May 2008 Archives

On October 28, 1994, I watched a TV show with my then-girlfriend, who'd studied acting, and we agreed that it was one of the most amazing performances of any sort of drama we'd ever seen. The show was titled "Extreme Unction," and it was an episode of "Homicide: Life on the Street." A serial killer was murdering women and dumping them at churches, naked except for white gloves. It developed that a witness, soon suspected to be a, well, suspect, might have been suffering from multiple personality disorder, and fairly soon into the show, Andre Braugher (as Det. Frank Pembleton) interrogates her. He cajoled, seduced, and bullied her toward a confession, and most importantly he navigated, with surpassing intelligence and trust in his abilities, the dark, twisting paths in the forest of this woman's psyche. Just amazing writing and acting. I saw it again tonight, 14 years later. It had the same effect. And you know what? That goddamned show never surpassed "Nash Bridges" in the ratings. JFK said it: Life is not fair. But check it out, if you like good drama. It really doesn't get better.

It was a work week, nothing too exciting going on, but a stray thought would go through my head occasionally. Like, for instance, one is told that in the 19th century, a woman who wanted to make the acquaintance of a man on the street would pretend to drop her handkerchief, and if he returned her interest he would pick it up, beg her pardon, tell her she'd dropped it, and the acquaintanceship would get rolling. Well and good, I think we're all adults here and realize that even in Victorian times, a woman who liked the cut of a man's jib would want some way to let him know. I mean, underneath the bustles and crinolines, people are still people, and there was never a time when they didn't know what a jib was for. But I'm musing about this, and I think, well, what if the guy doesn't pick it up? Do you keep walking on your crestfallen way? Do you pout and stamp your little foot? Do you double back, in the hope that some grubby little urchin hasn't picked up your handkerchief and sold it to a ragpicker? And what if you're a woman who's full of, shall we say, vitality, and you typically like the cut of the jib of five or six men that you see in a typical evening's walk? Did women carry capacious handkerchief bags back then? How many would you go through, in a week? Like I've said before, this is the kind of thing I'm thinking about when I'm looking pensive. Other people are thinking about how to get more money. Not me!

I'm an avid reader, and I take a broad view about how print materials should be stored. Bookshelves are fine, certainly. But almost any flat surface works fine too—the dining room table, the bedroom floor. But today, it was like when you're a drunk and you realize you really do have a problem. I picked up a copy of The New Yorker from the floor, no big deal, and started paging through the "The Talk of the Town." It seemed like the town was talking about events that had come and gone some time ago, so I looked at the cover to see the date. May 14, it was. Of 2007. The magazine had been on the floor, or on other flat non-bookshelf spaces, for an entire year. I guess I'm more avid about reading than I am about picking up after myself.

People who fish say they were "skunked" when they don't catch anything. So I was skunked yesterday, after driving two and half hours to the New Jersey shore, spending about three hours fishing, and driving what you would naturally expect to be the same distance back to my mother's birthday dinner. I'd made plans to fish with a couple of fishing buddies, and then found out that the dinner was happening that day. I really wanted to fish with these guys, though; I'd made and broken plans to get together a week before, and didn't want to repeat the nonperformance. Driving up alone, I had that sense of fierce anticipation as I got closer, and that was fun. But really the best part came about an hour in. It was clear the fishing was going to be slow, and I was talking with a couple of bait fisherman about it when I turned and looked far away, up the long path that leads down to the water. There were a couple of gray dots up there, a few hundred yards away, up the twisting path of soft sand we call the "Death March." It's not physically taxing, just a trudge that lasts long enough to be annoying. These guys were far away, but there were two of them, at about the time I expected my buddies to show, and they had the dull slate grey clothes characteristic of fly fishing regalia. I watched for a minute, and thought I recognized, at the limits of my vision, the shade of hat my friend Rick wears. And so it was. It's nice to see two dots, a long way off, but making their way toward you, and thinking, "Those are my friends."

