WriteOutLoud

Imagine My Surprise.

Just as I was thinking, "The only thing worse than being as sick as I am right now is being as sick as I am right now in  Cambridge,"  along came this little news service headline about how unhappy Harvard students, specifically undergraduates, are.  Really, spectacularly unhappy, somebody's study now shows.   Gee whiz, I wonder why that could be?

It's only what I've been saying practically since the day I got there and haven't shut up about since I left:   the place isn't fit for human habitation.  If the Pilgrims hadn't gotten lost on their way to Virginia, this whole country would have a different culture--a genuinely kinder, gentler culture--because those stiffnecked old Puritans would have thawed out, warmed up, relaxed, and made a few demands in the way of creature comforts plus good sex a way of life! 

Instead, however, the Puritan sensibility thrives on in what they logically enough called New England, since they couldn't tell it from Olde in terms of climate and topography.  They felt those hard, icy fingers of freezing wind clawing down their fussy little white collars, and felt right at home!  And so it is that Rule #1 back there is "If you aren't suffering, you aren't doing it right." 

For some reason, modern kids don't take too well to being frozen, housed in drafty/dilapidated old piles, overworked, underfed, underslept, underpartied, and downright neglected by the very people who are supposed to be "educating" them.  The "four levels of supervision" that the College tells parents are there to "nurture and protect" are really there to police and protect property.  In five years there, I saw countless suffering kids who needed nurture and protection--kids with eating disorders, mental illnesses, physical afflictions that they needed some savvy adult to catch on to, and to get them some help for.  But any time I blew the whistle ("She looks like she's going to die!"), I was told to shut up, it wasn't my job, it wasn't their job either, and if we just waited long enough, the student would eventually drop out or take a year off or whatever it took to get fixed on his own. 

That's how they do it back there:  they just look away and wait for you to die or otherwise get out of their way.  Like once when I spun out on sidewalk black ice, landed flat on my back, knocked the wind out of myself, and all the fine Cantabridgians who happened to be passing just stepped over me and/or gave me dirty looks for being in their way.  That's pretty much what it's like, being an undergraduate at Harvard, is my guess.

Because either you Belong there, or you don't.  There's no middle ground.  By some eerie 7th sense, everybody knows if you're a "legacy," i.e., if your family has gone to Harvard for generations (40% of each class is admitted on this basis--and no other).   If you're enough of a legacy--if you take yourself seriously as one, that is--you make sure everyone knows it right away.  So the goat-farmer's kid from Alamogordo and the hockey player from the Yukon and all the others who gutted their way into Harvard, and probably are ten times smarter than the legacies, have this entitlement behavior to contend with on top of all the other miseries.

So that's why I always tell kids who ask me about Harvard to go to Yale.  They're just as drunk, they're almost as cold, and they can be insufferable, yes, but somehow, they just seem happier.

Converting All My Sounds of Woe into "Hey, Nonny Nonny"

(It's a line from Much Ado About Nothing. Balthazar sings " Sigh no more, my ladies, sigh no more,/Men were deceivers ever,/One foot in sea and one on shore,/To one thing constant never./Then sigh not so, but let them go,/And be you blithe and bonny,/Converting all your sounds of woe/Into Hey, nonny nonny.")

This lovely ditty was NOT on my mind this afternoon as I headed off up the hill to teach Shakespeare at the fine arts school.  I was much wearied and discouraged:  I, who am never sick, have been sick for a week, apparently from speaking on the phone with someone who spoke on the phone with someone who had bronchitis; I've had to quit the liberry job because it's given me tennis elbow; the LOML is on the fritz; etc.  "Everything SUCKS!" I thought as I started up the hill.

