Dr. Metablog

Damn Yankees

The Yankees 2009 payroll was $201,449,189, exceeding the next largest (the Mets) by more than $50,000,000.  The median major league payroll was about $80,000,000 and the lowest $36,834,000.  With 103 wins in regular season, each victory cost the Yankees $1,955,810.  The other teams that made it to the playoffs incurred considerably smaller but greatly varying costs per win:  Boston Red Sox, $1,285,300;  Philadelphia Phillies, $1,215,097; Los Angeles Angels $1,172,325; Los Angeles Dodgers, $1,056,995; St. Louis Cardinals, $852,803; Colorado Rockies $817,402;  Minnesota Twins, $816,165.  Should we be surprised that the Yankees could beat the Phils?  Given the numbers, it would have been shocking if they couldn't. Cheers to the Cardinals, Rockies, and Twins. 

Cost per victory is a measure of management efficiency.  By far the most effective 2009 team, dollar for dollar, was the frugal Florida Marlins, who won 87 games at a cost of just $423,379 per win.  On the other end of the scale, the woeful New York Mets, with just 70 successes, were the only team to pay more per win than the Yankees.  It cost the Mets $2,133,910 each time that they walked off the field in triumph.  

As long as the Yankees are allowed to pay salaries one-third larger than their nearest competitors and two and a half times more than the median, it must be expected that they will win regularly  -- which is why I'm for rigorous, enforced parity.  Let's level that playing field.     

STAAS

The woman with whom I've shared the last fifty-plus years has developed an alarming new symptom.  She disappears in markets.

We'll be together, pushing the basket in the vegetable section, for example, and I 'll go off to fetch some cream cheese and a half-gallon of milk.  When I return, she's gone.  Nowhere to be found.  I walk up and down the neighboring aisles.  Nothing.  She's completely dematerialized.  I walk up and down, back and forth, vainly searching. 

After a twenty minutes, or half-an-hour, she's back, but teleported to an an entirely different part of the store.  She doesn't even know that she has vanished.  Sometimes she pretends that it's I who has vanished. 

I can understand that she could lose herself in the acre-and-a-half King Soopers, or in the McGuckin prairie, or on the vast Costco steppes.  But in Bradford's minuscule P & C?  Or in Bradford's Main Street, comprised as it is of far fewer square feet than any contemporary Walgreen's?  No, there's more here than meets the eye.  This is no natural process.  Something supernatural is happening.

It took some serious reflection before I came to the realization that it's a clear case of abduction by aliens.  There is no other credible explanation.

I've given a name to the disorder.  I call it Spousal Transient Alien Abduction Syndrome, or STAAS.

I've made some inquiries, and it seems that STAAS is not an anomaly found only in my family.  In fact, it's quite common.  More than four-fifths of the people that I questioned had experienced recent instances of STAAS.  Curiously, it's much more frequently discovered in long-marrieds than among the recently-hitched.  And less common among women than men.  In fact, men tend to disappear for longer periods of time than women.

Moreover, just as might be expected, not a single one of the disappeared remembers that he (or she) had ever fallen into the ungentle hands of aliens -- which is certain proof that the abduction took place, inasmuch as it is well known that these extraterrestrial beings possess the ability to scour human brains and obliterate memory.

I don't know what can be done to arrest the growth of this alarming syndrome.

Updike's Gamble

John Updike's novels are loaded to the ever-loving gills with invocations of the most evanescent and ephemeral manifestations of "popular culture."  I can't think of another writer who is so relentlessly fascinated by the most trivial of things.  If his novels are to be read in a hundred years, they will not be fully understood unless encrusted with extensive and elaborate footnotes.

"Roy has been carefully shaping can his Total mush into a kind of a pyramid with the back of a spoon."  Who will understand the meaning of this sentence.  "Total mush?"  I imagine a footnote:  "'Total' was the brand name of a fibrous dry packaged breakfast food which, when liquids such as milk were added, could be formed into a paste."  

Here's another example.  Rabbit is musing.  "Biblical names.  Rachel, Esther.  Not always.  Barbra, Bette."  And here's the putative footnote. "In this passage, Harry muses about the names of Jewish women.  "Barbra" (sic) refers to Barbra Streisand, a popular Jewish-American singer and actress of the period.  Professor Harvey Wrongbody's assertion that "Bette" refers to Bette Davis is clearly uninformed, as Miss Davis was not Jewish. "Bette" as Professor Wrongbody should have known, references Bette Midler, a performer famous in her day for impersonating Janis Joplin (see Index) in The Rose." 

In the first few pages of Rabbit at Rest --  which is perhaps the most consistently fine of Updike's novels, there are dozens or scores of allusions that will test the annotator's learning.  It's highly unlikely that with the passing of generations anyone but researchers of late twentieth-century Americana will be able either to identify or grasp the significance of  "this guy Bundy who murdered dozens of women in dozens of states."  (Bundy?  Is that King Kong Bundy?  McGeorge Bundy?  Al Bundy?)  Or have the least idea what is meant by a "Cabbage Patch doll with its bunchy beige face" or the possible thematic significance of "Cara Lott Gets Hot" or "Winn Dixie" or "Ekerd Drugs" or the National Enquirer or "Planter's Peanut Bar" or "Melanie Griffith" or "Deion Sander's recent arrest."  It's only twenty years since Rabbit at Rest was published, and I was there, paying reasonable attention, but frankly, I'm already becoming a bit vague about some of  the details.

If I were a novelist of Updike's talent, I would think twice about loading up on trivia that cannot help but  barricade the novels from future readers.  But perhaps Updike doesn't care.  Perhaps he's only interested in the moment and in readers of his own generation.  To me, it seems as though he doesn't give a royal fig for the future. 