When I do a lot of highway driving I wonder whether I should get E-ZPass. That's an electronic toll-taking thing that lets you roll right through the (natch) tollbooths. On the Garden State Parkway, they have these basket deals you throw change into, and it takes a minute. So I'm at the basket, and I throw my money in, and I notice that some people have missed, and there was change sitting on the flat part below the basket. Hmm! Nobody behind me to give me a savage honking. Let's go for it! I rolled the window down all the way and made a lunge. Got a quarter, and headed on. So I didn't catch any fish, but I met up with buddies, got a lot of much-needed casting practice, and I'm 25 cents to the good. I've had worse days.

Years ago a girlfriend said that one reason I got along with her little girl was that I was a "big kid" myself. I felt that just now, throwing fishing tackle in the trunk. There's an "oh boy oh boy I'm goin' fishin' I'm goin' fishin'" feeling that I remember from my own childhood, when I'd go out trout fishing with my dad. Today I suppose I'm the dad and kid both. But the kid needs some fun and boy, the dad sure does too. Bye! And if you want to wish a person luck when he or she is going fishing, you say "Tight lines!" If you want to wish me that, I'd appreciate it. Have a good day yourself, gang.

I didn't intend to have four martinis. You don't put on your calendar that a week from Tuesday you'll go out and have four martinis. But I met friends for dinner at a bar, had dinner, and still didn't feel quite wound down from a stressful week. Stern measures must be taken, I thought. Thus a martini, Tanqueray, three olives. It came, and I was disappointed. A good martini, especially a good gin martini, is like pine-scented mountain air. Of course, it's also pretty much straight booze too, so you drink it with a delight tinged by the certain knowledge of pain to come. But I didn't drink this one with delight. It was blah. Seriously blah. So I hurried through it and ordered another, assuming it was a fluke. It was no fluke. The next one was the identical twin in blahness to its predecessor.

This, I thought, will not stand! So we took it downstairs where the drinks are mixed by professional mixers, not by the eye candy upstairs. Ah! I sipped with the delight I had sought before. Drank it to the dregs. And why not treat myself to more delight, life being short and the night being young? And so I did. Walked home too, more or less in a straight line. Tried to read in bed, but mostly slept in bed. Woke up—and this is the only thing that worries me—not feeling too bad. I think my brain is completely scarred over at this point. But I didn't black out or anything. I remember everything. Including which floor to order martinis on next time.

I've mentioned lately that I've had a few stressors going on, and I should add that for a while there was a flurry of old friends getting in touch and making me nostalgic for the past. That hasn't been entirely bad—among other things, it's created some complex emotional states that make certain types of music much more comprehensible. One of my old college chums was a piano major, and she loves Romantic music.
I was never so sure about it; it sounded overly emotional, embarrassingly histrionic, and once I compared Brahms to a "crying drunk." But I've been softening in this view. Just recently I listened to a piece and it seemed to reflect exactly a situation I lived through five years ago—incredible tenderness, then dark, tangled emotions, and then all that clearing like a fog and breaking through to the tenderness again, richer and deeper. (I'm talking about the Radu Lupu version of the Intermezzo Op. 117, No. 1 in E-flat, from an album that Alex Ross calls one of the most beautiful piano records ever made.) So I sent that version to the friend, and she was suitably enraptured. It was nice to let her know I'm coming along in appreciating the chahms of Brahms, and to share that version legally for a buck was pretty convenient.

So. Anyway. Crying drunk. I think the problem was the same as when you have a problem with your parents or children because they're exactly like you. I'm sort of an irascible person with a huge vein of sentiment flowing inside like an underground river. I wish Brahms would come back and we could get plastered and have a good cry about things. Here's Wikipedia on his personality:

Brahms was fond of nature and often went walking in the woods around Vienna. He often brought penny candy with him to hand out to children. To adults Brahms was often brusque and sarcastic, and he sometimes alienated other people. His pupil Gustav Jenner wrote, "Brahms has acquired, not without reason, the reputation for being a grump, even though few could also be as lovable as he." He also had predictable habits which were noted by the Viennese press such as his daily visit to his favourite "Red Hedgehog" tavern in Vienna and the press also particularly took into account his style of walking with his hands firmly behind his back complete with a caricature of him in this pose walking alongside a red hedgehog. Those who remained his friends were very loyal to him, however, and he reciprocated with equal loyalty and generosity.

