Lance Mannion

Art for sex’s sake

One wonderful year, back in my Boston days, I lived in a studio apartment that had a Murphy Bed.  That’s the name for a bed that folds up into the wall.  I’m guessing somebody name Murphy invented it.  But maybe Murphy, Mister or Missus, simply ran a hotel that featured beds that folded up into the walls.  Maybe the same Mrs Murphy whose chowder had overalls as a secret ingredient.   Possibly Murphy is some unfortunate soul who got folded up into the wall with his bed one day.  I could google it and find out but it’s one of those things that are more fun to speculate about than to know.  I never got folded up into the wall trapped in my Murphy Bed.  I just slept very well in it when it was folded down.

I did some other things very well in it too and had things very well done to me.

It was a great bed.

And thanks to that bed I have some wonderful memories of movies I saw during that year.

I remember movies I saw that year that I would probably have forgotten within I week if not for that bed.

In those days, that bed was an integral part of my movie-going experience and it’s not much of a stretch to say that I actually finished watching many movies in that bed that I started watching not in the theater and not even on the way to it but when I made the date to go see that movie.

What I’m getting at is that at that time in my life going to the movies wasn’t simply the act of going to see a movie.  It was a piece of the dramatic action of the romantic adventure of my life.

There is a period in most people’s lives when going to the movies is part of falling in love or being in love or wishing to be in love.  For me that period began when I was around sixteen and lasted into my early thirties.  And it’s not coincidental that the movies that affected us the most powerfully, the movies we love best, the movies we think are the best movies ever made, are movies we happened to see during that period of our lives.  We love the movies we saw when we were young and in love, in our dreams if not with an actual person.  There’s an erotic thrill to be had from all art because there’s an erotic thrill in the confrontation with beauty and it’s natural that we are most responsive when we are at our most erotically charged ourselves.

This can throw off our judgment.

That year I lived in the apartment with the Murphy Bed was actually a pretty weak year for movies.  But I still have a fondness for some real stinkers I saw then, movies I squirmed and scowled through while watching them in the theater, movies I’d have panned with vicious glee if I’d gone back to a newspaper office afterwards instead of to that apartment.  I remember them and like them, sort of, because I finished watching them in the Murphy Bed.

The movies I saw then are part of the movie of my life and my feelings about them depend as much upon where they appeared in my story as any objective, sober, and informed critical opinions I formed or have formed since.  I like a certain movie more than another because I saw the one on my first date with a girl I loved and saw the other on my last date with the same girl before we broke up.

The same goes for other works of art.  I don’t hate The Fountainhead as much as it deserves to be hated because of why I read it.  My favorite painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Art became my favorite and was, to my untrained eye at the time, one of the greatest paintings ever painted because I saw it on a beautiful day after a walk across the Fens in the company of the girl I didn’t yet know I was going to marry.  My favorite piece of classical music is Dvorak’s New World Symphony because the same girl gave me the album for Christmas back when I was in grad school and it was beginning to dawn on me that we weren’t just dating.

Something else goes on during that time.

We get out into the world on our own and we meet up with a lot of marvels and monsters for the first time and have to deal with all kinds of magic we didn’t even know existed.  And among those wonders and terrors is art.

This is the time when we first come face to face with art when we have at least some judgment and experience and the beginnings of the emotional and intellectual maturity to understand that we’ve come face to face with something more than a pretty picture or a hummable tune or a ripping yarn.

This is when we are consciously able---and conscious of being able—to take a work of art into our heart and our head and our soul and make it a part of who we are while still being open to having a work of art take us over, head, heart, and soul.

We form our identities---or fashion the identities we wish we had or think we should have---and we form them through, around, as reflections of, in reaction to, colored by, reinforced by, and amalgamated with the art we have taken in and that has taken us over.

These movies, books, paintings, poems, and songs are the grains of sand around which the pearls of egos form.

Going to the movies, then, isn’t just part of our romantic adventures.  It’s a key plot point in the great Romance of our becoming who we are.

Needless to say, the movies---the art---that we encounter on that adventure are going to leave an impression.

This is why I hate to hear myself saying anything along the lines of, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

Of course they don’t.  Because they aren’t making me like that anymore.

That is, I’m not making me like that anymore.

Over at 3 Quarks Daily, Evert Cilliers has a post that is pretty much a They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore lament.

They don’t write ‘em, paint ‘em, or compose ‘em like that anymore either:

Do you remember when Rubber Soul came out? And Sergeant Peppers? And the White Album? You'd think Eleanor Rigby was the most beautiful song ever, and out they'd come with Hey Jude. It was incredible to be young in the sixties, and to have your ears stroked like that.

Do you remember when Bergman's The Seventh Seal blazed off the screen? And The Virgin Spring? And just when you thought it would be impossible for Ingmar to reach the level of The Silence, Shame and Persona ever again, up he pops with his first color movie, Cries and Whispers.

I saw Cries and Whispers with a lady friend in London when it came out in the early nineteen seventies. It left us literally speechless. We were together for the whole of the rest of the afternoon and that evening, and we started speaking to each other only after three hours of total silence had passed between us, so blasted-out-of-and-into-our-skulls were we.

I can’t put this delicately.  If you remember when Bergman’s The Seventh Seal blazed off the screen, you’re old.

You’re no kid if your memory reaches no farther back than when Rubber Soul was released.

I’m no kid and I barely remember when the Beatles broke up.

Cilliers follows up the passage I quoted with, “I'm sorry, but The Departed just didn't do that for me.”

Blasted him out of and into his skull, he means.

Of course it didn’t.  How could it?  If Cilliers saw The Seventh Seal when it made its first blazing appearances on American movie screens, which was in 1958, then unless he was a very precocious kindergartner when his parents took him to his first Bergman film, he was well past sixty when he saw The Departed.

It’s got to be some movie to affect you at sixty with the same force as any movie you saw when you were sixteen or twenty.  Good God, Son of Flubber probably has more of a remembered thrill for Boomers than The Departed.

Maybe Cilliers is somewhat younger.  Maybe he saw all his Bergmans in one fell swoop when he was in his early twenties and that was in the early seventies when he and his lady friend were pithed through the occiputs by Cries and Whispers.  Doesn’t matter, though.

What matters is that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Cilliers that part of his experience of seeing Cries and Whispers was that he saw it in the company of that particular lady friend.

He doesn’t consider what his feelings about the film then and since and his memories of seeing it would be if he had gone with a different friend, someone who wouldn’t have spent three hours with him in total silence afterwards.

He doesn’t think about the possibility that it wasn’t the movie itself but the people watching it that determined its devastating effect.

Cries and Whispers is a devastating film.  I know because I watched it devastate a “lady friend.”  I’m guessing I’m more than a few years younger than Ciliers, but I had a very similar experience to his.  I saw it at a college film festival when I was in high school and I was trapped for hours in the parking lot afterwards because my friend, who was older and had her drivers’ license, sat with her head on the steering wheel of her parents’ car weeping uncontrollably.  I was disturbed by the film, but I was far more upset by how completely it had wrecked my friend.

My opinion of Cries and Whispers has been ever since that it’s a powerful movie that susceptible young women should not see if they are the only person in the car who can drive.

Which is to say, I don’t have an opinion of it as a work of art.  I have a memory of it as an emotional event in the romantic adventure of my lost youth.

The thing is, if I could have an experience similar to Cilliers’ a few years later, then a few years after that, some other young couple could have their own similar experience, if they were lucky enough to be living in some college town or city with a great revival house.

And comparing all three experiences would tell us what about Bergman the director or Cries and Whispers the movie?

That sensitive young people can be emotionally devastated by it.

But sensitive young people can be emotionally devastated by a Hallmark card.

Or by The Departed.

Evaluating the relative genius of artists by comparing the emotional effect a work of art by one artist had on you when you were young with the effect a work by a different artist has had on you now when you’re on the brink of old age isn’t criticism, it’s memoir.

Ciliers’ post has more in it than They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore and I agree with many of his judgments on who is and who isn’t a great artist, although as far as I’m concerned Ingmar Bergman’s importance as a filmmaker has more to do with his influence, for good---Love and Death---and ill---Interiors---on Woody Allen than with how one of his films made a friend of mine cry.

But then I saw many more of Allen’s movies during the period of my romantic adventuring than Bergman films.  Coincidentally, though, I didn’t see any of Allen’s movies during that segment of that period when I finished watching movies in the Murphy Bed.

That was one of Allen’s less productive periods.  Stardust Memories came out the year before and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy the summer after I had that apartment.

I doubt that even the Murphy Bed could have salvaged my opinion of either one.

Bloggers pay tribute to Jon Swift by boosting themselves

Our late and much missed comrade in blogging, journalist and writer Al Weisel, revered and admired across the bandwidth as the “reasonable conservative” blogger Modest Jon Swift, was a champion of the lesser known and little known bloggers working tirelessly in the shadows of the Great Blue and Orange Satans and their petted favorites and familiars.

It made Al fume that the big kahunas of the progressive blogosphere didn’t do more to nurture and promote new and different voices on our side and he was determined to make-up for that neglect by focusing effort and attention of his own on them.

