The blonde would like to share her Mother's Day Cards and flowers with all the mothers on the blog roll and all the mothers who stop by to comment here and all the mothers of all our readers.
The Mannion Boys took their mom to see Spider-man 3. It's exactly what she wanted, really.
Happy Mother's Day to one and all, particularly the Blog Mothers of us all, Mama Shakes and Mother Linkmeister!
The blonde stopped at the supermarket on her way home tonight to pick up something for dinner. The market is a different place on weeknights than it is on weekends when she usually shops there. On weeknights, the blonde says, it's staffed by very timid and easily spooked clerks who startle and bolt like deer at the approach of a customer. Tracked down and cornered, a clerk at bay will freeze under a customer's glare as if jacklighted and forced to acknowledge a question will at first tremble all over and then answer by pointing or shaking their head. Take your eye off them a second and they leap a stack of canned goods and disappear down an aisle.
The weekend crew is a hardier, braver, friendlier, more helpful bunch.
This happens. I'm not sure how it happens, but it does. Businesses, offices, stores---they have personalities. You go into one place and it's cheerful and welcoming, you go into another and it's angry, defensive, suspicious, hostile to your presence and uninterested in your money. Some places are tense, some are haughty, and some are burned-out and depressed. You walk in to one video store in a chain and it just lifts your spirits, but a store belonging to the same chain the next town over has you hurrying in and hurrying out with your movie, anxious and vaguely unsatisfied, as if you're sure you made the wrong choice even though it's a movie you'd been looking forward to watching for a week. And these feelings come over you as soon as you cross the threshold, before you've spoken to a single clerk or secretary, waiter, cashier, or counterman.
Of course, when you do talk to someone who works there it usually turns out that they share the store's mood. But you have to ask yourself. Does the store give it to the staff or the staff infuse it into the store? Is it management's fault...or management's great success? Does the boss there have a knack for hiring people of the same temperament, for good or bad? The same managers who hired the weeknight staff at the supermarket hired the weekend crew. Maybe it's just a matter of who you can get to work when. Maybe it's the location. Maybe it's the customers.
Pick a business you frequent. Describe its character. Speculate why it is the way it is.
The blonde came home with a roasted chicken but without the macaroni and cheese the guys love. She doesn't know if they were all out or if they no longer offer it at the deli.
She couldn't find anyone to ask.
She knew they were there though. Hiding.
She could hear them breathing.
I always marvel at how big a white-tailed deer can get. See one from a distance, browsing an open field or giving you the quick evil eye before disappearing into the trees in the woods, and you know they aren't petite creatures. But you can't get a sense of their actual size until you're right up on top of one, or three, say three, a foot away from your front bumper in the middle of a dark country road at one in the morning after they've wandered out into your path and jacklighted themselves in your oncoming headlights and caused you to burn out your brake linings in order to stop just in time to avoid filling your front grille and possibly front seat and lap with venison.
After they got it into their heads that neither they nor I wanted to spend the night admiring each other through my windshield and finished crossing the road, in no great hurry, and my heart started pumping again, I remembered one of my favorite poems. It's by Thomas Lux. Lux is my second-favorite living American poet. My first favorite is this guy. It's about a moose-car encounter but it's still apropos, I think. It's called "Wife Hits Moose."
Sometime around dusk moose lifts
his heavy, primordial jaw, dripping, from pondwater
and, without psychic struggle,
decides the day, for him, is done: time
to go somewhere else. Meanwhile, wife
drives one of those roads that cut straight north,
a highway dividing the forestsnot yet fat enough for the paper companies.
This time of year full dark falls
about eight o'clock -- pineforest and blacktop
blend. Moose reaches road, fails
to look both ways, steps
deliberately, ponderously . . . Wife
hits moose, hard,at slight angle (brakes slammed, car
spinning) and moose rolls over hood, antlers --
as if diamond-tipped -- scratch windshield, car
damaged: rib of moose imprint
on fender, hoof shatters headlight.
Annoyed moose lands on feet and walks away.
Wife is shaken, unhurt, amazed.-- Does moose believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Speaker does not know.
-- Does wife believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Speaker assumes as much: spiritual intimacies
being between the spirit and the human.
Does speaker believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Yes. Thank You.----from New and Selected Poems
I hate my dreams.
I'm jealous of people who have visually poetic and phantasmagoric dreams, dreams of Freudian import, dreams full of Jungian symbolism and Dali-esque imagery, dreams of past lives and future loves and present adventures.
My dreams are boring. I have what I call "peeling potatoes" dreams, because I have, and I'm not kidding, often dreamed I'm peeling potatoes, and in these dreams that's what I do. I peel potatoes. One at a time. One after another. On and on. I dream the act of peeling each and every potato. These are very realistic dreams. I can feel and smell each potato. I can feel the peeler in my hand and the tension in my wrist as I peel each potato. And while I'm at it I dream my thoughts, the kind of thoughts anyone with a hundred potatoes to peel would have. "Boy, this is boring," I dream myself thinking. "That's ten down," I dream myself thinking, "Ninety more to go," and "God, I hate potatoes. Whose idea was it to have potatoes for dinner anyway."
I don't always dream about peeling potatoes, naturally, but all my dreams are that mundane, that detailed, and that dull.
Last night I dreamed I met Robert Redford and we became friends.
But did we meet at Sundance? No. Did we meet on the set of one of his movies? No. Did we meet on Cape Cod where in real life both he and I vacation in the same town and could actually meet sometime, although so far he's managed to avoid me? Nope.
We met at his "office" where he wanted to talk to me about something important.
His office was in a nondescript building on the campus of a community college. The something he wanted to talk to me about was his new hobby. He didn't want to pass along any good gossip from Sundance. Didn't want to talk about what it was like to work with Jane Fonda or Meryl Streep. Didn't want to let me in on any secrets about his "friendship" with Natalie Wood. He had no good stories to tell about the jokes he and his pal Paul Newman played on each other, like the time after Redford had his driver's license suspended---he had a bad habit of speeding when he was younger---and Newman had his Porsche towed away in the night, crushed, and returned in a block the size of a coffee table. Nope.
He wanted to talk all about how much fun it was for him to build and restore Renaissance era Nativity scenes.
He had one in his office. It took up the whole of the top of a desk in the corner. It was very intricate and realistic and beautifully crafted and it included a three dimensional backdrop of the town of Bethlehem, which looked liked a walled Medieval city in an early Renaissance painting. Redford explained to me how he got the texture of the walls just right.
That was it. That was my dream. I dreamed I was sitting in a dingy office like the kind that crushes the soul out of your average adjunct professor at a third-rate junior college listening to a deranged hobbyist who happened to look like a movie star go on and on and on about how to coat cardboard with plaster.
Happened to wander into a bookstore in Albany this afternoon where William Kennedy was reading and talking about his books.
