WriteOutLoud

"Excuse me,"

pipes the little voice behind me.  "Could you help me, please?"

I stop sorting books on the cart, turn around and whisper, "Sure!" while keeping a wary eye on the Reference Desk lest Mr. PotatoHead catch me actually helping a patron.  We pages are supposed to stick to the heavy lifting and refer all requests for assistance to the Reference Librarians, who have college degrees! in Library Science!  So I proceed at my own risk, here.

"Do you work here?" a sharper, grownup voice asks.  The mother.

"Yes!  Yes, I do!  I just forgot to put my nametag on today, is all.  I work here!  How can I help?"

Her adorable 12-year-old daughter, all long limbs and flashing braces, launches her request:  "I'm doing this science project?  It's about some man said, I think his name is Larry Summers--"

"--the President of Harvard--" I put in.  I think I know where we're headed.

"--yeah, and he said girls aren't as good as boys at math--"

We're there!

"--which I think is wrong because I love math and I'm really good at it and I don't really like reading stories all that much like girls are supposed to [pulls a face], I just like to solve problems, so do you know any articles or books or anything that could help me?"

"You bet!  Check the New York Times online.  And Google 'Larry Summers' and see what you get.  Then there's this other man, Howard Gardner, who has written some books about the different ways people learn--you could see if he has anything to say about boys and girls and math and so on."

"OK!  Thanks!"  She's already halfway across the room, headed for the internet access area.  Mom beams.  I beam back. 

Then I notice the small boy behind her, peeking around at me.  "So hey, Buster," I say, "what are you working on?"

"I'm not sure yet.  I think maybe, why girls throw . . . like girls."

Mom:  "Notice a trend here?"

"Yeah, maybe!"  Turning to boy, "Except I don't throw like a girl, so where do I fit into your research?"

He thinks.  Then, "Well, you're not a girl, you're a lady."

"A woman," his mother cautions. 

I ignore her.  "Oh.  Right.  Well then, in that case, do you think throwing-like-a-girl is something girls grow out of?"

He's thinking about this when his sister rushes up to us--"LOOK WHAT I FOUND!"  Her arms are loaded:  all of Howard Gardner plus something called Why Boys and Girls Learn Differently.  She's so excited, she's almost shouting.  "I bet I can find something in here, don't you think?"

"Definitely.  I definitely do.  And I'll get you something else."  I go to the computer, pull up my own email, and print out the NYTimes articles my friend Julia sent me last week (deleting her comment, "More on Summers' latest fuck-up").  I am very, very careful to hand them to the mother first.  She approves.

And then, "Ma'am?" her daughter asks, "would you like to be in my survey?"

"Sure!  What do I have to do?"

"Just some math problems.  Some easy ones, and then some harder ones."

! ! ! !  "Oh geez, Kiddo, I don't know.  I don't think I'm who you want for this research, I may be dyslexic with numbers, I'm really--"  Her face falls.  "OK, sure, I'll do it.  Sure."  And I give her my card.  And hope the hard problems aren't too hard.  For me.  But I know they will be. <sigh>

Million Dollar Baby

My back never looked quite that good, but sorta!  (Bush the First was enthroned at the time.) 

Not from boxing, though.  I've never liked fisticuffs, think it's beastly, the opposite of wrestling, which is elegant.

But it was Friday afternoon, my liberry shift over, LOML away on binness, so I made for the multiplex, determined to see whatever was on next, unless it was stupid.  Million Dollar Baby beat Sideways by five minutes.

Until Unforgiven, I had no use for Eastwood whatsoever, having accidentally had to watch The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly twice, just to be polite to somebody, I forget who(m), back in 1967; scarred me for life.  But I loved Unforgiven (though I've never been able to watch the first scene), and despite plotholes you could ride a horse through, Mystic River was a pleasure, thanks to Sean Penn.