One of his projects was a year-end Blogger Round Up.  Al/Jon asked bloggers far and wide, famous and in- and not at all, to submit a link to their favorite post of the past twelve months and then he sorted, compiled, blurbed, hyperlinked and posted them on his popular blog.  His round-ups presented readers with a huge banquet table of links to work many of has had missed the first time around and brought those bloggers traffic and, more important, new readers they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.

It may not have been the most heroic endeavor, but it was kind and generous and a lot of us owe our continued presence in the blogging biz to Al.

Al died last February.  Batocchio, the Vagabond Scholar, is honoring Al/Jon’s memory and spirit by bringing back the Round-up for at least one more year.

Here's the link:

Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2010  (The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves)

Please go visit and be prepared to bookmark.  There’s a lot of good stuff to read, some by bloggers you already know and love (Yep. I’m there.), much by bloggers you may not know and love yet but soon will.

Do it for Jon who did it for us.

________________________

If you missed Batocchio’s call for links, he asks that you still contribute by posting a link to your own favorite post, along with a one sentence intro, in his comments section.  You can also post them here in mine and I’ll see they get posted over at the Vagabond Scholar too.

If you’re not a blogger yourself, feel free to contribute a link to one of your favorite posts by some blogger you love who’s not featured in the post.  The invitation to post was general not specific.  Al wanted everybody’s work to be read.

The Poet sends his greetings from Iowa City

Steve Kuusisto:

When Wallace Stevens wrote: “The world is ugly and the people are sad” he was speaking in a specialized tense, “The Stevensian pluperfect” on behalf of an ordinary evening in New Haven.

The phrase, at once autocratic and abstract sounds right. But let’s contrast Stevens’ lines with these by Greg Brown, a folk singer from Iowa City: “The world ain’t what you think it is/ it’s just what it is.” One way to understand the difference between these two sensibilities is to say that Mr. Greg Brown has had his heart broken by local girls: (he grew up on a strawberry farm) while Wallace Stevens broke his heart on Schopenhauer, a matter that did not necessitate leaving his room. The difference matters since what we call “the local” in American literature is inexhaustible and organic and its words don’t spring from a vacuum. In other words: all human losses are local and are balanced by recoveries which occur in real fields and strawberry patches. This takes work, whether we’re talking about the psychiatrist’s couch or rebuilding your barn.

Read the rest.

True Grit and True Grit and…True Grit

Including the epilogue was not a good idea.

The Coen Brothers have been direct about how they were not remaking the John Wayne movie when they set out to film their own version of True Grit.  They were adapting Charles Portis’ novel and they planned on their adaptation being more faithful, in spirit if not in all the particulars, to the book than the Wayne movie was.  They did not think the first True Grit, which was directed by Henry Hathaway and released in 1969, was all that good a movie in its own right either.

I’m here to tell you the Coen Brothers were wrong on several counts.

The Coens’ True Grit is more faithful to Portis’ novel in at least one but impressive way.

Hailee Steinfeld is the living, breathing, braid-wearing embodiment of Portis’ heroine and narrator, Mattie Ross, giving such an indelible performance and making Mattie so much her own character that I suspect that the effect will work backwards on my imagination and when I watch the Wayne movie again Kim Darby will be erased from the screen and I will not be able to enjoy the movie in the old way as I stare at the blank space next to John Wayne that I will be wishing Steinfeld was there filling.

And this is why including the epilogue, which comes straight from the book, was not a good idea.

The epilogue takes place thirty years in the future from when the whole rest of the movie is set and presents us with a middle-aged Mattie Ross, played with no distinction by a non-descript character actress who is given little to do and doesn’t make much of that.  There is nothing in this Mattie that connects her with the Mattie we’ve spent the last two hours rooting for.

 The unfortunate effect is to cut us off from the best thing about the movie, which is not just Steinfeld’s Mattie but her interactions with Jeff Bridges’ Marshall Rooster Cogburn and Matt Damon’s Texas Ranger La Beouf.

Before I take this down the road any farther, I’d better clear away some brush.

First, the existence of Portis’ novel and the Wayne movie are irrelevant to whether or not you should see this movie.  You do not have to have read the one or seen the other or liked either or both.  This True Grit stands as a movie in its own right as neither an adaptation or a remake.

Second, I presume you know from either reading the reviews or from having already seen it yourself, that the Coens’ True Grit is a good movie.  I am about to write about my disappointment with certain things in the film and that might give the impression that I didn’t like it.  I did like it.  My disappointment is due to choices the Coens’ made that reminded me why I like the Wayne movie and why I love the book.  That’s me and it shouldn’t bear on your feelings about the movie or dissuade you from going to see it.

I recommend going to see it, if that matters.

The things that disappointed me happened to remind me of things I liked about the book and the other movie but they are flaws in the Coen Brothers’ movie as a movie.  If certain scenes had been done better or left out entirely, if certain parts had been better cast or given a different sort of attention, I wouldn’t have thought about the book or the other movie, just as I didn’t think about either one during the great majority of scenes that worked.  There are holes in the Coen Brothers’ True Grit that I filled with my memories and feelings.  You might fill them with a trip to the lobby for popcorn.

Now, to get back to the epilogue.

Of all the ways the Coens’ True Grit could have been and is faithful to Portis’ novel, including the epilogue is the least effective, because it’s a five-minute dramatization of a purely literary device.  In the book it’s just Portis writing his way out of his story.  There’s a little more to it, of course, but essentially what the Coens have done is the same as if they were making a movie version of a fairy tale and tried to end it by dramatizing “And they all lived happily ever after.”

I don’t know why the Coens thought they needed it.  Possibly to avoid having to invent an ending of their own.  Possibly they felt duty-bound to include a grown-up Mattie because of their intention to be more faithful to the novel which is a told story.  Mattie Ross narrates her own tale but she does so from the vantage point of her old age.  The elderly Mattie is a character in the book as she can’t help letting details of her life since the main action of the story slip into her telling of the tale.

This, though, is a joke for readers.  There is no point in trying to work the joke into a movie version, even if it could be dramatized, because it’s a joke that arises from the narrator herself being a literary device.

Portis didn’t put the elderly Mattie in there because she’s an interesting character in her own right---she isn’t, at all, that’s part of the humor.  The fourteen year old Mattie is able to do what she does because she is an overly-serious, very conventionally minded, and thoroughly unimaginative person and so it’s not really a surprise that her adventure doesn’t change her and that she grows up to be an overly-serious, very conventionally minded, and thoroughly unimaginative adult. 

By making her such a person, Portis can get away with the Biblically-inflected poetry of the narrative and the dialogue that is the source of much of the novel’s comedy, and it is a comic novel.  One of the jokes is that Mattie doesn’t always know she’s being funny.

The elderly Mattie is a strict Presbyterian and something of a Puritan.  So is the young Mattie, for that matter.  Of course she’s going to have a writing style that is based on the one book she thinks is worth reading.  The result is prose that is often comically at odds with what it’s being used to describe but which is also just as often as lyrical as a psalm and as powerfully and straight-forwardly dramatic as the gospels.

But besides the fact that the middle-aged Mattie we meet to no purpose and with no sympathy in the epilogue isn’t the Mattie who is narrating the book, she is another remembered Mattie, everything to be gained by faithfulness to the novel is already given to us whenever a character opens his or her mouth to speak.  You don’t have to include Mattie the narrator to bring her voice into the movie because it’s in every line of dialogue.

The epilogue is unnecessary.  The mistake of it is that it takes us away from the movie and the performances we just enjoyed and want to savor to make us watch a boring short about pretty much nothing of any interest.  It’s as if the Coens filmed their own version of The Music Man but went out of their way to make sure we didn’t leave the theater singing Seventy-six Trombones.

But it does something else, too.  It highlights a general weakness of the rest of the movie.  The poor casting and lackadaisical directing of the supporting players.

In the epilogue Mattie meets the outlaws Cole Younger and Frank James who are now old men trading on their former notoriety by running their own cut-rate version of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

They are far from the desperadoes they once were, which is the point: that Wild West was dying when Mattie was fourteen and set out on her adventure.  But we should still be able to see the dangerous young men in the mild-mannered old men and here I think that if there was to be any dramatic effect in including the epilogue the Coens should have resorted to some stunt casting.

I would have liked to see Keith Carradine and Stacey Keach in the parts.  Keach played Frank James and Carradine played Jim Younger in The Long Riders---Carradine’s late brother David played Cole in that movie and if he were alive he would have reprised the part if I’d had any say in it.

Even better would have been Cliff Robertson and Robert Duvall who played Younger and Jesse James in The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid.  The actor who played Frank James in that one is gone now too, but he was not a star.  I can see why the Coens wouldn’t have gone for that though, Duvall having played Lucky Ned Pepper in the first True Grit movie.

But the Coens essentially didn’t cast anybody in the parts.  They used actors of no distinction, hid their faces behind ridiculous and greasy-looking facial hair, and then barely focused any attention on them, treating them almost as background characters instead of as the cameos they ought to have been, as long as they were going to be there at all.

And they did the same with all the supporting characters.  Which is one of the holes in the movie that I wound up filling with memories of the Wayne movie.

Steinfeld is terrific.  Jeff Bridges is what he is, the best movie actor of his generation.  Matt Damon and Josh Brolin are both very good.  But considering what the Coens got out of the rest of the cast or seem to have wanted, the four of them might as well be alone on the screen.