It's been said that Kennedy's been doing to Albany in his novels what Faulkner did with his little postage stamp sized piece of Mississippi in his. Kennedy is the author of Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Roscoe, The Flaming Corsage, and one of the greatest American novels published since World War II, Ironweed
Kennedy is also a former teacher and sometime penpal of my brother, Luke Mannion, which gave the blonde and I something to talk about with him after the reading.
One thing leads to another. We told him where we were living these days and it turned out he's familiar with our local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record.
Not because he reads it.
Because, once upon a time, when the world was young, the paper fired his pal, Hunter S. Thompson.
In fact, that's how Kennedy and Thompson became friends. Kennedy was editing a newspaper down in Puerto Rico and Thompson, finding himself out of work for beating up the candy machine in the Record's breakroom, applied for a job as sportswriter for Kennedy's paper.
"He wrote me a very arrogant letter," Kennedy said. "So I wrote him an arrogant letter back. He wrote me a threatening letter back."
Kennedy replied to Thompson's threatening letter with a funny letter. They were friends ever after.
You can read their exchange of letters in Thomspon's Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman
It's hard to imagine the two of them, Kennedy and Thompson, friends. It's like imagining a friendship between an old sheepdog and a rabid squirrel or between Thompson and a normal, completely unself-medicated human being.
No point to this, and the reason I didn't title this post Fear and Loathing in an Albany Bookstore or Hunter S. Thompson's Greatest Game is the story Kennedy told about his cameo appearance in the movie version of Ironweed, which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep as the former ballplayer, Francis Phelan, and his lady friend, Helen, a former nightclub singer, on the bum in Depression era Albany. In the movie, and the book, there's a scene in a bar in which Helen imagines her glory days as a singer have returned. She starts signing to a small group of fellow down and outers in voice shot to hell by drink and bad health and in her head she blossoms into her old self with her old voice wowing a crowd of swells in a swanky joint like the kind she used to play. When they were filming the movie on location in Albany, the director stuck Kennedy and his wife in the scene as extras to fill out the bowled over crowd of Helen's imagination.
Streep sang her own song, in both voices, the broken and the restored. The scene was mostly one long shot, following Helen through the crowd as she sang. They did 17 takes. That was to be a wrap. Streep asked for one more. This time, take 18, she let loose with something extra. And she truly wowed the crowd on the set. Wowed herself too, a bit. The look of pride on Helen's face when she finishes her song and the crowd goes wild is perfectly in character, but it may be Streep breaking character too, revealing her own pride in her own singing.
You can look for yourself and try to judge which it is, if it's not both, because that's the take that made it into the movie, take 18.
Streep followed a slightly different path through the tables on that take too. She finished up at the table where Kennedy was sitting with his wife. And when she was done and while the crowd was going nuts she leaned down and grabbed Kennedy and pulled his face up to hers and gave him a great big kiss.
That made it into the movie too.
When he finished telling the story, Kennedy grinned with a mixture of shyness and slyness and said, "I think that's the whole reason she wanted to do one more take. She wanted to give me a smooch."
There are twelve days of Christmas. Think the tree's looking a little peaked. May not make it to Little Christmas. Swear to God, though,it won't be one of those poor trees stripped, taken down, tossed out into the gutter like a dead mobster rolled out of a speeding car in front of his boss's doorstep as a warning.
The twelve days of Christmas begin on Dec. 25. This means that any Christmas cards, presents, or company that arrive between then and January 5 are not late. So, if you're on the Mannion family Christmas card list and you're wondering what happened this year, watch your mailboxes next week.
Finally, there's a present under the tree.
Use the comments to explain why Santa made a mistake. Mac users can just write "yadda yadda."
Thanks to all who've contributed to the Mannion Family New Computer Fund, espeically the anonymous donor who left a very generous bit of Hanukkah gelt the other day. Much appreciated.
Donations are still being gratefully accepted. Remember, the very best way to contribute to this blog is by joining the Lance Mannion Tall Tale of the Month Club. This month's installment, Romance of the City Auditor, is a Christmas story and has something unusual for a Lance Mannion original---a happy ending.
Another good way to help is by shopping through my estore. Plenty of time to buy gifts. Don't forget. There are twelve days of Christmas.
Two trips to New York in three days last week. Saturday, after a quiet and enjoyable lunch at the Playwright Tavern and an insane half-hour inside Toys R Us, the Mannions hoofed it up to Grand Central Station where we caught the Number 6 train up Lexington Avenue, aiming for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When we got off at 77th Street, the ten year old declared himself an official New Yorker.
"Because I've ridden the subway now."
The thirteen year old had declared himself an official country boy back in Times Square when the first wave of pedestrians coming his direction swept him up and carried him backwards half a block from the rest of us.
From that moment on he was officially having a miserable time and he began counting the minutes until we would be getting in the car to go home, which turned out to be 420 minutes later.
This was too bad, because he'd been looking forward to the trip. He'd wanted to see the Christmas decorations, visit St Patrick's, watch the ice skaters, re-visit the museum to see the armour and the Egyptian artifacts that he had loved on a class trip two years ago. But his last two trips into New York had been drive-in-drive-outs, the school bus depositing him at the front steps of the Metropolitian and our car delivering him into the basement parking garage of the Museum of Natural History.
He'd hadn't been in the City either time.
I felt, and feel, guilty about his having such an unfun time of it, because I should have known and planned accordingly.
He is hardwired to be allergic to big cities.
Since he was small, noise and confusion have overwhelmed him faster and more thoroughly than they do most kids. He has a hard time sorting through visual stimuli and choosing what he needs to pay attention to. This has made him a great observer, because he sees everything. But there's a point at which there is just too much of everything to see. Most of us just stop paying attention when our limit is reached. (For a lot of people that limit is one more thing than the thing right in front of their noses.) The teenager can't stop paying attention. He just keeps taking it in until his head explodes.
One average New York City block has more to see in it than our whole town has to look at in a month. You can imagine what happened inside his head when he looked down Broadway and saw Times Square's electronic goulash of lights, giant flashing images, animated billboards, and all the other garish and ghastly apparations in that neon, open-air cabinet of wonders.
And walking, still the only sensible way to get around New York, although I haven't tried the bicycle taxis yet, is a trial for him. He has bad feet and is supposed to wear shoes that provide good support and I forgot to check on him before we set out. He was wearing his favorite pair of zip up sneaks. As far as his arches were concerned, he'd have been better off in his bare feet.
Basically, then, we were torturing the kid by dragging him off for what was going to be for the rest of us a pleasant outing in the Big City.
We may get him back down there for a specific event, another trip to the museum, a ball game, a play, but he will want us to promise that that's all we're going to do, zip in, see the show, the exhibit, or the game, and zip out.
People change. Circumstances change. Life takes us places we never thought we'd go. We learn how to deal and how to cope. Experience teaches us to adapt and how to adapt. We look closer and see other ways around. We approach from different angles. Someday the teenager might find that New York is his destiny and he's up to the challenge.
But as things are now, if he has his druthers, he'll make his home in a small town far away from the noise and the crowds and the lights and the confusion.
I expect that he will know, however, not to boast about it.
People have a habit of doing that, boasting about lifestyle choices as if they were proofs of superior virtue, intelligence, class, taste, when it's often the case that their choices were quite literally a matter of taste...and smell and touch and sound and sight. We say that we "like" a thing or a place or an act, but in reality it's our bodies merely expressing a physical preference.
The music we listen to, the pictures we love, the movies we enjoy, the places we feel at home appeal to us sensually. That is, we sense them before we do anything about them. We say they touch something in us. But they are touching us. We touch them. And if we don't like the way they feel we don't "feel" like we like them.
What we don't like, what we despise, look down upon, turn our noses up at, wave away with a lofty gesture expressive our good breeding and sophistication, are often only things we can't physically tolerate because of how we happen to be put together.
The main reason I bothered to write about Christopher Hitchens’ Vanity Fair essay last week was that it gave me a chance to express my skepticism for evolutionary psychology. The chance to dis Hitchens in the process was gravy.
It’s not that I don’t believe that evolution didn’t—doesn’t—play a role in our psychological make-up. It’s that I don’t think you can explain why people in America in the 21 st Century are the way they are by guessing what people were like as they hunted mammoths and gathered nuts along the retreating glacier’s edge at the end of the Pleistocene era.
My doubt increases whenever the guess tends to explain that the way the guesser behaves and wants to continue behaving is the way evolution designed people to be.
But the fact is we are biological phenomena. We are stuck inside bodies and can only be ourselves to the degree the bodies let us be.
More to the point, our self is what the body containing that self is.
I don’t know if we have a soul, but the mind that wonders about the soul’s existence is a pure product of a brain, an amazing contraption but unreliable, fragile, and so delicately calibrated that the slightest jar or tiniest chemical alteration will tilt it wildly out of whack.
We think therefore we are, but we think with brains and these brains depend on information gathered by eyes, noses, hands, ears, and mouths, and how well do those ever work?
About as well as the rest of the body they’re attached to.
“I don’t feel like myself today,” we’ll say when we’re coming down with something. Who do we feel like then? We feel like the person who inhabits the body that is sick. We are that person. The us we were doesn’t exist anymore. We are a memory of a body that was in better health and a hope that the sick body that is now us will get better.
You are who you are because you have good digestion or you don’t, because you are allergic to this and that or you are not. Your skin is over-sensitive or you have a hide like a rhino’s. Your ear is too well-pitched or you’re tone deaf. Your strength is as the strength of ten and so your heart is pure.
You are you and you like what you like and dislike what you dislike because that’s what the body you are is and likes and dislikes.
In other words, I wonder how many vegetarians really miss the taste of meat, how many nonsmokers have sinuses that are easily aggravated, how many city mice need the energy rush, how many country mice have sensory-integration disorders, and if you ever catch me making fun of people who like cats, remind me that not everybody’s allergic to them.
Whatever we are that isn’t an accident of nature is a result of nurture, but we got nurtured so long ago, at a time when we weren’t capable of understanding what was happening to us, that the only say we had in what our nurturers made of us was a purely physical reaction resulting from how compliantly or how reluctantly our bodies accepted and adapted to the nurturing.
All I’m saying is that self-knowledge is a tremendously difficult achievement. Self-discipline’s a struggle. Self-improvement’s a dream. But not an impossible dream.
We can compensate for our weaknesses. We can hone and refine our gifts and make the effort to use them for good and never for evil.
We can learn new tricks.
We can make allowances, for ourselves and for everybody else who’s stuck in a body and burdened by a past they can’t remember. We can try to understand. And we can forgive.
Meanwhile, the ten year old is a city mouse and can’t wait to get back. He’s up for it. He’s ready to go at a moment’s notice. We can take him anywhere.
Except to a farm.
I'm in line at the convenience store where we buy our milk, waiting to buy our milk. I'm a long way from the register. Busy time of day. Five or six people ahead of me, buying their milk. Young manager working the counter alone and getting frazzled. Man enters the store. Tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged, but stooped, slumped, and looking elderly. Missing his front teeth. A sad, unfocused, lightless look in his eyes. Goes to the coffee counter and lifts two large cups from the stacks. Holds them up high and calls to the manager in a voice meant to be friendly and cheerful but sounding cringing, apologetic, already expecting to be turned down.
Man: Can I take a couple of these?
The manager doesn't look up from ringing out a customer, but from the way his head and shoulders stiffened at the sound of the man's voice it's clear he knows him and knows what's coming.
Manager (discouragingly): What do you want them for?
Man: I just want a couple.
Manager: I know. Why do you want them?
The manager plainly knows why. The man doesn't answer. He's trying to think of a plausible answer. His eyes grow moist, like a little kid caught in a lie he didn't mean to tell.
Man: I---I---
Manager: You're going to pour your booze into them?
The man looks around him. He's still holding up the two cups. He tries to speak again. Can't. Goes to put them back. The manager isn't looking at him though. He's still too busy. He seems to think the man's going to argue, or walk out with the cups anyway, because he sighs and shrugs.
Manager: Take them.
Man: What?
Manager: Take them and get out of here and go get drunk.
Man (pretending not to have heard the last part): Thank you! Thank you! God bless you.
Manager: Yeah, yeah.
The man leaves with his cups.
Manager (muttering half to himself): Take them and pour your beer into them and give one to your brother, that's what you usually do. (Looks up at the rest of us standing in line. He's frustrated with himself. He thinks he's done the wrong thing but doesn't know what the right thing would have been. He speaks to us as if we want to know, which we do, of course.) He and his brother, they'll sit down by the river, and get drunk until they get sick. That's what they do every day.
My turn comes. I buy my milk. The convenience store is right by the river and as I pull out of the parking lot I can see down to the riverbank where there's a picnic table under a tree. Sure enough. Facing the river, two hunched, gray-haired figures sit on the table top, their feet on the bench, and one is passing a large white coffee cup to the other.
New York City. Thursday night.
Cop directing traffic along 7th Ave. Car zips through a light behind him and squeals to a halt inches from the bumper of another car stopped at the far side of the intersection. Cop punches the hood of the first car with his fist and points through the windshield at the driver and yells:
---What color red light were you waiting for?
Cop looked to be in his early 30s. If he's descended from a long line of cops, as so many are, I'll bet his great-grandfather used that line on somebody driving a Model A. They probably teach it at the academy.
Striding towards me up W 44th, a Sarah Jessica Parker lookalike, only dressed like a normal human being, cell phone pressed hard to the side of her head, indignantly assures whoever she's talking to:
---I would never do that! (The person on the other end doesn't agree fast enough. She insists, her voice rising) Never! Never ever ever ever EVER do THAT!
Standing across West 51st from Radio City Music Hall, a short and extremely thin man in his fifties wearing a natty blazer with a plaid scarf under the lapels; his hair is a work of art---a tall pompadour rising four or five inches over his forehead and a ducktail. He's hollering into his cell:
---I'm looking right at it! I'm standing right here! Where are you? No, you're not. You're not! I'm looking right at it! Right at it! I'm looking at it!
In the restaurant men's room before dinner: Two young men in suits, not yet defined by their jobs, the informality, good humor, and boisterousness of their college selves still clinging to them. One is washing up at the sink, the other's on his cell---have I ever mentioned how much I love cell phones?---finishing a call:
First guy: We're still at the restaurant. I'm in the rest room. Just sharing an intimate moment with young Jason here.
He wraps up the call with a promise to be home soon.
Second guy: An intimate moment?
First guy: We're intimates.
Second guy: Was that Wendy who left early?
First guy: Yep.
Second guy: She looked like she'd had half a package.
First guy: She was pretty chubbed up.
Second guy: Someone taking her home?
First guy: I heard Sue talking to her. She asked her if she'd be ok, if she wanted a ride.
Second guy: She turned it down?
First guy: She'll be fine.
Second guy: She was feeling...She was pretty emotional.
First guy: She's like that. (Pause.) She'll be fine.
And, said by people at our table:
---This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
---The two most beautiful words in the English language are “check enclosed.”
---Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
---They say he rides as if he's part of the horse, but they don't say which part.
---That woman speaks eighteen languages and can't say 'no' in any of them.
---Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
---It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
---All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.
---I have no need of your God-damned sympathy. I only wish to be entertained by some of your grosser reminiscences.
---The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
Ok, so the people who said those things ate and drank regularly at our table eighty years or so before we got there.
Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wolcott, Robert Sherwood, Robert Benchley, and the others made the Roundtable at the Algonquin Hotel famous. We were just basking in their reflected glory and hoping for a little inspiration from their ghosts---there's a sort of shrine to them on a sideboard behind the famous table and I think if you order them in advance the waiters will bring you votive candles to light with the dessert, assuming your dessert is on fire. Mine wasn't. I just had the cheesecake.
But our group included some pretty smart and witty people and I'm sure enough brilliant bon mots were dropped to keep the ghosts of the Algonquin wits from sneering too much at our presumption. I didn't take notes, but I overheard a great many stories and jokes that had me smiling and laughing all night.
You don't need to have been there to enjoy my dinner mates' wit and insight. Just visit their blogs.
And James Wolcott.
By the way, the Algonquin says that our table was the table, but I hung around after dinner long enough to watch the waiters and busboys clear and I checked when they removed the tablecloth.
None of the wits had carved their initials into it anywhere I could see.
But I was pulled away before I couldn't crawl underneath it. I'll bet Dorothy Parker wrote something down there and probably something dirty. Maybe even this one:
---If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Tree still standing.
No further incidents since Sunday's crash.
All ornaments and lights back in place. Mini-light count stands at 400 bulbs at present. Not enough. I'm adding another string of 100 today. That still might not do the trick. May need to go to 600.
Blonde hinting I'm obsessed and out of my mind. Waving electric bill around for some reason.
No presents under tree as yet. Situation must be rectified with some online shopping tonight. Having trouble coming up with ideas for presents for the Blonde. She has pre-emptively rejected power tools, Mets tickets, sporting equipment, and anything I might have seen on the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show Tuesday night.
How did she know I watched it? She was already in bed asleep. Suspect somone's spying. Have to keep guard up.
Hard to tell if she's done any shopping for me yet. She's cagey. Don't know if she caught any hints I dropped about power tools, sporting equipment, or Mets tickets for myself.
Water level low in tree.
Refilling now.
Next update Sunday morning.
_________________________________
I don't really want power tools for Christmas. I could use a new bow saw though. But what I'd really like Santa to bring me is a copy of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day
Kevin Wolf's decided to join the group, but with some trepidation. He's never read anything by Pynchon and his recent rediscovery of a beat up old copy of V.
Quick update: A very generous reader turns out to be one of Santa's elves! A copy of Against the Day is on the way to me now. Wow! Thank you very much, generous reader elf.
By the way, the Siren's started it off in the comments. What do you want from Santa this year? Remember, elves are paying attention here.
Cut down our tree this afternoon.
Douglas fir.
Looks good.
So far it's only fallen over once.
Of course it waited until we had all the lights and decorations on it.
Just two ornaments died in the disaster.
It's back up.
Updates with each subsequent crash.
At one point in the tour the ranger asked us if we thought someone like FDR could be elected President today.
I immediately thought of the patrician airs, the cigarette holder, the cape, the exaggerated aristocratic voice with the drawn out vowels and Britished R’s, and said to myself, Well, sure, because it was all an act. Roosevelt was a showman. He was performing for an audience and he knew his audience. He knew the act played. If he was a young politician running for office today he’d develop a different act, one that played to contemporary sensibilities, one that worked on television.
It wouldn’t have been that phony Man of the People act we’re told the people want, because the genius of FDR’s performance was that it was essentially true. He was playing himself only more so. And whatever version of himself he presented today, it would still be essentially true, and it would exude hope, confidence, and good cheer, just as the cape and the cigarette holder signified back then—but above all it would be Presidential.
Prancing about in military uniforms, rolling up your shirtsleeves and pretending to drive nails, moseying along in your jeans on the ranch you bought just so you could say you own a ranch—Karl Rove forgot that none of these images are in fact Presidential.
He might as well have put Bush in a cardigan.
Of course it helps you look Presidential if you are actually being Presidential by doing a good job as President.
So, sure, we’d elect someone like FDR today and I would have told the ranger so except he was already talking again, making it clear that he was referring to FDR’s being in a wheelchair.
He was leading up to the Splendid Deception, to the lengths Roosevelt went to hide his paralyzed legs from the voters and the help he got from the press—the ranger said that reporters would knock the camera out of the hands of any photographer who tried to take a picture of FDR in his wheelchair. The ranger said that he still encountered people on the tours he led who didn’t know until they saw the actual wheelchairs in the house that FDR couldn’t walk.
Then I remembered. The cape, the crushed hat with the turned up brim, the cigarette holder, the jutting jaw, the grin---all part of the act, sure. But all calling attention to the upper half of his body, drawing eyes to the great, handsome head, away from the withered, useless legs.
But I've often wondered how much of the deception was an actual deception, as opposed to an unspoken agreement between Roosevelt and the voters not to notice. After all, it was known that he'd been stricken with polio and everybody was familiar enough with that disease to know what it did to people.
What's more, while FDR didn't want to be photographed in his wheelchair, he wanted people to see him "walk," and anyone who saw him do this would know that it wasn't Roosevelt's legs carrying him forward, it was his mind ordering his upper body to heave his legs along.
With his heavy metal and leather braces---each one weighing over seven pounds---locked at the knees, he "walked" like the Tin Man when he was still rusty in every joint, and he still needed to lean on two canes. So I wonder if in allowing themselves to be "deceived" people were unconsciously helping Roosevelt deceive himself.
For a long time, FDR was convinced that through willpower and hard exercise he would regain the use of his legs.
Roosevelt was stricken in 1921, when he was 39 years old. The paralysis moved quickly, taking first one leg, then the other, then moving up his torso to his chest. At the beginning it looked as though he'd be bedridden for life. An iron lung loomed ominously in his family's and doctors' thoughts.
Eventually the paralysis in his upper body subsided. He was weak but he could move. And he was sure it was in part because he'd willed his muscles to come back to life for him. He set to work regaining all his former strength and reclaiming the use of his legs.
He built himself up through exercise---everybody knows how he loved to swim. He taught other patients how to swim at the polio clinic he established at Warm Springs. He taught them hope and confidence and determination too. His chest, his shoulders, his arms grew powerful. Boxing great Jack Dempsey stopped by one time. Came away impressed. Said from the waist up FDR had the build and strength of a heavyweight champ.
But his legs refused to respond.
He didn't give up. The ranger told us how FDR used to strap on his braces and set out to walk the length of the tree-lined driveway up to the main house at Springwood. I didn't pace it off, but it looked to be at least a mile to me. Roosevelt's goal was to walk the whole way. He never made it. But he kept trying. He'd drag himself and push himself and heave himself forward until he exhausted himself and collapsed. Servants and bodyguards would carry him into the house.
Too many people were there. Too many people saw. Even if the press was united in keeping the secret out of the papers, there would have been too much talk. Word did get around. Pop Mannion told me it was a surprise to him to learn, as an adult, that it was a national secret. He said he knew at the time, and he was just a kid.
And he was governor of New York before he was President, and his legs were done before he became governor. Governors aren't given the same deference as Presidents.
And he had far too many enemies. Far too many people hated him and wanted him to fail. If letting the cat out of the bag about the wheelchair really could have hurt him politically, a million hands would have reached for the knot to untie it.
No, I've got to think that everybody knew, but I think people's pretending not to know, pretending not to notice, pretending not to care, their not caring, was politeness, was their way of helping, was their way of rooting for him and for rooting for themselves.
It wasn't a deception, it was an mutually agreed upon dream. The people conspired with FDR to make him and his struggle the living symbol of all of us.
We're down. We're flat on our back. Our strength has been stolen from us. But we're like him. We're not done. We're not finished. We're fighting back. We're getting strong again. He's going to walk again and so will we.
They didn't look away from the wheelchair, they looked up from it. They looked up at the cape, and the hat, and the cigarette holder, and the jutting jaw, and the grin...
And they grinned too.
Eleanor and Franklin are buried on the grounds of Springwood. Buried near them are two of their dogs, one of whom is Fala.
According to the ranger, Fala's reputation as a beloved national icon is undeserved. He was a nasty little dog. Nobody liked him except FDR. Nobody. The Secret Service especially hated him. They called him "the Informer."
This is why.
FDR usually travelled by train. Fala went with him, of course. Every hour or so Fala needed a walk. The train would have to be stopped so that a Secret Service man could get off and walk the dog. People along the route between Washington and Hyde Park knew what to look for. Whenever they saw a train stopped along the tracks and a large man carrying a tommy gun and holding a little dog by the leash they knew the President was in their neighborhood.
The Secret Service felt this compromised security. I think they thought Fala was in the pay of the enemy.
At the time of his death, FDR had over 20,000 books in his personal library---half of them written by Eleanor, I think.
He had essentially donated all of them to the nation while he was still President. One of the buildings on the grounds at Springwood is his Presidential Library and Museum. FDR oversaw the building of it himself. He intended to use it as his office, headquarters, and study when he retired to private life. He did get to use it while he was President. He is the only sitting President who ever got to work in his Presidential Library while he was still in office.
Most of the library is actually museum. Books and documents are out of sight. The rooms are full of memorobilia and large photographs. There's one large room, practically a whole wing, devoted just to Eleanor.
The opposite wing houses a rotating series of exhitibtions devoted to specific aspects of the Roosevelts' lives and times. The exhibtion there now focuses on FDR's role as Commander in Chief during the War.
Too much to get into here. One of my favorite items, though, was a poem Eleanor kept in her wallet when she traveled on behalf of the war effort. It's in the case with the blue Red Cross uniform she wore when she visited hospitals and military bases.
Dear Lord,
Lest I continue
My complacent way
Help me to remember that somewhere, somehow out there,
A Man died for me today.
As long as there be war,
I then must ask and answer,
Am I worth dying for?
FDR's voice fills the exhibit. Recordings of his speeches and his fireside chats play over the loudspeakers, but on your way out, in the last room, there are other voices, the voices of the people who loved him. I don't mean his friends and family. I mean his friends. The people.
On one of the walls are facisimiles of condolence letters Eleanor received when he died. They are all from nobody we ever heard of, but they all felt that the Roosevelts heard them. One is from an accountant in East Chicago, Indiana, who typed up a poem of his own on company letterhead. He was inspired, he told Eleanor, when he heard someone in his office announcng FDR's death by saying, "The friend of the working man is gone."
Another poem was written by a woman, Ethel M. Vernam, of Portland, Oregon, who identified herself as "just a mother." Her poem included these lines, "I loved his smile...the flip of his head And twinkling eyes When something was said. I loved his friendly voice...his firm chin...Always longed for his words to begin."
The one that got to me most though is from Gerd Landaur, a boy who'd been born in...Germany. "Dear Mrs Roosevelt," it begins, "I am just an ordinary student in a New York school...."
I wonder where Gerd is now.
That last room was filled with recorded voices too. People who lived through the 30s and 40s remembering what FDR meant to them.
One woman talked about how terrified she was listening to the broadcasts from Germany just before the war.
You'd hear these great roaring crowds, she said, This screaming voice saying "Seig!" and thousands and thousands of voices screaming back, "Heil!"
"Seig!"
"Heil!"
"Seig!"
"Heil!"
You could hear in her voice the remembered fear that the world was going insane.
And then, she said, On the other side of the ocean, you would turn on the radio and this one, warm, comforting voice would come on to talk to us...
"My friends..."
Driving into New York along the West Side Highway the other evening, I passed the old aircraft carrier, the Intrepid, which is still stuck in the mud.
I had some time so I pulled over to see if I could help.
I walked out onto the pier and up to the young jg and a couple of SPs who were guarding the gate. I told them how the ten year old and I had visited the Intrepid last year with the Cub Scouts and how much I enjoyed the scene in National Treasure where Nicolas Cage escapes from the FBI by jumping off the Intrepid's stern into the river, so I felt I knew the ship pretty well and had a personal stake in getting her down to dry dock in Bayonne where she's scheduled for overhaul. "I got an idea how to get her unstuck," I said.
The jg said that the Navy had tried everything and was pretty much resigned to leaving the ship there for the December tides to lift, but if I had any good suggestions he'd be glad to take it up with his CO.
"Have you tried giving it a push?" I said.
The officer and the SPs looked at each other and then at me. I thought their looks seemed skeptical.
"A really good push," I said. "You know, really put your shoulders into it...Well, yes, I know it's in the water. I don't mean you personally. You get a couple of frogmen in there...I suppose you're right, it would be hard for them to get traction. How about this? You know those deep sea diving suits? With the big round helmets and the weighted boots, like the little guys in fishtanks wear? The Navy still have some of those lying around? They do, huh? Good. Say you put three guys in the deep sea diving suits out there, and they stand on each other's shoulders, the biggest guy on the bottom. The top guy's pushing right up against the keel...You don't think that will do it. You say it's stuck really good. Huh...How about this? You try rocking it? Like when your car's stuck in the snow. What do you call the guy up in the bridge who handles the controls? The helmsman? See, if your helmsman guns the engine, and then quickly shifts into reverse, then...Oh. The engines don't run anymore. No fuel. You took the propellers off? How's she ever supposed to get up to battle speed then? Oh. The Intrepid's just a museum piece these days. Well, yes, I knew it was a museum. Like I said, I was here with the Cub Scouts, but I thought...What if New York's ever attacked by the Japanese? How...Yes, I do watch a lot of movies. No. No. I'm not on any medication. I just thought...Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do have somewhere I need to be. I'm live blogging the Democrats' Victory Party at the Sheraton tonight. What? Yes, I'm wearing my pajamas underneath. That's very funny, lieutenant. No, I hadn't heard that one before. Yeah. Yeah. My cat's in the car. Another good one. What's time do I...About eight o'clock. Yes, you're right, I guess I should get there a little early to set up. Thanks for reminding me. I'll get going. If you're sure you don't need...I'm sure the Navy does have its best engineeers on it. Ok, well, I just wanted to help. You're welcome. I try to be a good American, yes. Good night, lieutenant. Say, one more thing occurs to me. You got any two by fours? Really long ones. You could shove them down underneath and...."
Gang of us headed down to Virgil's for a quick dinner before our live blogging gig at the Victory Party Tuesday night. Virgil's is on West 44th, ten blocks down Seventh Avenue from the Sheraton, and half a block in from the heart of Times Square.
When I was a more freqeunt visitor to the City, I spent most of my time down in the Village and Times Square wasn't much more than the name of a part of town I somehow managed to walk around even when I was uptown and near it. I can only remember going there two times in my bohemian days. Once to a discount camera store and another time to a store that specialized in renting vintage weapons to theater companies. My friend Rennie needed a broadsword or a pike or a halberd, I forget which, for some play he was directing in the Village.
And, not needing any cheap cameras or medieval weaponry in the meantime, I haven't been back that way since. Which means that Tuesday night was the first time I've been there after the big change.
Only two things were familiar. We passed a couple of discount camera stores. And there were scruffy looking men out on the sidewalks handing out flyers and coupons to passersby.
"Three dollars off the price of admission!"
"Free drinks!"
Of course, difference was, back in the day, if I'd used any of those coupons shoved at me, there'd have been naked women as part of the deal, and the coupons I accepted as we passed Tuesday night---always take the coupons, these guys get paid by how many they give away. And hold onto them for at least a few blocks so that their bosses don't look at the paper around their feet and in the trash cans nearby and accuse them of throwing the stuff away themselves and dock them---were for comedy clubs and chain restaurants.
Should add that the scruffy-looking men were scruffy-looking in the way college guys and struggling young artist types are scruffy and back then the scruffy-looking men were scruffy in the way someone who'd slept the last few nights in a cardboard box would be scruffy.
So I guess the Disneyfication's an improvement.
But, jeepers!
"This looks like Bill Murray's nightmare view of Tokyo in Lost in Translation," I said.
"Blade Runner," someone else corrected.
What it really looks like, though, is a giant outdoor mall.
Anywhere, USA.
But walk that half a block in, up West 44th to Virgil's?
You're back in New York.
Whatever your feelings about cell phones and the people who use them to hold intimate or inane conversations in public, you got to admit---they've been a godsend to voyeurs and spies and the voyeurs and spies who call themselves writers.
Really. Before cell phones, you had to go to a bar and hang around all night to be sure you'd get to eavesdrop on a conversation like the one I just eavesdropped on in line at the post office.
Woman was on the phone with her boyfriend telling him about how she'd just got off the phone with her ex-husband who'd threatened to sic his lawyer on her. Apparently the boyfriend knows the ex-husband well enough to doubt that he has a lawyer. The woman assured the boyfriend that the ex-husband really did have a lawyer. She told him the lawyer's name. Tone she used suggested it was a name the boyfriend would know. I'm guessing in their circle people all draw from the same small pool of divorce attorneys. The boyfriend reacted vociferously to the lawyer's name.
The woman listened to him rant for a bit. Then she laughed affectionately and said, "No, don't call him! I don't want you to call him!" She listened again. "And, no, don't go over there either. I'll call him as soon as I'm done here. Ok? Great! Love you! Bye!"
I want to know though.
Was the boyfriend threatening to go beat up the ex-husband?
Or was he going to go beat up the lawyer?
Speaking of sexy Halloween costumes. Made a pit stop at Barnes and Noble this morning for a quick cup of coffee. Got sidetracked at the new releases table by Michael Lewis' new book, The Blind Side. While I was skimming through it, I overheard three sales clerks talking about the store's plans for Halloween. All three were college-aged women.
First clerk: Well, I'm not wearing my costume to the store.
Second clerk: No?
First clerk: It's inappropriate.
Second clerk: What is it?
First clerk: I'm going as a Catholic school girl.
The other two clerks laugh.
First clerk: Seriously. If I walk in here wearing that little pleated skirt...
Third clerk: You'd have the guys coming up to you all day.
First clerk: I already do. They already do come up to me.
Second clerk: That's right.
First clerk: Really. As soon as I'm through that door, Bill and Steve and you know, they're like following right after me. "Can you do this?" "Oh, can you show me where that is?"
Second clerk: Yep.
First clerk: I don't need any more of that.
Before the start of Saturday's game, the ten year old's soccer team lined up at midfield for the coin toss. The opposing team lined up across from them and from where I was, behind our goal, I could see every single one of their kids' heads over the tops of our kids'.
Oh oh, I thought.
I wrote last spring about how the ten year old's team, playing in a coed division that included third, fourth, and fifth graders, had a disproportionate number of third grade girls---little third grade girls. Their goalie was barely four feet tall. She had lots of range to her right and left, but as you can imagine a lot of shots went right over her head.
The team somehow won its first two games but lost all the rest, managing to average half a goal over six games.
This season the ten year old's moved up a division and is playing with and against mostly fifth and sixth graders with a few fourth and seventh graders. Those fourth graders are there because they are very good and the ten year old's team has a couple of them. The rest of their roster are almost all fifth graders, but they are all good-sized and quick. Well, except for the tenth grader. He's a good size, but speed his not one of his strengths. He's very good on defense though.
Their whole defense is pretty solid and even though once again their best goalie is a shortish girl, this one can jump and she's made some excellent stops. The problem is the offense. Our strikers are fast, they control the ball well, but they're afraid to take shots, they wait for the perfect opening. This is mainly because they're not strong kickers. But their other weakness is that they won't pass to each other.
Actually, the boys won't pass...to the girls.
Drives our coach crazy.
He has them working on this in every practice, but it still in the excitement of the games it happens, the girls become invisible.
I've noticed that other teams have the same problem.
The mother of our team's best girl player is philosophical about this. She says that the boys naturally pass to the kids they're used to playing with, the kids they play with in their neighborhoods and on the school playground, where it's usually the case at this age that boys are playing with other boys, while the girls are standing around watching and gossiping. There's something in this. In our second game one of our strikers made a beautiful pass to his cousin and best friend, forgetting that he was on the other team.
But I've also noticed that our girls tend to take themselves out of the play.
It's not that they're passing to the boys while the boys aren't passing to them. They have the same tendency to look for their friends as the boys do. Trouble is, they usually can't find their friends.
When there's a loose ball, they don't chase after it.
When there's a group of players fighting for possession, they back off.
When they're in the open and have a shot, they don't get their hands up and shout for their teammates to pass it to them.
They don't seem to want the ball.
But that's not really it. They want the ball. But the ball attracts attention, and what they don't want is attention.
Not from the boys on the other team anyway.
At this level the girls are taller but the boys are heavier and stronger. They are more reckless and they are moving a whole lot faster.
The girls are scared of getting run over and hurt.
This is a shame because while the best players in the division are boys, it looks to me as though the players with the most talent and potential are girls. That's the case on our team, at any rate.
And what concerns me is that by the season's over several of these girls will have concluded that they just aren't good enough and they'll give up the game.
Our coach is doing what he can to keep them interested by keeping them playing and encouraging them to play hard. The coach of the team we played Saturday, though, is a woman, and all game long she was yelling from the sidelines at her girl players to pass to her boys. She wanted to win the game. Her best players were boys, that's all. But she had some very talented girls too. I don't think this is a problem coaches can solve.
The simplest and best answer is to split the girls off and give them their own division to play in. Most soccer leagues that I've heard of do this. The littlest kids play boys and girls together. But by the time they're in third grade they're playing on single-sex teams. The mother I was talking to Saturday thinks there aren't enough girls for this. I'll have to do a count. But I have a suspicion that if there was an all girls' division to move into a lot more girls would continue playing longer. I expect the drop out rate for girls after their first year in this division is pretty high.
Separating the girls into their own division where they wouldn't have to worry about competing with boys would let the girls' talents blossom. I think it would make them more aggressive players too.
Of course there are a few girls who will always be able to stand up to and even outplay boys.
But for the most part, from here on out, the girls will be too much smaller, too much slower, too much less brawny to compete with boys.
On the playing field.
I am all in favor of sex-segregated sports. I am very much opposed to sex-segregated schools.
Separating the boys from the girls in sports recognizes a simple biological fact, that no matter how talented she is, a five foot two inch, 85 pound 12 year old girl is at a distinct disadvantage against a talented five foot seven inch, 140 pound 12 year old boy. Treating the two as though the differences don't matter will result in the girl not playing. Her talents will go to waste and she will learn, consciously or unconsciously, that girls just aren't up to competing with boys in any arena.
Separating the girls from the boys in school doesn't recognize any fact; it merely flatters a whole lot of prejudices, the main one being that when you put boys and girls together after a certain age their only ways of relating to each other and dealing with the fact of each other's existence is sex.
Mostly, I think, this is a prejudice against boys, a belief that they can't control themselves and will always be either distracted by the girls presence, showing off to get their attention, or competing with each other for their attention.
When they're not trying to attract the girls, they're ignoring them, dismissing their ideas, interrupting them, not letting them get a word in edgewise, and stealing their thunder.
There's also the belief that boys just generally can't sit still and focus and that the amount of time and energy teachers have to spend making the boys behave means keeps them from gving the girls the time and energy they need from teachers.
To the degree that this is true, it's because on the whole boys aren't taught how to behave in school. They are allowed to run riot on the principle that boys will be boys and boys are little monsters, the darlings. They can't help it.
I've seen some evidence that boys and girls do better in single sex classes, but looked at closely it looks to me as though the boys do better because is more discipline and higher expectations, and the girls do better because there is...more discipline and higher expectations.
And often, in the case of the girls, it turns out that the single sex envirnoment is a privileged one, with more resources, better paid teachers, smaller classes, and more individualized attention---things that all kids can benefit from.
There is biological evidence that male brains are different than female brains, but this turns out to be interesting because...it's interesting. The differently configured brains do, on the whole, seem to work differently. Boys and girls learn differently.
But the differences between the way one girl's mind works and the mind of the boy sitting next to her works are not much greater than the differences between how her mind works and how her sister's mind works.
Brains are infinitely more complex than muscles. Two boys who go to the gym together and lift the same set of weights for the same length of time will, assuming they are already the same size and strength, will probably wind up with very similar silhouettes and evenly matched for an arm wrestling contest.
But the same two boys sent to the same school, taking the same classes from the same teachers, will, even if their innate intelligences are exactly equal, will wind up two very different people.
And if one of those boys is a born engineer and the other is a born artist, then the engineer will think a lot more like girls who are born engineers than like his friend the artist, who will think a lot more like girls who are artists.
Which is not to say that the engineer won't find an artistic girl with whom he shares all kinds of thoughts and feelings that he doesn't share with his best male engineer friend.
On the soccer field you're dealing with groups of bodies in motion. In the classroom your concern is individual minds in development. Single-sex classrooms are based on the idea that the body the mind comes in makes the mind's individuality irrelevent.
The ten year old's team lost Saturday. It was a tough game. Final score was officially 3-0, but I don't count one of those goals. The ref called a handball in the box and gave their team a penalty kick.
The referees are junior high school kids who have aged out of the league and the coaches have an agreement not to argue calls, but this was a bad call.
The rules say that a player has to be trying to get an advantage by putting a hand on the ball. A ball kicked by an opposing player that happens to strike your hand or arm isn't a handball.
