A few items from the Aged P Archives

Whenever I am back at my mother’s house, my childhood home, also my father’s childhood home, I try to help my mother clean out the attic and basement, closets and cabinets. It is tedious work and requires frequent hand washing and sinus-clearing. But it is not without serendipity. Among the rooms full of old guidebooks, the half-ton of old opera 78’s, the collection of “Empty wine bottles with good memories”, one can find picture that call to mind half-remembered stories, and pictures that rise more questions than they answer.

In the back of my father’s closet was this: A half-filled photograph album, of a kind we will never see again, the pages are thick black paper and the pictures are neatly slotted within four golden picture corners, and the captions are written in white ink.
This particular album appears to chronicle a few early business trips, and the portion of his honeymoon that was business as well.

The very first picture is of my newlywed parents (note the popularity of plaids and tartans) and the Kohler family in Germany. The two young girls are Bine (Christine) Kohler and her sister Renata. Their father, Herr Kohler, was a textile man and often came to the States to do business with my grandfather and father. We knew him as Hair Curler. Many years later Bine stayed with us for almost a year, and become one of my dearest friends;she still is. Many years after that I was visiting with her in Frankfurt and watched her daughter Anna bicycling off to school, wearing her uniform - a plaid skirt.

Later that same year my father traveled to Japan for business. Presumably my mother was home on Charles Street, pregnant with their first child. How did she occupy her days while her new husband concluded textile business in Osaka?
A letter glued into the album next to the picture reads:
“Having just received, after undue delay, a picture taken together on the day of your arrival here, I hasten to enclose it herewith for your consolation. Can you remember the name of the colossal rock-like fellow in the front line? He is called “NAYORAIWA” – being the combination of two nouns: “Nayoro” and “Iwa” – named after his native town’s name “Nayoro” plus the latter, meaning “rock”.”
[Nothing about the name of the lovely young lady seated next to my father.]

New Words for Your Mental Health, or, Skeuomorphic thixotropism leads to lordotic wordplay

I would be lying if I said I had been feeling rosy of late. But sometimes small things – new words - can make big differences, and it is hard to feel like complete failure, wretch, loser, and ne’er do well, when through no effort of your own, you manage to learn of 4 – count ‘em – four new words.
That’s how many new words I learned last week. (Nothing compared to the 400+ new words my three-year-old grandson learned, but then his brain is oh so much more plastic than mine.) They may not all be new to you. Maybe they are all old hat to you. To me, they are spring chickens, and frankly, much more appealing than the forty spring chickens out in the coop gorging themselves on organic artisanal baby chick feed.

The first word is lordotic, and it is the only one whose provenance I don’t recall. Wherever it was, lordotic was used to describe a character’s less than stellar physique, and now I understand way. “Lordosis is the inward curvature of a portion of the lumbar and cervical vertebral column.” So to say someone is lordotic means that person has a swayback. From the side view: concave in back, convex in front. The word is often used about horses; equine hyperlordosis is called a saddleback. But I rarely refer to horses.

Thixotropic comes courtesy of Eva Crane. In case you missed her obituary in 2007, Eva Crane is one of the great beekeepers and compilers of bee and honey wisdom. Starting with a wedding gift of a single hive – to supplement their wartime sugar ration – this PhD in physics went on to compile everything known about the history of bees and beekeeping. I use the word everything here in its most literal sense: from the ancient Egyptian beekeeping practices to a medieval codex forecasting the honey harvest to the chemical composition of honey to the exact differences in trace mineral content in honeys made from different flowers to every naturalist and scientist who ever studied bees and what they learned. It was in discussing the viscous properties of honey that I learned of thixotropism. As with so many of my favorite words, this one comes from the Greek: thiksis meaning touching, and tropos meaning turning. Heather (Erica) honey is thixotropic. Under static conditions it is fairly thick or solid (I can personally vouch for this), when agitated it becomes fluid and flows easily. This is not true of all naturally thick honeys (pine, honeydew) but you will have to study a lot more of Eva Crane to understand why. Other thixotropic things in nature are clay, synovial fluid and semen. That explains so much.

Meuse…this one was elusive. I heard the word from my Virginia host Sarah’s friend, Sally. She defined it as the imprint of an animal, especially a hare, in the tall grass. I knew exactly what she meant – or thought I did – because come spring when our field grows back the deer will reenter and make their beds. Walking in the field we always find smoothed down spaces of crushed grasses where they slept. The shape of slumber. Like the imprint of CSB’s head on the pillow, minus the deer ticks.
So I understood; but further clarification of meuse proved elusive…a slippery slithering creature in the tall grasses.
There was no meuse in Wiki, the Britannica or the American dictionary. Then at last I was rewarded by the delicious heft of the 13 volumes of the OED. There it was: [from the Old French: muce, musse, mouce, muche..hiding place, hole in a bed]1. An opening or a gap in a fence or hedge through which game, esp. hares, habitually pass and through which they run, for ‘relief’. B. trans. And fig. a loophole or means of escape; a device for, or way of, getting out of a difficulty.
2. The ‘form’ of a hare.