It’s unfair to say that Barry Pepper is no Robert Duvall or Dakin Matthews is no Strother Martin or even that Jarlath Conroy is no Dennis Hopper.  But they aren’t even allowed to be what they are.  Like just about all the other male supporting cast members, they are lost behind their dirty beards and neglected by the camera.  The Coens seem to have had a hard time keeping the camera pointed at them.

As the over-matched horse trader, Colonel Stonehill, Matthews gets the best treatment but his scenes are all with Steinfeld who blows him off the screen.

A star or a great character actor, like Steve Buscemi, who could have held his own against Steinfeld, would have made those scenes even better and, more to the point, increased our admiration for Mattie.

But that assumes that with a Buscemi in the part the Coens would have taken more trouble in their presentation of the character.

And this is one of the ways the John Wayne movie is both a better movie than the Coens give it credit for being and more faithful to the book than their movie.

Most of Portis’ novel is taken up with Mattie’s encounters with the colorful eccentrics she meets up with on her way to tracking down the coward who murdered her father.  The book is full of finely-etched portraits and sketches of even the most minor characters and while not all of them appear in the 1969 movie and not all the ones who do are played by stars or future stars, director Henry Hathaway gives all of them their due, right down to the useless cat who shares living quarters with Rooster in the back room of Chen Lee’s grocery store.

The Coens had their pick of a number of minor characters to include or leave out, but oddly they decided to invent characters and scenes.  It’s their movie, so why not?   But if your stated intention is to be more faithful to a book than you believe a previous adaptation had been, wouldn’t you go looking in the book for characters and scenes to include in your version that weren’t in that other movie rather than dragging in scenes of your own that reference other books and movies?

The Coens have invented three big scenes that look to me to have been inspired by Lonesome Dove, Jeremiah Johnson, and, weirdly, Oliver Twist, and that add nothing to their re-telling of True Grit, either as a supposedly faithful adaptation or an original movie in its own right.

For that matter, the epilogue might be nodding at Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians and there’s a shot of Jeff Bridges framed in the black-edged entranceway to a mine that could be an homage to John Wayne, although the Wayne of The Searchers not True Grit.

But, again, these don’t add anything to the Coens’ movie.

Let me tell you what does add to their movie.

Long before now, you’d probably figured out that I haven’t just read Portis’ novel, I have it memorized.

I was a lucky kid.  I stumbled upon the novel when I was in eighth grade, long before I saw the first True Grit movie.  It became one of my favorite books.  Still is.  I think it’s one of the great American novels.  In fact, it’s on my list of the twenty-five novels Martians should read if they want to understand what is to be an American.  The upshot of this, however, is that for me Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn and Lucky Ned Pepper and the lawyer J. Noble Daggett, who the Coens, in another goof, left out of their movie, are characters unto themselves, not parts played by John Wayne and Robert Duvall and John Fiedler.

I think Wayne did a fine job as Rooster, but he isn’t to my mind the definitive Rooster any more than Jeff Bridges is.  Both got at different aspects of the character but I don’t see either one when I pick up the book or, rather, I can see either one or somebody else as Rooster but not instead of Rooster.

Which leads me, finally, to a way the Coens’ movie is both a better movie than the Wayne movie and a more faithful adaptation.

The Coens’ movie stars Jeff Bridges.

As I said, I think Wayne is just fine as Rooster.  But he’s still John Wayne and he can’t help tilting the movie in his favor.  Mattie, in the book and in both movies, has to learn to see the hero in the one-eyed fat man she hires based on his reputation but whose grit she begins to doubt.  But with John Wayne in the part, we don’t doubt Rooster’s grit for a minute, because, well, because we can see he’s really John Wayne.  One of the pleasures of watching the first movie is waiting for the moment when Mattie realizes that she’s been in the company of John Wayne all along.

“No grit? Rooster Cogburn?  Not much!”

But this, along with Kim Darby’s not having a particularly strong screen presence, makes the movie more Rooster’s story than Mattie’s. 

Bridges, not being a living legend, can give way to his Mattie in a way Wayne couldn’t.  His Rooster doesn’t need to reveal the hero inside him to his Mattie.  There’s no doubt this Rooster Cogburn has grit.  For one thing, as much as the Coens might want us to forget the Wayne movie, at least while we’re watching theirs, it’s still out there and the ghost of John Wayne is going to haunt any Western not just one that features a character he once played.  What’s in question isn’t this Rooster’s grit.  It’s his commitment to using it to help Mattie.

Bridges doesn’t waste much time before revealing to us the hero inside Rooster.  There’s a moment not too long after he and Mattie set out after her father’s killer when he gets ready to draw on a possible threat and twenty years drop away from his figure and face and we find ourselves being stared down upon by a gunslinger as dashing and dangerous as Wild Bill Hickcock who, not coincidentally, Bridges has played.

But because he doesn’t carry Wayne’s baggage as a screen legend, Bridges can also let us see a side to Rooster that try as he did Wayne couldn’t make us believe was a side to his Rooster.

Outlaw.

Killer.

Villain.

Rooster Cogburn is a United States Marshall but not because he’s a champion of law and order.  It’s just what’s paying the rent at that moment.  He will and has gone whatever way the money’s flowing and that’s made him a bandit and hired gun at various points in his career as well as a store keeper and a restauranteur and rancher.

In other words, he’s a man out for himself and motivated principally by money.

Never for a moment do we believe that Wayne’s Rooster is going to abandon Mattie.  We don’t believe that Bridges’ Rooster will either.  But that’s because we have such faith in Steinfeld’s Mattie.  We know she won’t let him.  But he believes he might.  And he believes it right up until the moment when he can’t and then he realizes that he never really had the choice.

Instead of being the story of how Mattie Ross comes to realize that Rooster Cogburn is a hero, the Coens’ True Grit is the story of how Rooster Cogburn comes to realize that Mattie Ross is his own personal heroine.

Which is a way of saying that Rooster has to face up to the fact that True Grit is Mattie’s story.

___________________

On the same trail:

Via Sheila O’Malley, Katherine Hepburn’s admiring reflections on John Wayne’s acting, “You Don’t Catch Him At It.”

Fellow Arkansan Gene Lyons says Charles Portis isn’t as elusive as this New York Times piece makes him out to be.

Roger Ebert says that if he wrote movie reviews like this one Stanley Fish did for the New York Times he’d get himself to a monastery.

Sigh.  Better start calling me Brother Lance.

The first True Grit, starring John Wayne, is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

The world we’ve paved

Young Ken Mannion shovels out the family homestead.  Ten o’clock this morning.  Monday.  December 27, 2010.

Suited up and launched myself out the airlock at eleven-thirty last night to shovel out the mother ship.  Snow was over my boot tops but light enough that if I wasn’t morally opposed to leaf blowers and owned one and I wasn’t also morally opposed to waking up my neighbors in the dead of night I could have blown the driveway clear.

This morning around six-thirty the blonde rolled over in bed to find a triple-sweatered and parka-ed husband rooting through his sock drawer for a pair of heavy winter socks.

“What’s the snow situation?” she asked sleepily.

“Not as bad as it would have been if I hadn’t gone out last night and shoveled.”

“Lance,” she said, in her You foolish old man, you want to kill yourself voice, “What did you do that for?”

“So I wouldn’t have to shovel twice as much now.”

When I looked out at first light I saw as much snow in the driveway as I’d removed last night.  Plus a two-foot high, three-foot thick wall the plows had built sometime between then and dawn.

I cleared a path down to the wall and dug out a breachway wide enough for a circus clown car to pass through.  I started in from the other side, intending to expand the opening until there was room to back our clownless car out so I could go out and buy the milk I’d foolishly neglected to go out and buy yesterday before the storm hit.

Then I remembered.

I have teenaged sons.

“Screw this,” I said and stabbed the shovel into the nearest drift.

The snow had stopped falling.  The shoveling could wait until those teenaged sons woke up and got their butts in gear.  We still needed milk for breakfast though.

I’ve written many times how glad I am to live in a place where I can walk to get almost everything we might need in a pinch.

I can walk to pick up milk.  Walk to the bank.  Walk to the hardware store.  Walk to the post office.  Walk to the library.  Walk to the drug store.  Walk to the Chinese restaurant for take-out, although I never think to do this until after I’ve pulled up to the curb outside China Palace.  When the boys were in grade school and junior high they walked to school.  They could walk to their high school if the school day for high school students didn’t start in the dark, and Young Ken routinely walks home from school, usually taking the long way so he can stop off at the library.  Oliver takes the bus because he has to get home in time for his “job,” which he walks to, it’s at the reformed church, which if we ever get religion again, we’d walk to on Sundays.

We have to drive to get groceries for the week, but there’s a new little market in town we can dash to to grab something for dinner on nights we have nothing in or don’t feel like eating what we do have in.

There’s a liquor store, but we aren’t regular customers at any liquor store.  But it’s there if we ever need to make an emergency run. 

There’s no doctor in town, but our dentist has his office just a few blocks away.  We could get our hair cut in town, but I like the woman who cuts my hair at a place near where I work and the blonde goes to a stylist near where she works.

We can walk to get about everything.  Except paid.

We both have to drive to work. 

Forty miles round trip in her case.  Twenty-four in mine.

No public transit option available for either of us.

Having to drive in the snow to work ruined winter for me.

Twenty-four miles round trip is nothing.  Once upon a time, for a period of four years I did 180.

