, but always matching, scrubs every day – asked Mom about any previous surgeries. She mentioned her appendectomy in a Manila hotel room without anesthesia.
I couldn’t help a slight correction: the appendix was already gone - it was somewhere in Indo-China then being overrun by the Japanese - and the surgery referred to was to clean out an infected incision. “They put a cork in my mouth,” Mom added with some pleasure.

The next morning we had the first visit of Brigitte, the occupational therapist. She introduced herself as Bridget, but her nametag was spelled “Brigitte”. My mother explained that her other daughter (my sister) was also named Brigitte, but she pronounced it properly, the French way. She then informed Brigitte that there are 32 different ways to spell Brigitte. I did not add that this barely comes to a quarter of the ways there are to spell the name of the former Leader-for-Life of Libya.

2011-08-17T12:13:00.005-04:00

In case you have forgotten what I wrote here a few years ago, today is the feast of St Mamas of Cyprus, the patron saint of tax evaders. It is also the feast of Claire of Montelfalco (no, not the Clare of Assisi who is the patron saint of television) who was so tough on herself that if she broke her vow of silence she insisted on standing barefoot in the snow while saying Lord’s Prayer 100 times. I used to find this sort of story horrific and not a little creepy. But as I get older I appreciate the value of repetition as a mantra; and just last week I heard about a sixty year old women who, in order to prepare herself for a swim across the English Channel, sat in extremely cold water for a longer and longer period each day.
After Claire died – and was presumably autopsied – it was discovered there was an image of the cross formed upon her heart. I have not seen a picture, so I cannot verify this. Also, vials of her collected blood are said to liquefy each year on her feast day, which is today. I cannot verify this either, but I cannot deny that I would like – just once – to see one of these miracles of liquefied blood.

Today is also the feast of St Hyacinth, a Polish Dominican monk who traveled a great deal; but otherwise nothing you hear about him is likely to be true, at least “of little historical value”.
Here he is getting the word from the BVM that he should carry away her statue, weighing several hundred pounds, to save it from the Vandals or Goths or perhaps the Mongols. And he did.

On the Home Front, the boiler exploded last night. There is about 3 inches of water in the boiler room. I am currently ignoring it. Later I thought I would stand in the puddle and dry my hair.

Then the oven started leaking this dark sticky stuff; I think it is tomato slime since I had about 300 grape tomatoes drying in there all night long. It is amazing how tomatoes shrink overnight.

We are trying to figure out if chickens like peaches. Our peach tree has dropped a bunch of bruised peaches and I thought I would give them to the chickens; I knew they would like the bugs inside even if they scorned the fruit. But they seem to be enjoying the fruit as well.

Babyitting notes

2011-08-16T08:03:00.006-04:00

It is 90˚ at 8 pm in August and I am reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas to Leda in bed. Even though it is 90˚ in August she is wearing her new lavender flannel pajamas. We both love Cindy Lou Who.
In another room, CSB is watching the HoH Zoning Board meeting on the local cable access TV channel with Ignacio resting upon his chest. They are both perilously close to sleep, which is a better response to the smug speechifying (think CSPAN coverage of the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justices) of the zoning board than would be my response, which tends toward mouth frothing.(Lest you think I do not hold grudges, think again: in the matter of the barn-that-is-not, I most certainly do.) Hence CSB's delight to have someone – a 4 month old infant – willing to watching WHOH with him, because I am not.

2011-08-12T14:43:00.009-04:00

CSB is generally considered a good-natured and equable soul, with one exception: all equanimity flees when he finds himself a passenger in a car stopped at a red light that one might have driven through, had one sped up in proper time. Hence, when I am driving, his mantra at the approach of every light, regardless of its color, is “try to make that light.” Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I cannot manage to get worked up about it.

So in the interest of family harmony and CSB’s blood pressure, when we go into NYC and especially if time is a factor, he drives. And I take Bonine. That way he goes as fast as he wants and if he misses a light I say nothing. I do however harp on one thing: 2 hands on the wheel. You might say that I feel as strongly about two-hands-on-the-wheel as he does about making-the-light. I am convinced that the car swerves less and therefore I get carsick less if CSB drives with 2 hands. I know this. It is a fact.

This morning we headed down to the bottom tip of Manhattan for our 10 a.m. hearing with the Board of Sanitation, Bureau of Vector Control, regarding a ticket citing us for not having proper water buckets for the beehives on two of our rooftop apiaries. We left early because our friend Doug had told us the appointment times were meaningless and it was first come, first served.(FIFO) Doug has experience with the B of San in NYC because he owns a house on 104th street, and he is required to clear the litter from the sidewalk in front of his house and two feet into the street, which he does with alacrity, but it is entirely possible that immediately after he removes litter, someone else comes along and deposits more litter. In fact it is more than likely, it is guaranteed. Hence his experience with the B of San.
Our first stop was Duncan Donuts. CSB is a devotee of DD coffee. Without fail, every time he returns from a foray into DD he asks me, “Do we have stock in Duncan Donuts? If not, I think we should.” I invariably ignore this comment. (Do we have stocks? Do stocks even exist anymore?)

Then we drove into Manhattan, that is to say, CSB drove with one hand and with his other hand he drank his coffee and ate his bagel with a fried egg. (The less I say about the deplorable fact that CSB is willing to eat an egg not laid by our own hens, the better it is for family harmony. But I say it nonetheless, because what is harmony when held against the merits of fresh eggs?) I programmed the GPS to direct us to John Street; then I turned off the GPS voice (Female, American) because she was saying the obvious.
First there was the gorgeous biker-lady clad in leather armor.
CSB: Is that a woman?
Me (checking out the motorcyclist whipping past us): Must be. Wasp waist. Long braid.
CSB: The braid does not clinch it. As you know. (He is referring to my aversion to men over 30 with ponytails.)
Me: But that outfit. Nothing androgynous about it. Does Jean Paul Gaultier do biker gear?
CSB (pulling up alongside bike lady to better admire the curves): Who?
Me: Watch the road! I'm in charge of fashion here.
CSB: That must be a European bike.

By the time we approached the Upper West Side, CSB had finished his bagel and non-fresh fried egg, and that was a good thing because had he been eating, driving with one hand, and rubber necking at the flotilla of standing paddlers on the Hudson, I might have had to say some strong words. Maybe I did.
CSB: Those kayakers are standing up.
Me: What kayakers? Oh those guys. Those aren’t kayaks.
CSB: Can you read what it says on those banners?
Me: No! Please! Watch the road. Or pull over and let me drive and you can watch the standing paddlers.
CSB: Those boards must have heavy keels.
Me: I’ll watch the boards. You drive!!
CSB: I find it outrageous that you want me to watch the road when you always sightsee while you are driving.
Me: That is totally untrue. I only sightsee straight ahead.

We never figured out what was written on the banners flying from the escort boats.
We had no idea why the surfers or kayakers were standing up while paddling up the Hudson.
We arrived at 9 a.m. for our 10 a.m. hearing. At 9:05 we were informed that both citations had been withdrawn.We were free to go. Then we delivered honey to Murray’s on Bleeker Street and I bought a very expensive baguette and a slab of comté cheese.
On our way home, there were no more standing paddlers to be seen from the West Side Highway. Every last one of them must have made it under the George Washington Bridge by then.
The sport - which looks as silly as it sounds - is also called River Walking or Stand Up Paddle Surfing.

Broaden your horizons

2011-08-10T13:26:00.003-04:00

The last time someone commented on the egg stains on my shirt, my wrinkled skirt and my body odor, I responded by writing a nasty letter to the editor of the local paper accusing said person’s mother of performing sex acts with circus animals before running away with the Bearded Lady to get married in New York State. It never crossed my mind to have multiple orders of pizza (not even BBQ chicken which she especially loathes) and moo shu pork sent to her house. Obviously I wasn’t thinking outside the box. See below for an example of local political action at its best. And yes,there really is a judge named Lust.He handily beat Sloth in the run-off.

HARRISON — The case against accused serial pizza sender Maria Polera was adjourned Tuesday after Town Justice Ronald Bianchi recused himself.
Polera, 53, of 3 Woodside Ave., was arrested July 12 on allegations that for the past six to eight months she had been ordering pizzas and having them delivered to Town Supervisor Joan Walsh's home.
Bianchi, a Democrat and former town supervisor, did not give a reason for withdrawing from the case, but Polera is a former Democratic district leader who lost a 2009 bid for receiver of taxes while running with Walsh on the Democratic ticket.
Bianchi said the case would be turned over to Town Justice Marc Lust for the time being.
Lust was elected on the Democratic and Republican lines in the last election and has the endorsement of both parties in this November's race.
"I wouldn't be surprised if Judge Lust recuses himself also," Bianchi said during the brief hearing, before adjourning the case to Aug. 30.
Polera and her attorney, George Galgano, had no comment as they left the courthouse.
Polera and Walsh had been friends for more than a decade before they had a falling out last year, reportedly after Walsh told her that her body odor and appearance made her unelectable.
The bogus pizza orders began a short time later. Authorities said Polera ordered the pizzas and one order of Chinese food, and had them sent to Walsh's home as many as 25 times, including four times in one night.
After calling in the orders to pizzerias in Harrison and surrounding communities, police said Polera would park near Walsh's home to watch the delivery attempts.
She's charged with six misdemeanor counts of theft of services and one harassment violation.
Polera is free without bail.

from The Journal-News

The Log in Question

2011-08-08T14:38:00.004-04:00

We were not yet arrived at Georgian Bay’s Belle au Clair beach on the 14th concession before B - alerted us to the latest contretemps among the cottagers. A piece of driftwood is a key player in this drama. As pieces of driftwood go, it is remarkable for its length and straightness. From its top to its tangled roots it is one straight shot, uninterrupted by branches or bends. As a pivotal player in a dispute, it is remarkably unremarkable.

B -’s Georgian Bay cottage is rented out for the month of July. For the past seven years she has rented to the same family, who are also friends with the neighbors on the beach. So the renters are no strangers to the beach and its dramatis personae. This is all by way of background.
This past month, the renter noticed the driftwood that – as driftwood is wont to do - had drifted up onto their bit of beach, that is, B -’s beach. Perhaps now would be a good time for a disquisition on beach ownership as it is adjudicated in Canada, with pithy allusions to beached whales, royal prerogatives and of course the Fast Fish/Loose Fish chapter in Moby Dick. The renter – we will call her Wendy – determined it would make an excellent table and stump chairs for sitting round her children’s bonfires. She called B -to inquire about this and left a voicemail. Not hearing back, she gassed up her chainsaw* and headed down to the beach. She yanked expertly on the starter cord and the chainsaw roared into life; its metallic shriek ripped through the peaceful susurrus of the waves like unmuffled Harleys in a nursing home parking lot.
Wendy had barely applied the rotating blade to the tender wood when Odette from the Island-that-is-no-longer-an-Island came rushing down the slope, over the causeway and onto the beach. Because a chainsaw is very noisy and drowns out all other sounds, Wendy was not aware of Odette’s approach. It was only when Odette stood directly opposite her on the other side of the recumbent driftwood, bellowing, “Stop this right away. You have no right,” that Wendy jerked upright, clutching and even proffering the still-roaring chainsaw.
(I do not know much about Odette, other than her persona non grata status on Belle au Clair Beach, but I am assuming that she missed the important childhood lesson to never startle or bother someone in possession of an operating chainsaw. This is how accidents happen.)

It was not reported what exactly was Wendy’s initial response to Odette’s exhortation. Versions differ. Gloria from two cottages down swears that Wendy told Odette to go back to the Island of Dr Moreau and stay there. Hugo says that Wendy reverted to her native Hungarian and emitted an aria of Slavic curses. According to Mr. Mitch in the pale green cottage, Wendy wordlessly brandished her still-roaring chainsaw in Odette’s direction.
Whatever was or was not said, all agree that Odette stood her ground.
Eventually Wendy switched off the chainsaw’s engine, to better enable the beach to hear the discussion.
Odette said, “That log is on our part of the beach. You are violating our property.”
Wendy said, “Look carefully, O-dette. The log is on the Barley’s beach and B - doesn’t give a flying fuck if I carve up a piece of flotsam.”
Odette said, “Please don’t use that language in front of my children.”
Wendy said, “I’ll say flotsam any time I damn well please. “ She mimed scanning the horizon and then said, “I don’t see any children.”
Odette said, “So long as you and your tools of destruction stay off our beach, your language can be as vile as you like.”
By now Gloria, Mr. Mitch, Hugo and Mrs. Hugo had ventured from their sections of the beach and stood at a safe but audible distance from the log in question and the interlocutors.
Wendy said, “It is the Barley beach and if you want to file a lawsuit over it, feel free. I am sure the judge will be delighted to see you guys back in court.” (For reasons that shall be explained later, this barb was particularly well-aimed. For now I will simply say that Odette and her husband - for whom lawsuits were mother’s milk, bread and butter, and their raison d’être -had recently lost an expensive battle over beach rights with their neighbors on the other side, and their loss was the cause of much merriment and glass-clinking up and down the beach.)
Odette retorted, “You are wrong. This part of the beach is shared property between ourselves and the Barley’s. Notice our tire tracks.”
Wendy said, “You are the one in the wrong. Again. Just because the Barley’s have allowed you an easement to drive to the island is no way means you have property rights. Where did you study law? Transylvania?”
Odette said, “I am not going to allow you to make this spectacle, and threaten me with your vile machine.”
Wendy said, “Who is threatening whom? Did I order you off the beach? Think again.”
Odette stood taller and said, “Until you can show me legal documents that prove this is the Barley’s sole property and that you have permission to destroy this piece of driftwood, I insist that you stop what you are doing. Immediately.”
Mrs. Hugo, who spoke so little that no one on the beach even knew her first name, interjected: “Do you really care that much about a piece of driftwood? Is it worth all this aggravation?”
Both Odette and Wendy ignored her reasonable question. Mr. Hugo patted his wife’s shapely buttocks as if she were a donkey.
Wendy gripped the chainsaw’s starter cord as if she might yank it into life again.
Odette said, “I will have the police issue a Cease and Desist order if you do not put that down immediately.”
Wendy said, “Just because you have a sleazy trial lawyer at your beck and call doesn’t give you the right to harass your neighbors.”
Mr. Hugo piped up, “I don’t think anything is being accomplished here. Why don’t you both go into your respective cottages and have a few cocktails to calm down. “
Odette’s final shot, spoken as if to the rapt audience at the Royal Theatre, “The last time Wendy had a few cocktails they could hear her off-key Marseillaise all the way to Penatanguishene.”
Wendy brandished her chainsaw once more but found herself at a loss for words. She strode over the dunes back to her cottage. Up on the sweeping deck she started the chainsaw up one last time, and revved it to make sure the sound carried all the way to the island.

*You are no doubt wondering, as did we, about the likelihood of a family arriving at their summer rental with their personal chainsaw. We can neither explain nor verify this detail.

Of all the possible places

2011-07-31T17:17:00.003-04:00

Honorable #1 son has decamped for the summer to Paraguay, previously best known as the retirement home of Dr Joseph Mengele & friends; currently best known as the site of the assassination of Anastasio Somoza, by a Sandinista commando team calling themselves Operation Reptile. My son did not allow Paraguay’s reputation to deter him from volunteering for One Laptop/One Child. (Do check out the website; there is a very entertaining interactive map.) Honorable son, being a smart and intrepid young man, anticipated playing soccer in the rain (as it’s the rainy season), dealing with a recalcitrant bureaucracy and eating lots of beef and hard bread. He did not expect to find himself in the home of the gigantic Basilica of Caacupé, where resides the famous little statue of Our Lady of the Miracles.
Her story begins in the early 16th century when a converted Guaraní prayed to the Virgin to save him from certain death at the hands of his enemies. He hid inside a tree trunk and was saved. Afterward, in gratitude for her succor, he carved a statue of the Virgin, featuring blue eyes and blonde hair, for reasons unexplained. Then in 1603 Tapaicuá Lake flooded the surrounding valley, including the statue of the Virgin. When the waters receded the Guaraní Virgin reappeared, and she has been revered by the locals ever since.
Of all the places he might have gone in Paraguay, it seems to me serendipitous that my son has gone to a place where the Conception of the Virgin Mary is annually celebrated (December 8th) with great fanfare.

Full disclosure: After some prodding, my son did enter the basilica; but he evinced little (no) enthusiasm.