Oddly though, the OED does not include thixotropic or skeuomorph. Yet another reason for multiple references books. Only Eva Crane can be complete, so it seems.

I discovered skeuomorph - a “derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original” - in a paper by the renowned Welsh hagiographer Tristan Gray Hulse about St Diheuyr ap Hawstylr Gloff. Even though the paper is written in English, at least one third of the words and one hundred percent of the proper nouns are in Welsh, which make for a lot of consonants in unusual combinations. Yet there was skeuomorphic, clearly not Welsh: “some of these [stone houses] suggest a possible skeuomorphic recreation of small reliquaries in wood and metal.” I knew just what he meant, but not really.
Given that almost all the examples of skeuomorphs I found referred to computer or technical objects designed to resemble their analog antecedents, it seems remarkable that the word came to me via a reliquary resembling a pre-Christian stone structure.
And as a lagniappe, I wandered in to the next room and realized that there was my own skeuomorph: previously referred to as my pink neo-Princess iPhone attachment. (Thank you Pat.)

Changing in Public

It was a couple of weeks ago in the Times: a short piece about the closing of a discount clothing store, Loehmann’s. And snuck into the story between sample overstocks and leopard skin aesthetic was poor Mr. Loehmann and his Gregor-Samsa moment: "he found himself with a paralyzed lip.” No longer was he a flutist who could support dear Frieda in the style to which she was accustomed; he was now a flutist with a paralyzed lip. And Frieda would go on to establish a soon-to-be-venerable discount institution.

I don’t know if it was my first time enjoying the camaraderie of the group dressing room at Loehmann’s, but I do know it was the first time I overheard a conversation on a cellphone taking place in a group dressing room, or anywhere public. I assume it must have been sometime in the late 1980’s or 1990’s, before they were ubiquitous and even mandatory.
I was trying on black skirts. The woman gazing into the mirror adjacent to mine was trying on ball gowns, or prom-type dresses, though she was much too old for a prom. Flounces figured suggestively. And in the middle of this communal dressing room at Loehmann’s stood a tall young woman in a pair of turquoise pants, naked from the waist up and speaking on her phone. A cell phone. I imagined it was her mother-in-law at the other end of the connection, but I have no idea why; the only thing clear was that the young woman was speaking to someone looking after her children. She said that she was still in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles in White Plains, and she even complained about the slowness of the service at the DMV and the slowness of the clerks at the DMV, and this was why she would not be able to get back at 2 pm to relieve whoever it was who was looking after her children.
Did I comment? No. But I fear that I must have stared quite rudely, and not at her toplessness. In that instant I perceived this whole new world of possibility for deceit using cellphones. You could be anywhere, and you could claim to be anywhere else.
It was been years since that epiphanic moment in the dressing room. Much has changed. But even now, if someone calls me on a cell phone and claims to be in line at the DMV, I envision ladies of various sizes in various states of undress.

So naturally when I read of the closing of Loehmann’s, and of its original establishment because of a paralyzed lip, all I could think about was lying in public on the cellphone, and wondering which aspect of myself I would rather expose in a communal dressing room: my post-menopausal pooch or the fictions I tell my mother/my sister/my husband/ myself on the phone.

Lyubov Orlova and the Rats

It really has turned out to be the Trip that Keeps on Entertaining. About 3 and a half years ago my sister, brother,sister-in-law and I went to the Arctic and traveled aboard an old Russian ship, the MV Lyubov Orlova. (“An ice-strengthened Maria Yermolova-class cruise ship”.) The ship was named for Lyobov Petrovna Orlova, a Stalinist era Soviet film star. (You may recall her classics, Circus and Volga-Volga). The saloon was decorated with vintage movie posters. We had a marvelous time. We played 435 games of Bananagrams surrounded by Soviet-kitsch posters. We saw the Aurora Borealis and polar bears: we rode Zodiacs around icebergs the size of three Trader Joes; we dined on raw seal blubber, also fermented seal blubber, the real delicacy.
Immediately following our debarkation, the Orlova headed to St John’s, Newfoundland. There she was impounded by the Canadian authorities for unpaid wages. She ended up staying there for two years. The Russian crew aboard had not been paid and in most cases had not enough money to get back to Russia. We, the last passengers aboard, took up a collection and sent money to the Russian crew, many of whom we had grown quite fond of, despite the language gap, or perhaps abetted by the language gap. Meanwhile, the ship lingered while her owners ignored her. Finally, the Canadians started towing the Orlova down to the Dominican Republic, where she was to be sold for scrap metal. But the Lyubov Orlova never made it to the Sargasso Sea. The towline broke…and to make a short story even longer, the Lyubov Orlova was adrift in the ocean with no one aboard but the rats. That is the end of the real story.
But every so often, when things are otherwise slow in the sensationalist news department. the British press will print some horror story about cannibalistic rats aboard the ghost ship. I still wonder what has happened to those great posters of the lovely Orlova's films.