Amazingly, not once in those four years did I do any one-eighties doing those 180.

There are two ways of looking at this.

One is that thanks to cars and decent highways, people can live and work in places they wouldn’t have been able to had they been born a couple of generations earlier. 

You had to live near where you worked or you had to work near where you lived.  A new job in a not all that distant town meant you had to move.

We enjoy opportunities and a certain degree of freedom we would not have if we didn’t have cars and well-paved and maintained roads to drive them, that people who do not have cars don’t enjoy.

Another way to look at it is that we’ve added hours to our work days while docking ourselves exorbitant amounts of money to pay for gas, insurance, car repairs, and property taxes since one of the opportunities people with cars take advantage of is the opportunity to live in a too big house in a too pricy suburb far removed from the places they need to get to on an almost daily basis.

And those of us who live in parts of the country where it snows regularly throughout the winter have added the pleasure of having to get out of bed hours early on the most miserable days of the year to clear our driveways so we can climb into our big metal boxes and send them hurtling down frozen roads drifting over with snow and whited-out by wind to get to work where most every other day of the year our employers are happy to remind us we aren’t necessary, we can be replaced at the drop of a hat, but where during blizzards nothing can be accomplished without our presence and contribution, so get your ass in here, now, you weather wimp!

The walk down and back to the convenience store was actually fun.  The snow had stopped falling.  The wind had died.  The temperature’s climbing and I worked up a real sweat.  None of the sidewalks along the way had been cleared yet so I had to walk in the road and for long minutes at a time I had the road to myself.  But I still had to keep an eye out so I didn’t get clipped.  There were cars on the road.  Not all those cars were driven by people who understood what it meant to have snow under their tires.

Both the blonde and I happened to have today off.  We had been planning to be out of town.  We were out of town.  But we left Mom and Pop Mannions’ yesterday morning when we heard the storm was brewing.  My parents wanted us to stay until it blew through and head home Wednesday but we had to be back Tuesday for work.  Probably our bosses would have understood if we’d called in to say we were stranded up North.  Probably.

I hope all the cars that weren’t on the road belong to people whose bosses understood when they called in this morning.  I hope most of them belonged to people whose bosses called them to tell them to stay home.  I hope all the cars that were on the road were being driven by people who had to go to work because other people’s lives depend on their work.  A car with Jersey plates drove by me, its wheels spinning a bit as it tried to climb the small hill up from the center of town.  The lettering on the door panel identified it as belonging to a Biotech lab.  Somebody’s blood or tissue samples had to be picked up and delivered no matter what the weather.

But some of those cars were driven by people on their way to jobs that do the world very little good and pay them too little to do it.  They could have stayed home and no harm would be done.  Some customers at the mall who were too stupid to stay off the roads themselves might complain because there were only two registers open.  Some sales calls that wouldn’t be answered anyway because the person being called had had sense enough to stay off the roads wouldn’t get made.

When I got home with the milk, the blonde was up and had a fresh pot of coffee waiting.

“Paper arrive?” I asked.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“But it’s eight o’clock!  It should’ve…”

I caught myself.

Half the problem with winter is people who think that driving in winter is no problem---for other people.

____________________

Incoming Weather Bulletin:  Carl, of Simply Left Behind, known around these parts as actor212, lives down New York City-way where they had it a tad bit worse than we did.

Get your two turtle doves?

It’s the Feast of Stephen.  Second Day of Christmas.  Ten more days to celebrate, get together with friends and family, sing carols, send out cards, feast, drink, and be merry.  Take advantage.

In your face, Philadelphia!

From the Department of Communications:

Half a foot a snow on the ground in Mannionville, it’s still coming down, and Lance Mannion is outside playing football.

Football in the snow is a beautiful thing.

Please don’t tell Mrs Mannion.  She thinks he’s out shoveling.

Bears 38, Jets 34

The Jets are going to the playoffs?  That is just so wrong.

Introducing the loquacious stranger

Reading Dickens by the lights of the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve is very…hard on the eyes.

But I’m not stopping.

I am, however, changing books.

I was reading American Notes, but Dickens’ description of rough weather at sea was making me seasick.  So I put that one down and picked up The Pickwick Papers, just in time to meet Mr Jingle:

'Come along, then,' said he of the green coat, lugging Mr. Pickwick after him by main force, and talking the whole way. Here, No. 924, take your fare, and take yourself off--respectable gentleman--know him well--none of your nonsense--this way, sir--where's your friends?--all a mistake, I see--never mind-- accidents will happen--best regulated families--never say die-- down upon your luck--Pull him UP--Put that in his pipe--like the flavour--damned rascals.' And with a lengthened string of similar broken sentences, delivered with extraordinary volubility, the stranger led the way to the traveller's waiting-room, whither he was closely followed by Mr. Pickwick and his disciples.

'Here, waiter!' shouted the stranger, ringing the bell with tremendous violence, 'glasses round--brandy-and-water, hot and strong, and sweet, and plenty,--eye damaged, Sir? Waiter! raw beef-steak for the gentleman's eye--nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient--damned odd standing in the open street half an hour, with your eye against a lamp-post--eh,--very good-- ha! ha!' And the stranger, without stopping to take breath, swallowed at a draught full half a pint of the reeking brandy-and- water, and flung himself into a chair with as much ease as if nothing uncommon had occurred.

While his three companions were busily engaged in proffering their thanks to their new acquaintance, Mr. Pickwick had leisure to examine his costume and appearance.

He was about the middle height, but the thinness of his body, and the length of his legs, gave him the appearance of being much taller. The green coat had been a smart dress garment in the days of swallow-tails, but had evidently in those times adorned a much shorter man than the stranger, for the soiled and faded sleeves scarcely reached to his wrists. It was buttoned closely up to his chin, at the imminent hazard of splitting the back; and an old stock, without a vestige of shirt collar, ornamented his neck. His scanty black trousers displayed here and there those shiny patches which bespeak long service, and were strapped very tightly over a pair of patched and mended shoes, as if to conceal the dirty white stockings, which were nevertheless distinctly visible. His long, black hair escaped in negligent waves from beneath each side of his old pinched-up hat; and glimpses of his bare wrists might be observed between the tops of his gloves and the cuffs of his coat sleeves. His face was thin and haggard; but an indescribable air of jaunty impudence and perfect self- possession pervaded the whole man.

Such was the individual on whom Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles (which he had fortunately recovered), and to whom he proceeded, when his friends had exhausted themselves, to return in chosen terms his warmest thanks for his recent assistance.

'Never mind,' said the stranger, cutting the address very short, 'said enough--no more; smart chap that cabman--handled his fives well; but if I'd been your friend in the green jemmy-- damn me--punch his head,--'cod I would,--pig's whisper--
pieman too,--no gammon.'

This coherent speech was interrupted by the entrance of the Rochester coachman, to announce that 'the Commodore' was on the point of starting.

'Commodore!' said the stranger, starting up, 'my coach-- place booked,--one outside--leave you to pay for the brandy- and-water,--want change for a five,--bad silver--Brummagem buttons--won't do--no go--eh?' and he shook his head most knowingly.

One of the best introductions of a character in literature.  Why do I have the feeling Mr Jingle is going to cause some mischief for Mr Pickwick and his friends?  Please don’t remind me I’ve already read The Pickwick Papers five times.  I want to be surprised.

Children’s money not good here tonight

Christmas eve 2010 in Mannionville.  Grandma and Grandpa store owners, Lula and Lester Mannion, help neighborhood children with their last minute shopping outside their twin stores, The Curiosity Shop and the Village Hardware Co.

Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Clarence’s wings, and other things that make grown men cry

Oh for Judy’s sake!

Less than a week after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, established in law and principle what ought to have been a taken for granted fact that there are no straight Marines or gay Marines, there are just Marines, the New York Times runs a story with a lede like this?

IT’S not many a straight American man who will proudly and publicly proclaim his allegiance to “The Wizard of Oz.”

The humor here depends on us knowing that you can tell a gay guy by his love of show tunes and adoration of the ghost of Judy Garland while straight guys are cultureless oafs who won’t watch any movie that doesn’t star John Wayne but somehow that Somewhere Over the Rainbow expresses the wish to live somewhere where a boy can be loud and proud about his collection of Depression era glassware and the line “I don’t think we’re in Kansas, anymore” is practically the password for getting into the Mineshaft.

Basically, it depends on its still being 1974.

I’m betting the reporter wasn’t even born when those stereotypes guaranteed laughs on every sitcom.  I’d even bet the editor who let it pass wasn’t out of grade school.  So what are they doing leading off an article in the Paper of Record?

The reporter went to a bar where The Wizard of Oz was on the TV instead of a football game and she noticed that the place was full of guys she assumed were straight who weren’t objecting.  They were even watching, and enjoying it.

And this is in New Jersey, of all places!

Straight guys!  In New Jersey!  Getting a kick out of Bert Lahr!

The reporter was staggered by finding herself in a room full of men who still liked a movie they liked when they were little kids and were being reasonably grown-up about it.