The Importance of Jigsaw Puzzles in American Summer Houses

2011-07-31T16:48:00.003-04:00

For a while now I have been pondering this cultural trope. It seems fairly obvious that the chief pleasure of a jigsaw puzzle is in creating (arbitrary) Order out of (contrived) Chaos. What could be more satisfying?
You start with an unsorted pile of oddly shaped bits of wood or cardboard.
Hesiod’s world also starts with Chaos, a shapeless, bundled, tangled and inchoate agglomeration of everything and nothing, neither truly solid nor fluid nor gaseous.
You empty the box onto a flat surface. Before you can do anything else you turn the pieces over onto their ‘correct’ side; the assumption of the existence of a ‘correct’ side already being a great leap away from Chaos.
Hesiod tells us how the earth(Gaea), the sky(Ether) and Eros(the creative force), separate and take on form and emerge from Chaos.
(In Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton describes Chaos as: “… the vast immeasurable abyss. Outrageous as a sea, dark ,wasteful, wild.” It is the use of the word wasteful here that strikes me for its implied harsh judgment.)
Back in the American summer house, you sort through the turned-over pieces to find the Edges, because knowing the periphery of a thing is so helpful in defining it. Where we would be without Limits? Edges or Borders or Fences? (As you can see, we have already ventured far from a ‘simple’ jigsaw puzzle into some fairly ponderous questions.)
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the gods, the Titans and finally mankind develop on earth.
Your hands hover over the random pieces as your eye scans for matching colors and shapes; even so, your mind wanders. This puzzle featuring water birds of North America inexorably leads you to the skeleton of a Great Blue Heron that dangled from a rafter of the screened porch in Marshfield for many years. Your ex/late husband found this prize one day on the salt marsh at low tide. He strung it with fishing line and set it to spin above your heads as you dined and played Risk and painted pictures. When you last inhabited the house on the marsh, the delicate bird bones were already finely swaddled in dust and scented with marijuana and fish. Perhaps it hangs there still, witness to another decade of revelry and discord.
You return to the puzzle and discover that the blue-greenish underbelly of the avocet is similar in shade to a watery frond.
Each completed bird is created out of Chaos; each time the pieces smoothly interlock a small breath of Order enters the room.
All this, and it is only a rainy day in a musty house by a lake, where the loons sing duets in the mornings and the moose are always on the other side.

What a piece of work is man and/or woman

2011-07-26T08:49:00.003-04:00

The other evening we went to see The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark at Boscobel, presented by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival with a wonderful young Matthew Amendt as Hamlet, and I could have sworn someone was fooling around with my brain by having inserted the “What a piece of work is Man! How noble in reason!”* speech into Act 2 of Hamlet. You know the speech because it was set to music in “Hair!” and we can all sing it. And I could have sworn, and indeed did swear, that the speech belonged to Caliban in The Tempest. It is the perfect speech for Caliban, poor misshapen & oppressed creature that he is, to express his wonderment at these buff and sweet-talking gentlemen just been washed ashore onto his island.

Then I decided that the director (Terence O’Brien of HVSF) had conceived a clever device to illuminate the plays of Shakespeare: in each play he directed he would insert a speech from another play, but in such a way that it would proceed smoothly and mesh seamlessly with the action. I decided that this was his subtle way to illuminate certain recurring themes. And possibly, so I thought, it was meant as a signature fluke or “error”, in the same way that Native American weavers will deliberately leave one thread awry, so as not to provoke the gods with the perfection of their workmanship.

I may have missed some elegant swordplay in Act V because I was still working out the explanation for this unprecedented insertion of a speech from The Tempest (WS’s final play and a so-called comedy) into Hamlet (tragedy, without a doubt).

But I was wrong. The speech really is in Hamlet. The deeply troubled Hamlet says the words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, those perfidious friends.
How could I have been so confused? Is it possible that in The Tempest Caliban makes that same speech, that Caliban in fact, quotes Hamlet?

*What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
Reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving
how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! and yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no,
nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seeme
to say so

Three Odd Things about

2011-07-22T19:21:00.002-04:00

Three Odd Things about Lucian Freud’s Obit
1. The mention of the mooning incident: In 1938, he was expelled from Bryanston, in Dorset, after dropping his trousers on a dare on a street in Bournemouth.
2. The mention of the arson incident along with its refutation: While it is true that the school burned to the ground while he was there, the often repeated story that Mr. Freud accidentally started the fire with a discarded cigarette seems unlikely.
3. The non-naming of his children. He is survived by many children from his first marriage and from a series of romantic relationships.
Notes:
1.This writer certainly has no objection to mooning; in fact, regards it as a noble tradition. But rarely does it get mentioned in obits. Chances are very good that in their early years several presidents and Supreme Court justices – especially those who benefited from private education – mooned a figure of authority. Yet I defy you to find this delightful fact mentioned in any of their obituaries.
2.I don’t want to quibble, but this seems disingenuous to me. Should we all now fear that our (hitherto-hoped-and-assumed-to-be-reverential) obituaries will contain the following slur: While it is true that Michael Jackson died under mysterious circumstances, the oft-repeated rumor that [your name here] was responsible for his death by means of a voodoo doll seems highly unlikely.
3. Maybe I am imputing the offense I would take were my name omitted from a parental obituary; and maybe it is less offensive since none are singled out for omission. But still. Isn’t it fairly standard for the children to be listed (the survivors, the bereaved, the heirs, the progeny) in an obit? And what is the excuse here? That there are “many”? Are they to be penalized for the paternal proclivity for procreation? (According to Wiki: “Freud is rumored to have fathered as many as 40 children, although this number is generally accepted as an exaggeration.” Then the article goes on to list 13, and they all have names.

WHO's who where?

2011-07-18T14:56:00.009-04:00

It feels like ages since I have written in SQD and chances are I have missed it more than you, dear readers, who presumably have more important things to do. But for those rare moments requiring distraction, I am returning with a few vignettes from our recent time in glorious Pleasant Pond in the north woods of Maine.
And closer to home, if you happen to visit the NYC offices of NRDC you need only go next door(Save energy! Be environmentally savvy!) to buy your weekly supply of Fake Blood, Cobwebs, Ice Effects and Mustaches.

Do you ever read the WHO’S WHO in the Playbill, hoping for something to catch your interest, spark your imagination, and tell you something other than the episodes of Law & Order in which this actor supported his or her art? Only to be disappointed. That is probably because you are attending theatre in one of the great metropolitan areas, watching serious artists perform serious plays.
But if you are lucky enough to attend any of this summer’s performances at Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan, Maine* you will find in the WHO’S WHO a wealth and breadth of biographical detail you had not dared to dream of. I offer here a few selections; to appreciate the full experience you too will have to sit in a Torquemada™ chair and watch the 350 lb. owner of the hardware store in Moscow, Maine tap dance across the stage (and he was great):

NANCY resides in North Anson and likes Mexican food, An Officer and a Gentleman, Judy Garland, Carol Burnett, the color green and Hawaii 5-0”. She is really good at multi-tasking and wishes she had the magical power to lower energy prices.
JUAN’S pets are named Guido, Rosie and Sully. The 150 guppies are unnamed. He claims he is really good at being patient and his hero is Albert Einstein.
IRVING of Stetson lives with wife Jantha, Zeus the dog, and twin cats, Phantom and Ariel.
MIKE was born in England and his family includes Paris, 4 ½ pounds of attitude with a rhinestone collar. He has a degree in rock mechanics and mining, and works as an insurance advisor. Mike claims he is really good at doing a British accent.
GARY is the doting grandparent of Izabel, Madden, Alyuia and Brennan. A Scorpio, Gary likes chocolate, the color green, “Grey’s Anatomy”, and Henry Fonda. He wishes he had the magical power to change his Maine accent. Gary would like to visit the Holy Land.
GREG resides in Hartland and says, “I was born in the wrong era”. Greg’s hero is his wife Dawn and he claims she says he is “really good at everything”. He wishes he had the power to teleport anywhere in the world.
BOBBY claims he is really good at “being kind”. His heroes are Kurt Vonnegut and Daniel Day-Lewis.

*111 years old, and one of the oldest summer theatres in America, on the western shore of Wesserunsett Lake, this Lakewood should not be confused with the Lakewood Center for the Arts in Oswego, Oregon; or the historic Art-Deco Lakewood Theater in East Dallas, Texas; or the Lakewood Theatre Company of Nashville, TN; or the Lakewood Amphitheatre in Atlanta (its formal name is: The HiFi Buys Amphitheatre) or the Lakewood Cultural Center of Lakewood, Colorado, or the Regal Lakewood Cinema of Lakewood, Washington. The Lakewood Theatre in Skowhegan is not only the oldest and hence first Lakewood, but lays claim to the most uncomfortable seats among the Lakewoods, a coveted distinction.

Look for future posts on the Importance of the Jigsaw Puzzle to the American Summer Home; the Social Register at Pleasant Pond; the eternal problem of The Pecking Order; and the Virgin of Caacupé.

All the fun of travel without ever leaving the airport

2011-06-17T16:00:00.004-04:00

What follows is a slighted redacted version of my sister’s blow-by-blow description of her latest adventure traveling.
Background: She takes the bus down from Portland, and the parents go to Logan by cab. They rendezvous there at United Airlines, in order to fly to Chicago to watch their estimable & venerable godson/grandson graduate from Business school where he has learned how to find Free Food wherever it may be. It is time to go through Security, which in the 21st century has replaced cholera as a traveler’s best friend. We shall now switch to my sister’s voice:
• We get in line; there is only ONE line.
• Mom goes through first. She has a faux knee, which requires a pat-down after the scan. She goes ahead and has certain parts of her body patted down 'with the back of a hand". Dad and I are right behind her.
• I remove Dad’s shoes, which are double-knotted. Tightly double-knotted.
• I remove Dad’s belt. His pants start to descend. I will try to ignore this warning sign.
• I remove Dad’s jacket.
• I remove both wallets, one from each back pocket. He always carries two wallets – can anyone tell me why?
• He is called to go through the full body scanner. But he cannot do this because he physically cannot raise his arms above his head, and it is required to do this in order to be seen in one’s naked glory by the snickering TSA staff inside the Wizard’s black box.
• He steps out of the scanner and is sent through the metal detector machine. It beeps.
• I walk through the detector in order to re-check his pockets, and I unclip the volume control for his hearing aid.
• Have I mentioned that Dad is completely unsteady on his feet because they took away his cane, and he is walking in socks and has no feeling in his feet because of neuropathy? Well, he is.
• He goes through the detector again. It beeps again.
• I go through again and discover that his house keys are deep inside yet another pocket, and his watch is still on. I remove them.
• He goes through the detector again. It beeps. People behind us in line are getting agitated. Have I mentioned that there is only ONE line?
• I dig even deeper into his pockets and find a bag with extra hearing aid batteries and a used handkerchief. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy rooting around in my father’s business in the middle of Logan airport? No? That is because I was not enjoying this one bit.
• Dad goes through again. He doesn’t beep.
• Now I get scolded for going through the x-ray and must go back out the detector so I can go through the body scanner. The woman in charge of the scanner yells at me because I have my boarding pass in my pocket. I remove it, put the by-now radioactive boarding pass between my teeth, raise my hands above my head, and get scanned. I hope someone out there is enjoying this.
• I am sent on my way, and I put Dad’s shoes back on, double knotting the laces. I put his belt back on, his jacket back on, and put all his items back in their appointed pockets.
• At the gate we find Mom awaiting us.She could use a nap.
• The flight is delayed due to thunderstorms. We have excellent molded plastic seats at the gate, allowing us to watch the sky darken and the planes taxi.
• Six and a half hours later we are told we can board. We are on the gangplank. The pilot emerges from the plane and announces that there is no way he is flying in ‘that weather’ and besides, he is ‘timed out.’ We return to the gate.
• Thirty minutes later the flight is officially canceled.

Swarm étude

2011-06-16T16:52:00.004-04:00

Just when you think you have your day organized and that you are well situated to accomplish all your allotted tasks, something happens. Sometimes it’s a volcano that fills the airspace with resplendent ash or a tornado that sends you scurrying to the dank cellar. Another time it’s a surprise communication from a man you knew forty years ago, and with whom you behaved badly. Regrettably. Yesterday it was a swarm.
The call came as I was reading and making notes about the fractious friendship between Henry James and H.G. Wells. I kept seeing the two men as “the unsexed and the oversexed”, though that is not how the literary rivalry was discussed in the critical context. Esther in Tarrytown said that the bees were swarming, this very minute, and gathering on the crabapple right next to their stone terrace. CSB was not answering his phone. I told her that I could keep trying his phone and that one of us would get there momentarily. I found him, and we did.
The bees were indeed collecting on the crabapple. Often a swarm will alight on a branch and then hang down in a teardrop shape; when this happens all we have to do is snip off the branch and shake the bees into the awaiting hive box. But these bees were wrapped around the tree trunk, so there was no snipping to be done. How could we encourage them to relocate to the hive box we placed atop a white sheet at the base of the tree? We had not brought our bee brush with us, but luckily I was able to borrow a basting brush from Esther. Kneeling beneath the tree I gently brushed the bees downward, and they came. Initially I wasn’t wearing my bee veil, but then I got stung right between the eyes. (This was unfortunate since I generally assert to anyone who will listen that when bees swarm they are not at all defensive and so you will never get stung. The bees that stung me missed that directive.) So I put on my bee veil and the netting kept getting snagged on the crabapple branches, making it harder to see than it is anyway when wearing a veil. And glasses.
The afternoon was waning, and certain tasks could not be ignored, not even for a swarm. So Imogene slipped back inside through the French doors and started practicing her oboe, an elegiac piece, and the bees streamed down towards the hive box, creating a shimmering and undulating new kind of bark. Some bees stood outside the box, upraised their tails and fanned outward the queen’s delicious pheromones, to lure in any stray sister. Would a clarinet have pleased them just as well? A fiddle?

Re Issues constitutional

2011-06-16T16:12:00.002-04:00

The bad news is that CSB’s truck (performing valiantly as ever, delivering a chicken coop to Brooklyn) received not one but two tickets while parked overnight on the street.
The good news is that it is now possible to protest parking tickets on-line, thus obviating the lengthy trip into the city, the probable acquisition of yet another ticket, and the even lengthier wait in Traffic Court. I write as one not unacquainted with Traffic Court.
In case this happens to you, I thought you might like to see what I wrote, on CSB’s behalf, to the NYC Department of Finance, Parking and Vehicles Section, regarding our two (2) parking violations, which are not really parking violations but citations for an expired inspection sticker. But still, they carry a hefty fine.
I would like to have this violation dismissed because:
1. While my son-in-law was borrowing my truck, he parked it on the street and it was ticketed for an expired inspection sticker TWICE IN THE SPACE OF 32 MINUTES. This seems excessive. Also excessively punitive. Since there is no possible way the truck could have gotten inspected in 32 minutes, this perpetration of double jeopardy seems to be the linchpin of a transparent and craven policy by the Brooklyn police to target exurban vehicles to raise revenue for their city. I feel confident that there are several articles in the United States Constitution prohibiting this sort of targeted taxation without representation.
2. The truck was satisfactorily inspected immediately upon return to Hastings on Hudson, our bucolic home. I can supply a copy of this inspection, if you would like.

Shared birthdays, deathdays

2011-06-13T20:07:00.006-04:00

It must be poetic justice* that the birthday of my friend Becky Rice (she of Christian Scientist* upbringing who often chastises me for over-frequent references to the saints) falls on the feast of two early Christian martyrs, young virgins both, who suffered particularly gruesome martyrdoms. The ways in which Becky does not resemble Saints Felicula and Aquilina are so numerous as to make one suspicious.
Saint Aquilina was born in the 3rd century in Byblos, the oldest continuously–inhabited city in the world. (Unless you are speaking with a Damascene, who will knife you if you deny his city’s pre-eminence.) Becky was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which was inhabited by the Mohicans from about the 16th century until 1738 when a wealthy Bostonian acquired all the land for a subdivision. When President Teddy Roosevelt visited Byblos he suffered intestinally; when he visited Pittsfield his barouche collided with a trolley car. At the age of 12, Aquilina was arrested by Diocletian’s minions and threatened with torture if she did not deny her faith. Naturally she did not deny her faith - if she had we would not be reading her story – and so was subsequently beaten, had her ears pierced with red-hot needles, and then tossed into the water. Aside from voluntarily piercing her earlobes, Becky’s story in no way follows Aquilina’s. When she was rescued and completely healed by a nearby angel, Aquilina foolishly returned to her tormentors to make a point; this time she was decapitated and stayed dead. Though when her head was separated from her neck, milk rather than blood streamed forth. Not only has Becky never been decapitated, defenestrated or even garroted, if that were to happen, she would surely bleed blue blood.

Saint Felicula’s foster-sister was Saint Petronilla, who does not resemble Becky’s sister in any way: Petronilla was locked in a tower by St Peter after he cured her of palsy & then she died on a hunger strike. She could not ski.
Though Becky has had some odd husbands and boyfriends, none can aspire to the unseemliness of Count Flaccus who, when rejected by Felicula, sent her to a dungeon to suffer seven days without food or drink. Becky sometimes misses breakfast, but it is safe to say she would find seven days a real challenge. After her sojourn in the dungeon, Flaccus had Felicula sent to the Vestal Virgins for re-education. They were unsuccessful. Following that, Felicula was suffocated in one of Rome’s city sewers. Though I have tried valiantly, I have not managed to convince Becky to join me on a search for the legendary albino alligators of the NYC sewers. The albino alligators have more in common with today’s 2 saints, than does Becky, in that they are apocryphal. See Snopes/Urban Legends.

Just how much have I stretched the limits of your credibility (also known as gullibility, see Appendix 45.8) by writing this? What do these saints have in common with the birthday lady? Only history will tell.

* Like Christian Science which - and I was not the first to say this – is neither Christian nor Science, poetic justice is rarely poetry and hardly just.

