Dr. Metablog

Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of “The Big Book of False Etymologies” (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, “My Underwear” (Virago, 1997).

DR. METABLOG’S
GREATEST HITS

  • Innogen

    In Cymbeline (1611?), Shakespeare, still innovating even at the end of his career, deepens the character of Innogen by supplying her with an unusual psychological trait. He presents her to us as an escapist or fantasist who leaps to imagine herself a different person in a different world. Here's Innogen early in the play, when she realizes that her cross-class marriage to Postumus (she's a princess, he's a poor but worthy gentleman) is at risk: "Would I were/ A neatherd's daughter, and my Leonatus/ Our neighbor shepherd's son." She fantasizes herself surrendering her nobility to become a peasant. A few moments later, she learns that her lover Leonatus and his rival the clotpoll Cloten have been in a sword fight and that Cloten has retreated. Innogen's reaction: "I would they were in Afric both together/ Myself by with a needle, that I might prick/ The goer-back". Why Africa? Because, among other reasons, it is far from the British court where Innogen's activities are heavily restricted. So in two short speeches Innogen has expressed willingness to being transformed in both class and geography. Shortly afterward, Innogen describes (in another "would that" imagining) how she would have stared at the retreating ship which takes Postumus into exile: "I would have broke mine eye-strings, cracked them,/ To look upon him till the dimunition/ Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle." Indifferent to physical pain, she now imagines herself transcending not only class and space, but also the limitations of her own body.

    It was no accident that Shakespeare gave Innogen such freedom to re-invent herself, because in the scenes that follow, she will undergo a series of radical transformations — from princess to a "franklin's wife," into a boy cooking fancy food for three cave-dwelling mountain-men, and then a dutiful page to the general of the invading Roman army, all the while avoiding betrayal, attempted rape and apparent poisoning. It's a lot for Innogen to deal with, but Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing when he started her off with an imagination equal to the task. 

  • What Are the Odds?

    It's a commonplace that every one of us is improbable and accidental — a fluke of all flukes. The odds against you or me or any particular person being born, of coming into life, are infinitesimal — a positron's dimension (if positrons have dimension) shy of nothing, of zero.

    Why is any birth so unlikely?  To begin, while every sperm is sacred (as we're told on good authority), every sperm is also unique. There are 200 million or more of the little whipper-snappers in the normal ounce or so of human male ejaculate — each one a quirky unique assemblage of genes. Both your and my individual existence depends on one particular sperm lashing itself into a lather to be the first to break the tape. If the sperm with your name on it had foundered, and the dark horse sperm in the next lane had penetrated the egg, you yourself wouldn't have been conceived, wouldn't have existed. An entirely other human being would have suckled at the breast, cried in the crib, perched in the high chair. If you're a boy, your "other" might have been a girl, and vice versa.

    So we are all many-millions-to-one long shots. But multiply the odds against you yourself being welcomed to the world by the even more remote odds against the conceptions of your four grandparents. Your grandmas and grandpapas exist only because in each case two people out of all the potential great-grandparent-generation cohort on earth chanced to meet and find a particular opportunity on a particular day and particular spot of time to copulate so that those remote grandsires could launch their own flotilla of swimmers upriver. How many accidents had to occur to compile the particular DNA which comprises your own identity and individuality? 

    Then we must add factors such as the strife and wars and migrations and diseases that united or separated our great-grandfolks and their great-great grandfolks and yea, even unto our Olduvai forebears and to the pliopithecoids who preceded them, and then back through the early mammals and to the dark backward and abysm of time. Gosh, it makes you wonder how anything at all ever happens to happen in this random chancy aleatory world — and yet remarkable things (such as you and I being born) continue to occur. And a good thing, too.

  • Susan P. (1937-38)

    This entry is written at the specific instruction of my daughter, who says, "your grandchildren will want to know about your birth. It's their history too." The following paragraphs are for them and for their descendants.

    My older sister, Susan, died of pneumonia at the age of nine months on March 15, 1938. If she had lived, I wouldn't exist, nor would my ten descendants, and no one would notice.

    I was born on March 11, 1939, just one year minus four days after Susan died. It seems obvious that I was purposely conceived as a substitute for the dead child — and it therefore follows that I was delivered into a disrupted, stressed family. Was I to be treasured as a compensation for past grief or to be resented as an imperfect interloper? Or both, simultaneously? To raise the ante, it is also a fact that during that fatal March of 1938 when Susan lay dying, my older brother Eugene, then just shy of three years of age, was gravely ill of the same disease that killed his younger sister, and that although he was at death's door, he managed to pull through.

    So let us consider the situation of my parents, Manny and Lil, in June of 1938, the month of my conception. Poor Susan lay a-mouldering in her tiny grave for just three months. The Great Depression was still going strong and Hitler's Nuremberg Laws had been in force since 1935. Father Coughlin, celebrity Jew-hater, was agitating thirty million American radio listeners a week. Kristallnacht was just five months away and most everyone knew that war was imminent. Residing on East 9th Street in Flatbush were my grief-stricken young parents, who had helplessly watched one child die and had come within a hairbreadth of losing another. We must imagine them reeling, tearful, clinging to one another, dealing as best they might with heartbreaking anxiety and pain. Yet despite public and personal disasters, they made the courageous choice to throw the dice again, and out of their anguish to bring forth another child — and to run the real risk, in those pre-antibiotic days, of offering still another sacrifice to pneumonia or some other dread incurable illness.

    If my parents were still alive, I'd congratulate them, celebrate them, not because their resilience produced me, but because to beget a substitute child in chaotic, dangerous 1938 seems to me, now, looking back from the perspective of 2020, to be an act of unfathomable courage.

    Or so I would like to think. It's also possible that I'm here not because of their heroism but because of a failure of contraception. I'll never know. I didn't ask; they never said, and the facts are unrecoverable. Lil and Manny wouldn't dream of speaking aloud about anything so intimate as sex or reproduction, certainly not with their children and, who knows, perhaps not even with one another. In that regard, they were typical of their generation. Personal matters were kept close to the vest. 

    When Lil was five months pregnant, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. Exactly three weeks before I landed on this planet, 20,000 Nazi supporters rallied, complete with Fascist salutes, at the old Madison Square Garden on 49th Street. Four days after I arrived, on the anniversary –the yahrzeit — of the death of little Susan, while my mother was regaining her strength in Manhattan's Park East hospital on East 83rd Street, German tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. For Lil, for Manny, personal and public crises intersected. Nazis foreign and domestic were at the gates, and inside the hospital, my mother was still mourning the loss of the little girl whom my Uncle Dan, my mother's brother, remembered as an "exceptionally beautiful child." And lying beside Lil in her bed was the newborn, who was welcomed with joy, I'm sure, but with ambivalence also. Not an eternally glowing-in-memory girl child but me –an undistinguished chap, to put it in the most favorable light. Not "trailing clouds of glory" but instead enveloped in a fog of danger and possibly regret.