Shakespeare, a writer not for his age alone but for all time, occasionally included references to fleeting phenomena.  I rather like it that he did so.  I'd be intrigued to learn, once and for all, who was that "red-nosed innkeeper at Daventry" to whom Falstaff refers.   But neither Shakespeare nor any other writer with whom I'm familiar so saturated his work with multitudinous and forgettable popcultch trivia.

But perhaps Updike has made the right choice.  Perhaps the density of reference makes the novels so credible, so real, that scholars will be happy to annotate and readers will revfel and glory in the footnotes.

It's a gamble and my guess is that it's a losing one.  Time will tell. 

A Visit to a New Health-care Provider

Today I went to see a new doctor, a specialist.  His receptionist sits behind a sign that reads "Co-payment must be made at the time of service.  Failure to pay the co-payment will result in an additional charge of $10."  I took a seat to wait and to fill out various forms -- and to be apprised of a "policy change":  "A patient who misses an appointment without canceling 24 hours in advance will be charged $45."  I read a little further:  "Extended telephone conversations will be subject to a charge of $15." 

I know that doctors have to make a living and I don't begrudge them a decent wage.  But goodness gracious, must they transform themselves into shameless nickel-and-dimers? 

I want to have confidence in my doctor.  I want to think that he's the heir to Aesculapius, Hippocrates, and Jean Hersholt. I don't want to think that he's a money-hungry "provider" whose promary aim, transcending all others (including healing), is to squeeze me for a buck here and a buck there. 

Which is in fact what I did think.  Not a good first impression, Dr. Provider!

Another Baseball Dream

I have recurrent baseball dreams, most of them nightmarish. The most frequent is that I hit a sharp line drive to right, start for first but run as if I were stuck in a sea of mucilage.  My legs won't move. The right fielder throws me out before I'm halfway down the line.  I leave the field in disgrace, thirty-thousand fans vigorously booing.  What does it mean?  "I can't get to first base" sounds like an adolescent sexual worry, but I suspect that such an interpretation might be too specific. Let's just say that the theme of the nightmare is ineffectiveness.   

What a relief, then, that this World Series time I can report on a very pleasant dream.  My team (Dodgers or Phillies or just a bunch of nameless guys) was pounding the Yankees.  (Cultural context for you non-Brooklynites out there in Bloglandia: the New York Yankees represent all that is evil in American society, and have done so since the days of Joe Page and Snuffy Stirnweiss and Charley Keller, or for some sixty-plus years.  There is no question but that the rich, whiny, crybaby Yankees are the special favorites of Bernie Madoff, Ann Coulter, and Dick Cheney.)  In the dream, my side hit one opposite-field line drive after another and the score went from 5-0 to 13-0 to 17-0.  Finally, we brought to the plate a cute, tow-headed four-year-old boy.  He blasted the first pitch over the head of their center fielder and knocked in three more runs. I woke up elated, and in an aroused condition that gave me confidence that, yes, I could get to first base. Possibly to third base.  Perhaps even score.  .  

As Time Goes By ( in Baseball Years)

Two nights ago, I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing!  HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right.  Instead, it was the discovery that the Phillies' lanky, awkward-but-effective scraggly-bearded right fielder Jayson Werth sports a noteworthy baseball pedigree  His grandfather was Dicky Schofield, a good-field no-hit infielder from the 1950s -- from the days of my golden youth. Holy jumping jiminy!  I saw this young feller's grampa play! 

Youch!  More evidence, as if more were needed, of my long-in-the-toothedness.

Why should I be surprised?  I went to my first baseball game in 1946;  (At Ebbets Field -- Cardinals 3, Dodgers 1.)  Before there was TV.  I've been attending to the game for 63 years.  Close to three generations. 

I've grown accustomed to father-son combos.  Bobby and Barry; the Griffeys (who once played together in the same outfield; Felipe and Moises; huge Cecil Fielder and his even more enormous son, Prince; the Hundleys, the Stottlemyres, and many, many others.  Sometimes I can be watching a game and suddenly lose track of time.  Eric Young, Jr. looks and runs so exactly like his father that it's easy to fall into flashback mode.  I remember watching a game in which Pedro Borbon came in to relieve.  Holy moly, I said to myself -- he's a right-handed pitcher.  Why the heck is he throwing with his left hand?  Then after a few seconds of complete bafflement it came to me: Pedro Borbon, Jr.  I had simply lost twenty-five years -- a phenomenon to which your "mature" brain is occasionally and increasingly prone.

Jayson Werth isn't even the sole grandson.  Aaron Boone's father was the catcher (and manager) Bob Boone and his grandfather was the Cleveland infielder Ray Boone, whom I also saw play, but only on the TV.  And then there's the Bell family: grandsons David and Mike, father Buddy, and grandfather Gus, a big hitter with Cincinnati during the Dicky Schofield years.  

So here's the question.  Will I hang around long enough to watch the great-grandsons play?.  Is Jayson Werth married?  Does he have any kids?   Are there any budding Boones or baby Bells waiting at the horizon? 

Why I Love Health Insurance Companies, Reason # 453

I hate to fetch the mail nowadays because there are so damn many importunate communications from doctors, hospitals, from medicare, and from insurance companies.  Even though I'm in relatively good health and need only routine servicing, each time I visit a doctor the system manages to generate one piece of paper after another -- most of them written in codes that are almost entirely inexplicable.  Could anyone have devised a more lunatic, more inefficient health-care system? 

The other day I received a letter from Great-West Healthcare, my "supplemental carrier,"  to this effect:

"We recently reviewed one of your claims and discovered that we mistakenly sent you a benefit check for $31.80.  We now realize that payment should have been sent directly to your provider.  We have reprocessed the claim to pay the provider.  Therefore, this letter is a request for the $31.80 paid to you in error.  Please send a check for $31.80 to the address on the back of this letter.  If you have any questions, please contact our service center at the number on the front of your health plan ID card.  Thank you.

Of course, there was no address on the back of the letter, so I could not respond. 