Seeking connections where there arguably are none

2011-06-07T12:26:00.010-04:00

I am trying with little success to figure out what moral or advice Rep. Anthony Weiner (he of such profoundly bad taste in the matter of How to Pursue a Relationship with a person of the Opposite Sex while married to another person of the Opposite Sex) might glean from the story of St Wulphy (or Vulflagius), a happily married man with three daughters who lived in the dark ages before designer underwear and the social media.
Wulphy (d. 643) was such a good man that when the priest in Abbeville died, the local inhabitants asked Wulphy to take over as pastor. He agreed to do this and even agreed to cease marital relations, as they are so quaintly called. But his happy marriage soon trumped his pastoral inklings, and he resumed the above-mentioned marital relations. But then he felt guilty, so stopped again and went on a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
St Wulphy’s relics remain enshrined in picturesque Montreuil-sur-Mer, so perhaps the caddish Weiner might visit them when he pays his respects to the plague victims of 1596 and visits the museum featuring Madame Mary Wooster’s personal collection of Limoges bidets.

H.G.Wells update:
Tales of Wonder is quite good. The Invisible Man is a bit too hysterical for me. I am also enjoying the completely biased biography of H.G. by Anthony West, his son by Rebecca West. I have an Excel file to keep track of all his affairs, amours and trysts. I have no idea when he found time to write.

Why H.G.Wells, or What is Missing

2011-06-01T11:04:00.005-04:00

So the venerable and august Literature Club’s theme for 2011-2012 will be “Literature as a Lens of History”. Initially I wasn’t at all clear what was meant by this topic (having missed a key meeting, apparently) but I quickly overcame that difficulty. It means whatever one wants it to mean. That is the beauty of many of our Literature Club themes.
When the theme was “20th Century Masterworks”, the programs ranged from Kingsley Amis to Gertrude Stein to the 13 volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. In our year of “Seeds of Self,” we heard papers on such disparate characters as Sylvia Plath, Mabel Dodge and Kim Philby. It is true I might have had a hard time making a case for Balzac when the theme was “Voices of Islam”, but I did manage a paper that discussed Virgil and Nick Flynn when the topic was “Science and Literature.”

So what literature shall cast its lens on what history?
I am considering, H.G. Wells, and my family history.

Now I often start my research with a look at what the Encyclopedia Britannica (15th edition) has to say, because a) It is a good place to begin, b) they list sources, c) the articles are well written, and d) I feel relatively confident that the articles are unprejudiced and unbiased, which is not always the case with Wikipedia (though I am also a fan of Wiki) because in Wiki, devotées or disciples can write entries about their favorite person, book or battlefield. How do I know this? Because my devoted son wrote the Wiki entry for yours truly.
So I went over to the encyclopedia shelf to find the final volume (V to Z), and ..... it was not there.
The row of tomes ended with Volume 18, Taylor to Utah. I have searched high and low, in all the places where an encyclopedia might find itself (attic, wine cellar, under the bed, laundry basket, next to the observation hive) and others spots less likely, and I have not found it.
CSB has been enlisted to the cause, he too has sought the errant volume, in places too vertiginous for me, and also in vain.
We are flummoxed and bamboozled. We are at a loss and at sea. How can a single volume of the encyclopedia be missing? And no, I would not have loaned it to someone. I am not that sort of person.
It’s not just the salient facts about Herbert George Wells that are missing. That is bad enough, but the true state of affairs is far worse. We are also missing the Vatican, venereal diseases, verdigris and volcanoes. We are lost without wages, Wales, wallpaper, Walloon literature, Whig, wig and writ. Where are Xanthippe and x-rays? We are desolate without yachting, yak, yeomanry and Yiddish. But worst of all, we have nowhere to turn for Zacatecas, Zend-Avesta and Zero.
If you have seen this final volume of the Britannica, Vacuum to Zygote, please tell me where it is. There will be a reward: I will share with you everything I learn about H.G. Wells.

Why H.G.?
Wells is best known for his science fiction,and I don’t even like science fiction. I have tried to like it, or at least read it, because I am closely related to some benighted souls who really like sci-fi; but I have never succeeded. So why am I doing this?

Because my paternal grandmother (mentioned most recently in this blog in the tale of the mystery picture that turned out to be the Summer Institute for Social Progress) was passionate about H.G. Wells. At the time of her death she owned no less than 36 of his books, all showing the wear of multiple readings and bearing her tiny marginalia.
From the early 1930’s, when she and my grandfather separated (exact date unknown or untold), until the early 1960’s when she made the Vendôme Hotel on Commonwealth Ave in Boston her permanent residence, my grandmother traveled: she crossed the continent by trains, she crossed the ocean by ships and she crossed back, again and again. I know this because in the parental basement I found the ships’ manifests, from the S.S. President Coolidge, the S.S. Bremen, the S.S. Lapland, the S.S. Empress of Britain, the R.M.S. Caronia, the T.S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, the Triple-Screw Pennland and so and on; I found a stack of menus from the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad (“Scenic Line of the World”); and I found her Intourist’s Pocket Guide to the Soviet Union and her 1933 receipt from the Hotel Astoria in Leningrad. I don’t know what she did when she got to Leningrad or Göteborg or Helsinki or Naples; all I know is that she read H.G. Wells repeatedly, as well as Theosophical tracts and Numerology books and books by Krishnamurti and Tagore, Rudolph Steiner and Oliver Schreiner.
So I will be tackling H.G. Wells, with trepidation. Aside from the unfortunate science fiction, many of his books have titles that make me nervous, titles that more than hint of a message, or even worse, a moral. Titles such as Will Socialism Destroy the Home? or God the Invisible King or Socialism and the Scientific Motive or Crux Ansata – An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church or The Outlook for Homo Sapiens or A Year of Prophesying. You get the picture.
Having written the above, I have started with a very short book (98 pages) with the benign title of The Croquet Player. And I was encouraged to find the following sentence: “There were one or two sets of niceish people with whom a little light conversation was possible without entanglement.” And also delighted to read that the vicar, a key character in the story, presides over the church of Cross in Slackness.
Then I went to Crux Ansata, which, I am sorry to report, is the kind of diatribe that makes me want to actually defend the papacy and sale of indulgences.
I think my next effort will be First and Last Things.

It seems I am missing more than the final volume of the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Stranger bedfellows

2011-05-29T11:14:00.016-04:00

(Thanks to The Old Leather Man, by Dan W. DeLuca, for the above picture and most of the information.)
What do the Leather Man, unwashed wanderer, and Hughette Clark, millionaire recluse, have in common? Depending on how you look at it, very little or a very significant characteristic.
The Leather Man’s name, birthplace and date of birth are unknown. He died, alone in a cave, in March of 1889, wearing the same oft-patched leather garment he had worn through all his wanderings. He was approximately 50 years old.
Hughette Clark was born in 1906, the daughter of the 67 year old, William Clark and the 28 year old Anna La Chapelle, formerly William Clark’s ward. Huguette spent almost her entire life in the rarefied air of Upper East Side mansions. She died in Manhattan’s Beth Israel hospital at the age of 104, still worth millions.
The Leather Man ate cured meat, windfall apples, dandelion greens, nuts and berries. He chewed tobacco he found discarded at railroad stations and post offices.
Huguette Clark’s favorite lunch was saltines with sardines.
Starting in 1856 – when he first entered the general consciousness – the Leather Man walked alone on country roads and railway beds, and slept in caves and in abandoned cabins. His journeys took him through Connecticut and New York and sometimes to the Berkshires. Then in 1883 he began to walk what would become his famous and reliable circuit: every 34 days he completed 365 miles through Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess and Columbia counties in New York and Fairfield, Litchfield, Hartford and Middlesex counties in Connecticut. Local towns folk and town papers often took note of his passing through, but he rarely spoke or interacted with others.
After her brief unconsummated marriage in 1929, Huguette moved back into the family’s Fifth Avenue mansion and lived there with her mother and a chorus line of servants. Surrounded by her exquisite dollhouses and their perfectly dressed occupants, she occupied herself by painting, playing the harp and watching the “Flintstones”. (What about those animated cave folks did Huguette find so compelling? Was it the bone barrette in Pebbles’s hair? Or was it the prehistoric approximation of a 1950’s suburban foursome, in which the husbands act like cavemen and the wives are delicate flowers with some actual common sense?) In the late 1980’s Huguette, under as assumed name, moved into a NY hospital suite. She brought her French dolls with her into seclusion. She never left the hospital again.

Apparently, the preeminent wish of both Huguette Clark and the Leather Man was to be left alone, to live alone and unknown, and to die that same way.

And since I am trying to keep the hagiography to a minimum, I won’t mention that both Huguette and the Leather Man surely have more in common with the eremites, stylites (pole-sitters), and peregrinating ascetics of early Christianity, than with most of their 19th, 20th and 21st century peers.

St Anthony Abbott,in the Desert, by Zurburan

CSB and the Carpenter Bees

2011-05-27T11:46:00.003-04:00

Who ever wrote that “structural damage is generally minor or nonexistent” in the Wikipedia article about carpenter bees has not seen CSB on the roof with a badminton racquet. There is a reason gentlemen over 2 meters tall should not be roofers. Call it the tipping point. (But give them a lightweight racquet and they become weapons of mass destruction.)
Our carpenter bees, Xylocopa virginica, are larger than hummingbirds, hairier than woolly mammoths and just as annoying as the woodchuck in the vegetable garden. They make their nests by tunneling into wood, preferably the wood of our front porch, or the facia of the potting shed, or the underside of the shutters. Their tunneling technique – their large hairy bodies vibrate as they rasp their mandibles against the tender wood – results in telltale piles of sawdust falling to the ground and staining the clapboard. They also leave pollen skid marks under their tunnels. There is nothing subtle about a carpenter bee, or her depredations.
But what to do?
Years ago I was told to spray something toxic into the tunnels (assuming I could reach them) and then stuff in a wooden dowel (about 16 millimeters in diameter) to seal off the tunnel. My carpenter bees regarded this as afternoon tea. Recently it was suggested that we stuff steel wool into their excavations. But then the steel wool rusts and we end up with rust stains on the clapboard. There are also toxic bombs you can explode or drop onto the bees, and anything else in the vicinity, including the dogs, our own blessed honeybees, and us.
The ever-intrepid CSB has another technique. He swats the carpenter bees with a badminton racquet. I have tried this method with zero success, but he swears by it. In order to illustrate the potential deadliness of a swat with a badminton racquet, CSB points out that while the fastest a tennis ball has ever traveled is 156 mph, the fastest recorded shuttlecock speed was Fu Haifang’s 206 mph smash. On the lawn or the front porch this technique (Standing statue-still to ‘fool’ the bees, then lurching and swatting) may look silly but at least no human lives hang in the balance. This is not true on the roof, on the pitched roof, on the small pitched roof of the bay window.

The sport of badminton was invented in the 18th century by British officers stationed in Poona, India. Previous to these researches the only time I had every heard of Poona, or Pune, was as the venue of amazing erotic sculptures and reliefs, featuring the Hindu gods performing every manner of sex act you have ever heard of, and then some. * The game came back to England with the military, and was popular with the upper classes; think green lawns, long skirts, and shuttlecocks (“a feathered projectile with unique aerodynamic properties”). Until now, it has not been touted as a qualification for a career in extermination.

*And then upon further research I learned that I was completely wrong about that. How could I have been so mistaken? (The possibilities are myriad.) The famous erotic statues are in
Khajuraho, some 735 miles from Pune. But if you want to associate the birthplace of badminton with artistic sex scenes, I think that would be lovely.

SQD banned in China; Hold the MSG

2011-05-24T08:19:00.004-04:00

This just in from our dear friend Paco who is over in Beijing, explaining to Chinese retailers What Women Want and Why We Buy.

"Please take some pride in knowing that your blog (and many others) are deemed sufficiently subversive to the Chinese Communist Party, that it is blocked for Chinese readers. All your twisted finial piety worship and honeyed entries, does not conceal the truth that you are secretly funded by the Catholic Church to propagate the worship of Saints."

Of course I am honored to be in what I assume is very august company.But I can't help but wonder what I would have to do to be placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Catholic Church's most exclusive club, populated by such notables as Galileo, Casanova, La Fontaine, Sartre and Maeterlinck.About whom we might ask: was it his very explicit The Life of the Bee that was the deciding factor in his listing?

2011-05-23T08:55:00.003-04:00

Yes, indeed. The featured item is in fact a vintage Bakelite rolltop cigarette case made by the Rolinx company. You can also view this wonderful gizmo in the Science Museum in London and explain to your children how this innocent appearing contrivance is actually a cancer-stick & coffin-nail delivery device. I applaud the clever individuals who recognized it right away.
This item was designed and created by the very appealing Maurice Robin (1912-1982), "regarded as one of the post war pioneers of the injection moulding industry". One of his early successes was a "lighter faster pop riveter" used for assembling munitions during WW2. But it was his frustration with the wooden covers of pencil cases that led him to his trademark rolling plastic lid.

When I discovered it - in a cabinet in the parental basement, along with a silk Japanese flag ca.1945 - I was totally at a loss. Pencils? Chopsticks? Asparagus? But my younger sister, who has never smoked a cigarette in her life, knew it immediately. It seems that all these years when we thought she was usefully employed saving the aquifers and northern forests, she was in fact participating in James Bond marathons with her family.

The next challenge? Since my smoking days are now but a dim memory, an olfactory madeleine, I am seeking a new use for this item. Feel free to offer suggestions.

Mystery item #17

2011-05-19T10:09:00.002-04:00

What is it?
(And B - you are not allowed to answer, as you have classified information.)

2011-05-18T11:58:00.009-04:00

At dinner the other night my sister read aloud this piece about a remarkable intersection of entrepreneurial creativity and gullibility (or piety?). Recognizing that there are thousands of people in this country who genuinely believe that they will be Raptured up to heaven this Saturday, May 21, who also have pets who will not be getting raptures, an inventive atheist saw an opportunity. He set up a service to adopt the pets-left-behind of the newly raptured. For payment in advance.

We all laughed excessively, and not a little because we knew that we would never do something so silly as agree to be raptured without our pets. Seriously, how gullible can you be?
I think I have an idea.
Didn’t I just travel Baltimore to look at relics & reliquaries, and don’t Catholics all over Europe risk life, limb and honor to go see Mary Magdalene’s tooth, and wash their scrofulous faces in St Winifred’s Holy Well, and pray to St Pantaleon’s foot to heal their bunions? Throughout the Middle Ages, and beyond, devout Christians, often extremely poor and desperate Christians who arguably had better things to do with their time, chose to risk their lives, their health, and their sanity in order to arrive at to some cathedral advertising the healing powers of their resident relics. And they paid real money to see or touch those relics.
They prayed to saints that never existed.
Today’s Lives of the Saints features St Venantius, whose cult is characterized as “fictitious history”. Which does not mean that the text refrains from describing his gruesome martyrdom (scourges, torches, asphyxiation, smashed teeth, thrown to lions, thrown from a cliff and decapitated.) Following the fictitious Venantius, we find St. Theodotus. His story,”with its reminiscences of a tale found in Herodotus, must be treated as a romance written by an author possessing rather more literary skill that we commonly find in such cases.” Which strikes me as a rather elegant way to say it is not true. This apocryphal tale tells us that Theodotus the innkeeper promised Fronto, the priest that if he, Fronto, built the church, he, Theodotus, would provide the relics. Later, after being appallingly tortured by the pagan powers, Theodotus was burned on a pyre. Fronto then plied the guards with liquor so that he could retrieve the body. He lay it across the back of his ass, set it free knowing it would go straight home. Fronto then built the church enshrining the innkeeper’s bones.

Of course, compared to the Rapture, all of the above is entirely plausible.

Hall of Fame for Dames

2011-05-18T11:31:00.004-04:00

The Head of Athletics at Beaver Country Day (formerly all-girls) School opened their first ever Athletic Hall of Fame induction ceremony by quoting Cicero: The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory.
It was a nice classical touch and I wracked my brain to come up with the Latin for that familiar phrase. (Not successful. No more was I successful in learning when and where Cicero said those words, or even if he really did.) But then it dawned over Marble Head: Here is the classical source of No Gain, No Pain.
(While I cannot verify that Cicero said that pithy quote, I can tell you that his name comes from the Latin for chickpea, Cicer. According to Plutarch, this is because one of his ancestors had a ‘cleft in the tip of his nose resembling a chickpea’. I am having difficulty imagining such a cleft. More likely a skin tag or a wart, is what I think. I can also tell you that Cicero’s sister-in-law, Fabia, was a Vestal Virgin, which was a very honorable thing to be in ancient Rome. I mention this otherwise completely irrelevant fact because Lee and I were sisters-in-law for almost 25 years. I remain unsure what happens to one’s in-law-ships upon divorce. I seek advice in this matter.)

When I first met LeeLee I was dating her older brother, a poet and a pot-smoking Nietzsche-spouting hipster. I was a scrawny, wannabe-poet and LeeLee was an archetypal jock. (Except that she was not archetypal, as we shall see.)
At Beaver Country Day* she played varsity field hockey, basketball and lacrosse and tennis. She was the captain of all her teams; she excelled at sports that involved hurling a ball into a goal or across a net, all while eluding one’s opponent. She was an adept at wielding weapons such as field hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and tennis rackets. Had ice-hockey been played in girls’ schools back then, I feel confident she could have inflicted much pain with an ice hockey stick, or a puck, or both. She regularly broke records for goals, baskets, opponents pummeled, throws, whatever they were called.
When Lee entered a room, resplendently strong and sweaty in her brown pinny, I cowered. After all, my greatest, and only, claim to record-breaking in the gym department at my girls’ school was in the number and ingenuity of my excuses to avoid gym. Should they ever institute a Hall of Fame for Sports Evasion, I like to think I would be a contender.