Same problem here (what did he do to alienate his daughter? where is she? where's her mother?  what's with the Gaelic and the mediocre Yeats?), and it's slowww getting off the ground.  I sighed, flipped up the armrests for three seats in both directions, made a pillow out of my jacket and purse, and settled in for what I suspected would become a nap.  Even trashed-out, Hilary Swank looks her last name, very Saks 5th Avenue rather than WalMart, which her character's supposed to be.  And she punches like a girl and oh, ho-hum.

Which is, of course, exactly what Eastwood wants us to think, so he can bring us back to Square One and then take us to the title fight and make us believe it.  His character actually says it:  "Sometimes in order to throw a punch, you have to step back."  Hm.  Food for thought, there.

I never forgot I was watching a movie, unfortunately (mostly thanks to aforementioned plotholes), but Hilary Swank was absolutely riveting.  When she started getting her footwork together, I sat up.  And stayed up.  The idea of women actually slugging it out suddenly seemed plausible, and I got absorbed in the fight scenes like I never imagined I could.  I could well imagine throwing punches like that, but I couldn't imagine taking them, so I guess that was a problem.  The end was just plain maudlin, which annoyed me.  But " Sometimes in order to throw a punch, you have to step back" still has my mind going in good ways.  Which is all anyone can hope for from a Hollywood movie, I guess.

Windfall: Back in the Saddle Again?

Thanks to the tireless efforts of a dear friend and former student, suddenly I'm not so sure the fat lady has sung, after all.

Starting next week, for seven consecutive Friday afternoons, three hours a pop, I will be giving a course tentatively called "Splashing Around in Shakespeare" to 15 teenagers at a fine-arts boarding school.  "They will meet you at your intellectual level," the department head predicts.  Makes me a little nervous; I haven't been in a whole roomful of really smart kids who actually want to learn since 1997.  Do I still have my chops?  I wonder.

One good thing:  these kids and I operate from the same side of our brains (I can never remember whether it's right or left).  They are painters, singers, musicians, actors, and writers; they range in age from 14 to 18.  They are away from home, sometimes halfway around the world.  Their hair is purple/green/blue/pink, their eyebrows are pierced, their tattoos glow in the dark--they are among the most Intense People Their Age, already known for its intensity.  And for its acuteness:  all teens' BS detectors are calibrated to an eyelash.  You only get one chance, and you get it in the first three minutes of the first class.

"Not too much structure," the dept head advises.  "It's Friday afternoon, after all.  Don't overdo the syllabus thing.  Just go with your gut."  O music to my ears!  We'll do Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing.  We'll read them, we'll watch them (on a wall-sized screen) and we'll tawk a lot, write some.  I can hardly wait.

If it's half as much fun as Story Time at the liberry--where the oldest person is three, many others are in diapers, and nobody can read--I'll be perfectly satisfied.

A Wonder-full Day

Up till the end of the 19th century, the word "wonderful" had real meaning.  It was about being taken by surprise, finding yourself gobsmacked in the middle of the village market, or wherever.  In literature, you'd usually see it in the most pedestrian, lytotic context:  "It is not wonderful that . . . [something something something]" meaning "It's no surprise that [whatever] is true," however surprising [whatever] might seem.  Wonder was the occasion for real surprise, back then.  It was a thrill.

So in that sense, today was wonder-full.  The library was a laugh a minute, from the 7-month-old with the full diapers who knocked over a whole shelf of DVDs in the children's room in the process of taking his first steps!--his mama wept while I scooped up Barney, the Muppets, and Thomas the Train--to the priest with a pickup truck full of used books from Our Lady of Soledad church library (alas, all in English!)--to the wacko (?) squillionaire benefactor who strode into the circulation workroom to proclaim that he has just moved house, he has 5000+ books, and he needs somebody to organize and catalogue them. 

