What happens when Dad is tasked with being Mom for a couple weeks.
Legos + DSLR + Gimp = keep us busy and engaged for an hour, and we've added a little grandma happiness to the world.
Now tell me again how you don't want to make a birthday card?
In a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005
“The really important kind of freedom,” he said that day, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think.”
--David Foster Wallace.
(Read in a letter from Pomona College's President, In Memoriam)
I was riding up along the shore of the Bay this morning and ended up in Richmond, and stumbled upon the Rosie the Riveter memorial park. I'd seen signs for it from the highway for years and had always wanted to see it. I'm checking out the memorial and notice a National Park Ranger hanging around. Turns out the Red Hat Ladies of Richmond had arranged a little tour that morning, so I stuck around and crashed it. There were at least three honest-to-god Rosies in the group, one had worked on the Key system with bus maintenance, one was a clerk in a union hall, and one actually built PT boats, fitted them out with wiring and gyros and whatnot, in Stockton I think, almost certainly including JFK's PT-109. She's the one who told the story, at my asking, of when peace was announced, they blew all the whistles in the shipyard and told everyone to go home, they were all out of jobs. When she got out to her car in the parking lot, she noticed the trunk open--some of the guys were filling it up with bacon and hard-to-get-groceries, like what they were doing for all the Rosies.
They mentioned the song, that I'd never even heard of, by the "Four Vagabonds", no less. Some of the stories at the memorial, and told by the Ranger, who at the time was a twenty-year-old black girl working as a clerk in a union hall that wouldn't admit blacks, were about how hard it was for women and blacks to get any kind of a decent job before the war, how many areas they were shut out of, and how much FDR's "Arsenal of Democracy" and the integration of the industrial workforce opened up doors that had been firmly shut before. Her family had come to California from Louisiana in 1927, after the great flood, and she pointed out the contrast between California at the time and the Deep South where Jim Crow was still in full force.
I'd been thinking about those days anyway, since I've been reading Anne's copy of Little Heathens, a lucid and engaging account of daily life on an Iowa Farm in the 1930's. It's very appealing the way she makes it sound, where the kids all knew how to work hard, whiners weren't tolerated, people made do with what they had, and everybody was god-fearing and self-reliant. But the picture is so appealing that it was making me uncomfortable, and my little Jiminy Cricket reminded me that the lives of white folks on farms in Iowa wasn't necessarily representative of everybody.
So this summer I've been playing a game with Frank, checking to see how much he remembered from third grade that he can carry over into fourth grade. Like I'll ask "How much is seven times two" and he'll answer "thirty-eight and a half". The two standouts so far have been:
"What is the difference between plants and animals?"
"Plants move around to catch their food, and animals just stand in one place all day, blinking."
And this one:
"What are the names of the planets?"
"Steve and Lisa."
"Ah, so there are only two planets?"
"No, there are six. Steve, Lisa, Steve, Lisa, and Steve and Lisa."
Now the last couple of days I've been laid up with a stomach thing and not moving around much. Yesterday I was landed on UHF channel 26 watching Bollywood music videos on some Indian Entertainment channel, and noticed two things. First this commercial, which according to various press releases is targeted at South Asian audiences, the creative work reflects traditions and situations South Asians can relate to.
Sanjaya Malakar pesters his way into a monastery to see a guru so that he can ask him, "Oh, great guruji, I've tasted fame and fortune, girls adore me, but I still feel that there's something missing. Tell me, what is the most important thing in life?" To which the guru replies, "A good retirement plan. Oh, and a haircut." And I'm thinking, in my feverish, dehydrated stupor, "How many commercials aimed at American youth even jokingly have the quest for the meaning of life as a plot device?" Well, maybe a couple, but how many of those could use as plot devices the mechanisms for pursuing the question, the institutions that are embedded in our culture (the equivalent of monasteries and gurus)?
And then, and THEN, this show (Showbiz India, it turns out), ends with an interview with some hot young Bollywood star, with the friendly, fresh-faced girl reporter asking earnest questions of this actor about his career, and his latest films, and I'm like, yeah, whatever, but THEN she winds up the interview by asking him what he thinks is the purpose of life! And he pauses for a good long moment and thinks about it, and says, "You know, I'm really too young to have an answer for that yet. But I think it's probably to be the best person you can be, so that when you're dead and gone, other people can say, yeah, he was a really good person." And I'm thinking, damn, I envy that culture.