See, if it was me, I might have been bemused by the situation too.  Whatever you think of The Wizard of Oz, family favorite or gay camp, it’s not something you’re likely to see on the TV at your local watering hole.  But I wouldn’t have thought it was strange that beer-drinking manly men---and womanly women.  There were women in the bar.  I guess that’s why the reporter assumed all the men were straight, because you never see women in a gay bar, right?  Where did this reporter grow up?  Kansas?---were proudly and publicly proclaiming their allegiance to a classic movie.  And I wouldn’t have thought any gay vs straight thoughts.  I’d have thought, as I so often do, Life vs Cheers thoughts.

I would have been thinking, and saying to whoever I was with, “This reminds me of the opening of an episode of Cheers.”

“Which episode?” whoever I was with would likely ask.

“The Christmas episode the starts with the gang watching It’s A Wonderful Life and all of them pretending they’re too hard-bitten and cynical and wise to the ways of the world to be moved by the ending.”

“Oh yeah?  What happens?”

“They’re moved by the ending, of course.”

Outed L.A. Times restaurant critic won’t stop writing reviews - Yahoo! News

For anyone who hasn't been following along, here is the story of S. Irene Virbila, the veteran Los Angeles Times restaurant critic, and Noah Ellis, the Beverly Hills restaurateur who outed her.

via news.yahoo.com

Police: Thief tunneled into NYC home, stole art - Yahoo! News

NEW YORK – Police are looking for the person who tunneled through a wall into a New York City apartment while the owner was away around Thanksgiving and made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of artworks by Andy Warhol and other notable artists.

via news.yahoo.com

Artistic Genius With Vegetables

Mannionville’s resident artistic genius, Leonardo Mannion, hurries past Greenwich Grocery on his way to deliver his latest masterpiece, Forgery Number 12 in Blues and Grays, to the Mannionville Museum in time for Christmas.

All gone to look for America…

Saginaw, Michigan.  Photo by mural painter Eric Schantz via NPR.

We need a new national anthem.  I’m hardly the first person to notice that.  Among other things, besides not being a song that glorifies a war we lost, it should be one everyone can sing along on.

Some days, if my mood’s gloomy, I think it should be Born in the USA.  Most often, I think it should be This Land Is Your Land.  But there are days when I lean towards Big Rock Candy Mountain and other days when I feel it’s just got to be YMCA.

You think I’m kidding?

Look at the way that song brings crowds of strangers together.

Some days, though, in wistful and elegiac moods, I feel we already have our new anthem.

America by Paul Simon.

What else have we been doing for the past three centuries but going to look for America.

It’s often said that America isn’t a place it’s an idea, and that’s true.

But I think it’s a place too, only it’s a place that’s only brought into being by being looked for.  Then it appears, up ahead, on the horizon.  Not a mirage.  Just always a little out of reach, but visible, tangible, and welcoming as a the lights in house at night or the water in a lake coming into view through the trees on a hot summer day.

America is to be found in the looking.  The Right doesn’t look.  They’re convinced they’ve found it already, in the past.  I know lots of Right Wingers who like to congratulate themselves on their pioneer spirit.  They’re fooling themselves.  Like their heroine, Sarah Palin, they’re not pioneers, they’re squatters.  They’ve located the real America in their own private Alaskas, Idahos, Missouris, Pennsylvanias, and even New Englands and holed up there, claiming the ground as a retreat and defending it against invasion by the present and, the more fearsome threat, the future.

The rest of us know that the real America is still “out there,” a new land waiting to be discovered.  Every time we think we’ve made landfall, we find we’re still on our way, that here is just the farthest outskirts and a glimpse of what’s waiting for us.

This is why I prefer Simon’s America to Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, which strikes me as a little too rooted in the present moment.  Guthrie’s song is an anthem of triumph and defiance.  I like that.  But Simon’s song is a hymn of hope and longing.  I like that better.

The hopefulness seems more circumspect now, the longing sadder, the whole song more tinged with a sense of loss.  It feels more as though things are being left behind that we’d rather not have to leave, as though hitchhiking out of our own private Saginaws is a different kind of escape now, that instead of just making a mad, happy dash into the future, we have no choice but to head out because there’s nothing to be gained by sticking around in the present.

Maybe that’s just me getting old.

Or maybe it’s me reacting to this story on NPR about a group of guerilla artists in Saginaw who call themselves Paint Saginaw who have been busy painting abandoned buildings and factories around Saginaw with lyrics from America.  One of the artists, Eric Shantz, told NPR why:

"In a blighted city like Saginaw, it's kind of depressing when you drive through and all you see is boarded-up buildings and plywood everywhere," Schantz says. So the group decided that they would put Paul Simon's lyrics onto the plywood.

" 'America' has become a homesick song for Saginawians," Schantz says. "The city was once vastly populated, a couple hundred thousand — and now it's below 50,000. People left to go find their America, to pursue their American dream.  And when they left, they never really came back, 'cause there wasn't really much to come back to. And the emphasis on 'hitchhiking' to get out of here is kinda like people saying that they'll do just about anything to leave."

You can read and listen to the whole story here.

Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the singing of our National Anthem…

“How can soldiers be true to their country when they can’t be true to themselves?”

Ted Hayes is five weeks shy of being eighty years old.  He served in the Army during the Korean War.  He was a Baptist minister.  He had an ironic reaction to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Saturday.

Hayes is delighted that many pre-teens now feel comfortable enough to come out to family and friends.

But to Hayes, allowing openly gay people into the military follows a disturbing trend where homosexuals receive equal responsibilities without equal rights.

Hayes had a 26-year relationship with veteran Jack Waite, who is now dead.

“They’ll now let me get my head shot off,” he said.

“But they won’t let me get married to the person I love.”

Read all of Michael Novinson’s interview with Hayes in the Times Herald-Record.

Late night prescriptions filled

Albee’s Pharmacy in the Stoffel Building.

News from Mannionville: Lance Mannion hosts holiday party, lives to tweet about it

Aftermath.  Sometime after midnight, Sunday, December 19. 2010.

Mrs Mannion hosted her annual Holiday Open House last night.  Which meant I was nominally co-host.  The blonde is a born hostess.  She loves to welcome strangers into the house and feed and water and otherwise coddle and spoil them.  Me, I'm not quite as gracious.

The blonde has some odd and, I think, arbitrary rules for being a good host.  One is that I have to put the netbook away while the guests are here.  Fortunately, though, there’s Twitter.

Here’s my feed from the party.

Out picking up ice & wings for Holiday party. You on yr way? What do you mean you didn't get yr invitation?
about 12 hours ago via txt

 

Waiting for moochers...er...guests to arrive.
about 12 hours ago via txt

 

 

They better not scarf up all the food while I'm hanging up coats & serving drinks.
about 12 hours ago via txt

 

Hiding in basement. Guests already out of control. And none of them are even drunk yet!
about 11 hours ago via txt

 

I can stay down here for hours. Managed to carry off a plate of wings and half a gallon of egg nog.
about 11 hours ago via txt

 

Wings gone. Defeated. Must return to party. There better be some meatballs left.
about 11 hours ago via txt

 

Guests stlll here? What's with these ppl? Don't they have homes of their own to go to?
about 11 hours ago via txt

 

Apparently there's no getting rid of these intruders. Wife tells me most of 'em actually invited so we're obligated to feed them.
about 10 hours ago via txt

 

Thinking of starting a rumor there's going to be caroling. That should clear the room.
about 9 hours ago via txt

 

Hey! Where did everybody go? Party was just getting started. Oh well. Nite, folks. Happy Holidays. God bless us, every one.
about 7 hours ago via txt

Slammed!

Everyone has to have their custom embroidery done before Christmas!  Uncle Merlin recovers from a day of sewing like a madman at his business, the Any Design or Monogram Embroidery company.  ADME, for short.  December 16, 2010.

Gratitudinal

The car’s running again.  It’s got a sporty new starter in it.  Thanks very much to everyone who donated to the cause of putting me back on the road.  And thanks to blogging friends indeed Susie Madrak and lambert at corrente for the helpful plugs. 

I wish I didn’t have to hold fundraisers and my New Year’s Resolution is to find a way to keep things going without resorting to another one ever again.  The car repair blew a big, gaping hole in the budget, of course, and at the worst time of the year.  But the truth is that I’ve been operating too close to the margins and I counted on money that hasn’t come through and probably won’t.  I think I’m being stiffed.  Given the state of the economy, I’m not surprised or all that angry.  Just sad.  And worried.

At any rate, it would be nice if I had the support of a beneficent patron, a major advertiser, a sympathetic banker, or a kindly loan shark, and if you’re any one or all of the above I’d be glad to hear from you.  Seriously.  But I am glad to have had so much support and encouragement from all of you.  I’ve been a lucky, lucky blogger, and I’m incredibly grateful.

I hope you don’t mind if I ask one more time.

If you can swing it, a donation would be big, big help.

I know some folks don't like to use PayPal. If you'd prefer to donate by snail mail, the address is PO Box 263, New Paltz, NY 12561.  Please make checks payable to E. Reilly.

Again, thanks very much to everybody who's donated so far.  Proper paper thank you notes are in the mail.  And, as always, thanks to everyone for reading the blog.

What’s the going rate for babysitting these days?

Because somebody’s mother or father owes me for an hour’s worth of watching their out of control seven or eight year old twins who were determined to find a table to fall off of, a set of stairs to tumble down, or a railing to climb over and to send themselves plunging from the gallery at the dojo where my son has his karate lessons to the gym floor below.