Given my wimpiness and Lee’s manifestly superior athleticism, how did we end being such friends? You may well ask. The truth is that LeeLee read far more poetry than I ever played field hockey, and has even written some. I did in fact sail and ski (neither of which involve hurling balls) and I discovered a willingness to play Member-Guest tennis as Lee’s partner, just as she was willing to compete for the Consolation Prize rather than walk away with the Silver Cup.
We discovered we both thought was an excellent idea to end – or begin - a day with our kids at the beach a trip to DQ. It turns out you need a very special person to appreciate Dairy Queen as much as we did.
Basically though, we seem to find the same things funny. This has on occasion proved embarrassing, and possibly dangerous. We like to walk on the beach and solve the world’s problems, a pastime now sadly relegated to Personal Ads. We have spent more hours than is healthy counting the possible attendees at our respective funerals, and lamented their small number. The truth is, some things cannot be explained.

If my dearly-doted–on granddaughter ever sees fit to play field hockey, I hope that LeeLee will see fit to cheer her on. I will await them in the nearby coffee shop, reading about relics and fruitlessly seeking the patron saint of girls’ athletics.

*Fittingly enough, BCD was the sports rival of Milton Academy Girls Upper School (MAGUS), in my time. Not that I ever graced any team, in my time.

Visiting Mary Magdalene's Tooth

2011-05-13T14:43:00.004-04:00

Had I lived during the 15th century, and had I wanted to make a pilgrimage to see Mary Magdalene’s tooth encased in rock crystal and suspended in a golden reliquary resembling a two towers atop a chalice- maybe because I was a formerly-fallen woman, or maybe because I had a terrible toothache, or maybe just because I wanted to go on a journey - I would have had to walk from wherever I lived (Let’s say it was Alsace) to wherever the precious tooth currently resided (let’s say the cathedral at Arles). This would have taken quite a while, and would have surely involved muddy roads, filthy accommodations, hunger, bandits, marauders and most likely some unpleasant weather.
Had I lived in the 15th century, it is very possible I would already be dead from childbirth, plague, pleurisy, fits, or vile humors, because I am a just a few years past the average lifespan of a 15th century woman.
Had I lived in the early 15th century, I might have known that very brave and ultimately betrayed heroine from Domremy, Joan the savior of France. But that is unlikely, because she was courageous and brave, and I would surely be something of a chicken, at least so far as anything so strenuous as going into battle against English soldiers. (Our relation to each other would be not unlike the dichotomy I will experience tomorrow when I attend the Athletics Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at Beaver Country Day where my sister-in-law, the amazing athlete, will be inducted. While she was wisely spending her high school years vigorous pursuing, hitting, and hurling balls on fields of competition, I was smoking and reading poetry in the graveyard. And there is no Hall of Fame for that.)
But I do not live in the 15th century and so, in order to visit the tooth of Mary Magdalene, all I had to do was take Amtrak to Baltimore, sit comfortably in the train as we whizzed past Trenton’s claim to fame, sleep through Wilmington, disembark at Baltimore’s Penn Station, walk down Charles Street past the equestrian Statue of John Eager Howard, no less than 3 Afghan restaurants, and a very tall monument to George Washington which claims to have a statue of George Washington on its top – but it was too far up for me to verify - , and then past Mt. Vernon Methodist where this week’s sermon will be “Jesus was a Bad Preacher” and enter the Walters Art Museum and see their exhibit, Treasure of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe. And not a moment too soon, since it closes this Sunday.
Having made my perilous pilgrimage, I encountered not only the tooth of Mary Magdalene, but also one of John the Baptist’s molars. According to the sidebar, in 1931 a dentist confirmed that the tooth did in fact belong to a 30-year old man who ate a coarse diet. He could not, however, say how old the tooth itself was. I also visited an arm, I don’t know which one, of St. George, enough fragments of the True Cross to build a table, bones of Sts. Cosmas and Damien, St. Baudine's blood,a Holy Thorn and the skull of the lovely St. Blandina. To garner the benefits of touching so many fabulous relics back in the 15th century, I would have had to spend my short and miserable lifetime trudging on rutted roads and fighting off unfunny traveling jesters.
It may be churlish of me to complain that St. Peter’s Rib and St. Blaise’s foot did not come over from London, but then, I am churlish in this matter.

Mother, Other

2011-05-08T14:14:00.003-04:00

My mother in 1987. Note the smile.

My mother in 193?. Having been told she has a crooked smile, she is serious.

My mother and me in 1953. Note that she insisted upon wearing her glasses for this portrait. That shows character.Or stubbornness. She has worn contact lenses ever since.

Because it is Mothers Day, a holiday beloved of florists and purveyors of cards bearing prepackaged sentiments, and not because I am trying to extricate myself from my mother’s capacious and architecturally-correct doghouse, and I would like enumerate a few of the many things that I love about my mother.

Her vocabulary: She uses words like fenestration and curvilinear in regular conversation. On her answering machine, she asks the caller to “kindly leave a message”.

Her cuisine. When we were children in Hingham, back when Chef Boyardee spaghetti was foreign cuisine, and pigs-in-a-blanket and celery sticks were the acme of hors d’oeuvres, my Belgian, raised-in-Egypt mother fed us yogurt and falafel, sautéed kidneys, Italian cold cuts, French cheese, pasta with pesto, Syrian apricot leather, steak tartar and each morning, one raw egg yolk each. Much of that was not available in Hingham; she had to venture into dubious neighborhoods of the ‘city’ to find such delicacies. Our friends and cousins, served a bowl of fresh yogurt or raw meat with raw eggs, generally declined to eat again chez nous; until they grew up, developed palates, and then came in droves to dine à la Monique.

Her organization: She labels everything – you never have to be in doubt whether a painting was acquired in a gallery in Brussels in 1955 or inherited from a great aunt or presented by an admirer in 1977, because there will be a sticker on the back telling you the facts of the case. In her impeccable broom closet she has a box labeled: Monique’s Tiny Tools.

Her thrift: Aside from vintage lingerie, she has saved children’s clothes knit by Syrian nuns. (Are there many nuns in Syria? I always thought so.) Downstairs you can find almost every Shakespeare play complete with my father’s prep school annotations, as well as his assignment book from Brush Hill School, circa 1932. Although to be fair – and this has been pointed out to me very strongly – my mother is not personally responsible for the fact that in the barn and the basement you can find every ice skate ever worn by my father and his brother; Harvard Lampoons from the late 30’s (a treasure); Browne and Nichols beanies, and about 500 lbs of opera on 78’s – all those things came with the house she and my father inherited it from his father.
And she has never, to my knowledge, thrown away a book. In her house you can find books & books on such varied subjects (and these are a mere amuse bouche) as: theories of color, cotton waste, oriental carpets, arctic exploration, vernacular architecture, anything Egyptian, French cooking, learning German, Portuguese, Czech, Arabic, Swedish and Urdu. She has kept all our MAD magazines from the 60’s and 70’s and keeps them in the 3rd floor bathroom. If you ever lose a child – or an adult – for long periods of time in her house, that is where you will often find him. (It is not a coincidence that in my 2nd floor bathroom we have our much smaller collection of 80’s MAD magazines, as well as collections of Doonesbury, Gary Larson, Ogden Nash and P.G. Wodehouse. It is hommage.)

Her loyalty: When she arrived at Smith College in 1948, fresh from Cairo and a Swiss boarding school (where the English girls and their field hockey sticks gave her a lifelong aversion to playing team sports; an aversion I either inherited or came by honestly), she lived on campus with seven other girls, all Americans. They and their families took to this “fetching”* colonial, and eased her passage into American life. They were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. You can see them all in my parents’ wedding pictures, wearing hats that would not have looked amiss at the recent royal wedding of millinery notoriety. The Smith girls remained the best of friends through all the rigors of marriage and motherhood: puling infants, adolescent children, children making unfortunate marriages, and finally, grandchildren.

Her diligence: Because she was married to an America and lived in the US and spawned American children, my mother had the novel idea to become a naturalized citizen. She did not take this task lightly. Told that there would be questions about American history, my mother studied American history as if for a Ph.D. Her knowledge of the causes of the Revolution, the rational for Manifest Destiny, the exigencies of westward expansion, and the tribulations of Native Americans was vaster than the Immigration and Naturalization officer had ever heard before or since. She knows all the American presidents, in order, backwards and forwards AND she can describe for you the architecture of their houses, their furniture, and can tell you if the wallpaper in the restored Museum-House you will pay $10 to visit is architecturally correct.

Her fashion: This gets challenging. What can you say about a mother who wore bikinis at the Yacht Club in Massachusetts in the 1950’s? French bikinis, not American two-pieces. You can say she had the figure for it. Or you could mention that the Ladies Committee at the Yacht Club asked her to stop wearing bikinis, because there were children present. Also men.
Her sense of color in fashion is as good as her sense of color on houses. I am not the only one who recalls that at my high school graduation (as a trustee she was on the stage) she wore a deep purple dress from Paris, a wide red belt, red sling back heels, and a purple fascinator. In fact, at the one and only high school reunion I ever attended, my erstwhile classmates continued to note her elegance and style. Her style is not limited to the Gallic. Perhaps because of her time in the Middle East or simply because she is fashion-forward, she has always loved and collected ethnic jewelry and clothing. She is just as likely to come to your party in an Uzbek gown, a Guajarati sari, a Nepali shalwar kameez, an Egyptian gallibaya, or a Vietnamese ao dai as a Givenchy dress. She looks great in them all.

Do I dare add that our mother is and has ever been a source of endless quirky-Monique-stories for her numerous children, in-laws, grandchildren, godchildren and random hangers-on? Probably not. Happy Mothers Day.

* So wrote Edward Said, in Out of Place: A Memoir

Very minimal progress

2011-05-04T13:25:00.001-04:00

So while visiting the parents this week at their ancestral home I continued with my project of encouraging my mother to purge extremely unnecessary, useless, broken and unwanted items from her attic and basement. She continues to resist vociferously, e.g. You and your sister bully me around; and, You can do this when I am gone; and, Aren’t you glad I actually did save those old garter belts?

We went up to the attic where, in classic maternal style, everything is impeccably labeled, as in a zippered bag bearing this rubric: “Ecru and taupe hose, pre-era of Pantyhose” .

The very first drawer I pulled open was a bonanza of completely dispensable items. I identified a bag full of moldy and soap stained curtain rings, about two dozen assorted plastic curlers in tempting shades of Pepto-Bismal pink, prickly with that Velcro-like adhesive that was favored for curlers in the 1960’s, and a plastic bag full of old hairbrushes and combs, all well used, with missing bristles and teeth.
I said, “Mom, see how easy this is. Throwing these things out is a complete no-brainer.”
She said, “What just a minute. I’m not throwing out those hairbrushes. Some of them were very nice hairbrushes.”
I said, “But they have overstayed their welcome. They are decrepit. And they have been in this drawer for decades and you haven’t once missed them.”
Mom said, “There you go bullying me again. I kept those hairbrushes for a reason.”
I said, “Well at least you can’t argue about the curlers. You don’t use curlers any more and neither does anyone you are remotely related to.”
Mom said, “Maybe I could give them to my hairdresser for her salon.”
I said, “What an excellent idea. They’ve probably been looking for old, used, unsanitary hair curlers for ages.”
Mom said, “You and your sister think you are so funny.”
I said, “We are funny.”

2011-04-30T18:37:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was a great day for young men with more than the usual complement of middle names. No, I am not referring to the royal wedding, although a certain pink satin steroidal pretzel in the second pew pretty much made my morning. No, I am referring to the grand homecoming of the Igster. Yesterday, with a grand flourish of diapers and much toasting with frozen breast milk, Ignatius Schein Richardson Brownstein was discharged from the NICU and went home with his parents and his older sister, Leda of Sleeping Beauty fame.
Not bad for a babe born on the 99th anniversary of the fatal collision of the Titanic and a north Atlantic iceberg.
You probably know that the young affianceds chose yesterday for their wedding day - not knowing it would coincide with the joyous Iggy homecoming - because it is the feast of St Catherine of Siena, and Kate’s christened name is Catherine. I have never thought of the British royal family as having any particular interest in or fondness for the saints, so this made me take a second look at the young couple.
I am wondering if the fact that St Catherine and her twin sister, who died soon after birth, were the youngest of 25 children, will influence their family planning. Will the fact that at the age of six St Catherine had her first mystical experience – a vision of Jesus sitting on an upholstered chair between Saints Peter and Paul - influence their philosophy of early childhood training? I will not even allude to the matter of the stigmata, and the possibilities for trauma.

Press releases from Buckingham Palace neglected to mention that April 29th is also the feast of the Martyrs of Corfu, a group of imprisoned murderers, thieves and perverts. While incarcerated they were converted by Saints Jason and Sosipater, who were also in prison, but for the crime of preaching. Once converted, the aspiring martyrs proclaimed their new faith and were thrown into boiling oil. In case you find yourself looking for a special name for that special infant, you might consider one of theirs: Faustianus, Euphrasius, Saturninus, Marsalius, Mammius, Iniscolus, and Januarius

Also unmentioned in the Buckingham Palace news flash was the delightful St Torpes of Pisa, about whom nothing is known other than his martyrdom in the time of Nero. This unfortunate lapse is remedied by various legends created around St Torpes or Tropez. One endearing version has him decapitated and his head thrown into the Arno. (It would later be recovered in Pisa.) His executioners placed his body in a boat with an ill-tempered rooster and a hungry dog, who were encouraged to feast on the headless corpse. If you have already guessed that the animals did not touch one morsel of the saint, you would be correct and you can promote yourself to Hagiography 102. Of course the boat with the saint’s body, the rooster and the dog floated all the way to what is now St. Tropez, named for him. This beautiful Riviera town is where I first learned to appreciate pink wine, where there is the most exquisite tiled fish market and where Brigitte Bardot maintains her right-wing Save My Favorite Pets Organization. All over St Tropez you can buy postcards of a reconstructed but still voluptuous BB reclining on her king-size bed surrounded by a menagerie.

One day perhaps the Igster and I will visit St Tropez - taking a break from our tour of the Cistercian monasteries of Provence - and we will drink pink wine in red chairs at the old port. I will tell him that he departed the hospital and went home on the feast of the patron saint of Saint Tropez, and then he will surprise me and even himself, and ask for more scurrilous details about this St Tropez and I will tell him, and his astute questions will reveal him to be a nascent hagiographer and that evening I will rewrite my will and bequeath to him my entire and vast collection of hagiographica, which will probably not be quite what he had in mind.

Welcome to Romania

2011-04-27T17:08:00.002-04:00

For a long time the only things I knew about Romania were the following:
• In Romanian households there will be a cruet of chicken fat on the table, as a condiment. I know this because my little sister once went to Romania with her high school chorus for the purpose of singing popular prep school hymns to Romanians eager to hear such things. While visiting Romania, she was proposed to on six separate occasions; she received several offers to buy her blue jeans directly off her body; she drank Romanian champagne in a bathtub; and she experienced the culinary delights of chicken fat.
• When Ovid was banished in 8 AD for writing the scandalous Ars Amatoria, he was sent to Tomi, a half-barbaric outpost of the empire on the Black Sea; it would have been known as the Siberia of the Roman Empire, but the Romans were then unaware of the existence of Siberia. Later, Siberia would be referred to as the Tomi of Tsarist Russia. They didn’t even speak Latin in Tomi. The weather was wretched. It doesn’t bear thinking of the plumbing situation. Tomi is now the city of Constança, Romania.
• For a very long Nicolae Ceaușescu ruled Romania, and for most of that time he was so unpopular that one can only wonder how he woke up each morning and looked at himself in the mirror. While it did not take long to execute him by firing squad on Christmas Day of 1989, it took a much longer time, many months, to topple, dismantle and remove all the statues and portraits of Ceaușescu that blighted the Transylvanian landscape like strip malls In Yosemite.
• Somewhere in Romania there must be a national School of Cosmetology & Discipline that produces the legions of sadistic cosmetologists who now ply their trade in America, which apparently is populated by thousands of unsuspecting women seeking facials.

That was the sum total of my Romanian knowledge until the other night, at the PEN World Voices Festival, when I heard the Romanian poet, Mircea Catarescu, read a poem about an obsession with Natalie wood. He read the poem in Romanian, so I only knew that it was about a Natalie Wood obsession because the translation was projected on a nearby screen. He could have been reading aloud a newsy Christmas letter or a report on his elevated cholesterol, and it would not have mattered much to me. That is how much I enjoyed the sound of Romanian. From the very sound of it, would I have known that Romanian is among the very first Romance languages to split off from Latin, that it is descended from Proto-Romanian and that on the Latin language tree it is lateral with Aromanian? Indubitably. About Aromanian, also called Vlach, I know somewhat less. Mostly, it is just like Romanian except that it has more Greek words. Nor would I have been able to distinguish that Romanian has preserved only three of the six Latin cases. Don’t ask which three.
How would I describe the sound of a Romanian poet reading his poem?
Closeted. Edible. Ancient. Secret. Underground Italian. Mushroomy. Like musical fifths.

I have since learned that Romania is a big supplier of edible mushrooms to Western Europe, also of snails.