But if there had been an address, this is what I would have said:

Dear Great-West Healthcare:

Thank you for you letter of August 10.  I will be happy to refund the $31.80.  However, I have no record of this transaction, so before I pay you, I need the following data.

A copy of a cancelled check for the amount that you claim to have sent me. 

Evidence that you have actually paid the funds to the unnamed "provider."  This evidence should be in the form of a cancelled check but if the $31.80 was sent as an electronic deposit, a notarized affidavit from an officer of the "provider" will be ample.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me at my home phone number, which can be conveniently found in the local telephone book or obtained online, so that I can play you some nice elevator music while you languish on indefinite hold.

Thank you.

Yellow Face

"Yellowface" is the Asian equivalent of theatrical "blackface," as in the case of Warner Oland (a Swede) or Sidney Toler (an Scottish-American) impersonating Charlie Chan. "Yellow Face" is also the name of an uncharacteristic Sherlock Holmes short story -- one that is unusual among Conan Doyle's compositions in that no crime is solved nor none committed, and also because Sherlock Holmes' overconfident deductions prove to be entirely erroneous.

Grant Munro has married a young widow, Effie Hebron, who returned to her native England after her Atlanta husband died of yellow fever.  After some years of blissful marriage, Effie begins to act most strangely;  she sneaks out to a neighboring house in the middle of the night -- a house at the upper window of which her puzzled husband catches sight of a strange and unnaturally immobile yellow face.  

After listening to Munro's narration, Sherlock Holmes confidently theorizes that Effie's first husband did not die, but has secretly returned to England to blackmail his erstwhile wife.  But when Munro, Watson, and Holmes break into the house, they discover at the window not a husband come back to life but a young girl, Effie's daughter, wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she is a "little coal-black negress."  The mystery is solved:  Effie has been behaving peculiarly not because she is seeing another man (as Munro seems to fear) or because she is being blackmailed, but because she was afraid to confess to her second husband that her former mate was black --  even though, she proclaims,  "a nobler man never walked the earth."

And so the story proceeds to its climax.  How will Munro respond to the revelation? Will he reject his wife, or embrace her?  "It was a long two minutes [ten minutes in the first American edition!!] before Grant Munro broke the silence....  He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held out his other hand to his wife, and turned towards the door. 'We can talk it over more comfortably at home,' said he.  'I am not a good man, Effie, but I think I am a better one that you have given me credit for being.'" 

"Yellow Face" is designed to be an uplifting story of tolerance and trust and in truth it is extraordinarily progressive, even radical, by the standards of 1894.  But it's also a naive story.  It elides and dodges the complications that it raises, especially about matters of race.  Is it credible, or is it not more fear than fact, that a mixed-race husband and an English woman would produce a "coal-black" offspring. Doyle's belief that such an engendering is possible is a mark of the simplicity of his thinking about race.  Moreover, there were strict "anti-miscegenation" laws in Georgia in the last part of the nineteenth century. How did Effie and John Hebron manage to evade them?  In what way did they live?  Hebron managed to leave a considerable estate to his wife?  How did he achieve his wealth?

Doyle is interested in making a case for tolerance and he is interested in Holmes.  But he does not much concern himself with the other characters that he creates.  He does not explore the psychological costs for Effie when, as she says, "she cut herself off from her race."  What prompted her to violate so strong a taboo?  And why would a strong and independent woman suddenly become so fearful when she re-married?  What did it cost her, emotionally, to leave her child behind in Georgia where a dark mixed-race girl would be so awkwardly situated?  How could she conceal so much of her history from Grant Munro without overwhelming guilt?  How did she manage to achieve so blissful a union with him while carrying many important secrets?  And what about the poor child?  Born to an illegal union that is soon fractured by death, then abandoned, then reclaimed and brought to a strange land -- and asked to wear a yellow mask for fear the someone would be shocked by her pigmentation. Doyle does not even broach the question of the damage to the child?   And what kind of future can be in store for her in England?

Doyle seems to consider that "Yellow Face" concludes happily -- but does it? While it is certainly to the author's credit that he is unfazed by the taboo against "intermarriage," it is also true that he rests satisfied with easy, superficial, and naive answers to hard questions. Or rather, he does not even seem to realize that he has started a whole pack of hares in motion.   

It's curiously negligent that Doyle does not even give a name to the "coal-black negress."  She remains a plot-device, not a person. 

It is equally odd that Doyle does not find fault with Sherlock Holmes's' inability to think past the convention of the genre, where blackmail is a commonplace.  Intermarriage, Doyle seems to suggest, is so exotic, so unusual, that it would not occur even to so brilliant a detective as Sherlock Holmes that a yellow mask might hide a black face.

On Noise

Even as my hearing deteriorates, I become more and more disturbed by excessive noise.  For example: coffee shops, which in any sensible world, would be oases of tranquility, have become positively uninhabitable. When I visit such a place, I do so either to talk with a friend or to read silently.  I do not go to be assaulted by what the tattooed, benose-ringed young staff fancies to be "music" -- grating sounds amplified to 11 on the Nigel Tufnel scale.  And then last week I went to a baseball game at one of the new stadiums where they have embraced to the ultimate the philosophy of  the "total entertainment package," which means bright blinking lights, almost constant "music," and exhortations on the giant scoreboard to "Get Loud."  But baseball, more than any other sport, requires thought and concentration.  It's a subtle game, not enhanced by distractions. And yet it seemed that very few of the spectators around me were actually paying attention to the events on the field.  The noise forbade it.  When our side's left fielder played a routine fly ball into a single -- an act which would have provoked indignation and jeers at the low-tech Ebbets Field of my youth -- the crowd remained preternaturally silent, reserving its roars for the inter-inning "kiss-cam" and similar travesties.