And then, a couple on our block is moving to some place called St. Martin's I think, and having a moving sale so they can reduce their worldly possessions to three suitcases apiece. And so we pick up a copy of Scrabble for a couple bucks. I have the nagging suspicion I hate Scrabble, but Anne reminds me about the number of times she's played Carcassone and strategy games, so we bring it home and give it a shot that night. Halfway through the three of us have given up on most of the rules and are playing collaboratively, just so we have a hope of finishing it before bedtime, and we notice Frank can get rid of his high-scoring letter "J" and combine it with another high-scoring letter "W" that's already in play, but only if we bag the "no capitalized words" rule and let him do "Jew", and I say "I'll tell you what, we'll waive that rule for you here if you can tell us who the Jews are."
Now I know they haven't done Comparative Religions yet in third grade. But we try to help him be culturally literate here, we really do, we really really do. He knows the timeline of the major wars of the Twentieth Century, he knows England is in Europe and Gambia is in Africa and that Asterix and Tintin were both originally written in French. He knows Kirk and Spock and Laurel and Hardy and that the SUV commercial with Jimmy Durante's voice singing "Make just one person happy" is bitingly ironic because SUV drivers only think of themselves (he pointed that out himself, though I don't think "ironic" was his word).
But there's a lot to absorb. And I always wonder if maybe we're missing some important bits. His answer: "The Jews are people who believe in Jesus?" I think my godmother, bless her heart, just flinched in her grave. Nope, couldn't give him that one.
Ok, so we have stuff to work on. But maybe religion trivia, aside from cultural literacy, isn't that important? Maybe it's more important to be a good person? Maybe it's more important to be able to know to ask the question "What is the purpose of life?", just to be able to remember to ask that question every once in a while. Either way, I'd rather have him the way he is now than have him like the high school kid in the New York Times article this morning on teaching evolution in Florida public schools, who has been to church every Sunday of his life, and spend another hour of every Sunday reading the Bible, and is "damn sure he didn't evolve from apes!"
Sigh. Isn't that beautiful? Lissom and laughing. Nobody writes like that any more.Arrietty was glad to see the morning room; the door luckily had been left ajar and it was fascinating to stand at last in the thick pile of the carpet gazing upward at the shelves and pillars and towering gables of the famous overmantle. So that's where they had lived, she thought, those pleasure-loving creatures, remote and gay and self-sufficient. She imagined the Overmantle women--a little "tweedy," Homily had described them, with wasp waists and piled Edwardian hair--swinging carelessly outwards on the pilasters, lissom and laughing; gazing at themselves in the inset looking-glass which reflected back the tobacco jars, the cut-glass decanters, the bookshelves, and the plush-covered table. She imagined the Overmantle men--fair, they were said to be, with long mustaches and nervous, slender hands--smoking and drinking and telling their witty tales. So they had never asked Homily up there! Poor Homily with her bony nose and never tidy hair....They would have looked at her strangely, Arrietty thought, with their long, half-laughing eyes, and smiled a little and, humming, turned away. And they had lived only on breakfast food--on toast and egg and tiny snips of mushroom; sausage they'd have had and crispy bacon and little sips of tea and coffee. Where were they now? Arrietty wondered. Where could such creatures go?
Plus, in one of those crazy coincidences, that makes you wonder who is running this show, it used the term Merry Andrew, which I had just recently read in Tom Jones:
"Merry Andrew" was used in The Borrowers, when Mrs. Driver, the crotchety old maid, who is starting to notice things missing from around the house (things taken by the Boy to give to the tiny family under the floorboards). She has paranoid fantasies about who might be taking the nicknacks, and fixes on the idea of suspecting old Aunt Sophy, bedridden these twenty years.A violent uproar now arose in the entry, where my landlady was well
cuffing her maid both with her fist and tongue. She had indeed missed
the wench from her employment, and, after a little search, had found
her on the puppet-show stage in company with the Merry Andrew, and in
a situation not very proper to be described....later...