I don't walk that way. And I'm not a historic genius at music or anything else. But some of the rest of that fits.

So when you have troubles you're in a different place for a while, and you acquire new friends, and I guess one of them is, more and more, Brahms. So be it. I'm also reminded of the TV show King of the Hill. (Bear with me on this.) In one episode a young girl becomes, shall we say, a woman, and her mother is consoling her about the upsides of PMS. The mother contrasts with the native Texan characters because she's an upwardly striving Laotian yuppie, intensely irascible herself, so she's showing a rare tender side when she talks about this benefit: "Make sad movies truly excellent! You watch "Titanic" on the right day, it blow you away!" I guess that's how I've been lately about Brahms.

Occasionally I check my back-end metrics (stop smirking) to see if someone has linked to something I've done while hailing me as a genius. Still waiting on that, but I saw today that someone had used the image at left there in an argument thread people were having about prepositions, for Christ's sake. They were jawing back and forth about the New York thing of saying "on line" instead of "in line," and someone had found this on my site and linked to it (stealing both the image and the bandwidth, I might point out) and used it as an illustration, saying, "Is this an apple ON a table or IN a table?" Permission was not asked for or granted, by the way. Humph. It's not worth hassling over but still. I suppose I'm glad someone got some use out of it. But I think it's aesthetically pleasing so here it is again. I think it's got a certain Vermeer thing going on, but hey, I'm its daddy.

I also bought some wine last night for $5.99 and got a penny change and the penny was Canadian. I stood there looking at it, and decided it really wasn't worth mentioning. Pennies are pretty useless no matter what side of the border they come from. Another thing not worth the hassle. Peace, man.

Friends have remarked from direct observation and from a blogological perspective that I seem a little down lately. This is true. There are—well, how many reasons? Let's count them—or maybe let's not. Sufficient to the day, at any rate. But I don't think it's the end of the world to feel sad occasionally. Dostoyevsky said somewhere, "A young man who is always sensible is of little worth and not to be trusted—that's my opinion!" And me, I say that a middle-aged person who never feels sad is either lobotomized or not paying attention. I mean, come on, we live in a universe where everything is mortal, from the stars on down to landscapes and kittens and you and me. Everything you love will someday flicker like a candle and go out. And if you're still upbeat and positive and seeing the glass as half full that day, then again—I think you're missing something. But I have my memories, you're saying, Upbeat One? Indeed I do. A sweet sorrow, memory of what you loved. End of discussion.

But I don't wallow in it, when I feel this way. The other day I came home, feeling blue, and looked up and saw a robin on the telephone wire above my parking spot. Very alive, it was, very much alive. I got out the camera. You see that very robin right now. It cheered me up. And the other morning the entire eastern sky was suffused with a deep coral color that glowed like the Northern Lights. Simply magnificent. And last night I played music with a friend and then drove home through the hills, and the fields and hollows were filled with a soft white fog, and above them loomed the fringed mass of the greenish-black forests, and above them higher rose dark grey banks of clouds. All soft, all misted, like standing inside a Chinese landscape and looking up. It was magnificent, and in the presence of such things I have enough sense not to mope. So don't worry about me, I'm not tying a noose to the pipes in the basement or anything. It's like the weather, this sort of thing.