Do we truly enjoy or are we simply inured to the noise that has become so constant at the old ball game, in the restaurant, or even on the leafy suburban street, where the egregious leaf-blower has become an oppressive commonplace. (Why do we not ban a mega-decibel machine that is less efficient than the time-honored and virtually silent broom)?

The noise of machines and the noise of amplified sound is a relatively new phenomenon.  Until 1650 or so, no such sounds oppressed our ears. There was the occasional thunderstorm, and there were church bells, and there was the clatter of horse and coach on cobblestone streets  -- but there was nothing comparable to the sea of noise in which we daily swim. Our ancestors lived for a million years in a world that we would judge to be virtually silent.  There were no factories, no trucks, no airplanes overhead, no electric guitars and, inasmuch as 95% of the people were village-dwelling agricultural workers, not even large crowds.  The noise that we routinely endure is unprecedented and unnatural.  And unhealthy as well. 

     

Some Mid-Career Baseball Deaths

Ray Chapman, the most notorious of  the dead-in-mid-career, was batting .300 when he was hit on the head by a spitball thrown by Carl Mays in August of 1920. "Big Ed" Delahanty, a Hall-of-Famer, fell drunk off the International Bridge at Niagara Falls in 1903.  Cory Lidle, Thurman Munson, Nestor Chavez, Ken Hubbs and the great Roberto Clemente died in plane crashes.  Many players, including Nick Adenhart, a pitcher of great promise until April 9, 2009, have died in car crashes.  Danny Frisella died in a dune buggy accident.  Steve Olin and Tim Crews ran their motorboat into a pier in 1993.  Steve Bechler was a 2003 victim of Ephedra. Tiny Bonham and Jake Daubert died of appendicitis, Harry Agganis of a blood clot, Darryl Kile was found dead in his hotel room, having succumbed to an unsuspected heart defect. Urban Shocker died of pneumonia, Danny Thompson of leukemia.  Dernell Stinson, Gus Polidor, Dave Shotkowski and Lyman Bostock were murdered.  Just last year, Geremi Gonzalez was struck by lightning. Jim Umbricht died of cancer at age 34. His ashes were spread over the field he loved.  Unfortunately, he played at domed stadium with artificial grass, so after a few days, he was vacuumed up and spends eternity in a Texas landfill.    

Plastic Flowers

Our property adjoins the old West Bradford cemetery.  The two- or three-acre plot of ground is the most visible remnant of the village of dairy, sheep and apple community of  West Bradford, which was hacked out of the steep slopes above the Connecticut river in the first part of the nineteenth century, peaked before the Civil War, and then went into decline more that a century and a half ago. West Bradford lost its post office address in the 1920s and its schoolhouse (if word-of-mouth can be trusted) before WWII.  We still have a few sheep and horses and some beef cattle but also an ever-increasing number of commuters who head down I-91 to jobs in Lebanon or Hanover. 

The history of West Bradford can be read in the cemetery's gravestones,  There must two hundred of them.  The oldest are of local slate and are only a foot or eighteen inches in height; these date from the 1820s. One or two of them feature lugubrious, stunted iconic weeping willows which rain and wind have rendered barely decipherable. The markers that date from the end of the nineteenth century are larger, made of marble that was quarried thirty miles to the west of us, and reflect the area's growing prosperity.  They're laconic  -- just name and dates -- and entirely bereft of adornment or decoration.  They celebrate the Baldwins and Cunninghams and Lows and Tebbetses who cleared these hilly fields with horse and pung and who left behind all those massive and beautiful stone walls that snake and twist their way through lands that are once again deeply forested.  There are women buried here who have been denied even the brief immortality that a grave marker affords: a man's name and dates and the notation "his wife" or sometimes even "his wives."

Quarter-size headstones, numerous and unincised, attest to unnamed infants.

There's a new part of the cemetery, still in use, but which to my eyes is less sturdy and more frivolous -- an emblem of a culture in decline.  Just because it's possible to laser a prancing reindeer onto a granite headstone doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so.  How would all those long-bearded and puritanical Emersons and Pipers have railed against such trifling?

A few years ago, one of our local Thurstons erected a pink granite stone with a plastic cross epoxyed to its surface.  The cross, it was said, was to be a perpetual light -- lit until the end of time by some sort of device that gathered energy during the day and discharged it at night.  "Oh no," I thought the first few times that I came home late at night and was greeted by a ruby and unwinking polysterene crucifix, "how ugly, how tacky, how out-of-keeping." Fortunately, the perpetual light only lasted a year or so before extinguishing itself for good. 

I rather like it that the cemetery is nearby.  "Quiet neighbors," as they say here.  Our house lies halfway between the cemetery and the pond.  It's important to have the crucial symbols of life and death in place.  My only quarrel is that occasionally a visitor to the cemetery, a descendant of one of the pioneers, perhaps, will pitch an old vase or some sun-faded plastic flowers onto our land. I don't so much mind picking up a few pieces of trash as I object to my property being used as someone's rubbish heap.  It's disrespectful.  But any person who would think to commemorate his mother with polycarbonate or acrylic geraniums will generally not be the most mannerly or ecologically sensitive of souls.  

To honor both the visitors and the inhabitants of the West Bradford cemetery, I've composed a country-and-western quatrain. 

Remember me in marble and in granite;

     Remember me with rose and lily brave;

Remember me in sunshine and in shadow

    But don't put plastic flowers on my grave.

One day, many years ago, I was sitting on the cemetery's split-rail fence with D., a local farmer.  We were chatting about the weather and such.  He suddenly swung around and pointed to one of the headstones.  "That's the boy that died of eating the crayons."

 A truly Dickensian moment. 

Updike -- Part IV

The Updike-athon continues  Since my last report, I've read Museums and Women, Bech is Back, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. 