Fungi perfecti

2011-04-27T16:53:00.003-04:00

Theoretically, Leda was helping me pull weeds and clean winter debris from the garden out front. I was on a mission. Leda, on the other hand, was open to anything. Thus, it was she who espied the mushrooms hidden in plain sight among last autumn’s fallen leaves.
Sometimes in Sleeping Beauty they eat mushrooms, she said.
I don’t know that version, I said.
Nana, we can make mushroom pie now, she said.
Great idea, Leda.
I will make the pie and you can help. I am going to let you have all you want. And Chucker can have all he wants, she said generously.
What about your Mom & Dad? I asked.
I don't know if they will like it, She said.
More to the point, do you like mushroom pie? I said.
I probably won’t really eat it, she admitted.
We proudly took our basket of mushrooms inside. I climbed up the step-ladder to fetch the Mushroom Handbook and found, in the section on “Morels, Stinkhorns and Other Club-Shaped Mushrooms”: Yellow Morel, Morchella esculanta; Blond to yellow-brown, honey-combed cap on whitish stalk; Edibility: Choice. I was delighted. Leda and I once again congratulated ourselves on our brilliant find, right in front of our noses. But just to be on the safe side, I emailed a picture (see below) to our friend Tom, an amateur mycologist who graciously continues to identify whatever fungi I bring home from our rambles, and thus far he has not lost patience. He wrote back that to say they were probably the Half-free Morel, Morchella semilibera. (Yellow-brown, skirtlike, honeycombed cap on whitish stalk; Edibility: Good.)Or more likely the wrinkled Thimble-cap, Verpa Bohemica; Yellow-brown, wrinkled, thimblelike cap on whitish stalk; Edibility: Edible with caution.
Caution is not a word I like attached to food I intend to feed to my family.
Early the next morning, I found a package on our front porch. Inside were beautiful Black morels, Morchella elata, the real thing. I will cook them this evening with freshly-laid eggs, and throw caution to the winds.

Good Morning

2011-04-22T09:39:00.001-04:00

I tend to wake up slowly. Except when I lurch from the bed as if electrocuted. This morning was no different. Half asleep, or clinging to sleep, with eyes shut, I told CSB about yet another fascinating dream. This one took place in Mongolia, involved my sister-in-law’s braids, a girl on a large hairy horse, the Falkland Islands and a complicated situation that could only be solved by distracting my mother with questions about fenestration.
Then I really woke up, which is to say I opened my eyes. I could see but not very well because I had not yet located my glasses.
I said to CSB: Did I tell you my dream?
He said: No.
I said: It was in Mongolia.
He said: And you pulled Fritz’s braids and the horse’s head was tiny.
I said: How do you know that?
He said: I just do.
I said: Is the paper here yet?
He said: No.
I said: What are you reading?
He said: The paper.
I said: I get it.

He’s born, and he has a name.

2011-04-16T16:36:00.003-04:00

The matter of names – THE name – was finally decided, and not a moment too soon. On the evening of April 13th, pregnant daughter and son-in-law agreed on a name; they harmonized on that momentous issue, that bone of contention that had delivered such amusement to we bystanders and caused not a little angst for the vested participants.
Some of us shall prolong the conversation as we examine the importance of names, the importance given names by cultures and religions and pregnant parents. How much does a name matter? Would you be the same person had you been otherwise named? Had you a name more or less easily pronounced, or more or less easily spelled, how would you be different? Because of course you would be different. If a butterfly’s flutter in Mombasa can spark a hurricane in Tegucigalpa, then surely the fact that you have gone through life correcting the universal misspelling of your name has an impact on your personality. How are you shaped by bearing the name of a great leader, a famous ecdysiast, serial killer or sword swallower? The fact that I share a name with a saint who was thrown into the lake with a millstone around her neck, or another saint who crawled into ovens and levitated at her own funeral, surely has impacted my serene and rational self.
So what do we make of Ignatius, for that is to be his name? And of Iggy, his pre-designated nickname? Yes, the night before he was born his parents finally decided that should they have a boy – and they have a boy – they would name him Ignatius and they would call him Iggy.
I never could have predicted this.
Reine and Michael are not hagiographers – but Reine does associate Ignatius with the Jesuits, and to the extent that they represent the intellectual and cerebral (not to mention militant) aspect of Catholicism, she approves.
But he is not named for St Ignatius of Loyola, the 12th child of Spanish nobles. In his early manhood, Ignacio was indeed a valiant soldier. It was not until he was struck by a cannonball on that leg, and spent his convalescence reading two books - The Golden Legend *(Lives of the Saints) & the life of Christ - that he turned his life towards holiness. As soon as he recovered, he took a vow of chastity, hung up his sword, put on a pilgrim’s robes and went to live in a cave for a year. From there on he was a dynamo of saintly energy, converting the Muslims in the Holy Land, having visions, and founding the Society of Jesus.
Nor was he named for St Ignatius, a first century theologian who succeeded Peter as the Bishop of Antioch and was thrown to ravenous wild beasts for his beliefs.
And I very much doubt my grandson was named for Blessed Ignazio Maloyan, an Armenian who was sent to be a parish priest in Alexandria and Cairo, and then a Bishop in Armenian Turkey. He was shot by Turkish soldiers in 1915, and we are told that for three days after his death his body radiated a golden celestial light.
I can tell you that as of now he will be very Google-able.
A Google search and a Facebook search indicate that there is not yet a single Ignatius B…. in the cyber-sphere.
Further research tells us that the popularity of Ignatius as a boy's name peaked in 1900 when it was 600th on the chart. It now is not on the chart at all.
Anecdotally and personally, though, I know that Ignacio is not at all uncommon in Latin America, and I know (of) at least two Ignacios in Nicaragua (called Nacho), one in Bolivia and three in Costa Rica.
I particularly like the idea of Ignacio pronounced with a Castilian lisp, and I have been practicing.

Welcome to the world, Ignatius Schein Richardson Brownstein, born April 14th around 11 a.m., weighing in at 5 pounds 6 ounces.

Yclept?

2011-04-06T17:20:00.002-04:00

Are you aware of the difficulty of coming up with a suitably hip but still meaningful name for a soon-to-be-born baby when you live in Brooklyn, where the most ordinary pre-K class includes Max, Liam, Wilfred who prefers to be called Frog, Grayce with a Y, Ella, Sadie, Luther, two Naomis, Quinn, Toby, Ruby, Ahikara, George, Henry and Elias?
Let me assure you of the difficulty, especially when it is compounded by the fact that both parents are inclined to choose family names, but obscure and relatively distant family names.
On one side the obscure and relatively distant family names, such as Schlomo, Moises, Gavril and Adi, hark back to the Polish rabbinate. On the other side we find French names such as Raoul, Constant, Clement, Armand, Arnould, Hippolyte, Jehan, Bardin and Louis. On that same side we also have WASPy names. Basically the same 4 names (Charles, Jeffrey, Richardson and Winthrop) have been used for about ten generations, which results in lots of juniors, thirds and confusion.
And have I mentioned that both parents are opinionated, stubborn and determined?
The first order of business is rejecting names, for all the usual reasons. She knew someone in high school named Constantine. Nix Constant. He played tennis against a Bartholomew who was notorious for foot-faults. Any kid named Hippolyte would be called Hippo, and never survive kindergarten.
She liked the names of German artists, such as Dieter or Gerhard or Kiefer (for Anselm, not Sutherland). His grandmother would be profoundly unhappy with a German name.
What’s wrong with Anselm, I wonder? He was a great 11th century theologian who fought corruption in the church and opposed slavery. He is also a saint, but I won’t mention that to the parents in question.
Aldous (as in Huxley) was mooted for a while, then rejected, but I don’t know if the rejection was based on literary criticism or dissonance.
I have suggested the following for consideration: Aloysius, Sebastian, Benedict, Horace, Buckminster, Linus, Maurice, and Phineas. Around the holidays I put forth: Melchior, Balthazar or Casper. Casper got some traction. But then was tossed on the basis of the Friendly Ghost association. My argument is that every name has some association for somebody, and for that reason all such associations should be discounted. Except when they are not.
CSB fixated on Atom for almost a week.
Last night I had what I considered to be a brainstorm: Rainer. Or Rilke.
She liked it. He does not. And so it goes.

Another myster solved, sort of

2011-04-02T17:29:00.003-04:00

Yes it is true. Or not true, depending on what you thought. St DIGITassa of PHALANGEville* is no more apocryphal than so many other saints whose stories I have related, and no less so. That is to say, I made her up on the occasion of April First.

I could become very fond of her, and perhaps she will catch on in hagiographic circles.

*As one of my sharper readers pointed out: Phalangeville? A town named after a finger bone??

2011-04-01T12:45:00.001-04:00

I have been trying to keep my hagiographic divagations to a minimum, but I cannot resist telling you about a certain saint whose feast we celebrate today. St Digitassa of Phalangeville experienced a very ordinary youth, ordinary for the child of 14th century traveling acrobats. She was uneducated, promiscuous and triple-jointed. She could tumble before she could walk, and by the time she was eleven she was performing multiple contortions balanced atop a phallus-shaped pillar. (Apparently in the 14th century traveling acrobats were expected to be bawdy, and there were no regulations about child pornography.)
Because of her talents, the nubile Digitassa generated a decent income for her parents. She was actively discouraged from seeking any other way of life. But even so, she was drawn to holiness, and the Blessed Virgin Mary in particular. She regularly disappeared from the family caravan and snuck into local churches, where she was entranced by the statues and stained glass windows. In her religious fervor she unconsciously bit her fingernails and even her cuticles, and when there was absolutely nothing left for her to chew on, she bit her toenails. Because she was triple-jointed, this was extremely easy for her, so easy that she was unaware of the spectacle she made in church.
One day in the tiny village of Phalangeville in the Ardennes she was rapturously nibbling her toenails in a dim corner of the Chapel of St Wandrille when the Abbé noticed her unusual behavior. He immediately reviled young Digitassa for desecrating the house of God and threw her out into the muddy square, forbidding her from ever entering the church again. She was bereft. She looked at her hands and feet and realized that all her fingers and toes were bleeding, and she swore at that moment that she would spend the rest of her life atoning for her misspent youth* and blasphemous behavior in the church. She stopped a beggar-woman on the square and traded clothes with her: the beggar-woman was happy to walk away with Digitassa’s brightly colored, form-fitting attire, and Digitassa trudged away in layers of ragged filthy skirts, dragging her bleeding toes in the mud.
And Digitassa did indeed spend her few remaining years going from village to village, in a kind of sanctified mirroring of her earlier wandering days, but this time everywhere she went she displayed her scarred fingers and toes to warn the people of the evils of acrobatics and nail-biting. In 1313 she had wandered back to Phalangeville, the scene of her conversion. After displaying her hideous fingers to the populace, she walked outside the village and fell asleep under a tree. She never woke up. When a young shepherd found her body the next morning, all her fingers and toes had been restored to perfection. He ran to town announcing the miracle, and since that day the shrine of St Digitassa has attracted manicurists from all over Christendom to Phalangeville, where they can view the preserved body of the saint inside the very chapel she was once ejected from.

* and you regular readers of SQD are surely well-aware of my devotion to saints with misspent youths.

Mystery picture identified, I think

2011-03-30T18:43:00.003-04:00

One small mystery, out of all the extant and still very pressing mysteries, has been solved. I did not worship at the altar of Nancy Drew for nothing.
The mystery photograph has been identified as the assembled participants at the Summer Institute for Social Progress, at Wellesley College, in 1948 (or possible 1951). For 10 halcyon days you could take workshops on Civil Rights – How do we Preserve and Extend them at Home and Abroad, as well as The Mental Hygiene Approach to World Peace and Security.
How did I figure this out? In a dark recess of the aforementioned horsehair trunk I found a frayed program for this institute and then I went and looked for pictures of Wellesley College, and there it was: Tower Court. The surrounding buildings seem to be different, but the central structure is unmistakable. And an institute devoted to social progress might explain how we have such an integrated group back in 1948.

Germaine’s interests were not limited to social progress however. Born and raised a French Catholic, she subscribed to the Sufi Quarterly and the Christian Science Bulletin. Most summers she could be found dancing at the Shepherds’ Nine, the Noyes School of Rhythm. She attended seminars on Creative Maturity. She diligently filled out the Creative Maturity Inventory. *In 1950 she took a training course at the Hudson Shore Labor School. She corresponded regularly with Ethel Bret Harte, about matters astrological. I don’t think any of us really knew her.

*”You get a Creative Maturity Quotient by adding up all the mature answers which are “yes” for odd numbered questions and “No” for even numbered questions. The CMQ is whatever percentage you are of 100. If you answer 50 questions maturely, you are half way toward a Creative Maturity with a 50 CMQ.” For example, Question #53: Do you live without self-deception?

Please help identify

2011-03-27T17:46:00.004-04:00

Upstairs is a rather large old horsehair trunk filled to bursting with letters and photographs belonging to my paternal grandmother. She was born Germaine Levêque in St Vaast-la-Hogue in 1892 and was educated there and in Cherbourg, France. She worked as a teacher and governess in England, Germany and Switzerland before leaving in 1916 to marry Hans Lehner. Around 1920 he bought the house in Hingham where my parents still live. She had 2 sons, and then around 1930 she and Hans separated. They never divorced, presumably because they were Catholic. He stayed in Hingham and raised the boys, while she went from city to city, from hotel to apartment to hotel. Thus far, and I am far from finished, I have documented – via the envelopes of her correspondence – twenty different addresses from 1930 to the 1953, when she more or less settled into the Hotel Vendôme in Boston.
It is not entirely clear why I am in possession of this trunk, which presumably went from place to place with before coming to rest at my parents’ house around the time she died, in 1978. But I can guess: no one but an archivist manqué would take it on.
This is a selection of items I found this morning:
• In her tiny French script, a list of US presidents from GW to FDR
• A sheet torn from a 5-year diary, for March 15. The first four sections are empty. The last one is marked 1948 and reads: Monday. Feeling much better. Strange dream about Duke of Windsor and deep chasms!!!?
• A picture of my father and his brother (circa 1930) on their pony cart in front of the Orchard. I happen to know the pony’s name was Major, as that was one of the memories that as most vivid for Dad right after he had his stroke.
• A photo of Germaine standing in front of an airplane: Imperial Air ways, London. G-EBO. There is a uniformed, capped man standing next to the gangway; otherwise she is alone on the tarmac. She is carrying her hat which looks unfortunately like an upside down chamber pot. I think she was going to or from Greece because it was in a pile of photographs of Greece, in some of which she is actually wearing the aforementioned hat. From Wikipedia I have learned that the plane was a De Havilland 66 Hercules, a seven-passenger plane built in the 1920’s and retired from service in 1942. With a maximum speed of 127 mph and a range of 525 miles, it was obviously not used for transatlantic journeys. There, with a keystroke, are more facts about the plane in the picture than I seem to have about my grandmother.
• And this mystery group picture. Like almost every other photograph among the 100’s in the trunk, this one has no identifying names or dates. Who are these people? What is this gathering of apparently various folks? What brought them all to this nameless place?

2011-03-22T12:21:00.004-04:00

Yesterday was first full day of spring and it snowed. The emerging scilla** and daffodils were all covered in fat wet snow. That is not strange. What is strange is that yesterday was also the feast of not 1 or 2, but 3 different saints who gave up on marriage and chose to leave wife and children in order to live in a monastery or convent or up in the hills eating bugs. (I consider this a troubling tendency.)

St Enda of Arran (d. ca. 530) was an Irish prince who was converted by his sister Fanchea, also a saint-to-be. She found him a good convent girl to marry, but when he met her she was dead *and this put him off marriage permanently. In this way he became a monk and ultimately the founder of Irish monasticism.

St Nicholas of Flüe (1417-1487) was a successful farmer who also served as a counselor and judge in his Swiss canton. He had a wife and presumably he liked her well enough because they had ten children. But after a vision of a horse eating a lily, he went up into the hills to live as a hermit, surviving on nothing but the Eucharist for 19 years. (Among saints, this is a common enough form of nourishment that there is a word for it: inedia.) To this day, St Nicholas is beloved in Switzerland and regarded as a patron saint of the sustainable use of open land.

St Benedicta Cambiagio Frassinello (1791-1858) was married for 2 years before she managed to convince her husband that that should live chastely, which they did until her little sister died, and then she joined a convent and her husband became a monk.

* I particularly enjoy imagining how this scene transpired. At what point was it clear that the affianced girl was in fact a corpse? Was it commonplace for a betrothed young lady to neither breathe nor move?
**I associate scilla with the blue pollen the bees starting gathering this time of year, and I am concerned lest they are discouraged.

Not green saints

2011-03-17T14:06:00.004-04:00

There is no question about St Patrick's many good qualities, and I am personally in favor of coloring any food, but just in case you are inclined to broaden your horizons, and celebrate any other saint than Patrick today, here is selection.