One way to fight off a passing depression is to get in touch with your inner 14-year-old boy. So let's turn to the goofy side of life, and what better source of goofiness than—all together now—the Infamous W.! She was working in the library the other day when this old feller comes in and asks her if she heard about the guy who lost the key to his girlfriend's apartment and didn't get any new key. Another library staff person fled to the office for fear of losing it in front of the old feller. The Infamous stood her ground and scolded him like a schoolmarm, saying they're trying to keep the library G-rated, although from the stories I hear they're not trying hard enough. Library people have urges too, it seems. My own pronouncement on this joke: "Pathologically lame." Why do the old fellers do this? To inform women 20 years younger that they still have reproduction on their minds? OK, I get it, but why the stupid jokes? Couldn't you just make up a button or something? I was never a dirty-joke teller myself. I did notice in my younger years that when young, attractive guys told women mildly dirty jokes, the women would giggle and laugh and eventually go to bed with them, even the sensitive, intelligent women I thought I had a shot with myself. If there's a lesson in this, I've learned it thirty years too late. But probably the lesson is to be young and attractive. Don't quote me, though—I was never much of an expert in this.

Another thing I'l never understand: having your pants hang down as a fashion statement. Wait: I do understand. It's like the Chinese thing of growing your fingernails out to unimaginable curling lengths to tell the world you jolly well don't have to work. But in this case it means you're so ferocious that you don't have to run, like, ever. Or something. How would I know? There's plenty to think and wonder about in this world, that's all I can say.

 

Mired in what it amuses me to call the Slough of Despond. I don't like the thing itself, but I do like the term. If you've ever tried to slog through an actual marsh for any distance at all, it will seem apt. I looked it up the other day, and what do you know, it's from The Pilgrim's Progress, of all things. It's almost certain that neither you nor I will ever read that book, so it's fun to at least know one term—and thus derive one benefit—from it without going to the trouble.

It's not fun to actually be in a slough of despond. It feels kind of bad. You feel sorry for yourself, for whatever's bothering you, and then people try to cheer you up by reminding you of other people's far worse problems and it doesn't seem to work somehow. Like the earthquake in China. Tens of thousands of candles blown out, poof, just like that. James Fallows, one of the finest journalists and human beings on the planet, has done a remarkable thing: He's posted pictures of Chinese school kids. Just regular pictures. You look, and you understand what tens of thousands means. You also understand what one means.

So anyway, I'm not wallowing in the slough. It's more a case of one's optimism and forward motion being challenged by circumstances. But if being dead isn't one of the circumstances, you owe it to yourself to keep plugging away, right?

Got up today, feeling groggy as usual, and what do you know, the reason Lileks was silent most of last week was because he was making his annual pilgrimage to Disney World with the family. I have all kinds of admiration for the guy but his approach to blogging is to record daily life in Proustian detail, and sometimes Proustian is more detail than I want. He's funny, clever, all that. But sometimes, in the groggy morning, I don't feel up to tackling between 800 and 1,500 words about choosing shoes for the trip and how the portions were big at the restaurant and the odd choice someone had made in a T-shirt and so forth.

So if you're on the go, here's one quick Disney World anecdote from the time I was there during a convention in Orlando. I was with a colleague who had the habit of asking people questions—she would run up to strangers, like a friendly dog, and pepper them with all sorts of queries about God knows what. We were looking for something, and she sees this young guy in full cowboy regalia—hat, vest, chaps, the whole thing. So she runs up to him and says, "Excuse me, do you work here?"

He gave her a look of scathing contempt that would have had him fired on the spot if a manager had seen it. He pointed in the general direction of his outfit. "No," he said. "I just enjoy dressing this way."

Other than that, I don't remember much, but click that link and James will give you more if you want. I don't enjoy the sensation of falling, so places like Disney World are pretty much wasted on me.