All the workroom women fell silent, then turned to me.  Some even gestured in my direction.  I was so busy falling all over myself getting to this opportunity that I literally did fall all over myself:  I heard him out of the corner of my ear as I was shelving videos, spun around, lurched in his direction, and tripped over a book cart.  "Who is this?" Daddy Warbucks wondered aloud, watching them help me up.  "Ask her," said my supervisor.

He took me aside.  We went into the computer room.  We shut the door.  He started talking. 

Twenty minutes later, he was still talking--lecturing me on fundamental history, metaphysics and philosophy while I squirmed and rolled my eyes, wishing I'd never let on who I am (or used to be), even a little bit.  He wasn't stupid, just so desperate to be heard that all his social skills collapsed at once.  And he had a bad case of retro gender bias: "My ex was a flight attendant, gorgeous, but her nose was a little . . . um, funny," to which I responded, "Oh picky picky!"

My supervisor strolled by, fluttered her fingers and made a little haha face at me through the glass.  Eventually, after telling our "benefactor" I would be glad to organize and catalogue his library for $80/hour, I managed to extricate myself.

Back in the workroom, I splattered, "Who IS that guy?  What was THAT all about?"  And all my co-workers laughed (but not meanly).  "We just pass him around, from one to the next, whenever he comes in."  "Oh--so he's some kind of initiation ritual?  Am I being hazed, here?"  They found this hilarious.  As I hoped.

A few minutes later, in the staff room, I enjoyed a cup of tea and some really gross Ralph's birthday cake while being told by the retired thoracic surgeon who puts the labels on the new books that he is 94 .   Collapsing in laughter was possibly not the appropriate response, but I couldn't help it because he seems barely 75, if that.

Knock on the door:  benefactor again, book in hand.   "I bought this for you"--from the Friends' book sale, for 50 cents--"so please just read it even though it seems like whatever it seems like to you, OK, will you?"

I don't even look at it.  I seethe.  I hiss, "Why do you assume my mind is closed because I'm educated?  Do you see the flawed logic, here?"

"No!  I'm projecting!" he proudly announces.

I don't get it, either.  But the book is Hugo Prather's Love and Courage.  So I have to ask myself whether this bulbous weirdo might actually be some kind of angel. 

And a  few hours later, I am notified that the week-long seminar I'm scheduled to teach in April has expanded to eight weeks (starting next week) of splashing around in Shakespeare with 15 fine-arts students, asking ourselves, "Yeah? So What?" at luxurious leisure and for (compared to anything else I'm doing) lots of money.

So yes, overall, it has been a wonder-full day.

Was I Charlotte Simmons?

Tom Wolfe's new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, arrives (via the beneficence of a dear friend) at the precise moment when I most need to lose myself in a story other than my own.  At 600+ pp., there's a lot of literary acreage to get lost in, here.

And I recognize every square inch of the landscape--every vista, every cupola, proscenium and arch--every postadolescent cry of pain, blank stare of terror, lip lifted in scorn--because Wolfe's subject here is the current state of humanity's collective soul as enacted every day among undergraduates in the Ivy League.  The book's a best-seller, and rightly so; it's Wolfe's best work since Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers, but I haven't read even one review, so what follows is my own purest response to what I now think of as Radical Chic:  the Novel.

Charlotte Simmons is a freshman on full scholarship to "Dupont University," Wolfe's imaginary addition to the Ivy League.  (He blithely claims Dupont isn't based on any real school, ha ha, but the pseudo-Gothic architecture is pure Yale[Wolfe's alma mater], the attitude pure Harvard:  that desperate fear of being thought second-rate, etc.--only Harvard gives it a thought let alone worries about it.)  Charlotte is from Appalachia, from working poor white folks who eat off a picnic table indoors, say "whirr" for "where," and use lots of double negatives.  Charlotte is also a Presidential Scholar who reads Madame Bovary in French both for the fun of it and to get it right, to get all of it. 