You can salute the first century St Joseph of Arimathea, of whom “we know nothing authentically” outside of the gospels, but of whom there are numerous myths, fabulations, fabrications and legends. Among them: that he went from Gaul to Britain and the king gave him the island of Yniswitrin (later called Glastonbury) smack in the middle of a swamp, where Joseph built a church of wattles. Another story is that Joseph and his 150 companions all sailed from Gaul to Britain aboard the shirt of his son. Much later come the stories that Joseph brought with him 2 silver cruets (the Holy Grail) one containing Jesus’ blood, and the other his sweat.
Then we have St Agricola (6th century) best known for his simple and saintly life, for eating very little and standing when he did eat, and translating the relics of the recluse St Didier to his own cathedral at Chalon sur Saône.
I have already written about St Gertrude of Nivelles, whose own mother cut off her hair and shaped it like a monk’s tonsure, to ensure that no foolhearty man would think of marrying her. She has much to recommend her.
Nothing is known about the 12th century recluse St Diemut of Saint Gall.
St Jan of Sarkander was born in 1576 during the Protestant Reformation, educated in Prague, ordained in Austria. In the long and repulsive human history of torturing other humans, his ordeal was exceptional: he was tortured on the rack, branded with torches, racked some more, covered with pitch, sulfur, oil and feathers and then set on fire. And he had the terrible misfortune to survive and linger for a long painful month.
Comparisons are odious, really, but surely St Paul of Cyprus suffered as much on this day in 775, when he was crushed between two boards, torn with iron combs and then hung upside down over a slow fire and roasted to death, because he refused to trample a crucifix.
I am happy to report that Saint Withberga was born a princess in East Anglia, became a nun when her father was killed in battle, and died in her sleep in her convent in 743.

A floral bouquet of randomness

2011-03-14T17:58:00.003-04:00

I know that it is possible to move a large tree, if you have enough money and large equipment and men with shovels, but as with many things (miracles for instance) I really need to see this operation to believe it.
And we did see it.
Down the road from us is a beautiful stone villa built around 1840 that is being demolished, probably this week.
This is the sort of thing that upsets CSB.
CSB does things like salvage wavy old glass from demolition sites in order to have a supply of historically correct glass available to replace any broken panes we might incur. Did you know that an expert can date a pane of glass by the degree of waviness and distortion? Many of the windows in our house go back to the late 18th or early 19th century, and for them we need glass that is thicker (about 1/8th”) and more distorting. Hence we have a stash of old glass in the shed.
But to return to large trees on the move. The stone house that is about to be no more is surrounded by several massive wisterias. And they are being dug up and stored in enormous wooden boxes. In order to expose the roots, they first had to dig holes about the size of station wagons. Several holes, one for each separate plant. Then the root ball, about the size of a VW bug, is bundled. Then comes the heavy machinery.
Unlike so much else that we hold dear, wisteria is actually native to the eastern United States. Depending on whom you ask, it was named for Dr. Caspar Wistar or Charles Jones Wister, Sr, both of Pennsylvania. But as you can see, the names are spelt differently, and that signifies.
Massive as the uprooted wisterias down the road are, they are mere fledglings compared to the largest wisteria in the US. That one is in Sierra Madre, California and covers an entire acre and weighs 250 tons.
Because of its ability to climb either clockwise or counterclockwise, wisteria is the Patron Plant of the Ambidextrous.

Saint Seraphina, or Fina is not the patron saint of white violets, but she should be. (This is not an entirely arbitrary sequitur; her feast was 2 days ago.) During her short lifetime (1238-1253) she was known chiefly for her illness and her determination to increase her suffering. She refused to rest in a bed, and instead insisted on lying on an oak plank, where she remained for 6 years in one position. Beneath her the wood rotted and was filled with worms, but still she did not move. Then she died and the townspeople moved her body and discovered that the formerly rotten wood was now a field of sweet-smelling white violets. That is the sort of miracle I think must be seen to be believed. The best we can offer is Ghirlandaio’s famous painting. In San Gemignano, where she lived, white violets bloom about the time of feast day.
We are not in Sam Gemignano, so the chicken yolks are not bright orange and we have snowdrops in bloom. Every year around this time I head for the woods to find the snowdrops (galanthus nivalis). Because memory and its losses are much on my mind these days, when I remember, I have been very excited to learn that galantamine, an extract made from the flower and bulbs of snowdrops, can be used to treat Alzheimer’s. But that is not all.
I had never heard of Lucid Dreaming, or not as a distinct phenomenon, separate from plain old dreaming. That is, I regularly dream and I am occasionally lucid. Lucid Dreaming has its own entry in Wikipedia. Lucid Dreaming has given rise to some very delightful acronyms: WILD, DILD and MILD, meaning Wake-Initiated Lucid Dreaming, or Dream etc or Meditation etc. And galantamine (C17H21NO3 ) is also taken to induce Lucid Dreaming. Which makes me wonder why we don’t have the acronym GILD. But not as much as I wonder how the same drug can be used to treat Alzheimer’s and induce super-vivid dreams or oven out-of-body experiences (OBE’s).

Civic duty

2011-03-06T13:03:00.002-05:00

This is what I did on Friday. I do not think anyone is really interested, but I have this desperate need to justify those interminable hours on the third floor of the county courthouse.
But first: before I left the house, an ungrateful chicken escaped the lovely henhouse while the intrepid CSB was letting them into their yard and giving them their breakfast treats. She headed for the hills, the woods, freedom and Broadway, and despite our calling, lurching, beseeching and beckoning, despite my very appealing plaid (Black Watch) pajamas, she would not be caught.
Did she realize how vulnerable she is to the world and its predators? Did she realize there is a red-tailed hawk out there polishing his curved beak in anticipation of chicken tartar for lunch?

I drive to the county courthouse to report for Day #2 of Jury Duty. Thus far, I am one of 90+ citizens who answered the summons and now sit on hard wooden benches while the judge and attorneys execute voir dire. If voir dire takes this long for a piddling drug case, then I tremble to think what transpires in a big case.
I park beneath the White Plains library and put lots of change into a parking meter. Then I realize that this is a 1-hour meter and I need to park in a 12-hour meter spots, so I bid adieu to those swallowed quarters and move my car far into the bowels of the parking lot, and feed every last bit of change I have into the meter, until I finally buy myself 71/2 hours of parking.
Inside the courthouse I pay 75¢ for hot water, so I can make a cup o’ tea. The clerk is blind and has several earrings. He never smiles.
At 9:35 we file in and take our seats in courtroom #304. The bailiff with a chevron mustache takes roll call, in random order. We all respond to our garbled names, and then we wait. I do the Friday crossword, but struggle with the city on the Niagara Escarpment, because I have never heard of the Niagara Escarpment,** though it seems like a place I might want to visit.
There are 18 potential jurors seated in the juror box on the left. They are the ones being questioned, for now. The rest of us watch, listen, surreptitiously text, and do the crossword.
At 10:10 we all get up and go into the hall to wait.
At 10:30 we return to the courtroom.
The judge* picks up where he stopped yesterday, with questions 10 – 15 on the juror questionnaire. He takes every opportunity to repeat, verbatim, his exhortation that the chosen jurors must interpret the law according to his diktat, and not consult with one’s brother-in-law the attorney, or base a judgment on the character of one’s former husband the Yonkers policeman. Can you do that? He asks, again and again. When the answer is, I think so, or I will try, the judge repeats his question until he gets the desired answer. I find this technique fondly reminiscent of my son’s 5-year old belief that if he repeated his request enough times, I would change my answer to the affirmative.
The Assistant DA, who will prosecute the case, asks of the empaneled 18: You all have common sense, don’t you? Can you use your common sense? To my chagrin, no one answers with a resounding no.
11:00 we all file out of the courtroom for a 5-minute recess.
11:15 we all file back into the courtroom. The Asst. DA continues his questioning with these zingers: Can you be fair? Do you understand the concept of reasonable doubt, which has been explained no less than 8 times this morning? Again, sadly, no one answers no.

11:40 we all file out again.
11:55 the gum-chewing policewoman calls us all back into the courtroom.
The mustachioed bailiff calls out the 5 lucky chosen jurors. The liberated 13 skip out of the courtroom.
The bailiff spins his bingo basket and calls out 18 more names. But not mine. The 18 take their places in the jury box. Now, as we have done with the previous 2 batches of 18, we hear their vital statistics as they respond to questions 1 through 9 on the juror questionnaire. I now know the name, birthplace, education, marital status, occupation, number of children and the ages and whereabouts of those children, of 54 fellow citizens. I also know who among them has been the victim of, or witness to, or party to, a crime; I know which of their close relatives or friends, and in some cases, their not very close relatives or friends, has been a victim of a crime. I know about the pediatrician whose identity was stolen. I know about the mother–of-3 from Bedford who was sexually assaulted as a teenager. I heard from the young man who was attacked because of his race. When prodded, one woman says that yes, her best friend was murdered, but that was in Bulgaria. Does a murder in Bulgaria count? In this courtroom, of course it does, and please give us details. One fellow, a sales manager, was at his best friend’s apartment when there was a drug bust. I heard about the young woman’s ex-boyfriend who is in jail now on drug charges. The judge remarks on the wisdom of this fellow being an ex. He laughs at his own humor. Another upright soul asserts that he was arrested years ago for unlawful possession of marijuana, “for which I am not ashamed”, he says. Thereby assuring that he will not be gracing this jury. We hear the complicated story of a woman’s brother in Texas whose neighbor shot a bow and arrow into his house and pierced his refrigerator. Charges were not filed, because they were all good friends.

I wonder how the chickens are enjoying this fine weather, as I am not. For the sake of the escapee, I am grateful it is not as cold as yesterday.

12:50 we break for lunch. We are enjoined to return promptly at 2:15
I go to the local diner and read the paper. It too is full of crime. There is the Russian mobster who was convicted of killing and chopping up people in order to steal their identities. Their body parts were found in a New Jersey Nature preserve.
A 57-year-old mother stabbed her 38-year-old son to death. He had cerebral palsy. I pay special attention to their ages, as her age is close to mine, but she bred at a much earlier age, 19 to be exact.
A Russian citizen, who is in prison on arms-dealing charges, has filed complaints because he cannot get a proper vegetarian diet in prison. His wife says he is forced to survive on eggs and tea made with tepid tap water.
A long Island man who murdered a motivational speaker claims that the man hired him to “do a Kevorkian”.
It is a very nice diner, with actual jukeboxes in every booth. I would play some Neil Sedaka, but all my small change was fed into the maw of the parking meter underground.
I worry about the AWOL chicken back home. Has she been eviscerated by a hawk? Is she quaking with fear underneath the back porch? Or is she roosting in an adjacent tree mocking her sisters?

2:15 the jury pool are milling around the hallway outside courtroom #304.
2:35 we are called back in.
The judge continues questioning the 18 empaneled. He is on Question #13: Are you or is anyone related to you an attorney, a policeman or in the military?
We learn whose father, brother, nephew, cousin is an attorney and what kind of attorney they are. We learn who is related to a detective in the NYPD and what kind of cases he works on: mostly drugs.
Question #14 is: Do you have any moral or religious reason that would prevent you from passing judgment in this courtroom?
No one answers yes. My hopes are dashed, yet again.
Question #15: Is there anything else you want to tell us?
Yes, I am scheduled for a root canal and I really don’t want to miss the appointment, says empanelled person #7. Judge repeats for the 4th time today his parable – of which he is so clearly proud – of how, if the world continued to function after the assassination of JFK, then surely the world will continue to function while person X performs his civic duty, completely missing the point that person #7 apparently would rather get a root canal than stay in this judge’s courtroom. Juror #14 explains that she is scheduled to go a business trip first thing Monday morning. The judge repeats his parable in full.
No one expresses concern about her chickens running amok in her absence, but that is what I am worried about.
2:55 we all exit the courtroom while the judge speaks privately with the jurors who are unwilling (wisely in my opinion) to share their traumatic life experiences with a roomful of strangers.

I could be chasing a chicken now. Instead I am pacing the third floor hallway, counting my steps. No I am not OCD.

3:30 we all return to the courtroom and sit while the Asst. DA and defense attorney repeat their earlier performances.
4:00 exeunt omnes.
4:45 we all enter the courtroom. The names of the 5 chosen jurors are called. The magic number of 12 plus 2 alternates has been achieved. The rest are dismissed. The relief is palpable. Those friendships forged in the waiting outside courtroom #304 disappear like contrails.

*This judge, in his why-we-should-all-be grateful-to-serve on-a-jury-in-this-great country spiel, informed us that we – the assembled Westchester-ites - were not in Libya or Bahrain this week, but instead were rolling out of bed and heading to our yoga classes, and aren't we the lucky ones? This was addressed to a group of 90+ people that included old and young men and women, medical salesmen, contractors, nurses, a neuro- physicist, retired FBI agents, a somewhat humorous writer, landscapers, and high-school cafeteria workers, among others. I later discovered that I was not the only one insulted and not a little outraged by his condescending and completely inapt generalizations.

**Hamilton, Ontario.

2011-02-24T09:13:00.003-05:00

This may be from the last 'Memorabilia'box, now safely at the bottom of the green metal recycling bin at the DPW. But no promises.

On Side A, a ditto'd information sheet from Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island - dated 6/77 - regarding pregnancy results. It enumerates option #1, if you wish to continue your pregnancy, and option #2, if you wish to terminate your pregnancy. An abortion cost $170 and that included a post-abortion check-up.
On Side B, in my handwriting:
Bald Baby
The Motel next Door
The drapes were too short for the window in the apartment where they had lived for 10 years. Through the unclaimed space between the windowsill and the drapes they watched the activity in the sidewalk. Each night, after his wife had taken her last sleeping pill, he watched alone and hoped to see a mugging or a rape, some visible manifestation of the violence of our times, which he so deplored. He would call the police, of course, and blow his emergency whistle.
In 8/1877 my pregnancy with Reine was confirmed. Option #1.

Other items included a college essay about Quentin Compson and suicide, a handmade puzzle by my (then) ten-year old sister (who, lamentably, did not pursue a career in cryptography) and every ticket stub from every historical and archeological site in Greece and Turkey our family visited in 1975.

Pushing the Panic Button

2011-02-22T13:06:00.002-05:00

One of the things I do not miss about teenagers is worrying about them getting home safely at night. This is because I dislike worrying, and I have a vivid imagination, and also because I really like to sleep and get cranky when I do not.
It has been a while since I have anguished over the whereabouts of a vagrant offspring. But last night I got to revisit those halcyon days of pushing the parental panic-button.
A charming 18-year-old godson is staying with us this week while he works in the city for another godparent, as ours is an easy commute and an easy walk to the train station.
All I ask is to be informed when or if said godson will be showing up for dinner, or beyond.
So the dutiful Adrian called to let me know he would be having sushi with a friend uptown and then taking the train that would get him to Hastings by 10 or 11. Fine. I would probably be sleeping over my book (Mental Healers by Stefan Zweig; rather sleepy), but the door would be open and the lights on. Turn the lights off when you come in.
Around 1 a.m., CSB, who wakes at odd hours, told me that Adrian was not home yet.
Shit.
I called his cell phone but only got a voicemail message.
I began to imagine all sorts of events that might lead us to this particular juncture: Adrian not home and his whereabouts is unknown.
At CSB’s suggestion, I looked up the Metro North schedule to see when the last train got in. There was actually a later one than I thought, getting in at 2:29 am. So I allowed myself to hope that Adrian would be on that train.
Meanwhile, I was worrying about how I would contact Rip and Barbara on a cruise ship in the Caribbean and tell them that their son, who had lately managed to survive 10 months as an exchange student in a remote area of Japan, had gone astray after his first day on the job in NYC.
I kept assuring myself that after all that aphrodisiac raw fish, he and the young lady in question had simply become amorous and afterward he had fallen asleep.
I could equally well imagine that he and the young lady became ill eating the sushi and because it would reflect so badly on the entire Japanese restaurant trade for these young people to be seen vomiting on a sidewalk, the restaurateur performed the culinary version of extraordinary rendition, and dispatched the two nauseated youngsters to Staten Island in an unmarked van.
Then I imagined that while walking home from the train he had slipped and fallen on his head and was lying in the snow in the dark middle of Draper Park, being sniffed by hungry coyotes. Or perhaps he was attacked by a mugger who lost his way to Manhattan and ended up mistakenly in Hastings where he attacked Adrian and now he was lying in the snow in the dark middle of Draper Park, being sniffed by hungry coyotes.
This is what I did not imagine: that in course of an pleasant collegial visit, a friend’s roommate had an asthma attack and had to be taken to the ER, after which Adrian missed one train, got on a later train and fell soundly asleep and did not wake up until the train reached its terminus at Croton Harman, exactly 8 stops and 14.9 miles past the right stop. He arrived in Croton Harmon too late to catch a return train to Hastings, and had to take a taxi home. He arrived several minutes after he would have arrived had he taken the very last train from Grand Central.
Then I slept.

A very limited selection of items found in a box labeled “Christine’s Correspondence, Juvenilia and Memorabilia”

2011-02-18T11:37:00.004-05:00

• A postcard from my sister, Brigitte’s campaign for Trustee of the Portland Water District (she won)
• An invitation to Rip’s (first) wedding at Ear Inn, in which his and his bride’s faces are superimposed on a picture of two samurai warriors. Or are they meant to be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?
• A color Xerox self-portrait of my late ex-husband in a dinner jacket, a velvet bow tie and naked from the waist down
• A letter from Alex from the hospital when he was paralyzed from the waist down, about his sadness after the death of Geoff and the AIDS discrimination lawsuit. (they would both be dead when the cases was won)
• Among several letters from a dear friend from grad school, Harold, one from 1988 saying that he had been in rehab, that his wife had left him and gone with their young son to live in NYC; then in a 1992 letter he wrote that he was going to remarry, and he said of his new wife: “there aren’t a lot of women who love the Lord and understand what makes Samuel Beckett funny”. I wish I had written that.
• 40 birthday cards my mother sent on the occasion of my 40th birthday, each one alluding to a high (or low) point of that calendar year
• An astrological chart made for me in 1994 by Lis’s astrologer friend, 4 pages of small print, full of symbols, planets, glyphs, aspects, houses. I don’t understand any of it.
• Numerous letters from Ruth, who for many years was my best correspondent; some were written on PLAYGIRL stationary, where she worked sometime in the 80’s; others on PACIFICA radio stationary, where she had a talk show. I haven’t heard from her in over 2 years now, and it is a terrible mystery.
• My grandmother’s Saigon carte d’identité for 1939-1940. By 1941 they were refugees, fleeing the Japanese invasion
• A 1990 letter from my mother describing Bonne-Maman’s memory loss symptoms, in painful detail
• The 1940 handbook for the Golf club de Saigon. I had no idea my grandfather played golf, if in fact he did.

