Leaning Out for Love

I was laying in bed this morning thinking about the evoloutionary origins of human beings and how these account, still, for such a lot of bad behavior (including some of mine). I lay there resolving to be a better person, and to share this, my Special Insight, with the world, or at least the eight or ten people who stumble in here periodically. (Sorry, but I can't help this kind of thing. In addition to the cavemen of Europe I am descended from a long line of white Protestants who were nothing if not terribly earnest. I see you, you God-fearing bourgeois people with your spooky inner lives! I am shaking my fist at you here for some of the baggage you passed down this far. [Thanks for the immunity to various diseases and length of bone, though]). So, here goes.

Back when there was a serious people shortage on planet earth, a state of affairs which I believe persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, and survival of the human race was a very close call, we had written into our DNA a preference for people who looked the best and held out promise for mating and hunting and such like.

I found myself imagining a scene that I'd bet was repeated in the cold forests of prehistoric Gaul and MittelEuropa for a thousand generations or more. To wit: a small group of fur-clad youngish people and children walking away from a seasonal dwelling place. Behind them, at a dwindling fire, would crouch an old lady, or old man (of 45 or 50) or some of each, perhaps, left to die. Would the able-bodied have left the old people with food and furs, I wondered? Did the old people cry pitifully so that the departing had to plug their ears? Would the leader of the band mercifully brain the old people with his club before the he and the rest all took off for the coast? And what would have become of the damaged or defective in those days? I expect worse horrors awaited them. I have no problem believing our ancestors lived by a simple equation: damage = death. Infanticide, chucking into the sea, abandoning in the forest. If you couldn't dig for tubers, or carry a baby, or throw a spear, or at least run, you were out. Way out. Doomed.

And still the world and we our selves are often governed (or overmastered) by those same forces that dictate the seating arrangements at middle school cafeterias.

I remembered hearing Pope John Paul II say something once about how we, the well, should not avoid the sick and the dying, but seek them out. Thinking of the cruel anvil of evolution, this message seems especially tender and comforting.

And so Saint Sebastian makes his first ever appearance on my blog. I'm not actually a Catholic, but once you have seen a painting or two of St. Sebastian, he is hard to forget. When I think of elaborate possibilities of cruelty and suffering, and endurance, I think of him. And here's a fun fact, he's the patron saint of at least four towns in Italy, one in Spain, as well as raquet makers, diseased cattle, gunsmiths, bookbinders and plague victims. He's also credited with a bunch of miracles which seem the kind of God's magic tricks that make Catholicism an easy target for some. Not me though. Not, tonight, at least, when I am trying to let the better angels of my nature guide my thoughts. Love one another. Sigh.

More may be coming in some other post about the origins of this particular train of thought, or maybe not.

Lost Computer Update

See the last post. Whusband is off in Washington, D.C. this weekend and I persuaded him to trust me with the laptop he bought a month or two ago for "the family." (After it arrived, he decided it was too nice to actually be used at will by the family, but to his credit he is shifting his position). The lost laptop is still lost and I despair of ever seeing it again. I have concluded, in fact, that it was probably actually stolen, since my contact information was in a manilla envelope in the front pocket, and it should have surfaced by now. The good news, the homeowner's insurance people may come through with coin for a replacement.

Coming Soon

I was thinking about writing a post about my brushes with celebrity, having read a few fun and interesting ones elsewhere recently. So, if you've been frightened or appalled by this, check back soon.

I, And 345 Or So Others, Are Escaped to Tell You.

The old life odometer tipped over to "44" this last weekend. How'd that happen? The big day got started at the auction where I bought some chipped Haviland china ($5 -for 4 dessert plates and a sugar bowl) and a great little collection of Jackie-Kennedy-Era hats in period hatbox from Bambergers Department Store ($22.50).

The box is black and decorated with little gold Fleurs de Lis. The lid is black and white stripes with "Bambergers" written in jaunty gold script. My long association with Quebec, and strange royalist tendencies, pull me toward anything decorated with Fleurs de Lis. I think the hats will look smashing on the Understudy. I forced her to model the best one just now by threatening to give Shackleton the entirety of the last Fruit Roll-Up unless she went up and got that hat and put - it - on! The crappy picture was predictable. We'll have to do better on some later occasion. Still, you get a notion of how fabulous this hat is and of the wonders of the hatbox from whence it emerged.