    My parents, as I have said, kept their emotions tightly buttoned, so while Susan was not mourned or even mentioned within the family, she was never forgotten. In fact, throughout my childhood she remained a mysterious ghostly presence. In my parents' bedroom was a simple display — a child-size wood-and-wicker chair and above it, on the wall, a gold-framed picture of a very pretty infant. The shrine fascinated me, and I would sneak into my parent's bedroom to study it. Sneak? Yes, because their bedroom was a consecrated place not to be defiled by Eugene or Jonathan or me. Off limits. It was the sin of all childhood sins to violate the taboo and cross into the forbidden zone. My mother made an unholy fuss about this rule. "You are not to go into our bedroom. Ever." Which I did, regularly, when no one was looking — but it felt like a midnight intrusion into a deep dark country graveyard. Very creepy. Who is that infant in the picture? And why is she not allowed to rest in peace? I knew better than to ask.

    I never thought, then, to wonder how Manny and Lil, contemplating the gilded idol morn and eve, could fail to compare their frozen-in-time lost infant to her scruffy successor? Of course I was aware that my "difficult" mother was a deeply troubled woman. But never, trust me, did I have the least glimmer that the shade of the dead infant haunted our family — and myself in particular. No child, certainly not me, would have been so insightful. It's transparent now, but it was anything but obvious then. Nor could anyone possibly have predicted that there was to be an area of study within the discipline of psychology called "The Replacement Child Syndrome" (RCS). And that I was unequivocally a textbook case of such.  

    RCS lay dormant. Forty years later, and forty years ago, when I was in midlife, not having thought for decades about my dead sister or her shrine or my long-departed parents, I experienced something of a revelation. It came about indirectly, but dramatically.

    I was teaching classes on Shakespeare's plays. and I found myself paying much more heed to Romeo and Juliet than that immature early tragedy warrants. I was especially intrigued by Shakespeare's invention of the character of young Juliet — which is far more subtle than is necessary for the plot. With Juliet, Shakespeare attempted something utterly unprecedented in any previous work of literature. He cleverly situated his young heroine in a complicated family in which Juliet had, in effect, two mothers — a birth mother, Capulet wife, who is cold, distant and aloof, and a metaphorical and therefore real mother, Nurse Angelica, who is undisciplined but sensual and sexual. The two mothers, carefully differentiated, precipitate or echo or explain the conflict within Juliet between propriety and passion. One mother embraces and promulgates Verona's rigid mores, while the other is impulsive, emotional, and anarchic. In addition — and now it all was starting to become extremely personal for me — Shakespeare provided Juliet with a backstory (unusual because his characters rarely have prior histories). It comes to light that the Nurse's own natural daughter had died in infancy, that the bereaved mother was engaged to suckle Juliet — and that Angelica has been Juliet's surrogate mother and companion for almost fourteen years. So Juliet is, for the Nurse, clearly and obviously a replacement child. How curiously relevant! How provocative!

    I then remembered that William Shakespeare himself was such a child. According to the Trinity Church records, John and Mary Shakespeare had suffered two tragedies before April 23, 1564 when William was born. Their first child, a daughter named Joan, had been baptized four years earlier, in 1560, but lived only for two months. A second daughter, Margaret, was baptized in 1562 and lived for just under one year. A full year! and then the grave! How horrible for all concerned! Young Will therefore entered the world as the boy child who replaced not one but two older sisters. Even in an age of staggering infant mortality, two such premature deaths must surely have weighed on both John and Mary and on William himself. Is it an accident that Juliet is the only certified replacement child in early modern English literature (at least, the only one that I can recall at this moment)?

    Mulling these matters, I soon discovered that I had failed to register some additional facts about the Capulet family that by rights ought to have set my heart all aflutter. Listen to the Nurse nattering on about her surrogate daughter Juliet.

    Even or odd, of all days in the year,

    Come Lamass Eve at night shall she be fourteen,.

    Susan and she — God rest all Christian souls–

    Were of an age.  Well, Susan is with God.

    She was too good for me.

    How could I have missed it?  Right at the heart of the Capulet family dynamics, and therefore at the heart of the play, is not just a dead infant and a dead daughter, but a dead Susan.  

    I have to say that this discovery put my brain into quite an epiphanic tizzy. How could I not have recognized the parallels between the Capulet family and my own?  And also, given my near-compulsive interest in the bonds and affiliations among Capulet wife and Nurse Angelica and Juliet — how could my conscious mind have ignored information that had so vexed my unconscious?  

    Alerted by this 1595 play to my own personal being, I set out to learn about the Replacement Child Syndrome (RCS) in what is charitably called the "literature" of psychoanalysis. While almost everything I read was either obtuse or so encrusted with obscurantist jargon as to be indecipherable, it was not hard to distill the gist. According to the experts, a replacement is always vulnerable and at hazard, especially so if the deceased infant has not been properly mourned, or– as they say — if there has not been "closure." Such a lad or lass goes through childhood constantly judged to be inferior to the idealized dead child. At worst, the love that is owed to the living child may be withdrawn and the replacement resented –  less loved, or even unloved; tolerated but undervalued.

    Had she lived, the dead girl, let us call her Susan, of infinite and golden potential, would certainly have grown up to be an exceedingly dutiful daughter as well as a concert cellist and a world-class figure-skater who when just two years out of Yale would have created a state-of-the-art gynecological clinic in an underserved village in Moldova. The other, the replacement — me — bawls and pukes, bites a neighbor child on the cheek, throws a colossal shitfit over a missing puzzle piece, shatters an heirloom lamp, steals comic books from the local candy store, wastes weeks moping in his bedroom, totals the DeSoto, and fails trigonometry. No wonder he's a disappointment.

    Well, maybe I'm laying it on with a trowel, but that's the general idea. 

    Now (this is still forty years ago) reconstituted as a Syndrome, I entered into my "poor poor pitiful me" period. I wasted kilowatts of energy and eons of precious time conceptualizing myself as a case of "wrongful birth." I shifted the blame for all my emotional foibles onto my parents, especially, to be honest, onto my mother. Right at her doorstep I laid low self-esteem, intermittent depression, fear of success, disabling shyness and even (this was a bit of stretch) procrastination. But it didn't wash and it didn't last. I'm ashamed and embarrassed that I allowed myself to attribute my personal problems to my willing but helpless mother. Not that there wasn't a smidgeon of truth to the RCS analysis. Freud says that "a man who has won the love of his mother is always a hero in his own eyes"; well, that kind of heroism wasn't going to be my lot. Of course I would have preferred to have enjoyed intimacy with a smiling supportive mother. Not what happened. But it was selfish and wrong of me to dwell on slights which were trivial compared to the traumas undergone by my parents.They, not me, were and are the heroes of this story.

    The bedrock is that the RCS, though real, was only of middling significance to me. It was devastating for Juliet, because it led directly to her suicide, and it may have served as a spur to Shakespeare, who became Shakespeare and, incidentally, fathered a daughter named Susannah. For me — well, it was it only important for the moment. I was a wounded child — no, not wounded, scratched –but not a disabled one. I was healthy enough to pursue if not a distinguished, certainly a respectable career, to become a reliable father, to meet my obligations to my extended family and community and to form a long-lasting marriage — and when that first marriage was cut short by disease and death, to achieve in old age a second mature and satisfying relationship. My parents must have done a great deal right, for I became what my father used to praise, without a shred of irony, as a "proper, tax-paying citizen." At this point in my octogenarian life, there's no room for that old self-pitying me; instead, there's great admiration and regard for both Lil and Manny, who endured. And who, in the successes of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, continue to thrive and prosper.  

    An addendum: in the psychological "literature", I found no mention, neither jot nor tittle, of the family configuration in which a male child replaces a female. No doubt such situations have by now been thoroughly researched by trained analysts, but not back then, when such a discussion might have been useful to me. The case of Juliet, where one girl replaces another, has been explored, but not Shakespeare's situation, or mine. I wonder sometimes whether the case of a boy succeeding a girl might lead to gender confusion, or as they now say, "fluidity" (if, for example, the parents unconsciously favor female traits in their son). I don't mean sexual practice, because I myself have never been (or wanted to be) anything other than a vanilla heterosexual. But I'm not even slightly macho; I am strongly domestic, comfortable with roles that have been traditionally reserved for women. I'm a gatherer, not a hunter; not the kind of person who goes to the fights with the guys or plays rugby and eventually, shunning the entrapment of wife or family, rides off on his horse into the sunset. I am much more likely to clean the bathroom, weed the garden, make some bad rhymes, play casino with the grandkids, and whip up a beef stew for dinner. 

    Another addendum: I always wondered why Lil and Manny decided to give me an awkward obscure Biblical name. They had no interest in anything remotely smacking of religion. So why choose the name of one of Job's false comforters?  What were they thinking?  During my pitiful period, I imagined that they chose the name because they were disappointed with me. We can't name him Susan, said their joint unconscious, so let's give him an ugly name the diminutive of which is female. That was my theory, but now I have another idea. Perhaps, in March of 1939, to resurrect an obscure biblical name was to give the middle finger to Hitler. If so, it was an act of defiance. I hope I'm right.

    And finally: my younger brother Jonathan, who was as equally improbable a replacement as I, was born in July of 1942, seven month after the Day of Infamy. He too entered in troubling times. Jon was an extremely handsome youth, regularly gushed over by friends and family — and slightly envied by me. One of his shaping childhood experiences is of my mother holding his head in her hands and saying, "You would have made a very beautiful girl."

    Jon too is a gatherer rather than a hunter, and when I'm in the kitchen slicing the potatoes and carrots for a big pot of beef stew, it's his excellent recipe that I follow.

  • Deer Dream

    In this one, I see two deer (it's not clear whether they're mule or white tail) lolling on the ridge line. They're semi-anthropomorphic — they look like deer, but they're sprawled on the ground as if in a reading position, each supporting his head with one hand (or hoof). I climb to where they are lying and join them, but the terrain is very steep and I tumble backward  head over heel a hundred or so feet into a swampy thicket. The deer follow me gingerly. There's a fadeout. Next thing I know, I'm lying on the back of one of the deer just like in the westerns when a dead man is carried back to town  horseback.  The deer take me home — to a log cabin, unfamiliar to me, in the woods. My friends unload me, and one of them says, "We should do something for the deer." I say, "OK, let's not shoot them."  End of dream. 

    Once again, my nighttime life is orders of magnitude more imaginative that my daytime existence.

  • Amnesia on Film: The Vow (2012)

    Amnesia movies are not absolutely fettered to reality, nor should they be. Hollywood amnesia, as has been frequently noted, is the most flexible and variable of illnesses. Nevertheless, The Vow (2012) breaks new ground in want of integrity. One reviewer called it a "heartless, soulless jumble," but that's letting it off easy.

    A young woman, played by perky Rachel McAdams, suffers an automobile accident and forgets the five years of her marriage to a young man, played by wooden mumbling Channing Tatum. The couple stumbles around for ninety bumbling minutes but eventually he wins her back in cliche date-movie, rom-com tearjerk fashion. Loss of memory, which in any close-to-reality situation would be psychologically troublesome if not utterly disabling, proves to be of no more consequence than the loss of a pair of shoes or eyeglasses. Simplistic, superficial, offensive.

    The film advertises itself as based on real events. Loosely based, I'd say, because in actual fact, there was an accident and she suffered loss of memory, but he had an affair, the marriage crumbled, and they divorced. But that was in another country, one in which real human beings might dwell.

    "No redeeming characteristics" says another reviewer. The film is especially not redeemed by expressionless Channing Tatum, who fumbles and garbles a higher percentage of his dialog than any actor in the history of Hollywood.

  • First Days at Cornell, September 1956.

    Early in September of 1956, I found my way from Flatbush to Hoboken and there boarded the old Lehigh Valley Railroad (the 'Leaky V') for the eight-hour ride to Ithaca. Surely I was the most naive and callow lad ever to set foot on the grounds of Cornell University. I was ignorant and provincial and I had never so much as visited a college campus. Although I lived a bicycle ride's distance from Brooklyn College, I had never been either enterprising or curious enough to ride by and take a gander. What I knew of higher education was what I had gleaned from 1940s black-and-white movies in which mature-looking but prankish fellows in raccoon coats smoked pipes and harmonized and made fun of the 'prexy' and of the bespectacled 'profs' and who were unworthy of the attractive coeds they pursued until just before the final fadeout when they reformed themselves enough to earn a kiss and a wink. Nor did I have the slightest idea what was signified by the wink.         

    I arrived at Cornell a few days before classes began. During those first days I had three separate mind-shattering experiences.

    The first: one morning, I took my newly-purchased map and set out on a long walk (probably to avoid one of those atavistic rah-rah events which Cornell favored and to which I was constitutionally averse). Sometime during the day's wandering I came across a road sign that read "CITY LIMITS." It was as if I had been struck by lightning. Until the moment that I encountered that sign, I had no idea that a city could have limits. Regular readers of this blague know that I spent my first seventeen years in the interior regions of darkest Brooklyn, a large borough in an even larger city from which there was no exit and certainly no "limit" — especially not while on foot. My family, my family of origin, was automobile-free and I myself had left the neighborhood precincts only a handful of times. Although unworldly, I was nevertheless capable of extrapolation. If it was possible to pass beyond the city limits, then perhaps it was also possible to re-negotiate other limitations that I had assumed were eternal or unalterable. I walked past the sign and transcended the city of Ithaca. I couldn't go very far because my map went blank, so after a hundred or so feet I hustled back — but for the first time in my life I had stepped over the line.   

    The next day: terra incognita of an entirely different order. I wandered into the McGraw Library and found myself in the periodical room. Until the moment that I entered that space, I was acquainted only with magazines that would be found in a barbershop or in a dentist's office — Life and Look and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post and, for profound intellectual stimulation, the National Geographic. And yet here was a room with an apparently limitless number of periodicals: Journal of Physical Chemistry, Journal of Theology, Journal of Metaphysics, Journal of Medieval Studies, Journal of Biblical Archeology. I had no idea that there were such periodicals nor did I know that there were such areas of knowledge. Was there in truth a subject called anthropology?  and various shades of anthropology — cultural, physical, linguistic? To say that I was wide-eyed does not do justice to width of my eyes. I spent hours leafing through these publications. I didn't understand much of what I read, but I did realize that there were things going on in the world for which P. S. 217 and EHHS and Flatbush had not prepared me. 

    A third and most miraculous occurrence. My assigned roommate arrived. His name was Harry Wallace Blair II. He was delivered to campus by his parents and his grandparents. I was introduced to his family, and, wonder of wonders, his grandparents spoke English. Coming from immigrant Brooklyn, I had never encountered grandparents who spoke English. Or imagined that there could be any such. Italian, yes. Polish, certainly. Yiddish, of course. But English, never. I was totally flabbergasted. I wonder whether Harry's grandparents noticed my repeated gasps.

    Oh, yes, I forgot one other event of the first Cornell week. Classes began. I enrolled for introductory chemistry — a big mistake. Chem, I quickly discovered, was not where my talents lay. It was a large lecture class — possibly 300 or 400 students. We all sat for a math screening test. Quite in error, I was assigned to a special advanced section of twenty students supposedly talented in mathematics. In the class were nineteen men and one woman. Can you guess, grandchildren and regular readers, who was that woman?

  • “What Wondrous Life is This I Lead”

    "Now for my life," the doctor* boasted, "it is a miracle of [eighty] years, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry." Sir Thomas didn't know the half of it; if his life was a miracle, then mine is a hundred times more so. Yesterday the miracles started first thing in the morning when I drove (I own a horseless carriage — a circumstance Sir T. couldn't possibly have imagined) to our spanking new hospital to have my innards inspected. The MRI doughnut deployed a couple of teslas worth of magnetism to spin my protons into images, a process which, though incomprehensible to me, is a heck of a lot less agonizing than extracting the information from my personal body with scalpel and stand-by sponge, and is significantly more informative than inspecting my urine, which is what a seventeenth-century doctor like Browne would have done. Later, I took a short walk to the local bank to take care of business and moved some, well, not exactly money but virtual or magic money from one account to another. Back home, I conversed by cell to NGP who was on the road to Virginia in a horseless carriage of his own. Inasmuch as he was behind the wheel, we skipped the face time feature. Nevertheless the long-distance mobile communication experience was plenty miraculous. The climax of my day was a walk to a neighborhood theater where Angela Hewitt blessed us with an exquisitely rendered performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations. She was in a zone; I was riveted. Is it more wondrous that Bach composed the Variations, that Ms. Hewitt performed them with such delicate power, or that the concert took place right around the corner, almost at my doorstep?  After the Bach, the day being now almost over, along came still another miraculous moment when I watched, supine in my own bed, in real time, the last minutes of an NBA game beamed in from Boston, Massachusetts, two thousand miles to the east, and almost at the Atlantic Ocean. It was an excellent game — a stunning win for the Brooklyn Nets, and an equally remarkable triumph for my pixel-rich widescreen TV. It was a long day and a varied one, and I was beat, so while snuggling a-bed with the lady friend (an intimacy that is not only a miracle but a piece of poetry to boot), I instructed Alexa to give us a little opera. Alexa complied and chose WQXR in NYC, and for a drowsy hour we were grateful operavores.

    No question but that my day was comprised of a series of miracles, each one more incredible than the other.

    Nor do I even bother to tally daily miracles so commonplace that we cease to notice them: water in (both cold and hot) and waste out, electricity, central heating and A/C, refrigeration, natural gas to cook by, big bright cheerful windows, etc.

    "What wondrous life is this I lead."

    *Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, first published 1644.

  • Written for my Grandchildren

    Dear T, O, E, L, L, C, and A:

    A friend told us that when she entered Pomona College in 1961, it was the custom that all the newly arriving women ("co-eds" they were called in those dark days) were "measured" by the sophomore men. She said that the women were lined up and their measurements (height, weight, bust, waist, hips) taken and announced to the assembled spectators. This shameful blast from the past shocked and embarrassed me.

    I'm five years older than our friend, but I'm glad to say that I never heard of any remotely similar goings-on at the college I attended. (Maybe such things happened in the backward, benighted frat clubs, but surely, I hope hope hope, not in my part of the campus). In fact, I was a bit skeptical of our friend's story — it being so grotesque — so I searched a Pomona alumni website for confirmation and found this picture. I'm sorry to say that the evidence is incontrovertible.     

    image from voices.pomona.edu

    Tale of the tape, 1961.

    Crew-cut boy is smiling, and I think I understand why. He's almost touching shirtwaist girl's breasts. In those pre-Vietnam years, female virginity was still a mystical virtue, mechanical contraception (there were no pills) was near-impossible to obtain and prone to failure, pregnancy before marriage was a life-shattering disgrace, and abortion was illegal and sometimes fatal. It might be that taking the measure of the young lady's bosom was the sexual pinnacle of crew-cut boy's four years in college. Nevertheless, I'm puzzled that shirtwaist girl is so amenable to the taping. Is she actually smiling? Doesn't she realize that she's participating in an absurd demeaning dehumanizing rite? 

    I asked our Pomona friend how she dealt with the ritual. "Well," she said, "here's what I did. I went downtown and bought a large size inflatable bra. I put it on and blew it up to monumental proportions. I brought a pin to the ceremony. I planned to pop the bra just as I was being measured, but the thing was so tough it didn't deflate as planned. I wish it had. That was my protest. I should have done more. It was difficult to buck tradition. When things are customary, taken for granted, it takes a lot of strength to go against the system even when you know it's wrong." 

    Here's another story, young 'uns, from the same era. In 1960, your grandmother, AGP, began teaching mathematics in Newton, Massachusetts. Her salary was $4200 a year, but if she had been a man, it would have been $4300. The district had two salary scales, one for men and one for women. I remember studying a printed schedule that had one column labelled M and one labeled F. The difference between M and F was small, but it increased with every year of experience. However small or large the discrepancy, it was still an insult and an injustice, designed as much to assert superiority and inferiority as to make an economic difference.

    Both AGP and I knew it was wrong, but I'm embarrassed to say that we did not protest. Before "equal pay for equal work," it was taken for granted that Fs would be paid less than Ms. Why didn't we argue, agitate, organize?  Because we were paralyzed, I think, by the powerful forces of custom and convention. 

    I wonder about crew-cut boy. Was he forever locked into 1960 attitudes or did he eventually come to enlightenment? What sort of relations did he establish with mature women? And did he, perhaps, have a daughter? Would he have advised her to attend Pomona College, and if he did so, did he try to ascertain whether first-year female students were still being measured?

    I wonder also about the abuses in our society that we notice but tolerate because they are so embedded in the culture. And even more so, by the abuses we don't notice but will be clearly apparent in a generation or two. Which of today's events will look as antiquated and rearward in fifty years as that Pomona ritual?

  • Big Bangs

    Even though the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, more or less, the era of star formation is nearly complete. Because our universe expands so rapidly, the effects of gravity continue to lessen and therefore matter will soon cease to clump. Existing stars and galaxies will become more and more isolated. In a hundred billion years, the universe will be a thousand times larger than it is now. After a trillion years, all the stars will have burnt themselves out, except for slow-burning, feeble red dwarfs. In a hundred trillion years the Degenerate Era arrives and the universe will be populated only by white dwarfs and brown dwarfs, along with neutron stars and black holes, all fainter and fainter with time. It will all be dark, except when a rare supernova erupts. After 1034 years, atoms themselves will decay into protons and neutrons. In 1040 years, all of what we think of as matter will have become photons and leptons. Later, black holes themselves will leak photons and disappear. It's the Dark Era: just random electrons and positrons that rarely encounter each other –  an inactive universe that suffers from Heat Death. It's all dark, dead, and cold. This sorry state will continue for all eternity.

    it's a gloomy scenario, but I don't believe it. It doesn't make sense. And it doesn't account for Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which no one knows anything about except that they must exist perhaps in the form of neutrinos. Most physicists seem to believe that the visible, palpable universe, which contains the galaxies and the stars and the planets and you and me, is only about 6% of the whole kit and kaboodle. 

    My own theory, unsupported by observation, evidence,  or calculation, is that the universe will continue to expand for billions of years, and then Dark Matter will kick in, gravity will plump up and spring to new life, and the universe will start to contract. A few thousand billion years further on and here comes the Big Crunch, when all matter will contract to a point and then, mirabile dictu, another Big Bang and it's off to the races. Expand. Wait a few thousand trillion years. Contract. More years — expand. Contract. Expand. Again and again. My universe pulses, for all eternity. Et saecula saeculorum; in aeternum et ultra. No beginning, no end.

    The scientific consensus universe is this: start with the Big Bang, end with the eternal Dark Era. It's one-way ticket. My universe is round-trip. Multiple, infinite round-trips. The astronomers have the data and the numbers and theory on their side, but they can't explain how it all happened, or why? Why the Big Bang? What was going on before all the Banging began? They don't have a glimmer of an idea, not a clue; in fact, they punt and claim that it's impossible to know what happened in the first few fractions of seconds. But my universe has no start and no stop. It just is.

    Neither their theory nor mine answers the implicit question, which some might call philosophical or theological: "why is there something rather than nothing?" But my idea has the advantage in that it defers that question indefinitely. "What happened at the Big Bang? "Well, what happened is what always happens at Big Bangs." 

    (Information about the end of the universe is adapted from David J. Eicher, The New Cosmos (Cambridge University Press, 2015), an excellent introduction that is written so lucidly that I understood maybe 60% to 70% of the whole. Well, perhaps a little less. It's not Eicher's fault if I've gotten anything wrong.)

  • Even More Wisdom

     

    milkyway Photo by martin marthadinata -- National Geographic Your Shot

    I have the hardest time remembering the number of stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Is it 300 million or 300 billion?  Either number is so far out of my ken, so far beyond my ability to grasp, that it won't stick in my head. Moreover, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. But now I've checked once again — and it's 300 billion stars (ballpark –  not an exact door-to-door census). That's three thousand millions of stars. Also, it's 130,000 light years from one side of the galaxy across to the center (the radius). The mass of our galaxy is 1.5 trillion solar masses. Does that figure include or exclude Dark Matter? I don't know. 

    That's just the start. The full story is even more astonishing still. In addition to the Milky Way, there are approximately 34 billion galaxies such as ours in the universe. Or there used to be until a few years ago; the most recent estimate is 100 billion galaxies. From my standpoint, here on what Shakespeare naively called "the sure and firm-set Earth" — a smallish planet revolving around the lucky old sun in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way — whether there are 34 billion or 100 billion galaxies out there doesn't much change the situation. In a nutshell: it's big; we're little.

    Even seventy years ago, when I was a boy just starting to learn about the stars, the universe was smaller and simpler. No one told me, because no one knew, about the Big Bang, about star formation, about black holes and supermassive black holes, standard candles, quasars, exoplanets, etc. Knowledge is expanding as rapidly as the universe; it's only a few centuries ago that Galileo was sent to his room for proving that Earth wasn't a still point at the center of the world. "Eppure, si muove."

    Actually, I'm glad that Copernicus and Galileo and Newton de-centered the universe. I rather prefer being insignificant. Standing at the center of the universe — well, it was too much responsibility, too much pressure. It's mighty consoling to be trivial. It helps to put our daily woes in perspective.

    Is it more staggering that the universe is so ridiculously immense or that members of our species have had the smarts to figure it out. Not only the engineering skills to devise telescopes and spacecrafts to gather the data, but the brains to think abstractly and mathematically. And the courage to do so. We're an accomplished and admirable species when we're not torturing and killing each other for no particular reason. I'm proud of us, some of the time.

    When my father was the age I am now, he said to me, "As far as I can figure, I'm just a link in a long chain going from nowhere to nowhere." He was exactly on target. But we should also remember that the chain of which he spoke includes Bach and Rembrandt and Einstein. And you and me  And as long as I remain a link in that chain, I intend to make the most of my insignificant existence — the only one I have.

    "That which we are, we are."

  • Brief But Revealing Real Life Conversation

    Dr. M.:  "I grew a mustache but shaved it off. It made me look like my own elderly uncle."

    Old Friend:  "I keep my mustache because when I shave it off I look like my grandmother."

  • Dreaming Noirly

    I must be watching too many 1940-50s film noirs. They're infiltrating my dreams. 

    Last night, in my very own bedroom, I hosted a noir festival. Fragments of a more intricate dream are all I can remember now, but the bits my memory retained were mighty vivid. The dream featured an attractive young couple. He's handsome in a Barry Sullivan way but unidentifiable; she's delicate, like Coleen Gray in Kiss of Death (1947) or possibly like fragile young Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil (1957). Some "mugs" want these young folks iced (the dream didn't say why) and they want it done in the most painful possible manner. The scene then cut to a rickety wood-framed house which replicated the building in the dude ranch run by Mercedes McCambridge in Lightning Strikes Twice (1951).The goons break in and sadistically slash the guy's throat and handcuff the girl to a post, then set the house on fire (which copied the ending of Kiss Me, Deadly [1955]). Next thing I knew, the young lady was alive (the dream didn't say how she escaped the flames) and was being recruited and disguised by a trio of FBI or police officers. Not plastic surgery, just makeup and a change of costume. The plan was for her to go underground to identify and expose the hoodlums (a plot device common to numberless noirs).

    When I awoke, I was impressed by the imaginative work of my dreamatorium. "Not a bad plot," I said to myself. "Not brilliant, but original enough to serve. Add a car chase, a blonde songstress, a natty but corrupt district attorney, a crusading newspaperman, some heavies (Moroni Olsen and Mike Mazurki, perhaps), a heist gone bad, a skinny stoolie with a toothpick in his mouth, and a little amnesia, and you've got yourself a movie."

    I should add that this dream came to me in high contrast black-and-white. Excellent camera work. Well-directed. Think Phil Karlson or Ida Lupino. With gowns by Orry-Kelly.

  • McDonald Avenue Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, 1953-1956

    For all its fabled color, life in 40s and 50s Flatbush was extraordinarily provincial. In terms of sophistication, it might just has well been central Nebraska or U. P. Michigan. First generation working-class Brooklynites were simply too busy making ends meet to acknowledge that there was a great world outside. Although "The City" — i.e. flush upscale Manhattan — was just a 30 minute subway ride away, trust me, no tourists ever made it to our isolated grimy neighborhood.

    In the middle 50s, when I was a pupil at Flatbush's semi-famous Erasmus Hall High School, I worked after school shelving books in the McDonald Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I worked two or three days a week from 3 pm to 6 pm and earned seventy-five cents large an hour. A frugal young fellow (cheap as dirt, some say), I saved every penny, and I was proud to be able to pay my first year's Cornell tuition ($900). It was a good job for me; I handled a lot of books and because I was an omnivorous reader and an autodidact by nature, I borrowed and chewed over many a volume that I wouldn't otherwise have encountered. Plus I was able to sneak peeks at the contents of the 612.6 shelves.

    It was at the McDonald library, which was barely more than a storefront, that I experienced the first glimmer of an idea that there might be a world elsewhere. 

    The library staff was organized hierarchically. At the very bottom were the part-time shelvers like myself. Masters of the Dewey Decimal System, we had no greater qualification than the ability to remember the order of the letters in the alphabet. A long step up were the clerks, who checked books out and in, issued library cards, and collected fines. Clerks, like shelvers, were native to the neighborhood. But then there was the "professional staff" — five people with degrees in "library science" who answered inquiries at the reference desk, advised borrowers, and purchased books. The "pros" were not from the neighborhood; they lived across the river In Manhattan and took the elevated Culver Line to the stop at Ditmas, and they intrigued me.

    Miss Owen — Alice Owen — head librarian, imbued with gloom, was an extremely small, thin, clipped, austere woman with an unBrooklynish Maine or northern New England accent. Archetype of the proper maiden lady — sexless in my view, but then, as I learned later, who can ever tell?  Miss Owen was, how shall I say this respectfully, detail-oriented. There was Miss Warren, from South Dakota, a fan of Senator McCarthy, who explained to me that the world's brown and black people had benefited enormously from colonialism. Exotic Mr. O'Shea, obviously gay (but of course I didn't recognized it at the time) from North Carolina, a young man with more hip sway than Miss America and who actually — hard to believe — referred to our borrowers of color as "jungle bunnies." I was stunned and horrified. Miss Kyvelos, whose parents were Greek fishermen and who was as round and warm as Miss Owen wasn't.

    And then, another kettle of fish entirely, Bob Reisner, a 30ish bearded Greenwich Village writer (not an entirely successful one, or he wouldn't have been working at the library) who hung with jazz musicians and who was writing a biography of Charlie Parker. He was a type entirely new to me — skeptical, disrespectful, "anti-establishment." Borderline hipster. In strong contrast to the McDonald convention, his demeanor and language were lecherous, and he was more frank about his desires than anyone I knew, though whether his lusts and triumphs were real or imaginary I don't know. He was compiling a book called "Show me the Good Parts" — a catalog of the sex scenes in contemporary novels. Pornographically speaking, he was way in advance of his time. 

    On the whole, the McDonald library was quite an eye-opener for provincial me. I stayed on through the summer of 1956, then headed for Ithaca, where more surprises awaited.

    February 10. Thinking over what I've written, I can now correct my initial memory. Miss Owen wasn't the head of the library. That position was held by Miss Boies. Miss Owen was a figure of authority because she was in charge of the part-time shelvers like myself. Miss Boies was also a librarian who came to us directly from central casting by way of Ohio. At some point, she retired and was replaced by much younger Mrs. Gerstner, who contracted cancer and died only a few months after her arrival. I clearly remember her valedictory words to me, "Get the most out of life."

    And also, I wonder why Mrs. Gerstner and Bob Reisner took the time to talk to me. I had nothing to offer them. Is it possible that they saw me as a youth of promise. If so, they were over-optimistic.

  • ‘Hang there like fruit”

    Last night we watched "The Man Who Cheated Himself"(1950), a B+ noir/murder mystery/police procedural with Lee J. Cobb as a detective who falls for a rich homicidal dame and gets himself into a lot of predictable hot water. In the film, Cobb has a younger brother, a straight-arrow, played by John Dall, an actor well-remembered for his leading role in Hitchcock's creepy "Rope"(1948).
     
    Related image
     
    That's John Dall on the right with a young Lee J. Cobb romancing Jane Wyatt in the foreground.
     
    Afterward, we looked up John Dall in Wik and with mouths agape learned (verbatim quotation coming up here) that Dall "liked to be tied upside down to trees in Laurel Canyon in the middle of the night. He liked to hang upside down naked until morning. Once a week, he wanted this." Improbable, yes, but probably true, because it's beyond ordinary human imagination to invent such a thing. 
     
    As far as I'm concerned and naif as I may be to "alternative sexual practices," it's one thing to fantasize about hanging naked tied to a tree upside down until dawn in Laurel Canyon (I'm sure we've all done so), but to move from theory to practice  — now that is a challenge.
     
    Serious questions: Did Dall like to hang from a branch of a tree, or did he like to be tied to the trunk of a tree? In either case, he'd require assistance — at least two strong men, I'd imagine. Did they wait, motor running in the taxi, while he hung, or did they hang out at some all night coffee spot and then come back at dawn to untie him. And another question — what kind of tree?  Much of Laurel Canyon is merely sage or chaparral, but there are trees on the lower riparian slopes. What's the best tree to hang from until dawn? Willows, unless they're black willows, are too flimsy, but live oak, California sycamore, and Fremont's cottonwood might be hefty enough to bear the load. Did John Dall have a favorite tree to whom he was loyal, or was he arboreally promiscuous?
     
    And also — is once a week too many, or too few, or just the right number of times to hang upside-down naked from a tree through the night?

  • Frequentatives Perplex Me

    Frequentatives perplex me. Even on good days, I can't tell a frequentative from an iterative or what used to be called a present progressive or even from a simple present that expresses a continuing action, such as "he walks to work" — in the sense that he walks every day or many days, not just once. So instead of struggling with definition and nomenclature, I'll confine these paragraphs to old-fashioned frequentatives formed in the traditional way — by the addition of an "-er" or "-le" suffix.

    "Wrestle" is a gold star, certified frequentative. The verb "wrest" means "to grab" or "to snatch. The verb "wrestle" implies that the grabbing or snatching does not occur in one unique instance, but continues over a stretch of time. Wrestle is therefore the frequentative of wrest. In the English language, such frequentatives were once upon a time regularly produced. No longer, apparently; more's the pity. Frequentative productivity has hit rock bottom.

    Frequentatives in "-er" are not always obvious, inasmuch as the "-er-" suffix is also used for agency and for comparison. But frequentatives do follow a pattern: blab yields blabber; gleam yields glimmer; climb, clamber; float, flutter; put, putter; slide, slither.

    "-le" frequentatives are more common and more varied. Consider the relation between "fond" and "fondle". '"Fond" meant something like "to be in love, to dote." Somewhere before its first appearance in print in 1796, fond acquired an -le to become "fondle" = caress.  (Fondle in its turn generated "fondlesome" — a word which went from neologism to obsolete in an 18th century flash, and whose extinction is much to be regretted. Let's revive "fondlesome".) 

    Here's a short list of intriguing -le frequentatives: crumb, crumble; drip, dribble; nose, nuzzle; prick, prickle; daze, dazzle; joust, jostle; prate, prattle; spark, sparkle; spit, spatter; stride, straddle; suck, suckle. Not all of these frequentatives are as obvious as wrest-wrestle and some cases must be confirmed with the help of a good etymological dictionary.

    Frequentatives have a long history. Why can't they make a comeback? Take a verb such as "jump." Doesn't English need "jumple," a word that would accurately describe the deportment of my twin 4-year-old grandsons. They don't jump — they jumple. Sometimes they leaple. Other useful suggestions: hit, hittle; throw, throwel; run, runnle; hop, hopple. Scream, scrimmle. The possibilities, obviously, are endless.

    The time has come for a Frequentative Renaissance. 

  • Amnesia on Film: Unknown (2011)

    Just when you think that the movie industry has run the amnesia well bone dry, along comes still another wild riff on the subject of forgetfulness. What a great disease for screenwriters! a disease that keeps on giving — and with no end in sight.

    This time, Dr. Martin Harris, ostensibly a biotechnologist but in reality a professional assassin, is involved in an automobile accident. Harris wakes up in the hospital but of course without memory. He comes to believe that he's actually the scientist he's pretending to be — and so do the amnesia-naive among the audience. (I'm giving away the gimmick, but it doesn't matter because no one is going to see this movie ever again. No audience, therefore no spoiler.

    Implausible, derivative, threadbare. No cliche left unborrowed: two separate car chases, a coma, a mysterious new girlfriend, double agents, an international assassination syndicate, a sadistic hit man, doctored photos, phony passports, suspenseful countdown to the explosion of the terrorist bomb, etc. The usual stuff.

    On the other hand: Unknown is slick, expensive, well acted, well paced; well photographed,

    It's a quick fix for those who enjoy "thrillers." Bad medicine for those who prefer psychological credibility. Candy for connoisseurs of the infinite variety of movie amnesia.

    Unknown Poster.jpg

    By the way, what's happened to Liam Neeson's nose?  It's become Durante-esque. Cyranoid,

  • Sleep, difficulty with

    The hardest part of my day is the night. Sleep does not come easy — has never come easy. I regularly wake at 2:00 am, and stay awake for two or three hours. I use this time to fret about the state of the Earth (precarious), the state of the nation (doomed), and whether that new black spot on my left ankle will lead to agonizing death, or perhaps (best case scenario) merely to amputation at the hip. I then sleep fitfully until dawn, the last hours of the night crowded with grotesque, humiliating nightmares, worse by a long shot than anything Gregor Samsa could possibly imagine.

    Last night, up again, I experienced a moment of clarity — a revelation, an epiphany. Here it comes:   

    My mattress is just the right degree of firmness — I sleep neither on the hard earth nor on a gunny sack of corn husks. My blankets are soft Egyptian cotton — not leaves or newspapers. I rest my head on an authentic goose-down pillow. There are no rats scrabbling under my bed, no poisonous spiders descending from the ceiling, no lions roaring outside the door. No bedbugs or parasites or mosquitoes or scorpions. I'm dry and warm. The temperature of my bedroom is well-regulated: forced air heat in the winter, cooling breezes or air conditioning in the summer. I'm well fed, not kept awake by gnawing hunger. No noxious smells or hideous shrieks. No pains, cramps, headaches, or wounds. 

    I know that my situation is luxurious and is certainly superior to all of my ancestors and to 99% of the human beings on the planet,

    I am thankful that I have nothing whatever to grumble at, but I feel that I'm unappreciative. To lie awake as I do, not sleeping, is to scorn society's gifts. How my forebears would have reveled in my taken-for-granted comforts!

    No question but that I should be much more grateful. 

    "Lack of gratitude" will be the principal worry during tonight's insomnia. 

  • Slavery in Brooklyn, Oh No!

    Of all human institutions, slavery must be the most loathsome and soul-distorting (although wars, genocides, massacres, pogroms, and wrongful executions are certainly contenders for worst of worst). 

    It's easy to think that slavery is something ancient and foreign. Not something to concern ourselves about — not part our life, nor my life. And yet American slavery was only eighty years into the past — the blink of an eye — when I was growing up in the 1940s in Flatbush. At P.S 217 or at Erasmus Hall, neither our textbooks nor our teachers made much of its recency. Slavery was not our past; not here, not in Flatbush. It was a crime of the distant South — of Mississippi and Alabama, long ago. In the land of cotton, not the land of Coney Island and Jackie Robinson. Slavery was distant chronologically and geographically.  

    What an unpleasant revelation, then, to encounter the story of Flatbush slavery in Thomas J. Campanella's painstaking and eloquent history, Brooklyn, The Once and Future City (Princeton, 2019).

    The facts: "slavery was an essential element of New York life in the 17th and 18th centuries." "Only Charleston, South Carolina surpassed New York (i.e. Manhattan) in the number of enslaved residents." Campanella reports that there was "no place in New York that had more slaves per capita than Kings county, where one in three residents was in bonded servitude." One in three? In my neighborhood?  How could we not have known this?  How have we remained oblivious?

    Slavery, I now learn, was especially established in "Dutch towns like New Utrecht, where 75 percent of white households owned slaves." And also "in Midwout [our Midwood] where African-Americans constituted 41 percent of the population in 1790."  

    In 1790, the population of the town of Flatbush — my Flatbush — included 378 enslaved people, 12 free black people, and 551 white people – 75% of whom were slaveholders.The farmers of Brooklyn "formed a Southern planter class in miniature." 

    And it was the farmlands of Brooklyn — Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, and New Utrecht — that supplied Manhattan with grain and fruits and vegetables raised with slave labor. No slaves, no Brooklyn; no Brooklyn, no Big Apple.

    In 1799, the New York state legislature passed the Gradual Manumission Act: all children born of slave women after July 4 were to be free though they must remain indentured to their masters until the age of twenty-five for women and 28 for men. Though it seems a weak and toothless compromise, the new laws led to the rapid decline of slavery. In 1827, one hundred and ninety-three years ago, slavery was declared illegal in New York. (Vermont, to its credit, had abolished slavery two generations before, in 1777).

    Here's a Brooklyn bill of sale for "one certain neger girl called Anna" to Jan Lefferts for thirty-eight pounds. Her owner, Gilleyam Cornel, was illiterate. He signed with "his mark."

    lefferts_billofsale_may_21_1751

    From what I've learned in the past about the history of Brooklyn, and with these revelations, it's undeniable that the haunts of my childhood (East 9 Street, P. S. 217, St. Rose of Lima, Newkirk Station), were not very long ago farmed with slave labor. It's horrible and disillusioning, but it must be acknowledged.

  • “I could have been a better prairie dog”

    In a lifetime with pen in hand  or with fingers at the typewriter (or, latterly, at the word processor), I've written a lot of bad sentences and a handful of good ones. But last week, I composed my absolute best sentence ever. It's pure Olympic gold; a bottom-of-the-ninth walk-off bases-loaded HR; a sensational buzzer-beater. Deathless prose.

    Let us pause to savor this extraordinary sentence. "I could have been a better prairie dog." 

    Aficionados of Vivian de St. Vrain (fit audience, though few) will remember that this mellifluous sentence appeared just a few days ago, right here. You can appreciate it in context, if you will, but heck, the sentence stands alone.

    It is beautiful in itself but one can only marvel at its delicate but meaningful irony. Moreover, (bonus) it's near-perfect iambic pentameter.

    It's become, for me, a mantra of sorts. Whenever I start to bemoan my fate, or deplore my state, or bother myself over some missed opportunity or long-ago failure, I mumble, "I could have been a better prairie dog."  And I immediately regain perspective. So it's a sentence that's utile as well as dulce – as useful as it is sweet. Classic. 

    I'm absolutely confident that "I could have been a better prairie dog" will help me through episodes of middle-of-the-night self-laceration. In fact, it's working just as I write this.

  • Me and Critters

    An old friend reminds me that I once kept a cat as a pet. I had forgotten.

    Here's the story. There was a cat and I was overfond of her. We left the cat with a friend when we went on a three-week vacation. She refused to eat and starved to death before we returned. I've never owned another animal since. Too much responsibility. 

    Besides, I was a city boy who had lived a concrete and chain-link-fence childhood. No room for animals except maybe squirrels and pigeons. But because I've owned some rural land in Vermont since the 1960s, a surprising number of critters have passed through my life, though I've never owned a single one of them. Some have made an impression.

    There was the pair of geese, Brady and Lady, who liked to peck at the backs of my knees and also liked to frighten the children. I once watched my older son (when he was a small boy) mount a chair and in revenge leak all over Brady, who was sunbathing. A primitive assertion of dominance. There were chickens, many of them. I enjoyed the eggs but I was repelled by chicken sexual mores. And then the ducks. I remember once saying "Those ducks (there was mother and a dozen or so ducklings) are so loud they could be right in the kitchen." And they were. The heifers, July and September; I was very fond of September. I loved the way she cleaned her nostrils with her long tongue. Jackson the runaway horse. A nameless piglet, whom we boarded one summer, and whom the kids tried to teach to play soccer with his nose. Despite being assiduously tutored, he never improved. Rabbits, many of them; pets, not food. The next-door-neighbor's horses, all noble Morgans, both chestnuts and bays, all pastured on our fields: Gillian, the lead mare, Liz a wayward rule-bender; Gabe, an ex-boy, very friendly; Harmony, beautiful as a foal, who liked to look in my pockets for apples. Also in the back pasture: sheep, Scottish Blackfaces, many of them but no more than twenty at a time, with none of whom I ever established a proper one-on-one relationship. Occasionally I helped to track down a stray, but that's the extent of it. Goats, my favorites, with personality to spare — dwarf Nigerians mostly. Excellent pets, excellent playmates for the grandchildren. The glamorous mysterious rooster who came out of the woods, adopted us, and liked to  tom-peep into our bedroom. And then these last few years, the miniature donkeys, Big Joe and Little Joe, who winter in Connecticut and whom members of the family love for their beauty and the music of their braying. 

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