This Hill is not your average hill.  Did you see It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World?  This is the Hill where Terry Thomas literally kicked the bucket; that sequence was filmed here.  It is 40 miles of bad road, also literally:  two narrow lanes that rise from 16' below sea level to 5000' above, very swervy, many cliffs, much Driving While Stupid (too fast, too distracted, too scared) (other people, that is; not me).  Of course, I was in a hurry because I always am because I never leave when I should, and I always forget about the Stupid Factor and get stuck behind a Winnebago full of yokels from Minnesota who have no idea where they are.

Today, though, coming around a curve at the correct rate of speed, I fetched up behind a cement mixer.  Far worse than any Winnebago.

"Oh weeping Jesus!" I thought.  And burst out laughing.  Just when you think nothing can get worse, it does!  The thing was lumbering along at about 15 mph, huffing and puffing, grinding through its labyrinth of gears, looking from the rear very much like an elephant.  And I'm behind it.  In a hurry.

Pretty soon, the elephant was heading a parade of about 20 cars.  Also in a hurry.  Eventually, at its first opportunity, it pulled over and let all of us pass.  By then, I was so cheered up by all my laughing that I flashed my brights, honked my horn, stuck my hand out the window and gave the elephant a big thank-you wave as I sailed past.

All buoyant and happy, I glanced at my gas gauge--and got a fresh dose of bad news:  I had about three tablespoonfuls of gas left.  30 miles to go, 40 minutes to get there, and no gas stations in between.  Irrevocably.  NONE.  It's just ranch country up there, like on Bonanza:  a high plateau backed by mountain vistas, with babbling brooks, pine trees, a little store by the lake, but not one gas station.  Nope, nosiree, zippo, nada in the gas station department.  I was in deep shit.  Not that any of the kids would care if they were deprived of their Shakespeare on the last day before spring break, but I had a job to do.

Babbling brooks . . . pine trees--wait! . . . pine trees!  There's a fire station between here and there!  They have fire engines that need gas!  They have--I'm sure they have--THEIR OWN PUMPS!

Ten minutes later, I'm walking through the firehouse door.  A cheerful, handsome firefighter (they are all handsome; it's a Law of the Universe that there is no such thing as an unhandsome firefighter--or "fiahfighta," as they're called in Boston) says, "HI THERE!  [I am not having a Bad Hair Day.]  Can I HELP YOU?!?!"

"Um, gee, I sure hope so," I say, and explain my problem.  No, he says, he can't sell me any gas.

My face falls.  To the floor.

"But I can GIVE you a gallon!" he adds.  "It's a rule.  We can help out the public in this way, with a gallon of gas.  We just have to wait for the Captain," who is, evidently, in the bathroom.

So we wait.  I try not to look at my watch as I tell the Handsome Fiahfighta some of my problems--just making conversation, you know--and he commiserates.

Eventually, the Captain emerges from the latrine.  He is one of the biggest, baddest, fiercest-looking Mexicans I've ever seen--about 6'3", 250#, no fat, all muscle, spiky hair, full ganged-out tattoos including a blue teardrop at the corner of his left eye.  "Uhhhhhhhhhhh," I wobble, "hi,uh. . . HI! . . . Sir!  I'm just here because, um--"

HF chimes in:  "The lady needs some fuel for her vehicle!"

The Captain beams at me, all sweetness, and allows as how he thinks they could help me out.  "Can I please pay you?"  I squeak. 

"No.  We do this routinely." 

"But it's not routine for ME!  I mean, can't I give you beer money, or don't you have a coffee fund or something?" 

Well, yyyyyyyyesss, they DO have a coffee fund.  "Or," he suggests, "the next time you're in the area, you could just bring us some cookies or something."  I give him $5 for the coffee fund, assure him, "You bet!  Oh definitely, cookies, yes, thankyousomuch--" and drive off.  With TWO gallons of gas.

I'm almost to school when I see a truck parked on my side of the road with its hood up and its driver on foot about 50 yards ahead, slogging up the mountain.  I stop and pick him up; he is all over himself with gratitude.  "Don't thank ME!" I tell him, "thank the guys in the firehouse down in the valley--" and I tell him why I have enough gas to even be there let alone to pick him up.  "So the next time you're down there," I conclude, "take those guys some cookies, and you'll make this cosmic circle whole!"