After the auction it was off to Stowe for the kids' ski lesson. There were ice sculptures everywhere. Fabulous. Cold and windy, but fabulous. Whusband made a pie. I bought myself flowers at Price Chopper left over from Chinese New Year. They are still on the table. My sister and nieces sent me a card that arrived on Saturday with a $50 Target gift card.

So, I am not complaining. How could I? Well, there is the fact that I have the sense that I am falling apart like a cheap suit these days. Mortality! The Center Cannot hold, and all that. But then I got to thinking...

This birthday coincided roughly with my receipt of a book put together by some stalwarts from my high school class on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of our graduation from High School. I didn't go to the reunion, which took place last summer, but I bought the book.

Does anything make more fascinating reading than the bios, 25 years on, of the people with whom you went to high school? And are any illustrations more interesting than the pictures of the same? I sent in a little self-serving item like around 20 percent of our class, which consisted of about 350 people.

We were each of us reared in a prosperous suburb of Schenectady, New York. Schenectady was, and is, a high tech kind of place, at least vestigially, because of the presence of GE. It's R&D center was located in our "town" (no town center, really, to speak of, mostly housing developments within striking distance of the lab).

Our High School was a bragging point for most of the adults in our lives. People moved to our town to send their kids to this great school. I didn't believe this propaganda then, but I guess I do now. Lots of bios seem to mention "Yale" and similar institutions. Funny, people I assumed were miserable in High School seem to be largely responsible for all this rounding up of and organizing of the alumni. Could it be that I still don't know everything?

Most of those who provided recent pictures, or who allowed photographs to be taken at the reunion, have held up pretty well. Some look astonishingly good - better than they did at 18. I am not in that group. Others look, well, like strange old people. I am closer to this group. Then there is a third group, memorialized on a single page, who are dead. Whew. That's what had me thinking along the lines of Job, from whose book I have paraphrased today's post title.

There are five altogether out of our class of 350 (or so) who didn't make it into their early 40s. One - and I remember this well - didn't even make it to the high school. She died in 7th grade in a car crash. She was too cool to be my friend but she had come to my birthday party in 6th grade. Her name is etched in memory. I had heard about two others who were dead before we got out of college. Two others are on that page whom I don't much remember and whose fates were unknown to me until I got the book.

In the last year or so my sister dredged a bunch of our high school stuff out of the house in which we used to live. It included a picture of me being handed my high school diploma by the assistant principal, Mr. Carangelo, on the stage at Proctor's Theatre in Schenectady. I am grinning like an embarrassed idiot. It looks like my mortar board is a heartbeat from slipping off my head. I am wearing the gown in a shade of red no longer available in the United States and made of a petroleum based product, as I recall. I don't remember much about the ceremony, although I do remember sitting with all 350-whatever of us in the dark: jocks, nerds, drama fags (sorry but that was the affectionate sobriquet) we didn't have goths yet, all in alphabetical order, ready to be loosed on our lives and the world.

Pondering this I was glad that the Grim Reaper wasn't actually visible up on stage with Mr. Carangelo, letting us know the odds. Two of you will not make it out of your 20s, 2 more will not see 40. What news next? Always the same, I suppose. But in the meantime, there are adorable models for vintage hats,
and the hats and their boxes,
and skiing, and ice sculptures,
and discount Chinese New Year flowers ,
and apple pies,
and Target, and gift cards to Target!

And for that, and so many other things, let those of us who have escaped to tell be grateful.

Mom-ook of the Morth

Did you hear about the weather up here today? My kind neighbor drove my kids to school (the snow didn't come til around brunch time so school wasn't cancelled). I used an hour or two of the morning for a slow hike, befitting my semi-collapsed state - in my beloved woods at Jay Peak.

In all this snow, a creek rock becomes muffin-like, with strata of different snow falls clearly visible.