After two or three chapters of Charlotte, I thought, "Well, all this is great, but too bad Wolfe has the inside of this girl all wrong.  Her vision--her ambition--is too complete, too specific, too confident.  Nobody--not even Presidential Scholars [I've known many]--thinks like that!  Nobody--especially no young woman--thinks she's that invincible."

Nobody, I soon realized/remembered, but a girl who, no matter how brilliant, is also completely naive, who has heard of evil but never has seen it up close (though she thinks she has), so she can't conceive, ahead of time, that people she knows, people like her--or are they?--could actually do the things Dupont people do to each other, and to her.  Right while it's happening, she doesn't quite believe it, can't accept it till she's stuck with it, or it's stuck all over her.

The instant this penny dropped--snap! crackle! pop!--I realized Charlotte's story isn't "other than my own," as I expected.  I saw myself at 15 in the back room of a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. . . 18 in the basement of the Kappa Alpha house . . . 33 in grad school . . . 43 in the Ivy League . . . and here just lately (though in this case not actually to me) . . . slackjawed with amazement/horror at how awful, selfish, and immoral actual people could actually be to each other-- and to ME! who wouldn't hurt a fly but could throw a hell of a punch if I knew I was in a fight.  Trouble was, sometimes I didn't know I was in one till it was too late.  And besides, I always fought fair, which doesn't do much good when your opponent has no rules but the will to win at any cost.

Though I may not have much, I still have my soul.  What becomes of Charlotte's soul in the unholy mix of frat boys, sorority girls, jocks, professors and pseudo-intellectuals that is "Dupont," is Wolfe's subject here.  I won't spoil the surprise.  Just read it yourself, and take your own measure.  Which one of these people is YOU?  Because Ivy or not, relentless or not, you're in this story. We all are.

Caravaggio, Conversion, and Why the Internet Had Better Never Replace Actual Books & Pictures

So this morning, in the midst of a howling blizzard, Gomes is on about St. Paul, whose Day it will be on Tuesday.    With his characteristically cheerful, impeccable scholarship, Harvard's Plummer Professor of Christian Morals leaves intact what we bring to the table--our impressions of Paul as an odious, egocentric misogynist/homophobe--while convincing us that Paul also goes a long way toward redeeming himself by being crucial to Western civilization's understanding of what it means to change one's mind. 

When he fell off his horse that day on the way to witch-hunt Christians in Damascus, in other words, Paul taught us all a big, fat lesson about enlightenment (political, religious, romantic--whatever, says Gomes):  it takes time, during which it will knock you on your ass, leave you blind, and kill your appetite for a while--in Paul's case, three days. 

(You'll probably be able to hear this sermon, along with a bunch of Gomes' other pearls, on the Mem Church website sooner or later, whenever they get around to posting them.  His sermon isn't actually my topic here.)

So I'm lying on the floor of my mother's bedroom (we had a little sleepover last night), listening, and when Gomes mentions Paul's horse, I suddenly think about Caravaggio's painting, which I vaguely remember from some biography of the wildman 15th-16thC painter.   Click on the postage stamp above to get a far better view.  I'll wait.

OK.  Forget Campbell's soup cans.  What we have here is one of the great breakout, boundary-busting paintings of all time.  Back then (early 16th C), religious figures were considered the only suitable subjects for visual art, and they were to be painted Religiously--i.e., reverently:  haloes aglow, beatific expressions at full wattage, clothing in place (unless you were carving David out of a hunk of marble, and even then you had to have a fig leaf).

But in "The Conversion of St. Paul," Caravaggio thumbs his nose at contemporary conventions and paints a picture of a horse, mostly.  And oh yeah, its rider--flat on his back, helpless and glowing strangely.  I'd much rather look at the palomino (sorrel?) than at its rider--that is one hell of a horse--but what I find far more interesting than either of them is the groom. 