Muselet becomes a Chair, circa 2014

இனிய புத்தாண்டு
BOLDOG ÚJ ÉVET
СРЕЋНА НОВА ГОДИНА

Glückliches neues Jahr!

ՇՆՈՐՀԱՎՈՐ ՆՈՐ ՏԱՐԻ
SHNORHAVOR NOR TARI
GELUKKIG NIEUWJAAR

Barka da sabon shekara

FELIZ AÑO NUEVO

Bonne année!

Nothing in Common goes South, the Last Day

I would like to tell you about Mississippi, anything and everything about Mississippi, because Mississippi was surprising in a multitude of ways; not that I was surprised that Faulkner was born there and died there, in a sanatorium in Byhalia that has since been razed to make room for a gas station (we were not sure whether it was the Gulf or the Sunoco), or that Eudora Welty was born there and died there and had piles of books on very surface in her house, because I expected those things. But still.
Here it is already the holiday season that traditionally fills some of us – me – with sticky peppermint anxiety and jingle-bell-induced neuralgia, and it seems like a good idea to jump ahead and wrap up the Nothing in Common Southern Road Trip Annals.
So it was our last day. On our second to last day we visited Asheville and got a tiny bit lost in the lovely cemetery where Thomas Wolfe is buried, before visiting the Sliding Rock in the Pisgah National Forest where CSB fondly recalled certain youthful debaucheries, but I won’t go into that because we are jumping ahead to the last day.
On our last day we departed North Carolina and entered Virginia at 7:10 am. For some reason I noted that time, even though I had not done so on previous occasions of entering or exiting a state. CSB’s father was born in Virginia; he was a Branch of Virginia. Having entered Virginia so early no sites of note (neither the Museum of the Confederacy nor the Edgar Allen Poe Museum) were actually open when we arrived in Richmond. This was fine. We drove around and made several U-turns at the behest of Lorelei, our GPS. So it was that we discovered one of CSB’s illustrious ancestors: John Patteson Branch, a man so clean that he wanted the whole city to be clean.
It was definitely time to head north. I realized that while CSB’s forebear was promoting “good public health”, my own ancestor, Auguste (or Gustav) Brancart was busy publishing erotica in Belgium and the Netherlands, promoting another kind of health. It seems unlikely their paths crossed. But then, here we are.

Nothing in Common goes South, Day #4 or 5

It is not something I want to stress to heavily but it must be said: my ignorance of American history turns out to be on a par with my ignorance of Middle Chinese kingdoms. With my ignorance of Bulgarian country music. With my ignorance of phrenology, alchemy, and kymatology. Also Nascar, football (professional and college) and leveraged derivatives.
I should not make light of it.
So there we were driving across Tennessee, which, by the way, is not a small state. Driving across Tennessee is not like driving across Massachusetts, even though they share a certain horizontal rectangularity; hence my conflation of the two. In fact Tennessee is FOUR (4) times the size of Massachusetts. And Tennessee was home to Andrew Jackson, our 7th President (1829-1837). I know that now.
Naturally, as we were driving across Tennessee, it seemed like a good idea to visit the Hermitage, his home outside of Nashville.
Not only is Tennessee not the same size as Massachusetts but also Andrew Jackson the President is not the same person as Stonewall Jackson. Also, the Stonewall riots of 1969, in Greenwich Village, had nothing to do with Stonewall Jackson, who was a Confederate general killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville.
It was definitely Day #4 or 5 of our road trip. We spent the night at an excellent Comfort Inn (cheap, coffee maker in room, indoor pool) in Mt Juliet, Tennessee, where it turns out there are several apiaries. In the morning we went straight to The Hermitage and signed on for the tour. The tours are given by members of the Ladies Hermitage Association who all dress in period attire. (Let’s just say that I have mixed feelings about period attire.)
In the front hall I am especially admiring of the scenic wallpaper by Zuber; the costumed guide tells us that the scenes of Greek mythology were deemed appropriate for a young democracy, even though the scenes depicted Telemachus searching for the errant Odysseus. Then our guide turns to CSB asks him if he has a $20 bill.
Never pleased to be singled out in a group, CSB rather stone-facedly extracts a bill from his wallet. I am guessing this will have something to do with the face on the bill, nut am otherwise unprepared. The guides makes an elaborate show of examining the bill, then holds it up for the assembled tourists and says to CSB, “Sir, you could work here! You look very much like President Jackson! You would however need to use some hair products.”
CSB mumbles something that could have been: Just get on with the tour. Or, I would never use hair products, thank you very much. Or something not very nice at all.
Meanwhile I am delighted by this newfound Presidential resemblance that CSB has acquired. For many years, he dressed as Abe Lincoln (given his height and demeanor, kind of a shoe-in) when absolutely forced to do so. I also think there is much good to be said about Andrew Jackson’s hairdo, which I suspect he achieved without the help of mousse or gel.
Another happily mismatched couple?