The good news:  Updike is fluent, a masterful stylist, a remarkable story-teller, a distinguished craftsman.  He's original, entertaining, bold, inventive.  The section of Beauty of the Lilies that describe Alma DeMott's childhood in Basingstoke, Delaware is as good as anything I've read in years -- a truly classic piece of writing  

The bad news:  Updike's characters have no heart  They're almost uniformly small-minded, bigoted, hateful, unloving and, in fact, incapable of love.  The novels are distressing and depressing.  And inconsistent.  The Rabbit quartet is reputed to be Updike's masterpiece, but the long section about Skeeter in Redux is a ludicrous mess, a total bomb, a failure that disfigures the entire series  

A reader who knew America only through the Rabbit series would be convinced that Americans in the second half of the twentieth century were selfish, money-grubbing, racist, entirely without culture, sex-obsessed, alcoholic, uneducated, insecure, obnoxious, undisciplined and knowledgeable only of TV trivia.  I suppose that there are such people -- but there are also substantial citizens, artists and artisans, and good, functioning families.  I must say that four large novels in the company of Updike's folk can wear a reader down.  I think it's time to re-read Trollope's Palliser novels, wher4e there is villainy but also redemption.  I need an antidote.

Another P.S. 217 Picture

Is it my imagination, or did we mature later in those days than kids do now?  These handsome juveniles are thirteen and fourteen years old.  To my eyes, the girls look barely half-grown, the boys variable but distinctly unfledged.

Claire R., who sent me the picture (thanks so much, Claire!!), looks womanly, but the others --not far out of childhood.  The boys in the second row look as though adolescence has not yet begun to rear its unhandsome head. 

Want to know the names of these unpromising lads and lasses?  Search here.  

I

Notes on the "Tarpaulin"

We're packing up, getting ready to go -- even though there hasn't been the slightest hint of frost.  When I loaded the metal sculptures into the bed of the truck, I realized that it would be a good idea to cover them with a tarpaulin.  So down I drove to Main Street and to the recently enlarged Aubuchon.  "Where do you keep your tarpaulins?" I asked the young clerk.  "What is a tarpaulin?  I've never heard of it?"  "Never heard of a tarpaulin," I replied, taken aback, "you use them to cover boats or cargo or the backs of trucks." "Oh," he said, brightening, "a tarp," and he took me right there where the shelves were loaded with blue "polytarps" -- canvas being virtually extinct, at least in our part of the landlocked world. 

The young feller didn't know the world "tarpaulin" and looked at me as if I were some sort of pretentious snob.  But "tarpaulin" goes right back to my childhood -- it might be the first three-syllable word I ever learned.  Not that I was nautical, not in any sense a "tar." But when it rained at Ebbets Field, the ground crew would roll out the infield tarpaulin and then we'd all sit and listen while Red Barber and Connie Desmond chatted for an hour or so until either play resumed or the game was postponed. "Tarpaulin" is not a hard or obscure word -- certainly not to baseball fans who can remember when fields didn't have roofs.  But the big linguistic question is -- will the word tarpaulin survive in all its glory or will it be truncated into a pathetic apocopic monosyllablic shadow of itself?   Or will it be confused with the TARP, which is a horse of another acronymic color --. Troubled (or more accurately, Toxic) Asset Relief Program. 

Well, I bought the "tarp"  -- not at the Aubuchon, which didn't have the right size --but down at the Farm-Way.   So now we're one step closer to shoving off for DC and then back home.  I'm overwhelmed with pre-nostalgia.

My First Racist

There was this kid in our class at P. S. 217, back there in the 'Flatbush '50s.  I'm not going to name names, but if anyone is cares to look, you can know him by his smirk in the picture of our eighth grade graduating class.  For convenience, I'll call this guy K.   K was not particularly smart, or athletic, or talented, or attractive, or congenial, so he was quite a way down in the nebbish area.  But to give him his due, he was intense, dogged, hard-working, and perpetually argumentative.  He was not afraid to offend.  He took positions that no one else in the schoolyard supported.  I remember him haranguing me on the subject of social security.  It was a bad thing, he asserted, because his father could make more money by investing on his own rather than contributing to the pot. "But, but, but...," I remember stuttering, "it's insurance, and not everyone is a good investor."  This exchange must have taken place during the Truman years. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard, where everyone was the child or grandchild of immigrants, FDR was our guy and social security was a fact of life, a revolutionary improvement in quality of life.  Besides, wasn't it the case that my widowed grandmother received $32 a month -- not enough to live on, but a great help, enough to pay her rent?  To argue against social security -- where in the world could K get such weird, off-the-track ideas?  Plus K was a Yankees fan --an unholy, contrarian jerk!

Then K disappeared for a month or a year -- some period of time, I can't remember exactly how long.  He had relatives in a southern city -- Baltimore, I believe, and he lived with them for an extended while. When he returned, he starting spouting the most appalling racist remarks, one of which is engraved on my memory:  "they have a lot of uppity blacks down there, they won't even get off the sidewalk for you."  Whoa, daddy.  First of all, no one said "blacks" in those days -- they were "Negroes."  And second -- "uppity?"  I had never heard the term before and was shocked beyond measure.  "Get off the sidewalk" --WTF???  Beyond my conception, beyond anyone's conception in our part of the universe.  Remember, dear reader, that the only person more sacred to the schoolyarders than FDR was Jackie Robinson.

I tell you, I gave K a lot of room after that conversation.  Truth to tell, there was no need for our paths to cross -- we weren't in the same classroom and K didn't play softball or basketball -- as I said, he was pretty much of a klutz.  

I looked up K on the internet.  He's a retired professor of economics and is now a fellow at a right-wing  think tank.  He's made a career out of opposing third-world development and supporting "free market solutions" to all our ills.  That dogged dullness has produced a number of books.  I've even found a picture of him -- where he was once greasy and pimpled, he's now bald and sleek, with a malevolent cast to his eye. 