He looks at me like I'm nuts, but he promises to do the cookies.  We move on to other topics.  He is on his way to the little mountain town to visit his parents; I ask what they do there because there isn't anything to do there, and they must be my age because he is very young.  "My dad's an arson investigator," he replies.

"WOW!  No KIDDING?! What a fascinating job!  How did he get into it?"

"Well, he was a firefighter for 30 years--"

"Oh.  So you get it about the cookies!?"

"Right."

--Hey, nonny nonny!

"The Shockkkkk! of Recognition!"

It's Tom Wolfe's phrase from I can't remember which of his books, but it's what I feel most keenly whenever I see a friend's name on the cover of a book.

I don't mean just somebody I met once; I mean somebody I've worked with, gone to gradualschool with, sweat bullets with, faced attackers alongside.  It doesn't happen often that I get to see their names on book covers.  Maxine Rodburg, who fished me out of the Harvard motor pool and made possible every good thing that happened to me there, published as fine a collection of short stories as the world has ever seen.  Tom Perrotta, my officemate at the Scary School, has produced a string of pearls (novels), among them Election, which was made into a film that is now a cult classic and that made Reese Witherspoon's career possible.   

And now Frank Grady has written a Preface to the Canterbury Tales.  This is the man who brought me to baseball.  In the process, he taught me--entirely logically--that being a Red Sox fan is only right.  On top of which he has now delivered, in print for all the world to see, original and intriguing comments on the 800-year-old literary masterpiece that is the cornerstone of the Western literary canon.  He's not your average guy, is Frank.

He's a tenured professor at the University of Missouri, and I have a photograph of him, taken nearly 20 years ago, in which he is wearing a Tina Turner wig.   If I didn't love him, if he weren't the agent of several of the most positive changes in my life, I would publish that photo here.  But Frank is Frank, and when he found the wig, put it on, and posed, he was helping me move for the third time that semester--and he was doing so without complaint.

Some friends you just can't thank enough, you know?

"Can Become Aggressive"--! ! !

--reads the WARNING on the seed packet of Showy Evening Primrose (oenothera speciosa) I just scattered around my front yard.  Ooooooh--aggressive!  As in "Hey, what's become of the Doc?  Ain't seen her lately!" "Didn't you hear?  Those damned primroses she planted swamped her whole place, just like kudzu down in Georgia.  We think she's still inside, though, so there's a crew over there right now with machetes, trying to cut her out"? 

Apparently, England's late Queen Mother should have had such a warning embroidered across her back, like a boxer. [How's that for a segueway?!]  Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon Windsor, wife of George VI or was it VII, was as tough to get rid of as my primroses will be (they're like asparagus or bamboo); in her size 3-1/2 shoes, she sturdily trod the earth for 101 years.  I have this shoe-size factoid from Penelope Mortimer's 1992 biography, Queen Mother, which I came across in the process of reading the Biography shelves at the liberry the other day.  Normally, as a patriotic American and sentient human being, I have no use whatever for the stodgy, dimwitted, vulgar Germans who call themselves Windsors, but I'd always heard she was the interesting one.  And I love Noel Coward's story about running into her at some fancy do in the 40s, asking her, "What's a pair of old queens like us doing in a place like this?" and her laughing her head off.

She did have an interesting life, and she did a few good things for her country, like not packing up for Canada the minute the bombing started.  But Mortimer is no patsy.  She knows her history, has her Schlesweig-Holstein-Coburgs all sorted out, a sharp eye for detail, and a wicked sharp pen with which to pick out observations and anecdotes such as:

"The York-Bowes-Lyon wedding was not broadcast because the Archbishop of Canterbury feared that men in pubs might listen to it with their hats on."

"In November 1925 Queen Alexandra died at Sandringham.  The decorative, silly, kind-hearted old lady, no deafer now than she had been in life, was stowed away in the Memorial Chapel at Windsor."