Our player put up her hands to block the ball and, strictly applying the rules, she shouldn't have. But it was coming hard, right at her chest.
I think that when a pubescent girl reflexively throws up her arms to protect her chest that shouldn't count as a handball.
Technically, I suppose, the ref made the right call.
But the ref was a boy.
___________________________________
My prejudice: What I "know" about the ways men and women are different tells me nothing---NOTHING---about the way this man is different from that woman.
To put it another way, just because some study shows that women tend to be one way and men tend to be another, that study has proved nothing to me about you.
But if you are making the case that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, I can't help suspecting that what you are really arguing is that you think the gender you happen to be is the superior one.
Little while back, Echnide wrote a post that took off from another stupid David Brooks column, this one making the case that SCIENCE shows that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, how about that? Echidne's post looked at the flaws in the study that Brooks used to prove that "girls are icky."
Winslow Homer drew the illustration above for a magazine called Ballou's Pictorial in 1857 when he was 21 year old, and it's apprentice work and not all that good, considering what Homer would be doing just a few years in the future.
There's a lot of busy-ness in the drawing but nothing really going on. (Make sure you right click on the picture to see the larger image.) The central drama of the "story" being told here, the young woman hurrying out of the way of an onrushing carriage and the policeman dashing out to stop it, is taking place smack dab in the middle of things and yet it seems to be in there simply to divide the two groupings in the foreground, as if Homer's intent on having us focus on the rather static figures in the right and lefthand corners, particularly on the group of women on the right, who are a pretty interchangeable bunch.
The one "character" in the scene, the organ grinder to the left, might have been drawn from life---the extended caption that accompanied the drawing when it was published tries to give the impression that Homer drew the scene on the spot, as it happened, as if taking a photograph; more likely, Homer filled the scene with figures he observed and sketched over the course of a number of visits to that corner---but he looks like a college student dressed up in a costume, a pal Homer dragooned into modeling for him and not happy about it.
Homer never did develop the knack for, or the interest in, showing character through faces, but he became a master at suggesting a person's mood and thoughts of the moment through posture and gesture.
That mastery isn't on display here. The people are as stiff as manequins, like life-sized dolls in a museum display. Only the organ grinder's monkey, the dogs, and the horses seem moved by real muscle, and the most alive figure in the scene is the stone eagle ornamenting the cornice of the building across the street.
Homer would always be good at birds.
Like I said. It's not all that good.
But I love it.
I love it for several reasons.
The first is that I know that scene!
Back in my college days I used to work in a bookstore very close to that corner. The movie theater where I also worked was just up Washington Street from there.
Turn right to get to the bookstore, left to find the movie theater.
That intersection was part of my daily rounds for two years, and I swear that if you'd showed me this drawing then without any identification or mentioning it was by Homer, I'd have told you, "Why, that's the corner of Winter, Washington, and Summer in Boston."
Those days are so long ago now that it sometimes seems to me that Homer and I could have been contemporaries, but I'm sure that in the 130 or so years between when he was in his early 20s and wandering around downtown Boston and I was in my early 20s unknowingly marching around in his footsteps, there must have been a few changes in the neighborhood.
But maybe it's the angling of the buildings or the apparent width of the streets, but something in there identifies the corner to my memory as surely as would a photograph taken from the same spot Homer supposedly stood with his sketchpad in the 1980s.
Of course nowdays my memories of Boston are full of images and incidents that I did not see or witness when I was living there. Things I've read, movies I've seen, stories I've been told by people who still live there or who visited since I left, and photogaphs, paintings, and pictures like Homer's that I've looked at over the years have all been edited into my mental 3D map of Boston.
But even while I was there, what I saw wasn't just what my eyes took in and what I experienced wasn't just what I did.
There are books written about how hard it is for people to live life directly, how there's no living in the moment for creatures with big brains full of memories, no seeing a thing in and of itself, unassociated with memories, expectations, prejudices, and simultaneous demands on our attention from within and without.
I don't remember when I first saw this drawing by Homer. It could have been before I ever got to Boston.
It could be that I never crossed the street there without seeing Homer's Boston at the same time I was looking at mine.
It may also be that what I recognize in the drawing isn't the architecture or the geography, it's the scene itself.
Homer was drawing a typical street scene and that typicality never changed.
The crowds of shoppers, the cop on the beat, even the young woman hurrying to get out of the way of onrushing traffic, all of that would have been the same. I even saw an organ grinder down there once, with a monkey. The organ grinder was a young woman and the monkey was a stuffed toy, but she turned the crank on her hurdy-gurdy and her music was real. The people had changed their clothes but the business that took them to that corner hadn't.
And that's another reason I like this illustration. It is typical.
I like paintings and stories and movies that do that, show people being typical.
We don't have enough of that kind of art now to suit me. There aren't very many paintings or stories or movies that show us to us.
People used to like that. Seeing themselves on the stage, on the page, on the screen. They thought they were funny.
The magazine Homer drew for, Ballou's Pictorial, seems to have had no other purpose but to show people what they were like, for their amusement.
We don't have that. Television shows us caricatures of ourselves, farcically debased on sitcoms, absurdly romanticized in dramas.
Movies are worse, and magazines and newspapers only tell us what's wrong with us or what we're buying.
In fact, since almost all our popular arts and entertainment are driven by advertising, their job real job is to lie to us, to flatter us or scare us about ourselves, to make us think so highly of ourselves that we'll reward ourselves with the advertisers' products or despise ourselves so much we'll rush out to buy the products in the hopes of becoming somebody else.
Serious fiction still does it, to a degree. But because writers tend to focus on a very small demographic these days, themselves and their intellectual friends, and then to show them in isolation, cut off from the worlds of work and play, which means cut off from the way we live now, most people won't find themselves represented in a short story or novel even as a minor character.
It's why I prefer to read 19th Century novels. They're filled with crowds.
Like Homer's drawing.
If I could draw better, that's the kind of scene I'd be drawing.
And that's the third thing I love about the picture.
It's so much like something I would draw if I could that it almost feels as if I did draw it.
A friend and I were talking a couple weeks ago about our alternative lives. What are we doing in a parallel universe, we asked ourselves. This is another way of playing the What would you be if you weren't what you are game.
The rules were that these couldn't be outrageous fantasy lives. They had to be plausible in that we might very well have had those lives if we'd only made one or two different but minor choices.
So, the I'd have joined NASA and become the first man on Mars kind of thing was out.
My alternatives were park ranger, theater director, and Charles Kuralt like journalist.
But I'd add that I'd like to have a job like Homer had at Ballou's Pictorial.
I'd like to spend my time looking at people and then showing them themselves and making them laugh in an affectionate, forgiving, glad to be alive way.
What would you be doing?
Blake Bailey: A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
Laura Miller: The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia
James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War
Adam Cohen: Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America
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