We're very different, the woman who cuts my hair and I. But we get along swell, I must say. I got a haircut very early yesterday, so early I hadn't even had breakfast, but that was OK because there's a new little gourmet food place across from the hair salon that I could go straight to after the haircut. (I'd go to a regular haircut place for the old-world masculine solidity of it, but they don't understand curly hair in those places.) I settled in and we talked about scones for a while. I mentioned blueberry, she mentioned something like lemon ginger. This gourmet food place glowed in my mind: If you go to that part of town feeling hungry in the morning, you start to think about it and eventually you just go get a scone. At least I do. It's like the event horizon of a black hole—at a certain point, you're a goner.

Then the subject of my age came up and she did a very creditable impression of a person who was surprised to hear how old another person really was. "I had no idea!" she said. But talking that way has to be the first thing hair people learn, or they're not allowed to get licenses. I'm sure if I had said, "I'm negative 11. I won't even be born until 11 years goes by," she'd drop her jaw and say, "No! Get out! I'd have said you were much younger than that!" But still it felt good.

She mentioned that she'd had a first, the other day. A customer began wriggling under the cape they put around you, and the stylist asked if she were OK. It turned out she wasn't OK at all—her water had broken. I decided to myself that there wasn't much point in trying to speak genteelly, given the subject, so I said, "Cleanup on aisle 5!" I also observed that I don't know much about such things and don't really want to learn. We went on to agree that you can be a perfectly fine person and still not want to have kids. We started by listing ourselves, and then other people we knew. She's in her twenties, recently married, but in no hurry to devote her life to a child. And personally, I just never felt the desire. The world is being populated adequately without any additions from me. And while I think life is very beautiful, there are bad days, and if a kid ever said to me, "I didn't ask to be born!" I wouldn't really be able to argue the point.

So anyway, we talked and laughed about this and that. We crack each other up, she and I. And I trust her completely. I have to, because once I take off my glasses I'm effectively blind. I can't watch her in the mirror and say, "Hey! Don't cut that bit!" or anything. All I see are moving blobs. Anyway, she finished up, had me inspect her handiwork, and we went over to settle up the bill.

At that moment a 5K run had just started, and for a minute we watched a solid stream of runners come around the corner. We didn't say anything, just watched as this mass of outstandingly fit bodies flowed by, limbs pumping and thrusting with pent-up reserves of energy, lean and taut as greyhounds.

The stream thinned out. "Well," I said meditatively, "I guess I'll go get some pastry." And bless her, she threw her head back and laughed.

I guess the nicest part of yesterday was sitting on the steps of my back porch. I had a large bottle of Belgian ale by my side, and I was just quietly sitting there as the chicken cooked on the grill. This is the most delicious beer I've ever tasted, and it's pleasant to think about how maybe you don't have the best of everything but you can have the best of something, at least. It was quiet, just the 19th-century houses and the trees among them. At one point a young woman ordered a young man out of her car about 11 times, loudly cursing him for some misbehavior, but other than that, as I say, it was quiet. I watched the chimney swifts flying back and forth, giving out their chipping call, and noted how high they sometimes fly. Way up there, some of them were. So fragile, but such altitude they reach—like hopes, I thought. And grinned with rueful amusement. And took another sip of ale. 

Sorry, been busy lately and angsty, for lack of a better word. Suffused with angst. Angst-intensive. Something. So it's hard to walk around and find things that amuse and charm me, even if that's the mission I've charged myself with.

But I do think about all my friends in blogland often, and sometimes in the midst of doing other things I'll jot down ideas that haven't quite coalesced into a post, but that amuse me and seem worth the jotting. So today I grabbed one out of the slush pile (publishing term for the so-so stuff that you keep around because someday you might be desperate enough to find it useful) and will paste it in below. It's like sending a postcard: I'm not available, but I'm thinking about you. So here you are:

Sometimes I don't have time to actually read my e-mails, but I check the subject lines, just to stay on top of things. The Sierra Club is forwarding something about Wolf Awareness Week, which is good to hear about while there's still time—it's Wednesday already and I haven't yet become aware of even one wolf. Then Writer's Digest sent me something titled "When to Use Swear Words in your Writing." I guess writing is easier for other people than it is for me; personally, I find it excruciatingly hard work and I'm pretty much swearing quietly to myself the whole time.