And here's the Family Conveyance, as it appeared today after my trip up Jay Peak then to the Pick & Shovel and RJ's Friendly Market in Newport.



I actually love all this snow.

A Cheapskate and her ipod, or A Response to "Consider the Lobster"

In my ongoing search for free content for my iPod, I downloaded from Audible.com last week a free essay called "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace. I had never heard of David Foster Wallace but Audible assured me that he was Someone Special and, as an essayist myself, (albeit not endorsed by Audible.com or any other publisher other than Blogger.com, which is famously not very selective), I made a grab for it. Yesterday being Tuesday, I had my hour in the morning for a walk on the Stowe Rec Path (about which see previous posts). It was a rainy, cool-verging-on-cold November morning. The last few dead leaves were being shaken from the trees by a steady breeze, not quite a wind, and David Foster Wallace (hereinafter "DFW")was on my ipod and in my walking plans.

It's not like I am exactly sorry I listened to it, because it gave me food for thought resulting in this insomniac essay. But it's not like I actually liked it either. Friends, it was grim. Worse, it was irritating. DFW revealed himself within a paragraph (he read the essay himself) to be a classic pointy-headed intellectual. I was going to call him humorless, but unfunny is more accurate. Inside of the first five minutes, I started wishing that the writers of The Simpsons would get him. I remembered a Simpsons episode where Springfield was taken over by all the smart people, Professor Frink, Dr. Hibbard, Lisa, Martin, and things went to hell in a handbasket. Snob that I am, I am also impatient with the intellectual class and glad that most people aren't paying much attention to them. Mayor Quimby is preferable as a leader. God save the polity from DFW and his ilk.

I do have to hand it to DFW, however, for actually forcing the reader to consider the lobster in "Consider the Lobster." If this was his objective, he met it. Listening to this essay was the literary equivalent having a living lobster thrust to within about three inches of your face and twisting it there for a full 50 minutes with its little claws scrabbling at your cheeks and its larger claws, cruelly (it is suggested) banded or pinned, giving you a slap or two. The essay was, apparently written for Gourmet Magazine. I wonder what the editors thought when the product they commissioned arrived in their offices? They could not have found it a joy and rapture unforeseen, indictment of lobster eating and the Maine Lobster Festival that it is, at bottom. I expect it touched off an editorial argument, with the high-brows playing the "art" card and winning the day. Maybe the editors asked for a little rewrite. At the end DFW talks about how he's not intending to "bait" anyone who reads Gourmet and eats lobsters, cows, lambs, chickens etc. He just wants to ask if they have thought about the moral position they are in by eating these things. Yikes.

As noted, DFW is reporting, sort of, on the Maine Lobster Festival. Despite the image the words "Maine Lobster Festival" may conjure for you, images, of a happy sunny day near the ocean in summer, DFW found it, are you sitting down, a tacky and dislikable jumped-up county fair sort of affair. The MLF features a dull parade with home-made floats (presumably a contrast to the factory made floats of Macy's Parades and the Rose Bowl?) and a guy in a bad pirate costume saying "argh" to bystanders; people wearing hats with lobster claws on springs. Porta potties. Lines. Tourists. He includes himself in this last, loathsome category. In one memorable phrase says that he, like other tourists, ruins nice places by going there becoming an "insect on a dead thing." Here's a newsflash: crowds of people eating lobster, or anything else, as cheaply as possible accompanied by gimcrack entertainments and accommodated by poor sanitation facilities is not going to be pretty. They will be an easy target for someone with a large vocabulary. What mass event, other than church, or maybe some concerts, ever allows a crowd to come off well? Picking on the details is a way for DFW to show himself superior to it all. Yawn.

Come back soon. I have to get to bed now or I'll never be up in three hours to get the kids to school. In the meantime, "Annie, Get Your iPod!" here's a link to the audiobook under discussion.

http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/enSearch/searchResults.jsp?D=david+foster+wallace&Ntt=David+Foster+Wallace&Dx=mode%2bmatchallpartial&Ntk=S_Narrator_Search&Ntx=mode%2bmatchallpartial&y=14&N=0&x=11&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes