Lance Mannion

Goddesses running

Yesterday morning the sidewalks around Valley Forge were busy with people out for a walk or a run.  The walkers were of all sorts and conditions.   Young and old, men and women, boys and girls, families, couples, solitaires, gangs of middle-aged brothers and sisters, posses of little kids, teenagers in love walking hand in hand, teenagers out of love walking with arms folded and solid walls of silence between them.  Some were fit and trim walking with the purpose of getting fitter and trimmer.  Most seemed to be out for the sake of being out, enjoying the scenery and each other's company.

The runners were of one sort and in perfect condition.

Thirty-something women.

Running alone.

My first thought after the fifth blew by me was that they must represent a demographic fluke brought on by the holiday.  I figured they were all the hostesses of this year's feast escaping for some necessary alone time before their day was swallowed up by cooking and entertaining and coincidences of planning and scheduling had forced them all out to the park for their daily run at the same time. 

"I'm going out for an hour.  You watch the kids and when the timer goes off, take the pie out of the oven and turn it down to three twenty-five and put in the turkey."

But then, after the seventh or eighth ran me off the path---each one giving off an air of simultaneous blindness to my presence and irritation at my getting in their way as if I was an obstacle they sensed rather than saw and they resented having to break stride to avoid tripping over whatever it was that had the temerity to occupy a part of the sidewalk they needed to occupy---it dawned on me that they were all alike in another way besides the fact that they were moving faster than everybody else.

Each and every one was a goddess.

I don't mean goddess as in sex goddess, like Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth.  I don't mean any ordinary centerfold or supermodel type of body beautiful. 

Think of marble statuary.

Think of a Minerva or a Juno or a Diana, on an altar, within a temple.

As I said, they were all in their thirties.  They were all handsome if not beautiful.  They were all dressed alike.  There were no track pants, no shorts, no baggy sweats.  They all wore spandex tights and short, form-fitting jackets or long-sleeved t-shirts, so that their figures and legs were clearly defined down to the smallest muscle and dimple.  None of them were greyhound thin.  None of them carried an ounce of extra body fat.   They were all perfect, like statues.

And like statues the effect of their perfection wasn't erotic in the least.  It was cold, forbidding, rebuking.

To look upon one was to be inspired, not to lust or romance, but to duty, sacrifice, and penance.   You felt called upon to give up dessert, go back to the gym, roll out of bed in the pre-dawn dark and start running yourself.  And all these things you would do in a spirit mixing heroic determination and despair, intensely focused on improving in order to be worthy, already self-loathing and self-condemning because you'd know in your heart you don't have what it takes and will never be worthy of either their perfection or their notice.

Wouldn't matter if you were male or female, when you looked upon one of these goddesses you'd feel what Odysseus' men must have felt when they washed up on Circe's island, that you are not the hero or the heroine of this particular myth and she didn't even have to bother with the magic, you already know you're a mere pig.

All right, I'm romanticizing.  But I'm not fantasizing.  There are male versions of this type, but none of them were out yesterday morning.  Older women run and so do girls, but while I suppose one or two might have been in her late twenties or early forties, it sure looked as if anyone who was under thirty-four or over thirty-eight had stayed home.  And runners (like performance bonds) come in all shapes and sizes, not all of them look as though they were carved by Pygmalion on one of his more obsessive days, but all the other sizes and shapes, makes and models weren't running where I was walking.

The hour between eight and nine seemed to have been reserved for female deities in serious training for a new Judgment of Paris.

Just one of those things, I guess.

Back at the parking lot I did see some mortals getting ready to run.  Two women and a man.  The women were in their thirties and trim and attractive but in more human terms and dimensions, and they weren't wearing spandex.  They were in nylon track pants and windbreakers.  They were surrounded by kids and the man was helping the kids unload scooters and skateboards from their cars, a minivan and an SUV parked side by side.  One of the women was unfolding a stroller, one of those three-wheeled, rocket-nosed strollers for parents who jog.  The other woman, a tall blond who kept slapping at her hair to keep it from being blown across her face by the light but steady breeze, stood apart from the group, hollering into a cell phone.

"Where are you?" she demanded of the person on the other end.  "Why aren't you here?  Amy's here.  She made it out with the kids.  She even brought the baby.  If she can bring the baby, you can bring you!  Get over here!"

She was trying to sound jovial and teasing but there was a note of desperation in her voice too, as if the point of their all being out here was the company of the person she was talking to and the day would ruined if she---or he---blew them---her?---off.

There's one disadvantage to being a goddess.  Goddesses don't need anybody's company but their own.

Notes from the field: In praise of November

Notes from a walk I took when I was still young, vital, and healthy---a week ago today.

Bird count:  Blue Jays 25; Woodpeckers 1; all other species 0.

That was just between the house and the opening of the bike trail.  The woodpecker wasn't one of the usual suspects.  Flickers, downies, and hairy woodpeckers don't have that much blushing red on the backs of their heads.  They wear their blazes like kerchiefs not hoods.  Probably a red-bellied woodpecker.  Couldn't get a look.  It was very high up in this tree and kept itself in silhouette as I angled around trying for a better view.

No mistaking the blue jays though.  None of them cared whether or not I was watching them.  In fact, many of them seemed determined that I get a good look and they took up perches at close range.  Low branches, fence posts, leaf litter not more than a half dozen yards ahead of me, I swear some would have landed on my shoulder if they happened to get tired while I was in convenient roosting reach.  According to the guide books, this is their social time of year.  Family groups mix with family groups to form loosely-knit but gregarious flocks sharing territories and food supplies.  Many of the jays carried acorns in their beaks, which is also in line with the guide books.

I reported back in June that the town had cleared the section of the bike trail running south from here.  That part of the trail has since been paved.  A section running north has been cleared as well.   I went north today.

I hear there's snow in parts of Ohio and Michigan and things are hellacious in Los Angeles, but when I started out on my walk the weather here was awfully pleasant for mid-November in Upstate New York.  This part of the trail is still unpaved and it hadn't dried out from the rain over the weekend.  But it wasn't wet.  Freezing temperatures overnight took care of that.  The gravel crunched underfoot with the pleasant sound of breaking ice, the puddles in the ruts in the trail had rough skins of brown ice over them.

A week ago, Jennifer, alerted by her painter's eye, noted the sudden switch in nature's moods that marks the change from October to November out in her part of Illinois.  October, in spirit and in light and color, hung around past its stated end on the calendar and then, in the blink of an eye...

The majority of our trees stayed green forever this fall. There were a few that changed on scheduled, but so many were full and green and showed no signs of giving up the ghost. Same for the flowers and the warmth. Yes, the days were noticeably shorter and the angle of the sun was drastically different, but somehow it seemed like October would go on forever even as we flipped the calendar over to November.

And then it happened. The rest of the leaves all got on board, the flowers yielded to the frost and November grabbed hold of the earth and my soul. I looked out the other day and the sky was an unmistakable periwinkle that only November can bring. I looked at it and thought, it's just a blustery, moody sky. What is it that makes it look so purple in November?? Ah yes, it's the contrast to all of the blazing gold leaves that haven't fallen yet. The loud leaves are amping up the purple that might otherwise be mistaken for gray. It's pretty in its own somber way and while it's nice to look at, something about it reminds me it's time to turn back in... time to gather up my attention to a life that will be lived mostly inside for the next number of months. Even though we are moving into one of the more social seasons, this time of year also seems like the most introverted. Nature is pulling back in and so do I. The action will go on behind the scenes and we'll be showered with artificial light as opposed to the bright light of day.

Sky here isn't periwinkle, but then there's very little gold left in the trees to make the contrast and amp up the purple.  Below the blue sky the landscape I walked through was all gray and black and brown and tan and faded blond, except for the bright red of the berries remaining on the sumacs...

...and the sapphire blue blacks and clean cotton sheet white bellies of the jays.

Plenty of them in here too, verifying the guide books, doing their social and gregarious thing, visiting relatives, making plans for Thanksgiving, catching up.  Saw one of them do something I don't remember ever observing any other bird, except a hawk, do on the wing before, consciously make decisions about which way he wanted to fly.  He was loafing his way towards me, doing the aerial equivalent of a leisurely stroll, flapping his wings lazily and only as often as he needed in order to keep himself aloft and moving forward, and he turned his head this way and that as he flew, making slight alterations in his course quite clearly based on something he'd spotted up ahead, as if on the lookout for familiar landmarks to navigate by, as if thinking, "What did Aunt Martha say again?  Bear left at the third stump past the chokecherry, bank right again fifteen degrees when the pond shaped like an acorn comes into view..."

Probably all birds do this, but they're flying too high and too fast for me to see it for what it is.  Hawks, being large, dramatic, bold, and not at all shy about what they're up to, are obvious about it.  And you know exactly what they're thinking.

"There's lunch!"

"Second course!"

"Dessert!!!!" 

Speaking of hawks, although the blue jays outnumbered other species along the trail by about 5 to 1, those other species included more of variety than was represented by the lone redbellied woodpecker back in town.  The path is edged in on both sides by trees and shrubs, thickly enough that at some points it feels as though you're walking through dense woods.  But what's really on either side of you are acres of abandoned farm land that has not been reclaimed by trees yet.  It's all wide-open meadows and fields, ideal hunting ground for hawks, and towards the end of the this part of the trail I came to a stretch bare of cover on one side and on that one side were several acres of tall, dry, blond grass over which five red-tailed hawks looped and sailed, screaming out loudly to one another.

Stirred up a prayer meeting of mourning doves meditating in the leaf litter, had to stop to let a gang of red-breasted nuthatches cross the path at nose level---they landed on the bare branches of a small hawthorn and eyed me truculently. their rust-colored, not actually red, chests puffed out, pointing their long, hard-looking black beaks at me, as if to let me know that small and pretty were not synonyms for meek and harmless---and startled a little flock of juncos into acting out the part of the junco in Robert Frost's poem The Woodpile:

A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather--
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.

If it was a group audition, they would all be perfectly cast in the part.

Last month I wrote about how the sight of juncos---snowbirds---on my front lawn in the middle of October when not only wasn't there any snow but there were still green leaves on the trees unnerved me.  Coming upon a flock of them in the woods in November, though, isn't nearly as disturbing.  Winter is in the air and in the light, even if the temperature is still pleasantly in the autumnal range, and that snow in the midwest isn't going to stay put.  The juncos reminded me of a comment on that post I meant to highlight at the time.  Comment came from strudel guy of Strudel and Shotguns:

The dark-eyed juncos are my friends. We've already had numerous hard freezes here in the Piedmont of Virginia and they have favorably sharpened my memory of my native upstate New York at this time of year. I first met the dark-eyed juncos in the spring of 2005 while carrying a pack along the spine of the Blue Ridge on the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Their gentle chirps and white-blazed tail feathers became familiar and welcome companions, especially on days when I was very nearly a beaten man. It was when I was the most hurting and drained, weakened and dimmed, that my spirit was at its lowest ebb, that I was open enough and my mind quiet enough to appreciate those birds. In turn, at times like those, the birds seemed to sense my beat down condition and were less likely to skitter away at my approach, but instead would hop along the trail just feet ahead of me. Over time, as I learned to walk in the woods, I also learned to see more than just the juncos, which was exactly why I had come to the woods in the first place. In the winter, at least down here, the dark-eyed juncos come down from the high country some miles to the west and mob the thistle seed in the feeders. I'm glad to see them, these friends of mine. In summer we feed hummingbirds; in the winter, it's the dark eyed juncos, down from the mountains for a snack.

For a while I was followed by a pair of downy woodpeckers, a male and a female.  The male was less stand-offish than the female and a bit of a show-off.  His best trick was to go after a bug on the end of a thin woody vine dangling from a locust tree.  He lit on the tip of the vine and hung there, the vine swinging under his weight and the force of his pecking, like a kid playing Tarzan.

Mammals were represented along the trail by only two of their classification, me and a squirrel.

This stretch of the trail runs about two miles along what was once the bed of a railroad to New York City.   Came across only this sign that trains ever passed this way.  Looks like a gravestone, doesn't it?  Tomb of the unknown signalman.

 

It's made of wood with rusty iron truss work behind to hold it up.  Don't know what the 25 means.  It looks as if it was added long-after the marker itself went into the ground.  Trains stopped running in the late 1940s.

It's an illusion allowed by distance and accidents of development and neglect that I could make this walk imagining that I was looking at a landscape not all that different from one John Burroughs might have seen a hundred years ago had he wandered this way, and he might have, for all I know, he lived not too far from here and liked to wander.  But the trail dumped me out smack dab in the 21st Century, on a road at the edge of the grounds of a state prison where I got beeped at by a passing SUV whose driver I presumed recognized me, the beep being a quick friendly beep and not a get out to the road, you moron honk.

The sky had clouded up since I'd started out and a strong, decidely Novemberish wind had begun to blow.  The wind bit right through me as soon as I was out of the shelter of the trees along the path.  I'd set out in the fall and walked through the season into the onset of winter.  Long way to walk in one morning.

Thought about turning around and heading back along the way I'd just come, but I was suddenly feeling lonely.  The wind was blowing from the west, but I turned into it and followed the road a quarter of mile or so until it forked.  There I turned sharply to the south and followed the river back into town, sheltered again from the wind by trees and comforted by the smell of woodsmoke from the chimneys of the houses along the way.

______________________

Ornithologically related:  Raven Rana has spent some time lately watching birds slightly more impressive than woodpeckers, juncos, and blue jays---sandhill cranes.  And she has video!

Meteorologically related:  Chris Clarke reports on what November looks and feels like in his part of the Mojave---gray.

All the Isms

The blonde just reminded the teenager that he should put in a little study time before bed.  He has a social studies quiz tomorrow.

"What's the test on again?" she asked him.

"Oh, communism.  And capitalism.  And socialism.  Utilitarianism.  Nationalism.  Militarism.  All the Isms."

The way he said it made me think he sees this as a single field of study, Ismology.

Has an almost biological or medical ring to it, doesn't it?

We need more Ismologists, all working on a cure for the various Isms.

Doctor Frigidaire knocks on any Norge

Some aspiring filmmakers are influenced by Scorsese.  Some are influenced by Hitchcock.  Uncle Merlin was a bit over-influenced by the movies shown in his sixth grade science class.  I should mention, though, that Doctor Frigidaire knows what he's talking about.

The bird that wasn't here

Post started out as a quick email to the always affirmative Jennifer, who's a fan of snowbirds, but it got out of hand.

If the ornithologists at Cornell are to be believed, I'm seeing things this morning.  Dark-eyed juncos.  Two of them.  Out on the front walk.  But they can't be there.  It's too early:

Juncos are the "snowbirds" of the middle latitudes. In the eastern United States, they appear in all but the most northern states only in the winter, and then retreat each spring. Some juncos in the Appalachian Mountains remain there all year round, breeding at the higher elevations. These residents have shorter wings than the migrants that join them each winter. Longer wings help the migrants fly long distances.

Technically, I live in one of the most northern of the eastern states.  But it's a long way between here and any part of New York that's as far north as the most southern reaches of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.  Drive straight east from here and...well, you drive off a cliff into the Hudson River...Drive south a bit and then make a sharp left, cross the bridge, and then drive straight east and in no time at all you're in Connecticut, at a point where there's a whole lot of Connecticut north of you, a bit more than half the state if you divide it horizontally.  Which means that there is a space the size of the top tier of Connecticut and the entire height of Massachusetts at its shoulders between our front walk and any other front walk leading up to a house that could be said to have been built in the most northern parts of this part of the eastern United States.  And that means I shouldn't be seeing juncos on the front walk yet.

Juncos---snowbirds---are common around here, when there's snow!  I don't keep track of the comings and goings of our feathered friends on a calendar but I usually note their seasonal movements with enough attention and memory that I'll say to myself, "Robins showed up a little late this year" or "Middle of August and the geese are flocking, right on schedule.  Guess summer's winding down."   Yeah, I am that banal when I talk to myself.  Can't recall a time before today when I said to myself, "What the hell are the juncos doing here already?"

The only times in the past I remember seeing juncos in the neighborhood without snow under their feet were during a thaw.

There's no snow.  There are still leaves on the trees.  Green leaves.

What the hell are the juncos doing here already?

They know something?   Time to break out the snow shovels?  Nah.  I'm sure the bird brains at Cornell know what they're talking about and I was hallucinating.

Second frost this morning, but it's all gone now.  Sun's out.  Sky's blue.  You've figured out by now I have nothing much to say here.  This post is an excuse to introduce a poem by Robert Frost, that's all.  It's always struck me as a coming on to spring poem more than a moving into winter poem, despite its melancholy theme of "the slow, smokeless burning of decay," because of the way his foot goes through the snow now and then where the hard snow isn't hard anymore and can't hold him.  But there's a junco in it.  At least I think it's a junco.  I've never been sure.  I've just gone by the white feather in his tail.

The Wood-pile by Robert Frost.

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther--and we shall see."
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines,
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather--
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled--and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Recommended:  Fun site where you can listen to The Wood-Pile and other poems by Frost read out loud.

Overheard at the video store: Cannibals, dead movie stars, and unrealistic superheroes

Local video store's replacing Barnes and Noble as my favorite place to spy and eavesdrop.  Other night, while I was browsing I spied and eavesdropped on the following.

Trio of college students, three women all fans of Heath Ledger and looking forward to the release of Dark Knight on DVD.

First Ledger Fan: Wasn't he great?

Second Ledger Fan:  He made that movie!  He made it!  He was totally brilliant.

Third Ledger Fan:  It was a good movie.

Second Ledger Fan:  It was the best!  I can't wait.  I wish we could rent it tonight.

Third Ledger Fan:  What are we renting?

Second Ledger Fan:  Prom Night.

First Ledger Fan:  Prom Night?

Second Ledger Fan:  Prom Night.  It's good.

Third Ledger Fan:  What about Iron Man?

Second Ledger Fan:  You know, I didn't care for that one.  Everybody was like it was so wonderful?  But I didn't think it was all that good.

First Ledger Fan:  Why not?

Second Ledger Fan:  It was unrealistic.

Then there was a gang of high school students, mix of boys and girls.

One of the girls:  Oh, let's get this one!

One of the boys:  Raising Jeffrey Dahmer?  What's that about?

First girl:  It's based on a true story!

First boy:  Who's Jeffrey Dahmer?

Another girl:  "Who's Jeffrey Dahmer?"  You don't know about Jeffrey Dahmer?

First boy:  No.  Who's Jeffrey Dahmer?

Second girl (Big "Hello!" in her voice):  Jeffrey Dahmer?  Cannibal?

First boy:  Nope.

Second girl (Big "Duh!" in her voice now):  The Dahmer Party?

Politics as miniature golf

Sunday afternoon, we were on the back nine of one of the toughest courses around Lake George, and I was feeling pretty good about my game, shooting two under par with a four stroke lead.  I'd had a couple of bad holes.  The merry-go-round on 12th hadn't given me much trouble, but the lobster on the 7th ate my ball and the 8th proved that I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn or put it through the barn door either and I wound up taking the course regulation six without putting it in the cup.  But I was confident I'd be able to roll this one up the ramparts of the Hoover Dam with just the right spin to drop it on the green in one and I was about to take my swing when Oliver Mannion called out, "What state is that supposed to be?"

Damn.

Shanked it.

"Which state is which?" I asked looking up from Arizona and scanning the holes ahead of us, Kentucky, represented by the post at Churchill Downs, Hawaii and its life-size surfer dude, and the state Oliver was pointing at, which was surrounded by a ragged sculpture of dirty white plaster that more or less looked like a mountain range. 

"That one."

"Alaska," I said.

"Oh.  I thought it was some Rocky Mountain state," Oliver said.

"Nope.  Alaska.  See the polar bear and the igloo and the little oil rig?" Then I couldn't resist.  "And that tiny figure of the governor holding a gun and a bible trying to get the polar bear taken off the endangered species list?"

Ho ho!  Ha ha!  Lance, you're such a card.

The joke went right by the Mannion boys.  But, unusually for them when one of my jokes bombs and they're content to just roll their eyes and shake their heads at the old man's goofiness, this time they asked me to explain it.

Of course I welcomed the chance to give them the benefit of my political wisdom, but as soon as I started I caught myself being a little too careful.  Mainly, I didn't want to bore them or hold up the game, but I didn't want to have them thinking I was making fun of other people's religious beliefs or that hunters shouldn't have their views represented by the people they've elected to represent them.

I didn't like the sound of the too careful me and opted for blunt.

"She's one of those god-bothering types who think that because they know they're going to heaven they can tell the rest of us how to live here on earth and she wants to let polar bears drown so the oil companies will get richer."

I birdied Arizona and we moved on to the next hole, talking about how Sarah Palin's Climate Change denial conveniently combines her big business friendly faux-libertarianism, her reactionary religiosity, and her love of seeing big critters shot and skinned and their hides worn in the cold weather.  I think the boys were paying attention.

I was listening to myself, anyway, and I was making a note that when we got home I'd revise my post from Friday night to add another reason why I thought Sarah Palin was a pretty good bit of stunt casting as McCain's running mate, one that should have been obvious to me right from the start but which wasn't because I'm such a East Coast latte-swilling argula-munching god-hating gun-fearing liberal elitist, and I say that with some pride, which is of course part of my problem.

There was a lot of media blather about what a gamble the Maverick and Commander was taking with Palin and wasn't that just like his Mavericky-ness, what a gutsy guy, huh?  But it really wasn't the case that McCain was being bold and gusty.  The bold and gutsy choice would have been Lieberman because Jumpin' Joe would have pissed off half the Republican establishment and scared the rest.  By picking Lieberman he might have been showing that he really was an independent himself.   Palin, though, is on the ticket as the result of yet another pander.

Palin is a heroine to Right Wing reactionaries and a saint to the Religious Right, and McCain desperately needs both factions to come out in force this fall.

All the talk about this election being decided by Independents is hot air.  It's going to be decided by turn-out.  The winner is going to be the one who gets more of his voters to the polls than the other guy.  Nevermind all the PUMAs, who aren't all that numerous anyway and may not include as many Democrats as they'd like us to think, McCain is the one with the disaffected base.

Most people do not turn out to vote against candidates.  They turn out to vote for them.  As much as the Right might hate Barack Obama, John McCain has made it clear over the years that he's not somebody they'd be happy to vote for.

It's funny to watch McCain, who has only been shy about expressing his disdain for these people on the campaign trail and the floor of the Senate, but never aboard the Straight-Talk Express, kowtowing to them, and it's even funnier to watch the pandering backfiring on him.

What's not funny is the realization that while the news about Bristol Palin's making McCain a laughing stock among political junkies and media types who see this as a story showing up the McCain campaign's incompetence it's probably not hurting him at all with the people he was pandering to.

If they're mad at anyone, it's not at McCain and it's sure not at Palin, even though McCain could have saved everybody, including and especially Bristol Palin, from embarrassment if he'd made his choice with more care.  No, if they're mad at anybody they're mad at the Media for not respecting Bristol's privacy and at Liberals and Democrats, whom they suspect, with good reason, are sniggering at them for their holier-than-thou hypocrisy and the inadequacies and fallacies of the religious beliefs that are supposed to guide them in the raising of their children.

And, if anything, it's probably made Palin even more of a saint in their eyes.

Aimai, of If I Ran The Zoo, makes this point in a comment over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money:  One of the reasons people embrace such an authoritarian and judgmental religion is that they feel that their lives are out of their control.  The world as they know it is falling apart around them.  Drugs, booze, domestic violence, adultery, divorce, families dissolving---even if they themselves are doing all right at the moment, that's what they are, all right for the moment.

They've seen enough to know, watched enough good people they've admired and loved fall to be worried that the moment won't last very long.  One little slip-up on their part, one seemingly easy to forgive demonstration of normal human weakness on the part of someone they depend on, and everything can come crashing down.

Liberals are inclined to see the roots of a lot of the troubles that beset their communities as economic or cultural.  Teach the children well in good schools, make sure there are good jobs for them when they graduate, guarantee their children will have be able to see the doctor and the dentist, give daughters the same respect and opportunities and freedoms as are given the sons, and, although none of these problems will just disappear, their corrosive effects upon the community will be much the less because the community itself will be strong enough and smart enough to withstand them and take care of the victims.  This seems so obvious to us that it constantly leaves us asking in various ways, What's the matter with Kansas?  Why can't they see that their well-being is tied to their communal, economic well-being?

But we're asking this about people who believe that no matter how badly things are going economically or even personally it's everybody's first order of business to get themselves to heaven and that's a job that is up to each individual.  An individual's personal salvation is between that individual and God, which makes me wonder why they feel a need to be so public about it.  I'll get to that though.  Right now it's important to note that they also believe that even the best and strongest-willed individual is a weak and fragile and nearly helpless creature when faced with trials and temptations and the only way anybody can make it through is with God's help.

Getting and staying right with the Lord is a life and death matter.

And they know from personal experience how difficult it is.  When they around them they don't see signs of nationwide economic distress or political turmoil or derangement as much as they see individuals who are failing at the very difficult business of personal salvation, who cannot get right with God.  And since they are not Puritans of the bleak Jonathan Edwards stripe and do not see us all as sinners in the hands of an angry God but as wayward children a loving father wants to save and bring home, while we're asking what's the matter with Kansas, they're asking what's keeping God away from us here in Kansas?  Their answer is some form of "New York" and "Hollywood."

I'm not saying that they don't see an individual failure to be good as having nothing to do with individual depravity, stubbornness, and plain stupidity.  They just know that with God's help all of us can be saved, and since they know too many good people who didn't get God's help when they needed it and that God would have helped them and they would have welcomed that help, something or somebody is either getting in God's way or offering what looks like a quicker and more attractive alternative.

They often call this something else the Devil.  But sometimes, through the encouragement of bought and paid for preachers, they call it "Liberalism."

One of the things that annoys me about their old-time religion is the way it often seems to make a virtue of vanity.  They are vain about their virtuousness.  For people who claim to believe in a Savior who preached against praying in public they do what strikes me as an awful lot of it.  All their boastful testifying and bragging about being born-again and asking me if I'm saved, with that infuriating smile that implies they know they are but they're highly doubtful about me and no matter what answer I'm going to give I'm going to confirm they were right to doubt it.  They are the Pharisees showing off before God at the front of the temple, as far as I'm concerned, congratulating themselves on what's really the very bare minimum of decent behavior.

But I keep forgetting how weak they feel, how incompetent, how close to failure and disaster.  What sounds to me like bragging is cheerleading for a team that's way behind in the fourth quarter.  They are trying to keep their strength and their spirits up.  They need each other's example to inspire themselves to keep plugging away.  Sarah Palin's story is her testimony.  They hear it and they say, If she can do it, I can do it.  This is one of the things Barack Obama was attempting to do in his acceptance speech, testify.  The trouble is that as heard by Right Wing Christians he seemed to be putting government where God ought to be in his plans for change.  Which makes him dangerous.

Another thing about their fire and brimstone preaching that annoys me---infuriates me, actually---is that they are reserving the fire and brimstone for others.  They seem to assume all virtue belongs to themselves, that nobody but but them has ever led a good and righteous life.  The canonization of Sarah Palin because she didn't have an abortion when she knew her baby would be born with Down Syndrome, as if no one but someone as right with God would have done the same, especially makes me spitting-nails mad.

To get more help from Aimai, this time writing in a post at If I Ran The Zoo:

Despite right wing propaganda abortion isn't a sacrament in the liberal church. There are plenty of pro-choice women and men who have chosen to give birth to, and care for, children who were "not perfect." Not only that, but there are, as I pointed out over at LGM, literally thousands of gays and lesbians, liberal single dads and moms, who have gone out of their way to adopt or foster children with developmental or social difficulties of all kinds. Not only do liberals, gays, and lesbians value the lives of their own biological children, they actually have proven again and again that they value and even exalt, protect and love the lives that other members of this majority christian society have thrown away in the foster care system.

Makes me want to buy ten-thousand copies of Michael Berube's book, Life As We Know It, and start crossing the country handing them out on the doorsteps of the mega-churches like a Gideon handing out bibles.

But the fact is that while they believe that a lot of us liberals are actually wicked and evil, committing every sin in the book daily and with glee, they really don't care if we are or aren't.  They're perfectly willing to accept that some us are saints in our private lives and even that many of our leaders and politicians are more virtuous than theirs or at least no more stupid, greedy, hypocritical, and ruled by their dicks.  But it's irrelevant, because it's our politics that are evil and dangerous:  Liberalism, as far as they can tell, leaves out the most important ingredient for any solution to any problem---God.  Without God in the mix everything is doomed to failure.  Telling them that liberal policies will make their lives better and showing them proof is a temptation.

It's the Devil talking, for isn't it written, What profiteth men or women if they gain jobs in Kansas but loseth their souls in the process?

End of Part One. Part Two is here.

What this country needs besides a good five-cent cigar...

Long line at the video store the other night.  One of those somebody's credit card won't scan and there's only one register open, one clerk ringing everybody up, because her co-worker's on break hold ups, and I'm stuck at the end of it, behind a couple of college students.  Guy and a girl.  The guy has their movies and is waiting patiently.  The girl's pacing all about, wandering in and out of line, checking out the candy, roving as far as the magazine rack, never coming to a standstill in any one spot.  They're not a couple couple, just friends, and, it seems to me, friends of recent acquaintance, which I think is part of why she's so nervous and antsy.

He's black.  She's Asian.  But only his race matters here, and that's only because of what she's about to say and the asumption she's going to make.

"You decided who you're going to vote for yet?" she asks him.  She's just wandered back from the soda cooler so I don't know what's prompted the question.  He doesn't get a chance to answer.  She cuts him off quick, as if catching herself in a big mistake.  "Oh right.  Obama.  Duh."

"How about you?" he asks.  "You know who you'll vote for?"

"I'm thinking Obama.  I'm leaning his way.  But I don't know.  I've heard some good things about McCain.  But then I heard a lot of people don't like him."

In her pacing about she's gotten ahead of him so in looking back at him she's looking my way too and she catches the look on my face.  It makes her laugh.  "Oh no!" she says.  "Are you like a big McCain guy?"

I don't like to get involved in strangers' conversations, especially when they're talking politics, but she has asked me a direct question.  I try to sound very wise and disinterested.  "No.  But I think that anyone who's leaning towards Obama wouldn't want to vote for McCain.  He's very conservative."

"Oh?  I don't know.  I've just heard he's a good guy.  You know who I really think I'll vote for though?" she says to her friend, forgetting about me.  "The Green guy."

"What green guy?"

"You know.  The guy, he's like always running?"

"Nader?"

"Is that him?"

"Ralph Nader?"

"Is he for the Green Party?"

"I don't think so."

"Then who's the Green guy?"  She remembers I'm there and asks me. "You know who I'm talking about, right?"

"The Green Party's running a woman this year," I tell her.  "Cynthia McKinney."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Then that's not who I mean.  I mean, like the guy who's like, you know?  Kind of a hippie?"

By this point her friend is just staring at her, looking stunned.

"I've got no idea who you're talking about," he says.

"No?  Hmmm.  Well, whoever it is, that's who I want.  I think we need somebody like that.  You know?  Someone who's like all cool about things and everything.  Like if something happens, he'll just get all laid back and be real cool and like everything's fine, it's no big deal and shit?  That's what this country needs right now, I think."

That's the end of it.  They reach the register, check out their DVD's, and leave talking about where they'll stop on the way back to the dorm to pick up something to eat.

There's no moral to this story.  I'm drawing no conclusions.  That girl isn't representative of anything or anybody but herself and for all I know she wasn't even being herself.  I'm not sure she meant anything she said.  In fact, I suspect she was just talking out of nervousness.

What bothers me, though, is the possibility that she had heard some good things about McCain, the kind of things that would make her not see much difference between him and Obama and her idealized Green guy.

I'm also trying to imagine something happening and John McCain just getting all laid back and being real cool and like everything's fine, it's no big deal and shit?

John McCain, hippie Green guy.

Dorkiest thing on two wheels

The dorkiest thing on two wheels is a middle-aged man in a sweatshirt and jeans riding his bike uphill with a bright sun that makes it feel like eighty degrees beating down on him.

I swear, it was sixty degrees when I set out.

Oh well.  It was only three miles out and back to the bagel place and the road is all along the river and the river was the bright blue of the reflected sky and there was a great blue heron on a rock out in the water and the roadsides were blue and purple with chickory and New York asters except where they were yellow too with goldenrod and the bagels at the bagel place are always big and fresh and a small bottle of orange juice works wonders and I'm home now on the front porch with a fresh cup of coffee on the table beside me, admiring the play of light and shadow on the petals of the black-eyed Susans while I'm waiting for my cranberry bagel to cool, and I've recovered enough and am in a good enough mood that I hardly mind the noise from the neighbobor's lawn mower even though it's awful early on a Sunday morning to be out disturbing the peace just to lower the height of the grass in your front yard half an inch but knowing how hot the sun is already I can't say I blame him for wanting to get it done before the day really heats up and anyway his yard's not that close and his mower's not that loud and I can still hear the cicadas and the broken-bed spring squeak-squawk of some blue jays who are annoyed at something going on in the maple trees across the way and I'm rested and content and have half-forgiven myself for having been such a dork earlier and for being a dork now because if the dorkiest thing on two wheels was me huffing and puffling and sweating like a field hand on my bike, the dorkiest thing at a keyboard is the same dork describing his dorkiness on his blog in a string of run-on sentences and expecting people to read the whole post with interest and without getting really, really annoyed.

How's the weather where you are this morning?

Late-ish night thoughts about The Dark Knight, Stargate, and Patti Smith

This time of night, with all the Whos here in Mannionville all a-snooze and three hours or so of time by myself ahead of me, I tend to revert.  I go back to one of two me's.  Either I'm the twenty-three year old me, full of unspecified longings, urgent voices in my head telling me it's now or never, and what I want is out there somewhere in the night, waiting, hoping, looking for whatever I'm looking for too.  Then Patti Smith takes over.

Fortunately for my pride, my marriage, and my lawyer who hates to get phone calls waking him up in the middle of the night, I never make it out the door, even with Smith wailing in my mind's inner ear and setting my soul on fire.

Or...

I turn twelve.

The darkness and the quiet of the house, the feelings of coziness, the combined and complementary senses of freedom and responsibility (because such nights only happened when my parents went out and left me to watch my brothers and sisters), knowing I can do pretty much what I want and I'm in charge so I have to be somewhat good, which is a relief to a twelve year old, not having to make really hard choices, a glass of milk and plate of cookies on the floor beside me as I stretch out to watch whatever TV show I feel like watching---all this was my great delight then and all this is here with me now, the darkness, the coziness, the freedom,the responsibility, the milk, and the cookies.

Plus we just finished watching Stargate:Continuum.  Had my twelve year old self on the edge of his seat.  At the end the kid stood up and cheered.

So tonight I'm twelve.

And this has been bothering the twelve year old me for a week now.

How come Batman didn't know the Joker was lying?

When I was twelve one of the things I liked about Batman was his billing:  "The World's Greatest Detective."

I don't think he ever did much actual detecting, but the point was that in addition to being a dark knight of vengeance, Batman was pretty smart.  I remember one comic book that ended with Batman explaining to Robin how he was able to thwart that issue's bad guy by "staying one step ahead of Johnny Two-Step."  This bad guy, Johnny Two-Step, earned his moniker by being essentially a great chess player.  He had his opponent's game figured out at least two moves in advance.  Batman won by out-thinking him.

So how come he couldn't get one step ahead of the Joker?  It was an obvious move!

But in my comic books Batman's in his thirties.  He's been at the Batgame for years.  He's learned a few things.

How old is he supposed to be in Batman Begins?  Early 20's?  And only a year has passed when The Dark Knight opens. Is he still making rookie mistakes?

Still, the twelve year old me thinks he should have known.  The Joker wasn't going to make it easy for him.

By the way, Stargate: Continuum was pretty cool.  Better even than Stargate: Ark of Truth.  Together they add up to an almost satisfying end to the series.  Only almost because I wish the show wasn't done.

SG 1's troubles with Ba'al are handled much better than the last battle with the Ori, probably because the Ba'al subplot was always fairly tame and modest and therefore it could be wrapped up in what's essentially a single long episode.  The Ori needed and deserved more time.

But Continuum finishes with one of the main characters managing to get one step ahead of one of the villains.  It's the right main character and the right villain and the look on that villain's face when the realization dawns that the main character's there and a step ahead is priceless.

Now, excuse me, I have to run out to the store.  The twelve year old me has decided against cookies.  For some reason, he wants cake.

Pretty hands

Young people take the beauty that goes with youth for granted and so they often overlook the many pretty young things surrounding them in a vain search for exceptional beauty.

The college woman working the counter at the cafe tonight is cute, even pretty, if you look closely.  But I wonder how many potential lovers her age look that closely.  She's on the thin side, angular.  Her jaw is long and bony.  Her nose dominates her face.  A casting director for a movie would think schoolteacher, the strict kind who isn't impressed by an essay unless all the punctuation marks are in the right place and every word is spelled correctly.

But she has a good complexion, full lips, her ponytailed hair under her baseball cap is a pretty shade of reddish brown, and she has beautiful hands.

I'm not John Updike.  I can't rhapsodize on a single part of a woman's anatomy without feeling like a fetishist.  But take my word for it.  Her hands are beautiful.  When she goes to give me my mug of coffee I want to wait forever before accepting it, just so I can admire her hands as they are wrapped around the white ceramic.

I think maybe she knows about her hands and is proud of them.  She's wearing no make-up.  There's no other sign that she's primped for work.  She's dressed for the business of pouring coffee and wiping tables in a black top that looks well-worn and black cords with shiny spots on the knees and scuffed black sneakers.  But her manicure is perfect and she's chosen exactly the right shade of pink nail polish to show off the color of her skin.

I'm an eye man myself.  And a leg man.  Then a shoulder man, a back man, an inner thigh man, and a nape of the neck man.  I don't recall noticing that the hands of any girl I dated were exceptionally lovely.  Maybe lovely hands are always the exception but it seems more likely that I was just stupidly blind to the less obvious beauties of the young women I knew.

If this girl is looking for love---and not everyone is---I hope when she finds it it finds her beautiful for the same reason I hope that our loves find each of us beautiful, because we look like who we are.  But I expect that her love will notice her skin and her full lips and the color of her hair and think, "Boy, am I lucky!"

I wonder, though, if he---or she---will notice that she has beautiful hands.

A poem that needs to be written that I don't have the talent to write

At Barnes and Noble, my home away from home, again.  Character two tables over, middle-aged guy has been delivering a lecture on the history of film to a friend for the better part of an hour now.  I've been doing a good job of not listening.  But bits and pieces have gotten through and I know that Ian Fleming and the first Bond movies figure importantly in his thesis.  Japanese sexual mores do too and somehow he moved from discussing casual nudity on Japanese TV to Kaiser Wilhem's ambitions on the eve of World War I and now I have the title of a poem that I will never be able to write, but maybe Steve or Sherry or Mad will oblige:

"Naked,  the Kaiser dances with geishas."

Youth is wasted on the middle-aged

Ten o'clock and the gang all tucked in for the night, zipped out alone to Barnes and Noble for coffee and inspiration.  Abba playing on the store stereo system when I walk in.  Dancing Queen.

Head straight for the magazines, looking for something to read in the cafe.  The magazine section is up front by the windows.  Also up front by the windows are some armchairs.  In one of the armchairs is a couple, she in his lap, her legs over the armrests, her hands in his hair.  Liplocked.  He's curly-haired and square-jawed and handsome.  She's a tousle-haired bottle blonde in a halter top and very tight jeans and high-heels.

They are in their 40s.

He's well in.  Hard to say about her because much of her face is hidden by all that hair.  But she was in junior high at least when Dancing Queen first made the charts.

I tried to be quick picking out a magazine but it couldn't have taken me less than half a minute and they didn't come up for air the whole time I was there.

When I was in junior high, if I saw a couple like them, I'd have thought, Ewww.

When I was in college and in my twenties, I'd have thought, Good for them.

In my thirties, I'd have thought, Get a room.

Tonight I thought...I think I'll find a book to read instead.

And I zipped off to the essay section.

Ok, maybe I also thought how nice it must be, to be out on a date on a warm summer night, making out with your sweetheart while listening to Abba and that I was a little jealous too.

They still need to find a room.

In the woods, south of home

Another one from Friday's bike ride.  Somewhere near the southern end of the trail.  June 13. 2008.

(Right click on photo to enlarge.)

One for the birds

Once upon a time, you could take the train from our little town straight into New York City.  No old-timer I’ve talked to remembers the train or how long it took to get from here to the City.  It was a short enough commute that the local dairy tycoon would ride it every day to his Manhattan office and back.  That’s close to a hundred years ago now and tycoons worked shorter hours in those days.  He probably sauntered into work—another sort of tycoon might have strode into work, but the dairy tycoon was really a farmer with a lot of cows and a condensed milk factory, and so I imagine he sauntered—he sauntered into his office at ten or eleven and called it a day at three or four and was back home on the farm before the cows came home.

The train stopped running out of here in the early 1950s when the state demolished a “scalping” bridge between here and the next town over—trucks with drivers who couldn’t read the warning signs or didn’t believe them kept getting scalped as they tried to make their ten foot tall ways under eight or nine feet of clearance.  No one thought to lower the road bed or elevate the bridge.  Why bother?  Who needed trains anymore when we were only a decade or two away from having flying cars?  I don’t know when hey tore up the tracks and tore down the station or how long the old railbed was left to be reclaimed by the woods.  But in 1994 someone got the idea of turning the old line into a hiking and biking trail.  A good idea while it lasted.  Whoever was supposed to maintain it forgot about it over the years and by the time we moved here in 2003 it was completely overgrown.  I tried to walk it one time and was pretty soon up to my waist in brambles and brush and had to turn back. 

The trail opens on our main street into town so I passed by it pretty much every day.  For a while I would look down it hopefully, expecting that the town or the Boy Scouts or some private citizens with a chain saw and a backhoe and a lot of time on their hands had returned to clear it.  Over time though I got used to its being a short walk into nothing and stopped looking.  Eventually, it became as invisible to me as the driveways and lawns of the houses along the way, there but not there enough to register anymore.

But one day last fall something grabbed my attention as I passed by.  Probably I saw light out of the corner of my eye where I was used to seeing shade.  I paused before the opening of the trail and looked down it and realized I was looking a long way down.  The trail had been cleared.  I was in a hurry or else I’d have explored it to find out just how far down it had been cleared.  I made a note to come back but didn’t follow through until yesterday morning when I set off on my bike to see what I could see.  What I saw was about three miles of interesting.

For about half its length, the trail runs through woods, deep in the shade of oaks and maples.  The other half of the way, the first half as you head south from here, is more open, shaded in spots at ten in the morning by free-standing ashes, thin lines of young hawthorns, aspens, and birches no bigger around than my wrist, and the occasional tall-growing sumacs.  The train ran along the river, and the tracks were laid between bottomland and what are still working farms and those farms are the reason for that first mile and a half of sunshine.  The tall hardwoods that would like to move in and turn the whole neighborhood back into forest don’t have the room to spread out.  What’s green along this stretch of land tends to be short, the saplings I mentioned and thickets of shrubs and bushes including lots of honeysuckle whose flowers were past their first bloom but were still perfuming the air in patches that I rode in and out of like bands of invisible scent-fogs.

Landscape like this, neither woods nor field, is what the nature guides call an edge for the plain and simple reason that that's where you'll find one, at the edge of some place, a field, a woods, a road, a development.  Small animals love them.  Birds love them.  If you're a birder, edges are interesting but unsurprising places.  They're full of the usual suspects, sparrows, finches, wrens, some of the bolder warblers.  But if you're a bird-lover they're delightful places, because they are full of the usual suspects going about the kind of business they don't spend a lot of time on when they're visiting your backyard feeder.  The usual suspects aren't as usual to me as they once were since we've never put up a feeder here.  Yesterday, it was almost a novelty to see so many goldfinches, dancing butter yellow blurs in the air, and even the robins and cardinals looked bigger, brighter, wilder.  There were more than backyard visting-types too.  Hawks glided overhead.  I saw a kingbird on a telephone wire as I pedaled out and a redwinged blackbird as I rode back.  At one point something very big for a bird with a very red head swooped across the trail to a tree where it took up a woodpeckerish perch, nothing more exotic than a red-headed woodpecker, most likely, but I'll never know.  By the time I caught up to that tree the bird had moved on.  And I passed what I took at a glance to be a large species of white-backed dragonfly hovering over some flowers that it dawned on me later could have been a ruby-throated hummingbird.

The birds I was happiest to see were the catbirds.  I don't know why but catbirds have always been among my favorite birds.  They're all gray, except for a black cap and a red rump you can only glimpse when they flutter away, but it's a handsome, dignified, charcoal kind of gray.  And I like their boldness.  You can't scare off a catbird.  They'll sit there on a branch and stare you up and down before they move on, having evidentally dismissed you as a threat but decided that you aren't the least bit interesting.  Kind of like cats, when you think about it.  Catbirds actually meow, which is why they're called catbirds, naturally.  They also creak like rusty gates.   They sing but they don't have their own songs.  They borrow notes from other birds, like mockingbirds, to whom they are cousins.

Brown thrashers are also cousins to mockingbirds and catbirds.  I saw a couple of those yesterday too.  At least I'm pretty sure that's what they were.  They were brown and they thrashed.  These two rusty brown robin-sized birds landed on a thicket and then disappeared under the branches and vines and thrashed around in the leaf-litter below before I got close enough to get a good look at them.  Some birds are more aptly named than others.

Wish I had photos to show you of my ornithological observations.  But I'm not fast enough with my camera and I don't have the patience, especially when clouds of flies and bees decide to investigate my stalled presence on their turf.  I did get some pictures of a couple of deer grazing in one of the pastures but there's no point in posting them because the deer are just small brown interruptions in the green that if you squint are vaguely deer-shaped.  My next camera's going to have a real telephoto lens.

The farmers didn't plow from horizon to horizon.  Their fields are dotted with groves and glens of tall shade trees.  The railbed was built up because the fields on the one side and the bottomland on the other are really the same piece of geography, flood plain.  Streams cross the fields making their sinuous way towards the river and as they go they pass, deliciously cool-looking, through these oases of shade.  I didn't stop but once upon a time I would have because finding such spots was the point of the many walks the blonde and I used to take through the woods.  There's one sweet-looking grove out there where the water runs fast and is crossed by a low wooden footbridge that in our younger and more alive and more brazen, because we were so gosh-darned prettier back then, years would have drawn us to it on the run to go wading.

Yes, that kind of wading.

What, you kids think you invented skinny-dipping?

I could tell you stories.

I could tell you a story in particular about coming out of the woods on a hot day in July and finding an apparently abandoned house with a still working garden hose.

Another time.

Another blog.

Yamaharley

Met the owner of this gorgeous machine at the convenience mart this morning when I stopped in for a milk shake after my own bike ride---my bicycle ride.

It's a Yamaha with some custom-added Harley parts.  Owner calls it his Yamaharley.

Owner's seventy-five years old.

I asked him if he'd been riding all his life or was this something he'd recently taken up.

Used to ride a lot, he said.  When he was young.  He hadn't been on a bike in forty years before he bought this one last fall.  Riding a bike is not like riding a bike, not for him, he's still getting used to it, and still nervous about it.

"I've put about forty miles on it," he said, laughing at himself.  "It's a bomb.  It flies.  I'm not so good on the take-offs or on the turns."  He put up his hands in front of him and bent at the knees as if he was on the bike and then he shook all over and opened his mouth and widened his eyes mimicking his own terrified look as the Yamaharley threatened to drive itself right out from under him.

On my way home I heard a beep-beep behind me and there he was coming up the road, his black Kaiser helmet shining on his head,  He gave a wave without taking his palm off the throttle and then roared on ahead.  Looked pretty cool to me.

A satisfying thwap

I was in what I thought was a very funny mood this morning but the blonde thought I was deliberately trying to annoy her.  All these years and she still doesn't appreciate my sense of humor.

At one point, she was putting some eggs away when I got off another brilliant witticism which she insisted was at her expense.  She hefted an egg in her palm.

"Watch it, buster, or you're going to get egged."

"Aren't those hard-boiled?"

She didn't miss a beat.  "Yes, they are.  But they would still make a very satisfying thwap."

Over-idenfitication at the movies

Watched The Graduate tonight and the same damn thing happened that's happened every time I've watched it.  I over-identified.  Soon as the credits rolled, I ran out to my car, hopped in, and started up.  I couldn't put the top down on my red Alpha Romeo because it's a gold Saturn four-door hardtop, but I rolled down the window, and sped off, headed for Berkeley to find Elaine.

I used to get farther before reaility bit.

Tonight I was barely past the library three blocks away.   Young guy, a whole lot closer to Ben Braddock's age, stepped off the sidewalk and started to cross the street ahead of me.  I slowed to let him get to the other side alive.  As I passed him, smoke from his cigarette drifted in through the window.  One whiff snapped me back to myself.

I turned into the lot at the convenience mart.  Went inside and bought a gallon of milk and drove home to resume being Mr Braddock and not, if Jesus loves me, Mr Robinson.

A long time ago, in a museum far, far away...

Barack went to Pennsylvania for the bowling.  Hillary went there for a beer and a shot.  The Media followed along to make fun of them.  But I, I went to Pennsylvania to see...

Yoda.

As you might have guessed from Saturday night's postcard, the Mannions were at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia over the weekend to see Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination.

The exhibit seemed a little heavy on the imaginative, light on the scientific, the two meeting only in passing with an exchange of quick, friendly nods.  There was a display devoted to the current state of the art of prosthetic limbs, inspired by Vader's missing arms and legs and Luke's severed hand.  Another display, taking off from the planet Hoth, looked at the ways humans survive and work in the coldest places on Earth.  Coruscant's tiers and tiers of heavy air traffic was the basis of an interactive computer model for future city planning and not yet invented mass transit systems.  More stuff like that.  The real draws, of course, were all the props, models, and costumes from the movies.  I'm told it was all very interesting.  I couldn't tell myself.  I couldn't get close enough for a good look at any of it.  All these Jawa-sized and Ewok-cute poeple kept getting in the way.

A lot of Stormtrooper-sized people and even a few Wookie-sized ones, and a couple of Jabba the Hutt-sized ones, elbowed me aside too.

Naturally, there were a lot of parents who were there like us, pretending we'd come just for the kids' sakes.  But I was surprised by how many kidless late twentysomethings and early thirtysomethings there were too.

If you were 10 when the last of the original trilogy, Return of the Jedi, came out, you're 35 now.  If you were 10 when the first of the prequels, The Phantom Menace, hit the screens, you're 19.  Basically, for Star Wars to have been a formative part of your movie-going experience, you are most likely either between the ages of 35 and 45 (I realize that some fans fell under the spell when they were in college and are older than that), or between 10 and 19.  So how did all these fans who were too young to go to the first set of movies and too old for the second set become one with the Force?

Television.  VHS.

Whatever it is about Star Wars that captures the heart and soul of so many people doesn't need a big screen to do it, I guess.

But this is what really caught my attention.  Many of these grown-up fans were couples.  They went through the exhibit holding hands and stopped before the display cases leaning into each other as if they were strolling through Paris on their honeymoons.  And a lot of them had their pictures taken in front of the displays.  (One couple asked me to take theirs.  I hope the picture came out.)  They posed seriously too.  No goofing around.  They would stand in front of the Millennium Falcon or Luke's Landspeeder or Chewbacca or Darth Vader and smile shyly for the camera, as if it was the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame behind them.

Who'da thunk it?  George Lucas, master of romance.

Deer in the headlights

I'm at the Barnes and Noble near my in-laws'.  The manager's just announced over the PA, "Barnes and Noble will be closing in 15 minutes."  I've made my final purchases.  A brownie and a second cup of coffee. When I leave here I'll drive home through Valley Forge.  Usually when I make this drive at this time of night, which I try to do at least once every visit, I see a lot of deer along the way.  They'll be lined up along the roadside by the dozen, as if waiting for a parade.  Their eyes glow in the headlights of passing cars.  The deer themselves turn gray as shadows and sometimes when it's very dark all you can see are their eyes, like strings of orange paper lanterns way off in the distance.  That's a trick of my own eyes, of course.  The deer aren't off in the distance.  They're right there, a few feet away.

As I said, usually they're lined up by the dozen.  But last month, when we were here and I was here and I made that drive, I didn't see a single deer.  Not one.  It was strange.  I wonder how many I'll see tonight.  I'm about to find out.  Barnes and Noble has now closed.  Good night.