Of course yesterday was the 13th of the month, and as I was driving to work a black cat crossed my path. I crossed both fingers and kept them crossed through a couple of traffic lights and past several hills, until the maleficent influence of the cat compounded with the baleful number of the day could be left behind. So I didn't have any accidents, even driving with crossed fingers. So far, so good.

But you can't have too much good luck, or be too aggressive in warding off the bad. I was at my desk, doing some proofreading, and I felt a gentle tickle on my arm. It was a tiny gnat, green body and clear wings, clambering through the hair on my arm. Now, I'm not pegged to the nutso end of the animal-rights continuum. I eat meat avidly, I kill ants with bloodthirsty enthusiasm, and I catch fish because I get a charge out of it. But I had mercy on this gnat, which had done me no harm. I got up, holding my arm out so it wouldn't be alarmed and fly away. I went down the hall, holding my sleeve to avoid knocking it off. Out the door. Down the stairs. Out the building door. With a puff of breath, I sent the gnat on its way, to find whatever destiny lay before it. It would live the life a gnat was meant to live, courtesy of me. It just seemed like an opportunity to help, somehow.

Later that day the vet called with the results of my cat's renal panel—blood tests to determine his level of kidney function. It was normal. Normal! The cat almost died several times during the winter, he was a day or two away from it. He endured multiple emergency runs to the hospital, he was hospitalized for a week twice, he had two operations, he spent days attached to tubes, crouching in a cage, full of fear and misery. But they did brilliant work and fixed him, and his own healing powers kicked in, and now that number is normal. He can, for as long as he can manage, continue to be a happy little creature, affectionate and gentle. If you don't know, cats are very much capable of sweetness. People use that very term, "sweet," and he's the avatar of feline sweetness. Just a gentle soul, like Tom Hanks or Henry Fonda. And he's won back, for a time, the life of peace and comfort he deserves.

I don't think the crossed fingers or released gnat had anything to do with that, really. It was mostly good genes and good doctoring. But how did they hurt? Hmm? No answer? I didn't think so.

Yesterday I went to this very good flower shop in town here, asked for a bouquet at a certain reasonable price level, and told the guy not to make it too traditional—my mom likes pretty wild stuff. So he brought out this bang-up extravaganza of floral fireworks, and I was most enthusiastic. Plus which, they'll die, and my mom won't have to take care of them forever. I think giving people a potted plant is something like giving them a puppy—it obligates them to water it and all. It's the gift that keeps on taking. But cut flowers please you and then leave. Sayonara, baby, I'll call you some time, like that.

Then I went to this boutiquey little paper shop to get a card. I walked around the card rack about three times, peering at it for any sign under which Mother's Day cards might be found. Finally the clerk said, "Looking for Mother's Day cards?" I pointed at her and grinned. "You're good," I said. But in a friendly way, which is how she took it. She came over and showed me the few they had. One was retro, a '50s mom. "I don't know about retro," I said. "It might remind her that she's getting pretty retro herself." I picked one that had a bird going "MOM MOM MOM MOM" but I wasn't happy with it really, and then I saw one that was a simple bouquet. Of course! We've got a theme going! Back went the bird. I have no idea if she'll notice the thematic coherence and all, but I put the thought into it anyway, and one is told that's what counts.

Gather around, children, and I shall tell you a tale of the Infamous W. (for new readers, this is a particularly goofy acquaintance of mine) and her profound credulity. Today's story has to do with the woman across the street from me. She's moving away today, after living here for a year or two. She wasn't terribly friendly, and I never met her or learned her name. She was obviously an avid horsewoman, judging by the trailers and getup, and either naturally or from the exercise of riding she was a noticeably shapely lady.