Other than holding the horse while looking eerily like the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, what's the guy doing there?  Paul may very well have had a servant with him on the road to Damascus, but there's no servant in the Biblical account--the story's all about Paul, the horse, and Jesus--so why would Caravaggio put the servant in the painting?  The horse looks sturdy and loyal, like he (?) wouldn't just clatter off and leave Paul lying there.  Doesn't need anybody to tell him what to do, this horse.

The servant barely appears in the painting; most of him is behind the horse, but we do see some of his face, one hand, and his lower extremities in some detail.  But Paul seems to be supplicating him.  And he seems to be looking benevolently down at Paul.  So I have to wonder: Is the servant a servant--or is he Caravaggio's version of Jesus?  After all, that's who supposedly knocked Paul on his butt, there, on the way to Damascus.   So what, if anything, is Caravaggio saying about Jesus in this renegade painting?  We'll never know, but it's entertaining to think about.

Then I look again at how shadowy the servant figure is.  I think how easy it would be to Photoshop (or whatever) him entirely out of there.  You could change the whole meaning of the painting, maybe! 

But as long as the real painting survives in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, and as long as prints of it appear in books, or the books in which it already appears survive, it won't stop raising its provocative question in our minds.  (Unless, of course, something like Jasper Fforde's vision of the future of art and literature comes to pass--then we'll be in real trouble!)  Or am I being naive in thinking this?  Wouldn't surprise me.

The Thing About Love:

It is the place where your most personal, timid being emerges, blossoms, and is recognized by the one other human who sees in you what you long to see in yourself. 

It makes you vulnerable.  It scares the fuck out of you.

And even with all these tender feelings to protect, it makes you want to proclaim to anyone you can buttonhole that, at long last, after being widowed at 19 plus all the (decades of) striving, suffering/expiating (cf. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying) not to mention personals ads gone astray, disastrous blind dates with MDSOs (who knew?), ill-conceived love affairs with men half your age, and chance meetings with chess champion-terrorists on the Costa Del Sol, all of which seemed innocuous enough at the time but some of which nearly got you killed, you have figured it out.  You want to tell the world that Love--in all its long-touted fullness and absolution--is real because it's happened to you. You want to holler about it as if you were some 16th century town crier:  "TEN O'CLOCK! and all's especially well because guess what, all ye dames and damsels, gentlemen and yeomen, LOVE IS REAL!"

Maybe, in some form, the God-is-Love thing is true.  Because when you look into that man's or that woman's eyes, really deeply into them the way Rhett and Scarlett are doing here, you recognize every truth you know, all the force life has, all the positive meaning to which experience ever can lead.  You understand what that person means, and you understand what you mean.

But forget trying to show this meaning to anyone else!  Nobody but you is ever going to see it.  Forget it!  To everyone else on the planet, your guy is just another guy, your girl is just another girl.

(Doc Rock Shakespeare Warning:  Run away now if that name strikes fear in your heart!)

Far as I know, nobody communicates this incommunicable feeling better than Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra.  Play starts out with legendarily gorgeous Cleopatra rhapsodizing on Antony's charms, on how he is just the best, the most, the wildest, the most powerful, the biggest . . . etc.  He is Ecstasy on the hoof, this guy.  We believe her because she is the Queen of Egypt, she is a fox, and we know she's going to kill herself by attaching a snake to her breast for love of this . . . uh, man.

She goes on proclaiming her lover's attributes for at least an act and a half, maybe two.  (I am not referencing my Riverside, here.)  By the time Mark Antony actually shows up, we are all in a lather several times over, to meet this paragon of masculine perfection.

"SO," the professor asks us, "when Mark Antony shows up, what do you think of him?"

Silence in the seminar room. 

The echoing kind of silence.  Goes on for a while.  Unusual among this many (15) gradualstudents.  We know something's wrong, but we can't admit it, and we don't know what to call it, so we just sit mum.

Finally, some fearless, forthright individual says, "Antony's . . . aw, jeez . . . y'know?  He shows up, he says some stuff, but shit, man, he's no big deal.  He's like, um, the guy from the gas company who comes around once a month to check the meters.  He's totally unimpressive.  His lines are mediocre.  Nothing happens.  Who cares?"