Somebody else’s parents owe the woman trying to read her newspaper at the table next to mine for making sure another out of control second grader didn’t lose the same challenges to gravity.

The parents of the little girls who were running around with those three little boys get a pass because they didn’t climb on anything and they were stirred up by the wildness of the little boys.

But still, those girls were up in the gallery unsupervised.  I assume their parents were just downstairs, gabbing with other parents while they watched their older kid or kids working out on the floor, and they were keeping one ear open for screams of pain, anger, frustration, or impatience from above.

I don’t know how comfortable I’d have been leaving kids that young out of my sight for an hour because I don’t think I ever did it when the guys were that age.  I wasn’t worried about whether or not they’d be safe.  I was worried they’d get into trouble.  But maybe their parents know that, usually, their darlings will behave when left up there and play quietly with the toys over in the corner.  That’s what they were doing before the boys charged in. 

The parents of these little boys have to know, though, that their kids won’t behave, because they never do.

I’ve seen them there before.

Last night they were calm to the point of appearing sedated compared to the way they’ve behaved on other occasions.

The dojo is not a mall or a supermarket or some other public place full of strangers and with lots of doors small, inquisitive, and adventurous children can wander in and out of.  It’s a confined space, crowded with people who know each other by sight if not by name.  The one door in and out is always blocked by knots of adults who can’t be budged come hell or high water.  Believe me.  I have to try to budge them at the end of class every Thursday night.

What is it about doorways that attract people who need to hold long, involved, intense, personal conversations in public?  Isn’t that what corners are for?

That’s a question for another post.

The question for this post is what is it with some parents that they think it’s ok to let their children run loose and unsupervised in public?

The dojo isn’t a mall.  But it isn’t a playground either.  It’s a school.  Given how respectful the instructors and students are to the traditions of their particular style of karate, the place sometimes feels a little bit like a church.  Is this how these parents let their kids act in church?

Dumb question.

The backs and basements of many churches are teaming with children whose parents can’t divide their attention between the sermon and their kids, whose devotions to their prayers are such that they can’t be disturbed by bored and squirming children in the pews beside them and so those kids are set free to terrorize all the tax-collectors whose humility has them kneeling at the back of the temple instead of standing up front and boasting of their goodness with the Pharisees.

And ask any librarian, store clerk, waiter or waitress, or responsible parent or guardian keeping  a watchful eye on their own charges at the playground.  They’ll tell you.  There are many parents who think the world is full of free babysitting and taking advantage of it every chance they get.

When Oliver and Young Ken were little, it used to surprise the blonde and me when waitresses and store clerks would compliment us effusively on how well-behaved the boys were. 

We never thought they’d been exceptionally well-behaved.  We just thought, with relief, that they’d behaved themselves properly.  And we never felt comfortable accepting a compliment when it seemed more directed at us than at the guys themselves, because we didn’t feel that we’d done anything particularly deserving of it.  We just felt lucky that we had a couple of kids who enjoyed being taken out to restaurants and stores and had temperaments that kept them patient, polite, quiet, and in their chairs or at our sides.

If they’d been the sort of kids who couldn’t behave when we took them out, we wouldn’t have taken them out.

The only thing I can remember ever doing that might have influenced their thinking about how to not to act up is making it clear at times when they were on the verge of acting up that we’d be out of wherever we were in a flash if they did act up.

Young Ken has loved going to Barnes and Noble since he was the youngest Ken he ever was.  And the staff at the Barnes and Noble in Syracuse loved him.  One day when he was about two he got cranky while I was trying to pick out a book.  He wouldn’t sit still in my arms and he wouldn’t stay put when I set him down and whenever I picked him up or pulled him back he got angry and he let me know it.  He let everybody in the store know it.  And one of the assistant managers, a woman about my age but not a parent herself, came bustling over.  She was another one of Ken’s fans, but she knew what had to be done.

“Take him out,” she said firmly but not with anger or recrimination.  “Take him out right now or you’re going to have this problem every time you come in here.”

Up to that point I was still thinking I could reason with the kid.  I almost told her that I didn’t think it would be necessary to take him out, he’d calm down as soon as he realized he wasn’t going to get his way, and then I realized that we were long past the point when he should have realized it if he was going to realize it.  He was two years old, for Pete’s sake.  How reasonable could I expect him to be.  So I thanked the assistant manager for her advice and said to Ken, “Sorry, buster, but we’re out of here.”

He stopped squawking and gave me a cynical look.  You wouldn’t think a two-year old had a look that crafty and mean in his repertoire. It was the look Mark Twain must have had in mind for Injun Joe when Tom told him he didn’t know where the gold was.  It was a look that should have been followed by Ken’s taking the straw out of his mouth and spitting sideways before saying, “Yeah, right, old timer.  Pull the other one.”

I’d set him down again at this point and he took advantage.  He made a bee line for the children’s section…

…and found himself strapped into his car seat, whizzing home, with a fuming father refusing to look back at him from the driver’s seat while he yowled and cried and said, “Take me back!  Take me back right now!  I’ll be good!  Take me back!”

I did.

About two weeks later.

That’s the last time I remember pulling that on him.  That’s the last time I remember needing to.  And I don’t remember ever having to pull it on his little brother.

But I must have, and I must have had to pull it on both of them more than a few times.

Little kids are little kids.  They have only so much patience, understanding, and self-control.

But it could be that because of the problems Ken had dealing with crowds and big, open, noisy places that when he was overwhelmed and had to be scooped up and whisked out of there and we thought he was relieved he was actually feeling remorseful, thinking he was being punished instead of rescued.  And it could be that Oliver, watching from his perspective of three years behind, only understood what was happening as Ken’s punishment for acting up and he took it as a warning.

I don’t know.  They don’t remember.  However it worked out, the blonde and I never thought of ourselves as particularly wise and effective parents because we were able to go out to restaurants and the grocery stores confident that the kids would not disturb the peace of other diners and shoppers.

I think this is how most parents teach their children, unconsciously or reflexively setting good examples, laying down rules and enforcing them, making sure that actions have consequences, making sure that their kids learn that there are such concepts as cause and effect.  They don’t deserve and don’t expect medals for this because it’s just what parents do.  It’s part of what you sign up for.  You change their diapers when they’re babies, you show up for their concerts and little league games, you teach them how to drive, hand them the keys, and wave goodbye as they set out to make their own way in the world, and all along the way you do what you can to teach them what you know about how best to do that, knowing that the only trophy you’re going to get is the mug that says World’s Best Dad or World’s Greatest Mom and which for several years, the ones between when they’re around thirteen and when they’re twenty-one, will be a source of ironic amusement, if not a taunt and a rebuke.

You teach them to control themselves when they’re out in public and mind their manners the way you teach how to brush their teeth and put away their clothes and their toys and pick up after themselves generally.

But there are parents---and by parents you know I mean guardians and caregivers of all types, right?---who seem to take it for granted that, whatever rules there are at home and however strictly they’re enforced there, once the kids get past the front door they are other people’s lookouts.

Those twin boys intent on learning that they can’t fly last night are not always that out of control.  But I’ve never seen them in control and I’ve never been able to connect them with any adults there whose job is to control them, which makes me think that they get dropped off at the dojo with only the big brother or sister, who is busy with the karate lesson, to keep an eye on them while their parent, parents, or guardians go off to do whatever it is they think they have to do that’s more important than minding their own kids.

But the other little boy, who is also always up to mischief and mayhem, is usually there with his grandfather who normally tries to keep him from running amok.  I’ve watched him try to help the kid with his homework some nights and I suspect the little boy has some problems that may require medication and counseling.  Last night, however, I guess he had no homework, because the grandfather brought him up to the gallery, where the twins were already dancing on the tabletops and testing the railings and exciting the little girls to run up and down the gallery with them when they weren’t climbing things, and left him there to “play” with the other children.

Before the grandfather disappeared downstairs, though, he spoke to the woman trying to read her newspaper and looking as though what she wanted to do was roll it up and start whacking away at anything she could reach under four feet tall.

“Are all these yours?” the grandfather asked her with a too jolly sympathy as if he was glad to find a fellow prisoner of the whims of small miscreants.

“No,” she replied pointedly, “None of them are.”

He didn’t say anything to that.  But in a few moments he was gone, having bid a fond farewell to his grandson whom I twice had to talk down from the railing he was leaning over so far that his legs stuck straight out behind him.  This was in between the several times when the woman with the newspaper had to haul him out from under her table where he apparently thought there was ample room for running and sliding.

I think he was imagining he was Anakin Skywalker landing his starfighter on the hanger deck of General Grievous’ battle cruiser.  At any rate, there were explosions from underneath that lifted the table several inches off the ground.

Part of not teaching kids how to behave in public is not teaching them to respect other adults.  No matter how many times the woman or I told the kids to simmer down, they just kept boiling away.  Most kids, when a strange adult scolds them, will go running to find the adults that brought them there for comfort and reassurance.  Not these kids.  They just stared at us blankly and then went back to work.  It got to the point where I was ready to grab the one kid by the seat of his pants and carry him downstairs to drop him in the lap of his grandfather.  But that was a scene I didn’t want to be a player in.

I think I know what I’m going to do next time.  But I’m taking advice.

What would you have done?

Besides charging their parents for the hour.

__________________

A tall drink of water orders a tall drink of hot chocolate:  Young Ken Mannion at a place he grew up in and where he’s always been on his best behavior.