Why am I doing this?

There is no other way of putting it: I am fearful lest I drop dead suddenly today, tomorrow, sometime soon and leave my children with the task of wrestling with boxes of papers and pictures. I want it all to be tidy.
Meanwhile, I could be losing my grip.

2011-02-17T10:36:00.003-05:00

A long time ago, at the dawn on the Internet era, there was a very funny cartoon in the New Yorker featuring a dog at a computer and the caption: On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog.
Today I would amend that: On the internet (and providing you turn off the video monitor) no one knows your face is evidencing a weird and disconcerting allergic reaction to some as yet unidentified aspect of the universe, with blotches, bloating and itching. On the Internet you can still look like that 1985 picture of you in a red bathing suit reclining near a Costa Rican waterfall.
Over here, across the Internet, my face is prickly and puffy and none of the normal remedies (Benadryl, eye of Newt, bee stings, St Ulphia’s Cream, arnica) are doing any good. I have no idea why my face is doing this, but when I think about it too much – and I am thinking about far too much – I cannot help but think this is the outer manifestation of my inner prickliness and puffiness. I must mend my ways, but what ways shall I mend?
I checked out the patron saints of skin rashes and skin diseases, and they are a good bunch.
St Anthony the Abbott, anchorite of Egypt, (251-356). The rational for his patronage goes thus: In art he is generally represented with a bell, a book, and pig by his side. Originally the pig denoted the Devil, with whom Anthony had many tussles as he prayed out there in the desert, and Anthony always got the better of the Evil One. But the meaning changed in the 12th century when the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony used to allow the poor people to graze their pigs gratis upon the monastery’s acorns. And since skin diseases were often treated with poultices of pork fat, to alleviate itchiness and reduce inflammation, the connection was made between St Anthony and skin disease. For extra credit, here is a good word to know: tantony. A tantony pig is the runt of the litter, named for the saint.
Yet another confusing aspect of Saint Anthony the Abbott, is that he is not the St Anthony I thought he was. St Anthony was my beloved grandmother, Bonne Maman’s favorite saint; she invoked him almost hourly to find lost objects. But the Anthony of Lost Objects is not the Anthony of Egypt, which confused me as a child since she had lived in Egypt for so long. The Anthony she prayed to never left Italy.
Anthony the Abbot died at the respectable age of 105, and Butler informs us that not one tooth “was lost or loosened.”
Pisanello’s Madonna with St Anthony Abbott and St George. The pig at St Anthony’s side looks more like a boar to me, but what do I know?

Saint George is another patron of skin diseases, but I think we dealt with him, and his dragon slaughter, yesterday.
So we shall move on to St Marculf, the renowned missionary to those pagan Gauls. There is no mention of intimacy with skin rashes in his lifetime (Unless you count the Miracle of Snail Slime). But later French kings, otherwise known for their clean living, found that touching St Marculf’s relics, particularly the ulna bones, could cure their scrofula, also known as The King’s Evil. (Scrofula is a kind of TB with some very unattractive symptoms; it is the root of the excellent adjective, Scrofulous.)
St Peregrine Laziosi (1260 – 1345) was so anti-church in his youth that during a demonstration he hit the papal nuncio (later to be St Philip Benizi); Philip turned the other cheek and Bam! – Peregrine was converted. In order to do atone for his misdeeds, he spent 30 years working in silence, solitude and standing. The only time he spoke was to preach. We don’t know whether or not it was on account of the constant standing, but Peregrine did develop cancer of the foot. The night before his scheduled amputation, he had a vision of Jesus touching the diseased area, and in the morning he was cured.
The only patron saint I would have guessed is St Roch (1295-1327), because he is often represented lifting his robes to display his plague-ulcerated leg, with his faithful dog by his side.
Roch contracted the plague while ministering to the afflicted and then went into the forest to die. He survived because a dog brought him food and gave him solace. Unfortunately, when Roch recovered and returned to Montpelier, he was arrested as a spy and jailed for 5 years. It is not said what happened to the dog while Roch languished in prison. We do know that an angel brought Roch food while he was incarcerated, but he still died. Draw your own conclusions.
St Roch with his dog

As my sainted mother would say when confronted with a sumptuous dessert tray: “L’embarras du choix.”

2011-02-16T16:01:00.003-05:00

There are the memories evoked by the postcards with their bizarre images and unfathomable messages; it is as if each word is a portal to a memory palace.

And then there are the strange photographs of dubious provenance; and even when identified, still it remains unclear what I was thinking when I took them.
Here is a picture taken inside the Cathedral of León, Nicaragua. I know that because it says so on the back, and nothing more. The picture’s main feature is a dark green plaster dragon at the foot of a robed statue. Between its bared teeth, the dragon is biting something red and amorphous. Because it is in a church and inside a glass case, I am guessing this red dangling blob was once a bouquet of faux flowers; I only say this because on so many occasions I have been shocked to find plastic or silk flowers gracing a statue inside a tropical church, when just outside there are real flowers in profusion, agapanthus, datura, bougainvillea, jacaranda, birds of paradise, and wild ginger.

The statue is truncated above the knee by my photographic ineptitude, so without a renewed visit to the León Cathedral or a conversation with the current deacon of the cathedral (assuming there is one, which is an optimistic assumption given the dearth of clergy in Central America and everywhere else, except Rome), I can’t tell you which saint’s feet the dragon sits upon. I guess it is either Saint George or Saint Margaret of Antioch, because they are the two saints most commonly represented with dragons. St George is generally shown on horseback slaying the wicked dragon and thereby saving the princess about to be devoured by said dragon, as his daily meal of a beautiful virgin.
Recently I revisited the story of Saint George and the Dragon, on account of Leda, precocious and beloved granddaughter. As we sometimes do, I met up with Leda and her mother in Grand Central Station. They have come from hipster Brooklyn; I have debouched from Metro-North. The very first thing Leda showed me was a postcard of Raphael’s St George and the Dragon, this having been her choice of all the possible postcards in the bookstore in Grand Central. (In case you are wondering which Raphael version of Saint George’s heroic feat/ animal slaughter, it was the one in which the grateful virgin princess is off to the side in a prayerful position, not the one in which George’s candy-cane lance is broken and the dragon is nipping at his heels as the virgin flees in the background.) Precocious granddaughter explained to me that it was a good thing George was killing the dragon, which prompted us both to wonder exactly why are dragons always the villains (I am thinking pre-Puff.). We learned that one reason dragons were so fearful and feared, was that, along with their tongues of flame and their appetite for virgins, their exhalations spread plague over the countryside. Leda added, peripherally or perhaps not, that she sometimes has dragon breath in the morning. “But it’s alright, Nana,” she explained. “We all do. Even you.”
Back in Nicaragua, I am now persuaded that the saint only seen from the knees down is Saint Margaret, because she is wearing a gown and she is not on horseback, and the dragon is not dead. Saint Margaret of Antioch is the patron saint of childbirth for the very good reason that when she was swallowed whole by a marauding dragon, the crucifix she carried aloft tickled his throat and he coughed her right back up. Her emergence from the maw of the dragon being a rough version of childbirth, if you have a vivid imagination. If you perceive the dragon as representing Satan, as it generally was in medieval times, then the patronage becomes even more farfetched.

← Leda’s choice. Note praying princess. ←another Raphael St George, this time with the princess fleeing.
This morning – finding the postcard under our bed where it must have flown when Leda was practicing her somersaults - CSB asked me how Raphael died. Was this a trick question? (Would Watson know?) I knew he died young (37) but I didn’t know how. But I do now.
Vasari tells us that after a night of riotous sex with his beloved mistress, Raphael developed a raging fever and died on Good Friday of 1520. This was the same year Magellan sailed through the Straits of Magellan, though they were not yet so-named, and also the first year of the smallpox epidemic that would kill half the Aztec population (Gracias, conquistadores.) Most importantly, in 1520 chocolate made its first journey across the ocean from Mexico to Spain, so that 490 years later more than $1 billion could be spent on chocolate hearts on or about February 14.

Discovering the pecking order

2011-02-11T18:26:00.002-05:00

When honorable-son-in-business-school first asked me if we would be fitting our chickens with contact lenses, I laughed, and very wittily answered that we would do just that right after they got their hair extensions.
“Seriously, Mom”, said honorable-son. “You mock, but they really exist; we did a case study on the company that developed them, and they will solve your pecking problems.”
“What pecking problems?”
That was then. This is now. Obviously I have heard of a pecking order, and being well versed etymologically, I knew from whence the expression came. But knowing an expression’s provenance is not remotely the same as experiencing it, intimately, daily in the chicken coop. Yes, our chickens peck each other, and the chickens at the top of the order peck the ones lower down the order. This order is, so we have learned, determined by their combs and their perception of combs, and this is where the contact lenses come in. A while back a farmer’s chickens developed cataracts. He separated the afflicted fowl from the rest of the flock, and called the vet. Together, they noticed that the chickens with cataracts were markedly less peckish and cannibalistic than his chickens with 20-20 vision. So instead of seeking to cure the cataract-chickens, they wondered how they could similarly afflict the whole lot of them.
You cannot actually give the chickens cataracts, but with red-tinted contact lenses you can reproduce the effects of cataracts, and their behavior will improve. A trained crew can insert lenses in 225 chickens per hour. We don’t have 225 chickens, and we aren’t trained. Sometimes it takes us several minutes to catch one chicken. And I gave up wearing contact lenses myself about 20 years ago because I became so impatient inserting them each morning.
For the Hens of Hastings, I am considering red-tinted spectacles on elastic bands.
Perhaps if they had all been wearing glasses, Wanda would not have met her untimely end, de-feathered and pecked by her roommates. It was while we were lamenting her death early this morning that Joanna, who is Polish, asked CSB if we ever feed our hens bread. He said that I sometimes do. And it’s true that on Wednesday when I made crust-less cucumber sandwiches for the Ladies Literature Club, I gave the crusts to the hens, and this somewhat mollified my normal guilt feelings about wasting all that good crust. I once tried serving cucumber sandwiches with crusts, but it was not a success; connoisseurs of cucumber sandwiches (such as CSB) are adamant that crusts have no place in a proper one. According to Joanna, her sister back in Poland does not give her chickens old bread because it is bad for their livers. She said it was the acid in bread that bothered their livers, but I think – from her rising gestures - she meant the yeast. English is not her first language.
Just a few minutes later Gill called to tell me that she read an article about a chef who asserts the secret of making great pasta is using Italian eggs because they have the most orange yolks. And Gill, who frequents Italy, concurs that Italian egg yolks are significantly more orange than even our newly laid eggs. So the question is: what are the Italian chickens eating?
And do they wear contact lenses?

Epiphany in the Container Store

2011-02-04T09:25:00.004-05:00

Since Jeff died over a month ago, I have (obsessively, maniacally, frantically) organized and purged: the basement, all the Christmas paraphernalia, all the children’s books, my vast collection of filched stationary from hotels, several drawers filled with tools, random screws and broken appliances, and boxes of old letters and birthday cards. It was all about working my way up to the mother of organizing tasks: the pictures.* That documentary evidence of our past happiness, folly, and confusion. Those images more resonant for their lacunae.

In order to complete this insane project of organizing all our photographs, I decided I needed boxes of a very specific shape. My own box supply was deficient, and then I heard about the Container Store.
I had never been to the Container Store before, and it was, for me, akin to what Disneyland must be like for cartoon-infused children. I didn’t know where to look. I started hyperventilating. I had never seen so many boxes, in so many sizes, for so many specific purposes, made of so many materials. Perhaps if I lived in the Container Store my brain would undergo sympathetic convergent compartmentalization. Perhaps.
They carry boxes specifically designed for every possible article of clothing: Panty boxes, Sock boxes, Boxer and Brief boxes, Bra boxes, and Lingerie boxes. Of if you prefer, you can get a Diamond Drawer organizer for all your socks. And for $7.99 you can buy a hanging Flip-Flop Holder, to store your collection of cheap rubber sandals. The myriad possibilities for storing and stretching and preserving your shoes have robbed me of words.

There is an entire wall of gadgets and gizmos for organizing and concealing cables & cords. How could one choose? I could not.
You can buy a package of large rubber bands designed to hold the plastic garbage bag in place in your wastebasket. Someone somewhere actually decided that the consumers of America needed task specific rubber bands, and so they created them (& had them made in China) and packaged them and now you can buy them for $7.99.
I cannot say for sure, but I have the distinct impressive that a large percentage of the goods at the Container Store can be bought for $7.99.
The section on desk & office supplies sent me into rhapsodies. You can have a stapler shaped like a dog. Or you can have a stapler that uses no stables but very cleverly punctures the paper and then uses the punched-out chad to bind the pages. It is touted as the environmentally friendly stapler, presumably because papers stapled together in this staple-less fashion can be easily recycled. There is a row of magnetic bookmarks, and another row of designer page flags. I was delighted to learn that those handy sticky things are called page flags. Never having conceived before that designer page flags even existed, I am now coveting the whole set of designer page flags, the ones with geometric patterns and the ones with naturalistic patters (I like the grass) and the abstract expressionistic page flags.
Another aisle is devoted to various boxes for storing your rolls of wrapping paper, tissue paper and ribbons. Or perhaps you would prefer a hanging canvas apron (I don’t know what else to call it) with pockets for wrapping paper, ribbons, scissors, tape and whatever else your wrapping requires.

This morning I returned to the Container Store to return all the boxes I don’t really need, but could not resist on first acquaintance. But I am keeping my Mini-Cable Turtle.

Why is this task so daunting, and why will it take forever? The above is one small example: 2 snapshots of beloved son and his favorite cousin in Marshfield, that summer when it rained all August. A month of rain is a long time when you are a small boy. In a moment of cabin fever the cousins had the brilliant idea of going to the old boat house and setting up the even older pool table. Like all proper pool tables, it was made of slate and hence weighed many hundreds of pounds. Using methods known only to those two small boys and now deeply classified, they managed to move the pool table from a corner and were on their way to installing it, when it fell and landed on beloved son’s toe, and crushed it. (Yet this is only the official version of events. There is also the ineffable. There is the provenance of every piece of furniture and every hideous fabric; there are remembered smells.)
Later, his grandmother would describe the bloody mess as resembling blueberry jam.
Tristram spent the next week or more in a cast. The doctor told him he might lose the toe if he did not keep still and stay off it. The cousins then played a lot more Monopoly, at which they were, and still are, very adept and cutthroat. You play with them at your peril. His toe is fine now. It is not a thing of beauty, but it does everything a toe needs to do.

The Orthographic Apis mellifera.

2011-02-02T13:31:00.002-05:00

(Excuse the title, but how could I have resisted?)

On Friday evenings, a certain person I know likes to eat Thai take-out and watch Swiss Family Robinson. Another heads for the gym to lift three times his body weight. One dear friend celebrates the end of each work week by eating alone at a Romanian restaurant.
I go to the Spelling Bee.
Admittedly, I am unable to go to a spelling bee every Friday night. Only once a year* do I manage this feat. But I love it, and neither death nor disease nor ice storms (and we have had plenty of all three) can keep me from spending an evening testing my spelling chops against the teams on stage, they with the Painfully Punned Names (The Bee-spoke team; the Bee-lievers; the Wordy Women; the Spellbinders; the Bee Train: You get the idea.)
And yes, CSB loves the spelling bee as much as I do, though he declines to test his orthographic skills – even though the program provides a blank page for this very exercise.
As for my orthographic skills…there is room for improvement.
For instance, the word was Gnathonic, with a silent G. The enunciator pronounced it and defined it (Fawning or flattering. After Gnatho, sycophant in Terence's play Eunuchus.) and some atavistic linguistic memory told me that the first letter was silent. But I guessed it was P, as in Pneumonia. I was wrong. It was G, as in gnome. Now I can only wait patiently for the perfect occasion to use gnathonic.
Another treasure I came home with was erythropsia, the condition of seeing everything as red. I have since discovered that erythropsia is not the only possible chromatopsia. If you see everything as yellow you are experiencing xanthopsia. If your eyeballs are yellow, you have jaundice. Cyanopsia is blue vision, and it is not curable.
There was exactly one word that not a single team on stage spelled correctly, but I did: Clerihew. And why was this? Because I actually know what a Clerihew is, because my friend Helen Barolini explained it to all of us in Literature Club, and because our Literature Club sponsored a clerihew contest. One person in Britain submitted over 90 clerihews, and I am sorry to say that most of them were quite unfortunate.
I was so delighted with this turn of events that I almost had to say something. CSB would have found this painfully embarrassing, and so I did not.