"Cleopatra," the professor answers.

So we all have to sit with this and think about it.  And what we arrive at is that she is the Queen of Egypt and we aren't.  She worships this man, and we don't.  We arrive at the conclusion that she knows something about love that we don't, but boy damn do we wish we did.

And then when we find it, we can't share it--the Good News--with anyone other than the person who called it out of us.  Which is, of course, as it should be

When To Count Your Chickens--and When Not To

So I was lying in bed last night, just about to turn out the light, disappointed in what I was reading (Time To Be in Earnest, a memoir by P. D. James) and thinking about how grateful I am that neither I or nor anyone I love--so far as I know--has been washed away by California's latest cinematic natural disaster.  (I am big on Grateful, these days.)   

Lord knows, I've been through enough of them.  We all have.

Conflagrations galore: I remember crossing a parking lot after work one day in the San Fernando Valley, reflexively yelling "FIRE!" as I noticed the pavement glowing orange, then looking up to see 15-foot flames cresting the hill 100 yards away.   Decades later, I drove sorta through the wildfire in the Berkeley Hills in order to haul out a pal who had no idea anything was happening, so engrossed was she in preparation for her PhD orals the next day. 

Was that before or after the World Series earthquake?  Who remembers, and what does it matter?  What I do remember is standing in my living room, having just handed my friend Frank a Dos Equis, the two of us watching Jose Canseco take warmup cuts--and then the screen going black, and everything starting to shake.  I expected it to be over right away because I'd never known it not to; I expected to be able to reassure Frank, my pal from Massachusetts, where nothing like this ever happens, that it was nothing.   But it just kept ON.  "Um," I told him, "I think we're supposed to go stand in the doorway.  Or something."  So we shuffled over to the front door--still shaking--and watched my Bronco, parked at the curb, rock on its shock absorbers, and telephone poles up and down the street flex and snap.

Floods?  Oh yeah, even here, even in the "desert."  In September of 1976, it rained like hell; the dam nobody knew was there broke, up in the mountains ( 20 minutes above us) and I watched palm trees and cars and roofs float merrily down the wash behind my mom's house.

By the time I got the job offer in Boston, I was so tired of all this--it was right after the Berkeley fire and earthquake--all I wanted was to get away.  I didn't want to be at risk of my life, at the pleasure of the environment, any more.  So I ran to Boston only to discover that , back there, the weather still tries to kill you; only difference is, it does it a day at a time, not all at once, like out here.    

So last night, I'm dutifully being grateful that nobody I know/love has gotten swept away, and I'm about to bid the Universe goodnight, when I hear The Sound.

Thing about earthquakes is, if you're awake, you always hear them before you feel them.  Not like any other noise, that tectonic roar.  Before it hits, you have time to think, "Oh shit."

As it hits, if it's big, you have time to think "OHHHHHshit!"  Which is pretty much what was going through my mind last night, as I lay there rocking and bouncing and watched the ceiling fan over my bed twitch and flail.  I actually lifted a lip and snarled at it.  "Don't you come down, you SOB!  Don't you DARE come down and hurt me!"

And yeah, pretty soon it didn't.  But I was humbled.  Once again.

The Territorial Imperative

As both of you know, I don't read much nonfiction, never have.  Somehow, though, Robert Ardrey's 1966 book, The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations, made a big impression on me.  I've been watching how people own stuff (ideas, for instance), and how vicious they can be in protecting it, ever since.

The territory in the liberry where I work is invisibly marked out:  I've learned that here at the Circulation Desk, where We are, is not at all the same as Over There, across the room at the Reference Desk, where They work.  As a library page, I am allocated to the Circulation Desk kinda by default, since my main job seems to be whatever nobody else wants to do, i.e., shoving stuff around, removing gummy residue, and mostly shelving books, which apparently is considered grunt labor, but I love it because . . . hmmmmm! . . . it gives me a sense of territoriality, like "Yeah, when I got here an hour ago, the 973s were a shocking mess, but look at them now--in perfect order and lined up straight!  I did that!"