The mayor of Mannionville officially welcomes you to our little town

The holiday season is well underway in Mannionville, as Mayor Levon Mannion greets visitors from the steps of the town hall.  Yes, it says City Hall.  The mayor has ambitions.

There’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true…unless you’re a conservative, then all dreams will come true yesterday

Last night, on my way from here to there---never you mind what I was doing---I passed by a bank of televisions.  Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was playing on all of them and Sam the Snowman had just taken out his banjo to start singing “Silver and Gold.”

And I stopped to listen.

And sing along.

I hope in my head.

But maybe under my breath.

I know I all the words, of course.

But not from a dozen viewings from a dozen Christmases from my childhood.  And not from my sons’ childhoods either.

I learned the words by heart because Sister Mary Catherine and Sister Mary Jacinta made me learn them.

As the seventh grade’s part in our school’s Christmas pageant we sang all the songs from Rudolph.  Holly Jolly Christmas.  Rudolph, of course.  But also There’s Always Tomorrow, We’re A Couple of Misfits---two very short eighth graders dressed us Hermey and Rudolph led us through that one---The Elf Song, Island of Misfit Toys/The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, and Silver and Gold.

So I wasn’t singing along from general memory.  I was singing along out of a specific memory.

I was transported back to the auditorium of my grade school, a week before Christmas, when I was thirteen.

And I started to tear up.

I didn’t actually cry.

But it was a near thing.  If I had been singing out loud I’d have choked up.

Inside, I was crying though

I was crying for all the people who were there that night who are gone now.  For my grandparents, for many of my teachers, including my favorite, Mrs McLean, who died way too young, for many of my friends’ and classmates’ parents, for too many of the kids who were onstage and backstage at that moment.

For myself.

I was crying over my losses since then.  I was crying for all the losses that are to come.

Basically, I was crying because I felt sorry for myself for not being young anymore and as happy and as full of Christmas spirit---which included without any contradiction childish greed but also generosity.  My saved up allowance was burning a hole in my pocket.  I honestly couldn’t wait to go to the Five and Dime and buy my family their presents---and a sincere, childlike faith that Jesus was the reason for the Season because Jesus was who the nuns said he was.

But I was also crying because I was happy.

That was a wonderful night.

This was all in my head.  But I’m sure if anybody had noticed me they’d have seen my eyes glistening and it’s a good thing I didn’t have to talk to anyone for a little while.

Probably, if I’d been on 60 minutes and Lesley Stahl had got me reminiscing, I’d have broken down, just like our soon to be Weeper of the House, John Boehner.

But I’ll tell you.  There’s no way that in weeping over my lost childhood and youth I’d have thought I was weeping over some lost, golden, better America.

There’s no way I’d have mistaken what was going on in the auditorium of my grade school for what was going on in the country at large.

If I had to pick a moment from my school years that was at all emblematic of what was going on, it would be the day I served as an altar boy at the funeral mass for the eldest nephew of a neighbor.  He’d been killed in a helicopter crash while training to fly choppers in Vietnam.

Probably most of the kids in the auditorium that night were enjoying relatively happy childhoods.  Some weren’t, that’s a given, but I wouldn’t have known which ones weren’t.  I’m not sure it would have occurred to me wonder.  I was doing ok and my friends were too.  At least, they appeared to be.  God knows what some of them might have been hiding.  I was aware that there were children in the world whose childhoods were anything but happy and I knew that not all of those children lived in Africa.  But for the most part we were all contented, well-fed, warmly-clothed, generally safe, healthy, and comfortably and securely sheltered.

And by sheltered I don’t just mean we had nice, clean, warm houses or apartments to come home to.

I mean that we were sheltered from what was going on in the country by virtue of our parents being middle class or working class, which in those days, in Upstate New York, where most of the blue collar work was at the many nearby GE plants---most of the white collar and pink collar work was there too---where thanks to the Unions and GE’s manufacturing strength effectively meant middle class.

But we were also sheltered by our parents being responsible grown-ups with the attitudes and codes of parents of that time and that place, some of which were less than ideal, but one of them was the principle that adults did not share their feelings with children.

By then the Recession had hit.  I’m sure there were some kids in school who wondered why suddenly so many of their suppers featured tuna casserole or pancakes and scrambled eggs.  I didn’t.  There were six kids in our house.  I just took it for granted that my mother fed us what she was sure all six of us would eat.  I also knew she didn’t have time to make a big meal for eight every night.  I didn’t figure out until I was in college that my father’s salary was in the process of being effectively halved by inflation.

When one of us asked why we couldn’t go out for ice cream after dinner tonight or why we couldn’t have a toy or a particular item of clothing we just needed to have by this weekend if not right now and we’d have to wait for our birthday or Christmas, we accepted---because we had no choice but to accept it---my mother’s calm and patient reply, “We don’t have the money for it today.”

Being old enough to begin to understand how money worked and good at simple arithmetic I understood that the cost of spoiling us all rotten would add up.  Plus, there was that whole building character thing parents seemed to put a lot of stock in.  You know, patience is a virtue, delaying gratification, counting your blessings, all those lessons that were supposed to help turn us into responsible adults.

Sometimes she slipped and I caught the worry in her voice.  I was a sensitive kid.  I wasn’t necessarily on the lookout for my parents’ feelings but I wasn’t oblivious.  I was, however, a smarty-pants with a pretty good knowledge of American history.  I would catch my mother not being able to hide her worries about money and I’d think, “Well, after all, she did grow up during the Depression.”

See, I was a product of my time, too.  I knew that the Depression had wrecked the country, but I also knew that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal had saved it for all time.  Another Depression couldn’t happen.  We as a nation had learned our lesson.  Good times, prosperous times had arrived after the War and they had lasted for over twenty years which proved that they would last forever.  My mother worried because she had learned to worry when she was young and couldn’t break herself of the habit.  But she didn’t need to.

If I did anything around the house to help save money or if I put off asking for stuff I wanted but knew I didn’t need, it was only to spare my mother the worry.  I wasn’t the least bit worried myself.

You may wonder where my father fits into all this.

He wasn’t home a lot.  He was working.  Two jobs.  College professor by day.  Town supervisor by night and on the weekends.

That’s what kept us afloat.  Two salaries.  That’s what was suddenly keeping a lot of families afloat.  Two incomes.  My mother didn’t have to go to work.  With all those little kids around she didn’t want to.  But she was lucky.  Other mothers were going to work, even mothers with very small kids at home.

Feminism has been a good thing.  But it’s important to remember that much of the good its done has been in reaction to a bad thing.

A lot of women who could afford to stay home in the 1950s and 60s suddenly couldn’t.

They had to go to work and the workplaces they entered were incredibly hostile to them.

Still are, of course.

My parents were faring better than a lot of people in the country.  They were faring better than a lot of people who were in the auditorium that night.  Those jobs at GE were great, while they lasted.  GE was already in the process of disassembling its manufacturing and technical divisions.  Executives even before Jack Welch took charge were seeing the future and it wasn’t in bringing good things to light.

And not a few parents there had sons, my friends’ and schoolmates’ older brothers, who were draft age or soon would be.

For that matter, my friends and I were all only five years away ourselves and that damned War had already lasted more than five years and didn’t look to be winding down.  There was no light visible at the end of the tunnel.  Peace With Honor was an oxymoron that Nixon seemed determined to turn into a tautology even if it took his whole Presidency.

What was going on in that auditorium that night was not what was going on in the country or even in our town.  All that was going on was that we were enjoying another safe and happy night, one of the many we were lucky enough to enjoy during our safe and happy and sheltered childhoods.

John Boehner is older than I am.  Wasn’t all that long ago I’d have said he was a lot older.  The gap in our ages somehow seems to be narrowing every day.  But back then I’d definitely have thought of him as a lot older.

In fact, I’d have thought of him as a grown-up, because that’s what he was.

Boehner was born in 1949.  The years of his childhood and youth include all of the 1950s and half the 60s.  Boehner cries about many things.  I don’t believe it’s because he’s such a sensitive New Age guy admirably in touch with his feelings and secure enough in his manhood that he’s not afraid to show his softer side.  I suspect his tears are 80 proof and, bottled, could not be sold to minors.  But one of the things he cried about on 60 Minutes was the collective loss we’ve all suffered.

The America John Boehner grew up in is gone, he sobbed, and pity the poor children who won’t be able to grow up in it.

Steve Benen points out that the America Boehner grew up in and misses to the point of tears was created by New Deal policies and economic realities that Boehner and his fellow Republicans have dedicated their political careers to undoing.

But besides being the product of some politically correct revisionism---Right Wingers these days are more PC than any post-modernist literature professor circa 1990---the America Boehner “remembers” is historically incomplete.

His America doesn’t include segregation.  It doesn’t include Joe McCarthy.  It doesn’t include the atomic bomb.

I don’t know what was on thirteen year old Johnny Boehner’s mind in October of 1962 but it doesn’t appear to have been the imminent outbreak of World War III.

The America Boehner remembers doesn’t include Vietnam.  Unlike so many members of his warmongering Party’s Baby Boomers, Boehner actually served.  He was in the Navy, for less than six months before he was invalided out, and his Seabee unit was stationed in Mississippi, but still, basic training must have brought him in contact with a few Marines who would have been glad to tell him what they had trained for and where there was a good chance they were going to end up or where they had been.