There's always been a connection in my mind between conservatism and racism.  The link is narcissism.  "I've got mine, let "them" take care of themselves."  For the Ks of the world, it's not "how do we take care of less fortunate and of our old people?"  It's, "how do 'we' deal with 'them.'"  And "they" are usually, almost always, darker-skinned than "we."  I'm sure that K would deny that his "free-market" views have anything to do with racism.  But I know better -- I was there at the beginning, before K became quite so sleek.  

New Bird in Town

A creature previously unknown to me has appeared in the pond.  After a few moments with the binoculars and a glance at Peterson's classic Field Guide to the Birds along with some intense internet research, I could make a positive identification.  It's a double-crested cormorant, usually found at the seacoast but sometimes in rivers and lakes, which has been "recently extending its range" and which has just now arrived on Hackett Hill Road.  Although it's exciting to encounter a new bird, especially a large graceful swimmer and diver, the cormorant arrives tarnished by a bad reputation.  Cormorants form very large colonies and over-indulge their voracious appetites -- they gobble fish, frogs, salamanders, clean out the lakes.  Is it after our trout?  They've become a pest on Lake Champlain, where they're now "taking measures" to reduce the population.  I don't mind one cormorant, but I certainly don't want to host a horde of them

When the first wild turkey arrived, about fifteen years ago, everyone would stop and stare.  Now turkeys are as common as pigeons, but as far as I can tell, do no damage (unless they get into the garden, which they haven't, so far).  They eat insects, not frogs. Plus they're good eating.  I've never heard of anyone salivating over roast cormorant.

I'd trade the cormorant, and the turkeys for that matter, for some of the birds that have disappared over the last forty years.  We used to have a symphony at dawn and dusk -- now there's hardly a peep, except for the robins and the bluejays.  I'd give a lot to hear a white-throated sparrow at daybreak.  It's been years since I've seen a bluebird, a wren, an indigo bunting, an oriole, a purple martin, a red-wing blackbird, a sandpiper, a tanager, a vireo.  Or seen the swifts overhead. Even our once-abundant swallows have become rare. Where are they? 

Late Blight

It sems so allegorically named, late blight, especially appropriate to your septuagenarian gardener. But it's more than symbolic -- late blight here and it's real.   It's official name is phytophthora infestans.  It's a noxious fungus and it appears just when you're about to start harvesting your abundant tomatoes.  Late blight blackens and putrifies leaves, stems, and the fruits themselves. It leaves nothing edible, and there's no recourse o do except to pull out your plants, and then either burn them or put them in black plastic and take them to the dump.  We're trying to rescue a few of the tomatoes by pulling off the bad leaves, but it's a losing cause.  All that work -- starting the seeds, watching and watering, fertilizing and staking and tying up -- all wasted.  What a pity.

 Late blight also affects potatoes.  In fact, this nasty fungus is responsible for the great Irish famine of the 1840s.  So while we're mournful, we're glad that we don't depend on our tomatoes for sustenance or income. 

Why this year?  Some say that the disease comes to us from the great factory farms in the south, where tomatoes are started early and then shipped north in late spring. My neighbors put the blame on Wal-Mart.  But in all honesty, I must admit that all my tomatoes were started locally, by friends and relations.  The fungus can't be transmitted through the seed, so the tomato factories are off the hook.  The real culprit is the weather -- the soggy cold of June and July was hideous if you're a tomato but just perfect if you're a blight.  

I think I'll take a year off from tomatoes -- let the garden go fallow, or just plant flowers.  I couldn't bear to lose another crop. I'll follow the official advice --root out every single volunteer tomato and pull every weed in the nightshade family.  No tomatoes until 2011.       

Richard Poirier (1925-2009)

Richard Poirier died last week at age 83.  The New York Times paid tribute with a long obituary and an appreciative essay.  Poirier was a "distinguished man of letters" and also a Professor of English.

In 1960, as the juniorest and least-sophisticated graduate student in the history of the universe, I enrolled in an AmLit course taught by Poirier.  Fifty years later, I can affirm that it was the single course in my graduate career in which I performed the absolute worst -- both in the instructor's judgment and in my own.  I'm still embarrassed at the woeful mess of a paper I offered him.  I remember little of it, except its incompetence and the recollection that I used the phrase "a writer of his ilk" -- I can't remember to which I writer I referred -- and that Poirier wrote a longish exasperated note explaining to me that I did not have the standing to treat any American author with disrespect.  However, the honest-to-goodness reason why I did so badly in the course was that Poirier expected his students to think -- and thinking was not an area in which I was gifted.  I had discovered early in my educational career that my memory was far superior to most of my contemporaries, that I had an ear for language, and that I had a moderately fluent prose style.  But I never, ever, possessed a logical, orderly, or penetrating intelligence.  (I could remember sentences and phrases and whole poems, but not arguments or chains of reasoning).  My skills were sufficient for literary study -- indeed I doubt that I could have managed an academic career in any other discipline.

In fact, I did rather well in studies with most of my graduate-school professors -- distinguished and learned gentlemen all of them -- who were so happy to encounter facility that they didn't notice the want of brain.

It is curious that some of the most profoundly learned of my professors were the least adventurous of  thinkers.  I remember, for example, Douglas Bush, now a mere trivia question, but a most renowned scholar in his day, whose superficial, fey, conservative, neoChristianist-pixie observations on Spenser and Milton I duly recorded. for two endless semesters, learning absolutely nothing of worth or value.

Poirier was more serious.  Only 35 (I was 21), he was thinking deeply about the qualities that made American literature distinctive (I believe that he was in the process of formulating the ideas that came together in A World Elsewhere).  He was an intellectual rather than an academic. It would have been wise for me to have listened carefully to him. I might have learned something. 

It's shocking to me that the young, dashing lecturer whom I remember so clearly could be so old, so dead -- but ther's no denying that half a century has slipped away since I last listened to his rumbling voice.   