Nobody but a page would ever get their hands that dirty, especially not the Reference Librarians.  When the occasional Reference shelf is in disarray (two books lying flat at the end--quelle horreur!), they flutter their fingertips and look around for grunts like me to remedy the situation.  Which I cheerfully do, and that's the end of that.

No matter who you are, so long as you live in this city, when you want to read a book the liberry doesn't have, you're supposed to go to the Reference Desk and put in a Request, which  I did with some trepidation this morning.

Me:  Excuse me, Sir, but I want to read a book we don't have here.  We have the audio version, but I don't want to listen to it, I want to read it.

Reference Librarian [giving me the Hairy Eyeball]:  Yeah?  So what do you want me to do about it?

Me:  I want you to do what you would do if I were just a regular patron.

RL:  Do you live here [i.e., in the city that privately funds this liberry]?

Me:  Yes [give address--a PO box; I actually live in the next town].

This RL and I had a brief exchange a couple weeks ago, before I understood the territoriality of my new workplace:  as if we were peers, haha, I asked him what he was reading at the moment, and--lo and behold!--I turned out to have heard of it even though it's extremely obscure.  Big mistake, to admit that.  (Not only had I heard of it but had researched it extensively in my dissertation.  Which I didn't mention.)  But we're both acting like we've never seen each other before.

RL:  OK, so what's the title?  the author?  your name?

Me: Will in the World:  How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare;  Stephen Greenblatt; [my name]

RL [looks up abruptly]:  Wow, that's quite a name!  You must have been Somebody--who were you?  A high-powered lawyer?

Stunned by his implication that I'm not anybody anymore and struck by the irony that, of all things, based just on the sound of my name, he would think I was an attorney, here's all I can say, staring off to my left, where liars look:  Uh--no.

He agrees to put in a request and explains it might take six to eight weeks for the Committee to decide whether to buy this book; they'll send me a letter, he says.  I say fine, thanks very much, and go back to shoving books and furniture and even a piano around.

Hours later, he appears in the staff room at the precise moment I am having a cup of tea during the 15 minutes I am allowed to sit down, out of the five hours of my shift.  He tries to make conversation, and I am civil, wishing he'd bug out of there because I'd really like to call my mother to check on my aunt, who has pneumonia, but I don't want to be rude.  Eventually, I retreat to the bathroom and call my mother.  My aunt is OK.

Later, he corners me in the stacks and starts yammering about a new Indian restaurant in town, and the lunch specials he's heard they have there.  I flinch; I know what's coming.  "I don't do Indian," I say, definitively.  "It all smells like socks to me," and I waft away, thinking to myself, "Here is a moment when an engagement ring would come in handy."

Because it's all about territory, isn't it?  The LOML and I have promised ourselves to each other, and I don't need some ridiculously expensive rock to prove it.  So in all ignorance, this twerp feels entitled to make his pathetic little moves. 

A minor inconvenience, true.  But it IS all about territory.  Isn't it?

All Over But the Shoutin'

Look at this face.

Stopped me flat while I was shelving the Biography section.  Such fine features!  Katharine Hepburn and Princess Grace made millions out of cheekbones less delicate, less symmetrical than these.

Her name is Margaret Marie Bragg, and she picked cotton in Alabama and went without a new dress for 18 years in order to raise three boys whose father was an abusive, negligent drunk.  Margaret Marie pretended not to be hungry when there wasn't enough to go around.  Margaret Marie is a hero.  Her middle son, Rick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, makes this clear.

Sounds like a Great Depression story, doesn't it?  But Margaret Marie did her hard work in the Sixties. 

Think about it.