"Mrs. Greville's two unreliable butlers, Boles and Bacon, may or may not have remained [at Mrs. G's] to attend on the honeymoon couple [Elizabeth and Bertie].  If they did, there must have been some hilarious meals.  Both retainers were constantly as drunk as the lords they waited on, but oblivious to reprimand and never, for some curious reason, sacked.  Boles, who claimed to be a communist, had been known to eat the entire dish he was about to serve; Bacon, on receiving a furious note from Mrs. Greville saying 'You're drunk.  Leave the room at once,' placed it on a silver salver and carried it unsteadily down the table to Sir Austen Chamberlain, who was astounded." 

I hadn't realized Monty Python's Flying Circus was a documentary.  And that's exactly how much fun Penelope Mortimer's book is.  If you like that sort of thing.  I suppose if the Circus had originated here, it would have featured Condosleaza and the Shrub playing Cowboy in an Oval Office swamped with primroses.

Paradigm Shift

OK, normally?  I eschew and villify any and all video games or anything that even vaguely seems like a video game, and have done so since their inception.  Basic common sense told me right away that they are brainsucking, zero-sum, violence-promoting timewasters long before I watched way too many of my students, not to mention my own nephew, turn themselves into vegetables who can't tell reality from fantasy (but have excellent hand-eye coordination that's going to make them all Top Guns).   (Yeah, right.) The truth about video games instantly was evident to me much the way I figured out what was going on with LSD as soon as it turned up, so I never did it and never regretted my decision.  Sometimes, I'm just RIGHT, that's all!

But now the LOML has sent me http://www.mikensports.com/game/index.html

As a result, I have caved.  Have just spent the last hour pretending to be an MLB batter at the plate.  LOML hit a 482-foot home run on his first pitch; I did nearly as well on mine, 388 feet.  (Keep in mind that he pitched semi-pro and still plays in senior leagues and wins World Series regularly, whereas I never did, still don't, and can't imagine how it would feel to do so although I do have one of his doorknob-sized World Series rings.) 

My beginner's luck was followed by many flubs; quite often, I'd swing and be back in starting position before the ball crossed the plate, etc.  So I really have no idea what I'm doing.  But my record (so far ) is 683 feet, AND I've broken four windows.  Can you (or he) say the same?  (Helpful tip:  hold the cursor down on the batter till the pitcher delivers, then just let up when you want to swing.)

What I love about this thing:  the variety of pitches.  They're not all strikes, nor are they all hittable.  They're curves, knuckleballs, fastballs, sliders, change-ups. Some are so fast, you're still taking your next breath while the ball is already behind you.  So I assume this might be at least a little like how it feels to try to hit a real MLB pitcher.

What I don't like about this thing:  you can't control the altitude or speed of your swing; all your swings are the same.  This seems unrealistic to me.  After all, not all strokes are created equal.

But who cares?  It's a blast!  So much so--and here's the bad news for LOML--I could play this all night!

Oh, PLEASE . . . !

Just puh-LEEZE!  She's out, but she's under "house arrest"--when she can leave the house, unchaperoned, for 48 hours a WEEK?  I don't even spend that much time out of the house, and I have four jobs! And she's back on the payroll right away, to the tune of $900,000 a year.  At my current earning level, I'd have to work non stop till I was 145 years old to make that much. Once.

My favorite quote from her since her release from the Alderson Country Club had something to do with capuccino--she said she didn't miss the actual subtance itself as much as she missed the idea of capuccino.

Attagirl, Marty!  All about notions--of elegance, fairness (or unfairness, in her own case), success, "lifestyle" (GOD but I despise that word!) rather than their reality; all about fabricating illusions and selling them for huge profits made on the backs of her friends and of consumers who can't afford the shit they don't need but she convinces them they do.  The reality--Martha's reality--is thus verrrrrry different from the ideas she promotes.  I agree with every word of Andrew Leonard's assessment and only wish I'd said them all myself.