The Slightness of the Lambs

As far as I can tell, the deer generally keep clear of the back field where the Morgans and the Scottish Blackfaces are pastured.  Perhaps it's because the domestic animals eat down the grass, or perhaps the deer just don't like company.  But a few days ago, I watched four white-tailed deer -- a doe with three fawns, I believe, though such a group makes an unlikely family -- chase twenty-two sheep out of the field and back to their fold.  Sheep are notoriously skittish, but then, so are the white tails.  It was a battle of cowards.  It was especially painful to watch because one of the sheep was the ram, McCavish, and it's his job (aside from the annual servicing, at which he performed brilliantly) is to guard the ewes.  McCavish is the "herd sire," new to the flock,  He was recently imported from Wisconsin; his grandfather came from Scotland in the form of a vial of sperm packed in dry ice.  What was Mr. McCavish thinking when he ran from the field?  I was embarrassed for him and for the entire flock.  Query:  will the sheep stand their ground or will they allow themselves to be intimidated by the wild turkeys?

Zucchini News

In our part of Vermont, the common wisdom is, "never keep your car unlocked in August, because someone will open your door and throw in a couple of zucchinis." Like most local gardeners, I'm drowning  in the  squash.  We can't eat our zucchinis fast enough.  And no matter how vigilant I am in picking them, I wake up in the morning to lift one of those huge hairy leaves and there it is --- another baseball-bat long, sumptuously fat zucchini, staring its one-eyed stare at me.  To make matters worse, this year I'm growing two kinds of zucchinis -- the standard green supermarket variety and a fancy striped "Romanesco."  Also another exotic squash, a buttery globe called "Ronde de Nice," most plentifully produced.  

Last week I was weeding in the garden when I had an unexpected visitor -- unusual for our dirt-road, off the beaten track neighborhood.  I can't remember having to deal with a solicitor since two barely fledged Mormons popped by, fruitlessly, in 1978.  This young man, who arrived noiselessly on bicycle was from VPIRG, and he came to tell me about the hazards of the Vermont Yankee atomic power station.  I told him right up front that I wasn't going to donate any money and I told him why --it all went to Obama.  But he was cordial nevertheless, and we chatted.  He's a Latin major, just graduated from UVM, off in the fall to join Americacorps.  Nice kid, I thought, but an easy mark.  After twenty minutes, he rode off with no donation but with  two substantial zucchinis and a Ronde de Nice in his backpack.  Also a large head of broccoli and a handful of beets.  . 

Pond News

Last week, we had a great blue heron act in a most unheron-like way.  The great blues are ordinarily skittish birds.  We can't get closer than fifty yards before they're up in the air, beating their slow, graceful, pteordactyl wings.  But this guy kept us company even with the grandchildren floating on the plastic boats,  squealing and keening.  The kids watched as he speared a small fish and swallowed it whole.  I worried:  perhaps he's hurt and can't fly.  But after a day or so, he rose into the air, wheeled about, and off he went.  Was he a poorly-educated juvenile out on his own for the first time?  We'll never know.  

And then, yesterday, a new critter.  The pond has become home to a muskrat, which swims slowly along the opposite bank.  Should we be happy about this?  Muskrats eat cattails, of which we have a more-than-adequate supply.  But they also eat small frogs, and we love our frogs.  They are philoprogenitive, reproducing like rabbits.  We don't want vast colonies of these lemming-like creatures.  And they burrow into and undermine banks -- which is not good if they damage the artificial dike.  OK, Mr. Muskrat, here's the deal -- you stay on your side of the pond, the natural side and we'll be good friends, but don't try to make a home on the artificial side. 

When I was a boy in the unenlightened 40s, women wore fur coats.  One of the common furs was called "Hudson seal."  Guess what?  "Muskrat fur that is dyed, plucked, and sheared to resemble seal." 

Two can play the same game.  If anyone asks, that rodent over on the other side of the pond with the long ratlike tail -- that's a Hudson seal.        

Ligawinitude

The word "ligaw" in Pilipino, a language of which I am totally ignorant, apparently means both "totally lost" and "courtship."  And therefore the adjective "ligawin" refers to someone who is both "directionally disabled" or "directionally dyslexic" and also "attractive to persons of the opposite sex." What a wonderful correspondence, especially to those of us who regularly lose the car in the parking lot and to whom a walk in a strange city is a fearful and daring adventure.  (My lexicography is contributed by a Manila reader whose forthright and thoughtful blog can be accessed at this address.)  "Directionally dyslexic" is an ugly phrase, filled with self-loathing; "ligawinitude" trips off the tongue.  Well, almost trips;  it's certainly superior to "ligawinness" -- which sounds like the female of an extincit predator.

Here are some examples of ligawinitude (fellow sufferers will empathize) which I have borrowed from Ana in Manila:

"I am so ligawin I still lose my way around the UP campus after 30 years working there. I am so ligawin I'd enter the main door of an unfamiliar office, transact my business, and then try to let myself out through the door of a conference room right smack at a dozen people all gaping at me. I am so ligawin that when I eat out, I can get lost going back from the comfort room to my table at a big restaurant till my friends are about ready to page me....  When I am in a strange place and I wish to explore it, I walk a straight path. When I reach a fork, I turn back."

Ana claims to be "the most ligawin person in the world."  It's a hard claim to substantiate. The instances of ligawinitude that she cites -- well, I can match them with one hand tied behind my back.  We won't crown a world ligawin champion until we tabulate the results of the Internation Ligawinitude Olympics.  Nevertheless, it is curious to me that the ligawinitudinous often boast of the severity of their condition.  No one says -- "Oh, I am the most colorblind person in the world," but we (the ligawinoids) take a perverse pride in topping or lost friends. "Loster than thou" is our odd claim.  

Because the general public and even our closest friends treat us as comic, we respond by boasting of our affliction.  In effect, we identify with those who laugh at us. 