The Infamous W. was avidly curious about her, as she is about everything. You should know that the Infamous is also very credulous—she'll gladly believe any crazy story, as long as it makes someone look foolish or hypocritical. The Infamous often makes up crazy stories herself, based loosely on things you tell her. She's always telling me funhouse-mirror versions of things I said, and I'm always saying, "I didn't say anything like that."

Anyway, for some reason she mentioned the neighbor one time and I decided, mentally picturing the neighbor's well-sculpted hindquarters, to have some fun with the Infamous.

"Oh, by the way," I said, "I found out her name."
"Yeah? What is it? Tell me! Tell me!"
"It's kind of an unusual name," I said.
"Well, what is it?"
"It's 'Glutea.'"
The Infamous shrieked in delight. "Glu-tea? Really?"
"No. of course not, you idiot," I explained helpfully. "Nobody is named 'Glutea.' It's a joke name."

I had occasion to remind the Infamous of this just yesterday. She suggested that I shut up. And now I'd like to present one of the funniest riffs ever on the idea of Roman-sounding joke names. The title of this post appears around 2:10.

Just concerned about the people of Burma, suffering while international relief workers wait impatiently at the borders, blocked by a despicable government that can repress but cannot rescue. Here are some groups trying to help.

At the urging of people (well, at least one peep) that I respect, I've enabled comments, but to be honest, I've done it with a certain trepidation. Partly it's a trust thing. I don't want people to say mean things that will make me cry and cry.

But partly it's looking at the comments in YouTube with the morbid fascination I'd feel looking at an example of the two-foot salamanders they call "mudpuppies" or "hellbenders." You know what I mean, of course. Comments like "You suck" or "wtf?" and so forth. It's just appalling how many dumb people there are—you want to look away, but you can't. I'm not accusing anyone in the room here, you understand—I love my readers, who I figure must be like-minded folks for the most part, just basically nice people who are interested in a wide variety of things and enjoy talking about them with their guard about halfway down. So don't bum the rest of us out, haters! You don't like it, read someone else's blog!

Some people would say criticism, even moronic criticism, is a good and healthy thing. It's a point of view, I suppose. But the moronic aspect—frankly, it makes me wonder. I mean, if you read about hellbenders, you'll see that having hellbenders in a stream is a sign of its excellent health. But they bite, and they're a little bit toxic, and frankly they're not the most attractive animal in the world. So why can't we take one step further and have an equally healthy stream, just without hellbenders? And comments sections without rampant buttheadism? See what I'm saying?

for pet-oriented holidays. I have no idea whether pets are more or less gratifying to love than humans. How would you measure it? But face it, they're easier and simpler to love by a wide margin. I don't think there was ever a case, in the history of the world, in which a pet got mad and threw all its owner's clothes out the window. Most of us get along pretty well with our animal friends. So let's decide that the next time someone manufactures a holiday, the way it's been done so often before, it's about dogs and cats and birds and fish and chinchillas and whatever sort of critter you're glad to see at the end of the day. I'm not arguing you shouldn't love humans—hey, feel free, whatever—I'm just saying we do love pets, and if trees and flags and April Fools get a day I think my cat should too.

They're celebrating Cinco de Mayo (technically it's Cuatro de Mayo today) in town here, which means that for one day of the year, Mexican food is sold in a different place from where it's sold all the other days of the year. They have food trailers uptown, they have a band, decorations, like that. I can walk to get great Mexican on all those other days with no trouble at all, so I'm celebrating Cinco de Mayo by doing laundry and practicing the piano. Cinco de Mayo is one of those holidays that are handy if you want an excuse to drink, but I don't need an excuse to drink. If I want to drink, I just drink.

None of this means I have any problem with Mexico being independent; I wouldn't want to give that impression. I just needed to get to the laundry.