Getting a Jump on It--

My next birthday, that is.  One or the other of the two of you may recall my shameless solicitation of contributions (family only, of course) last year so that I could spend my birthday being pampered almost too much at Two Bunch Palms.  That went well, but I don't care if I never do it again.

Last night on the Travel Channel, I accidentally discovered that, at Sea World in San Diego, it is possible not only to pat dolphins but actually to swim with them.  Ever since I learned dolphins like to swim with people--about 20 years ago--I have hankered to oblige them. Watching Matt Biondi train in the pool at UC Berkeley, I marveled at his 8-foot wingspan and the way his body moved through the water, and I thought, "He doesn't swim like a person--he swims like a fish, just up and down instead of side-to-side."  And sure enough, after he won 7 gold medals at Seoul in '88, he went off rejoin his own kind (yeah, I know they're not fish) in Hawaii.

At the time, one could swim only with wild dolphins, and only in Florida or Hawaii; while I lived on the East Coast, I entertained the notion of taking myself down to Key West and making some flippery friends, but never got around to it.

But now I see that I can do so a mere three hours from home!  It's expensive ($150) and doesn't last very long (1 hour), but they give you a wetsuit and booties (I have fins left over from my abruptly truncated scuba career), so just call me Splash--I'm ready!

One of The Things I Like Most About Myself

But before I tell you what it is, ask yourself what you like most about YOURself.  I think you'll find the question entertaining.  At least.

OK, my answer:  in crisis situations (emotional/physical/psychological), I am very--VERY--good.  Somehow--so far, anyway--I always get it right; sentiment drops away, practicality comes first, but humor also is my weapon, no matter what, and it always works.  I wisecrack while I do excellent triage:  drop a catastrophe or an emergency on me, and all I think is, what needs to happen, in what order, and what's funny about it?  Just ask me.  I always know.  And I always do it.  I suspect I get part of this from my mother; I've watched her handle horrendous, terrible, often gory emergencies with flawless, level-minded aplomb.  She's never said a word about it, she's just shown me that one does is, one drops into low gear and moves relentlessly ahead, doing what needs doing and damn the torpedoes.  (I still don't understand how she does this without a sense of humor, but she does.)

First time I became aware of this in myself was in a parking lot about 30 years ago.  I heard screams.  An elderly woman was standing next to a man in a wheelchair, at the ass-end of a Cadillac, yelling (feebly), "Help, oh please somebody help!"  So of course I raced right over.  "My husband's having a stroke!" she told me.  I looked at him, sitting in the chair; he wasn't doing much of anything, just sitting there, staring.  So I ran into the nearest store, saw a clerk talking on the phone, yanked it out of her hand, said, "I'm sorry, this is an emergency," hung up on her call, dialed 911, said what I had to say, apologized again to the startled clerk--and suddenly discovered I wasn't feeling too well, myself.  Handed the phone back to the clerk, reached for the counter, and sank gracefully onto the floor, out cold.

Another time, it was me in the chair, this time in Cambridge, having gum surgery.  The young, smart but inexperienced periodontist hadn't bothered to warn me this might be a little difficult, so I'd taught a full day and then some (in November, in the snow), then just barely scooted into the chair on schedule.  Now we were both having problems:  despite dozens of shots, he couldn't get me quite numb enough, and I was was feeling him, slicing and dicing.  Both of us were pouring sweat.  "Do you want me to stop?" he kept asking.  "NO, I do NOT," I hissed at him, then asked, "What do you drink?"  "Bourbon!" he puffed, "but your blood pressure's way too low, are you sure you're OK?   I'm afraid you're in shock."  "Of course I'm fucking in shock, but just give me a blanket and I'll get over it.  Just DO YOUR FUCKING JOB."  Which he did.  And a little later, with my thanks, enjoyed a fifth of Maker's Mark for his efforts.