There has been much fractious discussion about the spelling of eleemosynary. The enunciator said it was spelled: eleeymosynary, with that additional Y. But I think he was wrong. It is hard enough to spell eleemosynary without putting in an extra Y.

* A fundraiser for the Irvington Library, held in January at the Irvington Town Hall. Full disclosure: Let it Bee Local Honey advertises in the program.

Some old advice that is still useful

2011-01-26T17:15:00.003-05:00

On top of the piano in a fraying Egyptian basket filled with ocarinas, I discovered a tiny red leather diary of 1920 that once belonged to Joseph Swan, grandfather of CSB. We have no idea how it got there.
On January first Joe Swan was in Yokohama, partying with Messrs. Kerman, Evans, Kelley and Brooks.
In the tradition of so many diaries that begin in January with a literary flourish and arrive at December with a blank page, Joe Swan’s last entry was on February 2nd: “Dreary day. Edward and Wanda stop by and ask me to come to Astor Tea Dance. Miss Bremer there. Return to work til 9. Mrs. Winter kindly had boy get dinner. Letter from Mother and Louise.”
But that is not all.
This very useful diary came with many useful tables, charts and bits of advice. For instance:

• In 1920 £1 was worth $4.85 or 25 Belgian francs; in China “the Mexican dollar is in common use; it is worth ¢50 US.
• The ANTIDOTE for arsenic is “freshly precipitated hydrated sesquioxide* of iron made by adding magnesia to any iron solution.”
• In case of MAD DOG OR SNAKE BITE – “Tie cord tight above wound. Suck the wound and cauterize with caustic or white-hot iron at once, or cut out adjoining parts with a sharp knife. Give stimulants, such as whiskey, brandy, etc.”
• As for BUSINESS LAW: Contracts that are made on Sunday cannot be enforced.
• THINGS EASILY FORGOTTEN includes the size of your Hat, Gloves, Hosiery and Drawers.

*Lest you, like me, are unfamiliar with sesquioxide: it is an oxide containing 3 atoms of oxygen and 2 atoms of another element. More importantly, sesquioxidizing, meaning the creation of a sesquioxide, is the highest scoring word that would possibly fit on a Scrabble™ board, for a possible 2044 points. If I ever get to use this word, I feel confident that I will beat my beloved and extremely competitive Scrabbling son. The word does not appear in the official Scrabble™ dictionary, but it is in the OED, which is surely what really counts.
This, however, does not address the question most pressing to one suffering from arsenic poisoning, which is: where do I acquire freshly precipitated sesquioxide and why would I have it in the first place? By which time the arsenic has turned one green.

On April 18, 1926, an announcement appeared in the paper that J.E.C. Swan was admitted to the Shanghai Stock Exchange and had opened a brokerage house.

The Merits of Meeting your Pelvis

2011-01-22T16:29:00.006-05:00

Again and then again I am forced to rediscover why I cannot throw away books, why I can no more throw away a book than I can toss out the infant with the dish water, why throwing away a book feels like surgically excising a memory I have not yet experienced in order to remember, why the throwing out of a single book is like burning the Pont Neuf, why discarding a book is like the tragic loss of a language spoken by one surviving member of the tribe, and then she dies, why … but I belabor it.
I had gone so far as to fill a cardboard box with books and ancient literary magazines to be given to the library, and to put that cardboard box in the back of my car to be removed when next I visited the library. But the library is not accepting book donations this week and so I revisited the contents of the box.
I removed a few and took them into the physical therapist’s office to read while I churned the stationary bike. Not that I have any objection to People magazine, but it takes less and less time to ‘read’ now that I recognize fewer and fewer of the sculpted young persons with their bee-stung lips and pierced bellybuttons, and then what do I do? I will tell you.
This morning it was an Unmuzzled Ox from 1979, a volume entitled The Poets’ Encyclopedia. That alone should be alluring enough, combining as it does two of my favorite things: poetry and encyclopedias (though not always poets). I opened this Unmuzzled Ox, savored the odor of basement damp,chitinous discards and mildew, and read more than was strictly necessary about the seminal proto-castration of a bull producing the world’s first ox, muzzled or otherwise; and then came upon a few dear old friends, back when they were hipsters and I was nursing a one-year old. Now some of them are still hipsters and some of them are dead and I am about to babysit a four year old. There in the physical therapy office I read a short piece about marbles in Malaysia by Paco Underhill(now best known for telling the unsuspecting consumer why he buys what he buys); it started out nicely enough evoking the games of childhood, and ended with a bloody breast found in the road. I opened another page and was face to face with Sari Dienes’ silhouette of John Cage. We have a few Sari ARTifacts here at the house, as CSB is a fan; but none is made from mushrooms. Sari’s name was invoked not so long ago, by the aforementioned Paco, when he quoted Sari’s assessment of herself, and Jeff, circa 1978: “A poet, a painter, a troublemaker."
Imagine if I had done the rational thing and consigned said volume to the recyclers.
And then there is a book found by my daughter, who seems genetically doomed to hang onto to odiferous and tattered books long after any sane person would have consigned them to the dumpster.
Together we found much merriment in perusing Nicole Ronsard’s No-Excuse Exercise Guide, with special attention to the illustrations; their style is classic 70’s, according to Reine, who ought to know, as the book came out before she was born. Nicole Ronsard is identified as the person who “made cellulite a household word”. She has much to answer for. Before she came along, “cellulite” was only spoken in hushed tones in the corridors of monasteries on islands in the eastern Mediterranean.

Waffling Moules-Frites Parenting for Dummies

2011-01-22T09:20:00.003-05:00

By now you are all, presumably, well versed in the proper Chinese-mother techniques to create the highly motivated, perfectly smart and super-focused child?
But what if a perfectly smart and perfectly well-behaved child is not what you are seeking? What if you long to be contradicted and questioned? What if your fondest hope is that your beloved daughter scarifies herself with tacky tattoos and runs off with a tantric motorcycle guru? What if you drag your precious son to Karl Marx’ graveside, attend mother-son yoga camp with him and bankroll his tuba lessons, in hopes that he will toss it all away and become known as the Baby Doc of Hedge Funds?
Then where do you turn?
It occurs to you that I might have some words of wisdom on this subject, having produced and raised two offspring who, though smart enough, do perfectly well what they want, when they want and how they want.
How did I accomplish this feat of what I shall now refer to as The Waffling Moules Frites of Franco-Belgic Mothering?
Rule #1: Threaten anything and everything, but never follow through.
Rule #2: When threats do not achieve the desired results try bribery.
Not a rule: Read aloud everything, including the copyright & publishing information.
Merely a Suggestion: Your children can never hear enough about the gruesome deaths inflicted by Diocletian upon the 3rd century Christian martyrs.
Rule #13: Save every scrap of artwork ever produced by your prodigiously gifted offspring, then have the pieces lacquered and turned into fine dinnerware and give this to them as wedding gifts. Gratitude is overrated.
Rule #3.14: Learn how to cook your national dish. If your national has no dish, you are f***ed. Your child will suffer the lifetime consequences of ostracism when he/she fails to delight at his/her school’s Celebrate your Ethnic Origins with Food (enough for 12) and a Recipe (50 copies) Festival.
Advice: Perfume can solve most grooming mishaps. What perfume cannot do, epoxy can fix.

Welcome to the Happy World of Manneken Pis!

Why Fairy Tales are Important and a Few Things you probably didn’t know about Sleeping Beauty

2011-01-13T18:12:00.004-05:00

Since her grandfather died suddenly, shockingly, alarmingly, 2 days before Christmas, Leda (oft-mentioned beloved grandchild) has, more times than I can count, asked me to read or tell or enact the story of Sleeping Beauty.
As you surely know, the story’s power relies on this conceit: the disgruntled fairy’s curse is partially alleviated by the final good fairy’s wish and Sleeping Beauty’s death sentence is commuted into a century long siesta; a hundred years of sleep not only for the lovely maiden – she was on the very cusp of womanhood when she pricked her finger – but for every living inhabitant of the castle. Just as Morpheus takes over inside, the rose bushes outside the castle grow with the speed and ferocity of a rainforest on steroids. In minutes thick thorny vines have knit an impenetrable cloak around the castle walls. From a distance, only the very tips of the castle spires can be seen, like red noses in the snow or Bambi’s white tail in the forest.. That is the story we act out and this is how it goes:

Leda*: Nana, let’s play Sleeping Beauty.
Me: Fine. Let me get my wand.
Leda: Nana, I’ll be Sleeping Beauty. You find me [and this is when she lays herself down in the position of rigid death] like this. You’re the prince.
Me: I’m going to go out and start outside the castle walls.
Leda: Don’t forget, Nana, you have to kiss my hand first. Watch, my eyes are shut. [Squeezed shut, cracked open.]
Me: [Walk away 6 steps, turn and return to recumbent child.] O behold! A poor dead Princess! And she is so beautiful that I am already in love with her! But wait! She is not dead but only sleeping! [Bend over and kiss her.]
Leda: Nana! You have to kiss my hand first! I told you!
Me: Sorry. Let’s do it again. [Leda repositions herself in sleeping pose. Take hold of her limp hand and utter more sweet nothings. Kiss her hand.]
Leda: [Bolts upright] My Prince! O I love you too. Let’s go wake up the castle.

It seems simple enough, our ritualistic enactment of the story pared down to its essential elements, defined as Type 410 in the Arne-Thompson folktale classification system.

In other words, it is never that simple. The Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose, which most of us have read in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (Jacob 1785-1863; Wilhelm 1786-1859) is just one incarnation, and perhaps the kindest iteration, of the tale.

The story was first written down by Giambattista Basile (1575-1632) in his Pentamerone, or Tales of Tales. Like the Thousand and One Nights, it is a collection of tales within a tale told to keep a drowsy emperor awake, or to keep Scheherazade alive one more night, or to stop the wicked trickster servant/wife from “punish[ing] my belly and murder[ing] little George.” Over five days (thus the Penta) ten stories or diversions are told.
And like the Thousand and One Nights, the version of the Pentamerone I read was translated into English by Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), the Victorian explorer, pornographer (depending on whom you ask), linguist (29 languages) and lover of convolutions, purple prose and then some.

Sole, Luna e Talia is the Fifth Diversion of the Fifth Day. Talia is the much beloved child of whom it is prophesied that she would incur great danger by means of a chip of flax.** Being a king and able to make such pronouncements, Talia’s father orders that all spindles and all flax are banned from the kingdom. It being prophesied, Talia nevertheless comes upon an old crone and inquires about the flax she is spinning, and gives it a try. A chip of flax pierces her finger and she falls dead. When the king finds Talia’s lifeless body (the old crone having wisely fled) he is so distraught that he props her up on a velvet throne, closes the doors and abandons the castle.
An unspecified number of years later, a Prince is roaming the countryside, comes upon the castle and finds Talia, as beautiful as ever. (Not that I want to interject any saints into this narrative, but the annals of hagiography are full of beautiful virgin saints whose dead bodies remain incorrupt, and often sweet-smelling, for centuries after death, such as Saint Rita of Cascia, Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, and Saint Catherine of Siena, she who is the reason Prince William and Kate are to be married on April 29th.) And now here we encounter a somewhat ruder awakening than that experienced by Perrault’s, or Disney’s, Sleeping Beauty. As Burton translates:
“At least he came to the saloon, and when the prince beheld Talia, who seemed as one ensorcelled, he believed that she slept, and he called her, but she remained insensible, and crying aloud, he felt his blood course hotly through his veins in contemplation of so many charms and he lifted her in his arms, and carried her to a bed, whereon he gathered the first fruits of love, and leaving her upon the bed, returned to his own kingdom, where, in the pressing business of his realm, he for a time thought no more of this incident.” In other words, he rapes the sleeping princess and then decamps, giving new resonance to the old saw, “Love ‘em and Leave ‘em.”
Nine months later the still sleeping Talia gives birth to beautiful twins, a boy and a girl who will be called Sun and Moon. Sometimes they manage to suckle at her breasts, but one day the baby boy can’t find the breasts and starts sucking her finger instead. He sucks so vigorously that he extracts the flax chip from her finger and voila! She wakes up. Naturally, she is confused to find herself the mother of two. Until a while later when the prince recalls his quickie in the castle and returns for more. He finds Talia awake with her beautiful babies, and tells her what happened, and “when she heard this, their friendship was knitted with tighter bonds, and he remained with her for a few days.” At this point in the story I want to speak rather strongly to Princess Talia about statutory rape and her reproductive rights, just for starters. But it’s a fairy tale.
Now we come to the second part of the story, which Charles Perrault (1628-1703) includes in his version, but the Grimm Brothers excise, and Disney most certainly excludes. And so does Leda.
In the second part, the Prince’s wife (sometimes it’s the mother-in-law) figures out that he has another family, and manages to trick Princess Talia into sending her the children. Her wicked plan is to have the children cooked up and served to their father (shades of Medea, Tantalus; there is nothing new under the sun). But because this is a fairy tale, the softhearted chef saves them and serves (sacrificial) lamb instead. In the end, the wicked wife or mother-in-law is punished, and the happy family is alive and reunited.

Only in Charles Perrault’s version (Surely because he is French.) is it specified which sauce the children are to be cooked with: sauce Robert. It is made with mustard, onions, butter and a reduction of white wine and said to be excellent with pork and other meats.

The Brothers Grimm omit the faked infanticide of Basile’s and Perrault’s version. The Grimm’s Briar Rose ends when the prince kisses and wakens Briar Rose, and in an instant, the whole castle awakens. I am particularly fond of certain details: the horses stand up and shake themselves, the flies on the wall start crawling, the fire in the kitchen rekindles and cooks the food, and the maid finished plucking the fowl.
In the mid-20th century Italo Calvino collected and retold 200 Italian folk tales***. Sleeping Beauty and her Children is #139. In his version, the heroine’s fate is neither prophesied nor cursed, but brought upon by the barren queen foolishly praying for a child in this foolhardy fashion: “Blessed Mother, help me to have a daughter even if she should have to die at 15 from pricking her finger on a spindle.” Naturally, the king banishes all spindles from the kingdom, and just as naturally, the princess finds the one rogue spindle and pricks herself. Her parents are distraught and they stand at her bedside for weeks, we are told, not believing she is dead, even though is neither breathing nor is her heart beating. Finally, still unbelieving, they install her beautiful body a mountaintop castle and then brick up the only door. Years later the Prince arrives, breaches the castle walls and finds the undead Princess. Calvino describes the rape thus: “The young king’s love was so intense that the sleeping maiden gave birth to twins.” The next part follows Basile’s tale: the jealous mother orders the children to be cooked up and served to their father; the cook subverts her orders, the wicked mother is found out and cooked instead.
Just one more. The inimitable Angela Carter (1940-1992) radically skews the tale in “The Lady in the House of Live”, which appears in her collection, The Bloody Chamber. In her version, it is the ‘prince’, an English soldier, who is the virgin and innocent. In his rambles, the young soldier happens upon a rotting, mildewed and cobweb-infested castle in Transylvania. It is inhabited by Nosferatu, a child-like female vampire whose only companion is a mute housekeeper who regularly brings in wayfarers who have foolishly stopped at the fountain for water. The travelers are given dinner and then introduced to the beautiful but very creepy Nosferatu, always wearing dark glasses because even the candlelight is painful to her vampire eyes. She then sucks their blood and discards the rest like chicken bones. The innocent English soldier arrives and dines, like the others, alone, served by the mute maid; but when Nosferatu enters, he is overwhelmed with compassion for this pale and nymphic woman, photophobic and possessed of unfortunate dentiture and taloned hands. He wants to save her. Her glasses fall to the ground and shatter, she pricks herself on a shard, and then, for the first time, sees her own blood . She is unable to staunch it. The soldier wraps her bleeding finger with his handkerchief, but when it continues to bleed, he kisses the finger and tastes the blood – and this somehow makes her human. And being human, she will now die.

Leda and I took the train into Grand Central last week. We like to sit on the western side of the train and watch the slow- moving barges and the tectonic ice flows on the river. Steeped as we have been in all things Sleeping Beauty, when we pulled into Glenwood and found ourselves staring into the old power station: a ruined brick hulk, with its broken windows and strangling vines, we looked crazily at each other, a little bit frightened but also tingling with recognition, because this was surely the sleeping castle of Sleeping Beauty.

*It is rarely necessary to change into costume because Leda is normally garbed Princess-wise, in tattered dress-up clothes from my youth or fancy outfits sold in Costco at Halloween.

** Nothing in my far-flung researches can adequately explain why a chip of flax should be prickly, so I am crediting Burton with yet more fabrication. I did however learn that there is a cave in Dzudzuana, Georgia where 30,000-year old dyed flax fibers have been found. And they are significantly older than the 6,100-year old red wine residue recently found under sheep dung in an Armenian cave. Along with a 3,000-year old size 7 moccasin.

*** I was doing fine until I went to the bookshelf and found – it was right where it belonged between Cosmicomics and Six Memos for the Next Millennium - and opened the Calvino collection. Then came the kick–in-the-gut of pain and remembrance as I read the birthday inscription inside the Folk Tales, in Jeff’s forever-recognizable scrawl: “For Christine, the smartest, prettiest, kindest twenty-nine year old [something illegible] from her loving husband and daughter.” Three months later he fell madly in love with another woman – someone from the yacht club and why was that extra painful? - and for the next three years he desperately wanted to leave me, and just as desperately I pled for him to stay.

Grief, like Sleeping Beauty, is complicated.