The other day I spotted something in a flash, out of the corner of my eye, as I was zooming down a two-lane road and it's been making me wonder ever since. This is a road that used to cut straight through a wide swathe of farmland, but more and more it cuts through a wide swathe of housing developments. I was rolling past a high, steep bank on my left, and it was topped with a fence to keep kids and dogs from tumbling down the bank. Above the fence you could see the tops of houses. But on the near side, I saw something dark: a thin stump, a couple of feet tall and about eight inches wide, with an ax stuck in it. The handle stood out horizontally, as if the woodcutter had just chopped the tree down, buried the ax head in the stump, and stopped for a sandwich.



But I kept thinking about it. I wondered if it had actually been there for years, maybe decades. When was the last time you saw someone swing an ax? People use chain saws now. An ax comes from the past, when tools were simpler and required some care to maintain and strength and skill to use. Chopping wood is harder than it looks, and keeping a blade sharp is a whole field of study in itself.

Like I say, you would have thought the person had just finished chopping, but I wonder. Maybe the farm's last owner sold the place, and went and chopped a tree for one last Christmas at the family farm.  (OK, maybe a Yule log; it's a fair-sized tree.) He went out in his red plaid coat, chopped the tree, sunk the ax in the stump, and came on back, with a couple of kids and the dog following him. And then he celebrated the holiday with mixed emotions. Yes, they had a couple of million in the bank, where as a farming family they had never had money before. And he'd never have to do any chopping any more. No more blisters on his hands or ache in his shoulders.

But no more sense of self-sufficiency, either. If you have a couple of hundred acres of farmland and a sharp axe, you don't have to worry about Christmas trees. You go out to the edge of the pasture and in half an hour, you've got your tree. I know that it's easy to romanticize farm life and manual labor, but I always felt a certain connection to the rural life that was fading away around me as I grew up.

I have a little row house in town now, and even if I had an ax, I'd have nothing to chop.

Lots of us have nothing to chop nowadays, is the thing. People are moving to the city in India and China. In France, you have lots of aerospace engineers in Toulouse who have fading memories of grandpere's farm. The engineers probably all have penknives—lots of sophisticated French folks carry one as a connection to the family farm that's part of their tradition.

For most of us, this change happened gradually, between one generation and the next. But for that guy I'm imagining, he knew that his life would change between one day and the next. He chopped that tree, and thought for just a moment how it was the last tree he'd ever need to use an ax on, then sunk the head in the stump and started to carry the tree back to the farmhouse. Maybe his kids asked why he did that, and maybe they just looked at each other. They'd been undoubtedly told until they learned that you don't leave things lying around, but there the ax was, as they walked away.

I don't know if that's how it happened. But I can't think of another reason that you'd find an ax in a stump by a fence on a high bank where nobody ever goes.

I keep thinking the Infamous W. will cure herself of what ails her, but she never does. She tells me yesterday that she went to a garden supply place and there was a turkey walking around there. It's sort of farmlike there, so I didn't fall down in astonishment or anything. She told me that it made a noise, and was trying to describe it, and I stopped her.

"A gobbling noise?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's not really that remarkable. Turkeys gobble. It's what they do."

See, the Infamous finds everything remarkable. She sees someone she knows at a store, it's an event, a bit of conversational fodder. A turkey gobbles, it's an event. Some people might find this childlike and refreshing. Me, I tell her all the time that she sounds like a mental patient. But it does no good.

"I suppose if you saw an iceman thaw and sit up," she said, "you wouldn't think that's remarkable because that's what icemen do."

I began to reel with disbelief. That happens a lot, talking to the Infamous.

"You mean an iceman like the Iceman from 4,000 years ago? The Iceman from the Alps?"
"Yes."
"I would think it was remarkable if an Iceman thawed and sat up," I said. "That's not what icemen do. What icemen mostly do is stay dead."

At this point the Infamous was shrieking with laughter at herself, having begun to realize that comparing a turkey gobbling and an iceman thawing and sitting up in terms of remarkableness was perhaps not as apt as she had first thought. I was going for paper and pencil because I knew that if I didn't write it down quickly I wouldn't believe she had said such a thing. But it's true. This is the kind of thing I deal with all the time. It's not easy to be me.