Instead, therefore, of answering my landlady, the puppet-show man ran
out to punish his Merry Andrew; and now the moon beginning to put
forth her silver light, as the poets call it (though she looked at
that time more like a piece of copper), Jones called for his
reckoning, and ordered Partridge, whom my landlady had just awaked
from a profound nap, to prepare for his journey; but Partridge, having
lately carried two points, as my reader hath seen before, was
emboldened to attempt a third, which was to prevail with Jones to take
up a lodging that evening in the house where he then was.
When I read that, I knew what it was talking about, because I'd asked The Great Fuvog, I mean looked it up on the wikpedia. It's a clown or buffoon. I noticed the term in Tom Jones because there's a beautiful English Country Dance tune by that name, and I had always wondered about it, for some reason I thought it sounded like it was alluding to Andrew the Apostle:Ah, thought Mrs. Driver, was not this just the sort of thing she might do--the sort of thing she would cackel over, back upstairs again among her pillows, watching and waiting for Mrs. Driver to report the loss? "Everything all right downstairs, Driver?"--that's what she'd always say and she would look at Mrs. Driver sideways out of those wicked old eyes of hers. "I wouldn't put it past her!" Mrs. Driver exclaimed aloud, gripping her feather duster as though it were a club. "And a nice merry-andrew she'd look if I caught her at it--creeping about the downstairs rooms in the middle of the night."
But, according to the Great Fuvog, I mean the wikipedia article, Danny Kaye also made a movie called Merry Andrew. Who is running this show?
Way back in 1971 he published this one. He got ahold of David Brower, one of the biggest big-shot environmental conservationists of all time, apparently, someone who singlehandedly kept at least three dams from being built in the American West, apparently. McPhee got Brower to come along on long outdoorsy trips accompanied by some of the guys on the other side of the table. A mineral geologist, a developer, the Commisioner of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation (that's dams). They camped, they hiked, they hung out, they even ran the Grand Canyon in a raft, and McPhee took notes on the conversations.
If I was ten years older I would know who David Brower was. Or even what he looked like. A different time, I guess. But kind of embarrasing. Wanting some context after I'd finished the book, I looked him up. After running the Sierra Club for twenty-seven years, he eventually went on to found the Earth Island Institute. Gee, that name sounds familiar. Let's see, it's headquartered in San Francisco. Oh, that's right! I used to play Bluegrass music with Dave Phillips, the Executive Director. An awesome mandolin player, and a really nice guy. I've ridden in his car, and drank beer in his kitchen. And there he is, right there!
Oh, but one more connection. The cover of the book is a painting of Hetch Hetchy valley by Albert Bierstadt, from before the valley was flooded to provide drinking water from San Francisco. Since I seem to be one of the few people who doesn't compulsively drink plastic-bottled water trucked in at great expenses and consumption of oil from who-knows-where, now I can enjoy the tasty San Francisco tap water I drink even more, knowing that it comes from a beautiful valley now filled with water. Uh, hmm...
This just made my day. It's almost enough to make you glad to be a human being.
It's raining in Paris.
-- Antoine (on irc this morning, and I couldn't get it out of my head all day)
The New York Times on Sunday couldn't have put it better:
For some, the rebates seem like a trifling compensation handed out by the same administration whose tax cuts and expensive foreign adventures have damaged the economy.
"It's insulting and patronizing to try to satisfy a whole nation of people with a little payout, " says Joy Osmanski, 32, an acress in Los Angeles.
I mean, really, that's the best idea our MBA President could come up with? Print more money and throw it into the crowd? What is this, Mardi Gras in New Orleans?
So here's my response (accompanied by raised middle finger, not shown):
1) Half goes to our local school district, which is being nearly bankrupted by our tight-fisted Republican governor, who was elected on the promise of rolling back a vehicle sales tax, and who has since been sucking money out of the local counties and cities to shore up his no-new-taxes fantasy in Sacramento. Children, education, our future--which of those three things do you not think is important? Hello?
2) And the other half goes to electing somebody who just might be able to bring us some distance out of the embarrasing and destructive parochialism of the last eight years. That's what I think of your "stimulus", buddy!
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the world but lose his soul?