Nope.  John Boehner’s America is a very small place.  One little corner of Ohio, population 1---John Boehner.

John Boehner’s Lost America is indistinguishable from his lost childhood.  It is his lost childhood. 

Given all that he’s left out of his memory of the America that extended beyond himself, you have to wonder how much of his childhood he actually or accurately remembers.  God knows how much revisionism, nostalgia, vanity, denial, and memory loss brought on my the alcoholic drowning of brain cells have contributed to his autobiography.  But that’s what his talk about the great and gone America he wants back amounts to.  Autobiography. 

John Boehner is in mourning for his childhood.

That’s what he’s weeping for.  That’s the country he wants back.  John Boehner is sad because he’s getting old.

He’s not the only one.

In the coverage of the Tea Party it’s routinely noted how much self-pity motivates a lot of its adherents and leaders, especially the one with the glasses.  It’s a strange movement of middle class white people who feel sorry for themselves because they feel they no longer live in a country where it’s a good thing to be middle class and white.

They feel oppressed.  They feel like they are the most oppressed and exploited people in America, even relative to migrant workers.

They feel oppressed by migrant workers.

Even the ones who live in suburbs of big cities hours away from the nearest lettuce fields.

“We want our country back,” they whine and are encouraged to whine by the likes of John Boehner, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, who, they never bother to point out themselves, are doing very well in the country as is.

And it’s easy to assume that the America they want back is an America in which middle class white people didn’t have to share any of the benefits and privileges of being middle class and white with anybody else.

It’s easy to assume because it’s true.

Much of the Tea Party is fueled by the idea that “I got mine, you get yours” is a fine and Christian philosophy to build a country on.

But it is also true that middle class people of every color do not enjoy the benefits and privileges that the middle class, blue and white collar included, enjoyed fifty and even forty years ago.

So they’re right about the fact that there used to be an America where it was much better to be middle class than the America they’re living in now.

They’re just wrong in believing that those benefits and privileges were taken away from them by Liberals who gave them to migrant workers.

Those benefits and privileges have been stolen from them by the people who have been most benefited and privileged by living in the America we live in now, who have collectively decided that it is morally wrong for them to share any of those benefits with anyone who is not like them, rich.

Those people don’t want their country back.  They like it just the way it is.  They just want to own more of it.

But, as I said, middle class Americans, white and every other color, on the Right and on the Left, are not wrong in believing that it stinks to be middle class these days and it’s getting stinkier.  It stinks to be anything but rich.

Democrats, from the President on down, seem to have trouble acknowledging this.

Republicans have had no problem exploiting it by exploiting the fear and the anger that goes with it.

What the Right Wing is wrong about and what it’s always been wrong about is that the way to fix this, the way to unstink things, is by going back.

It’s not silly or stupid or childish for someone who was born in 1949 to think that the country was generally a better place in the 1950s.  It may be self-centered.  You have to ask the question, Better for who?  But the fact is that if you were born in 1949 you could grow up believing that the future was going to be a better place to live in.  The country was growing richer and more open by the day.  By the time you were twenty, though, you might have started to notice that things weren’t what they were.  By the time you were thirty it would have been very clear that things were getting worse.  And by the time you were forty, if you were working class and lower than upper middle class, you couldn’t help but conclude that you’d gotten about as far as you could go---forward.  The only direction you were likely to travel now was backwards.

It’s not surprising that a lot of people began to convince themselves that backwards was the right direction.

The Tea Party Movement is nothing new.  It’s just a new and goofy name slapped on the Right Wing Reactionaryism that’s been taking over the Republican Party since the days before Goldwater, and a nostalgic, childish vision of a purer, more innocent, happier America has always been a key element of that reaction.

It’s said that the past is another country, but that’s not a metaphor to the Right.  They believe that country’s there and they can get to it.

It’s not childish to believe that there were things that were better when you were young and it would be a good thing if we could get those things or at least some of those things back.  It’s childish to believe that because things were better for you when you were a kid they must have been better for everybody else.  It’s infantile to believe that all those things that were better for you can be gotten back and the way to bring them back is whine and complain and scream and blame others and vote for orange-skinned weepers who promise they can get them all back at you at no cost and with no sacrifice.

The Right honestly seems to believe that the country is a thing like a toy that has been unfairly taken away from them.

Which is childish enough.

But the country---the toy---they expect to get back is the one they grew up in.

And not the historical one.

The one they’ve idealized in their memory.

It may not be that in the case of all of them that lost, idealized America is their childhood.

But a big part of what they miss, what they want back, is the feeling they had when they were kids that everything was going to be all right.

Things stink.  It’s scary.  People are right to be worried.  They’re right to be angry.

And they’re right to not want to feel scared, to want to be relieved of their worries or at least feel that some of their worries will end, to want to be able to stop being angry---at least most people want to stop being angry.  There are plenty of people who are addicted to their anger---they’re right to want to feel more hopeful.

They’re not right to expect that they can feel as unafraid, as carefree, as good-humored, and as hopeful as they imagine they felt when they were children.

They’re not right to feel sorry for themselves because they are no longer the safe and sheltered children on the stage and now have to be the grownups in the audience doing the sheltering.

And they’re not right in demanding that the rest of us find ways to make them feel like children again.

Anywho.

Wanna sing along?

German ants fail to impress Mark Twain

Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious ant at his work.  I found nothing new in him--certainly nothing to change my opinion of him.  It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely overrated bird.  During many summers, now, I have watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one.  I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about religion.  Those particular ants may be all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.

---from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain.

Much as I’d like to see Barbara Boxer kick Mitch McConnell down the Capitol steps…

I’m reading and enjoying a book called Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain by Roy Morris Jr.

You could call it a biography covering a decade in Twain’s life, more or less, focusing mainly on the years between 1861, when Twain, then just Sam Clemens, was forced by the onset of the Civil War to give up his dream job as a Mississippi Riverboat pilot, and 1870 when, now somewhat famous as a writer going by the name Mark Twain, he married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, the woman of his dreams.

Morris tells the story of how an itinerant journalist became the writer who would turn out the novel that all modern American literature comes from.

Hemingway said it, not me.

Not disagreeing with him, just giving proper sourcing.

Anywho.  You could call Lighting Out for the Territories a biography, because it is, but what else it is is a book-length annotation of Roughing It.

Morris gives background to incidents, events, and people Twain introduces in his account of his time out West, filling in gaps in Twain’s narrative with geographical, historical, and biographical detail that Twain left out for reasons of space, tact, or effect---where the truth wouldn’t do, Twain was happy to lie, and Morris is right there to correct the record.

Sometimes the correction, which is to say, the truth, is as interesting and funny as Twain’s “stretcher.” 

There are things Twain left out because he didn’t think they were part of the story and other things he may have left out simply because he didn’t know about them.  For example, a politician turned diplomat named Anson Burlingame helped launch Twain onto the national stage and so deserves some credit for getting Twain to write Roughing It.  Burlingame makes no appearance in Twain’s book, since he appeared in Twain’s life after Twain returned from the trip to Hawaii that concludes Roughing It, but he shows up in Morris’ like so:

Worn out from all his volcano climbing, island hopping, and horseback riding, Twain took to his bed at the American Hotel with a bad case of saddle sores.  He was nearly expiring from boredom---the only book in the hotel library was a copy of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poetry---when he received an invitation to call on American diplomat Anson Burlingame, minister to China for the Andrew Johnson administration.   Burlingame, a bluff, barrel-shaped, muttonchopped former Republican Congressman from Massachusetts, had first won fame ten years earlier, in the summer of 1856, when he accept a challenge to fight a duel with South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks in the aftermath of Brooks’ savage attack on Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate.  A crack shot, Burlingame had offered to meet Brooks at Niagara Falls, New York, for a shootout with rifles at fifty paces.  Brooks declined.

You’ve probably heard about the attack on Sumner, an outspoken abolitionist.  Brooks bushwacked him from behind and beat him so severely that it took years for Sumner to recover.  Presumably, Twain had heard of it too.  But Morris doesn’t say and doesn’t say if Twain knew about Brooks’ challenge to Burlingame or Burlingame’s prowess as a marksman.

He doesn’t say why Niagara Falls, either.

I didn’t know about Brooks and Burlingame.  I didn’t know any of the following, either:  The owner of the San Francisco theater where Twain gave his first “lecture,” engaged in a shady real estate deal that “brought down the administration of Mayor David C. Broderick.”  But that didn’t end Broderick’s political career:

Landing on his feet, the politically agile Broderick went on to win election to the United States Senate, only to be killed in a duel with political opponent David S. Terry in October 1859.  “They have killed me because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt administration, Broderick gasped on his death bed…

Wait, there’s more.

Terry was later shot and killed by a bodyguard of Supreme Court justice Stephen J. Field after attacking that worthy with a knife.

Some things to keep in mind when you hear pundits bemoaning the polarization of Washington these days.

Can’t be more polarized than finding yourself at one end of a field of honor facing down a political opponent who intends to kill you.

However bad it is, I think we’re still a ways away from having Senators and Congressmen inflicting grievous bodily harm on one another.

That’s good, although…

Might be fun to watch Nancy Pelosi make John Boehner cry.

Nah.

Too easy.