The chronically lost require liberation.  We're not clowns;  we're just subject to ligawinitude. 

Which means that we're a) lost and b) sexy.  

Updike-III

Two more Updike novels down the hatch.  The first, Seek My Face, published in 2002, is an extended short story rooted in the author's prodigious knowledge of the contemporary art scene.  It's casually written -- as if Updike didn't try very hard.  Am I excessively sensitive to be insulted that Updike didn't extend himself to invent a plot?  The second novel is iRabbit at Rest, composed back in 1990 when Updike was trying harder.  Harrry "Rabbit" Angstrom, "hero" of four novels, is a force in modern fiction.  He's nasty, amoral, and crude, but hardly more so that the panoply of suburbanite creatures who surround him  Updike mercilessly draws attention to everything odious in America culture -- he's the poet laureate of tacky. Rabbit is fascinating but repellent. Whatever happened to "to teach and to delight?"  

Every once in a while Rabbit, always, alas, comprehensible, becomes momentarily sympathetic. But then Updike allows him to speak -- and Rabbit's words are invariably aggressive and offensive.  I think that the gap between what Rabbit thinks and what Rabbit says is a major structural flaw in the novel -- and one that will eventually push the novels from center to periphery.  But time will tell. For now, the Rabbit books are a guide to our own American kind of shallowness -- and so here I am, off to the library or to the second-hand bookstore to hunt down the earlier novels in this series.  What does Dickens say about Uriah Heep -- something about "fascinating in his own repulsion."  Yes, I think that phrase will serve nicely for Updike's Rabbit.   

Starlight, Dewdrops, etc.

The Stephen Foster songbook was a staple of my childhood.  My mother, sitting at the old Hardman baby grand,sang "Camptown Ladies," and "O Susanna" and "Old Black Joe."  But times change and Foster was pushed to the sidelines years ago. Too racist, too sentimental, too 'soft'. 

Now we're enjoying a Stephen Collins Foster Revival and Festival in our very own home.  It began with the discovery of the "American Dreamer" cd that Thomas Hampson recorded in 1992.  Hampson, opera lovers will know, is the world champion of living baritones, and in this cd, he does Foster proud -- to the inventive accompaniments of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, No question but that Foster was a truly superb melodist --with a long string of songs that would have gone double-platinum, if there had been such a thing, in pre-Civil War America.  

Hampson sings the Foster songs as if they're Schubert lieder, but there's another recent cd, "Beautiful Dreamer" -- a "tribute album" in which Suzy Bogguss, John Prine, Allison Krauss, Mavis Staples and a bunch of excellent lesser-known (to me) but wonderful musicians lay into these tunes with enthusiasm and verve. Who would have guessed the "Beautiful Dreamer" was country before country was cool? Pure country.

Foster was a better melodist than poet. Often his lines are awkward and time-bound and mawkish, but occasionally he hits the nail on the head.  I like "beautiful dreamer, queen of my song";  I think that "slumber my darling the birds are at rest" is fine, but a succeeding line in the same song --"thy pillow shall sacred be" -- is bad beyond ordinary bad;  "weep no more, my lady" is positively Shakespearean and "all the world is sad and dreary/ every where I roam" is well-rooted in the medieval contemptus mundi  tradition;  "long may the daisies dance the field, frolicking far and near" is far too pseudo-Wordsworthian for my palate.  Foster's best lyric, in my view, is "Hard Times Come Again No More" --  "'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary/ Hard times, hard times, come again no more/ Many days you have lingered, around my cabin door/ Oh! hard times, come again no more."  It's inspired, heartfelt, and eternally pertinent -- and also, wedded to an excellent melody.  "Hard Times" was not known to me in the days of my youth -- more's the pity.  

Old guy, maybe a bluesman, bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, sits on a bench in the middle of the night, downtown, playing air-sax, nodding. Young fellow comes by, cheerful, asks him, "Crosstown buses run this way?"  Blues guy looks up, pauses for a second, and then drawls, "Doo--dah, doo-dah."     

Pastorale

Sharon was here yesterday.  She has a new method to keep the raccoons and the rats out of the food bins.  "The rats gnaw through the plastic garbage cans, the raccons open them unless I bungee them real tight. Galvinized works, but what we do now is buy junk refrigerators or freezers.  The rats can't get into them.  Of course, what you spill is feast for the mice."  Sharon's husband is a vet, but at lambing time last winter he was still recuperating from a hip replacement.  "One of the ewes," Sharon says, "was having a hard time delivering her lamb.  I went out to help pull.  I pulled out a head and a leg.  The lamb must have been dead for a long time.  I whipped out the cell phone.  I said to David, 'I don't care how long it takes to limp down here, you're in charge.'  He took one look, got the rifle, and shot the ewe." 

Updike- II

In Terrorist, Updike takes us inside the head of a young,malleable, soft-spoken Islamist fanatic.  The protrayal is persuasive, in part because the horror bigotry is understated and casual.  It's quite a feat of imagination on the author's part.  It's a good novel -- a page-turner, as they say.  It's most remarkable feature is that the hero of the novel is a tired and bedraggled high school guidance counsellor;  What a breakthrough -- the guidance counsellor, figure of o-so-much contempt and satire, as savio!.  Of course, the contrived/dramatic ending in which the terrorist and the counsellor square off is totally unbelievable, but at least it doesn't involve fistfights or animatrons.  On the whole, Terrorist is a very readable, imaginative and largely satisfying novel.  It's a bit spare, laconic  -- but perhaps it only seems so because I'm also reading Doestoevsky.  It's not a novel for the ages -- it's too obviously occasional.  And I must say, I'm suspicious of a piece of fiction about the interaction of various ethnicities in which the only two Afro-Americans are a whore and a pimp named Tylenol.  

Off to the Bradford Public to see what else is in their Updike holdings.

Our Lady of Internal Combustion

I was in one of those highway gas-station convenience stores a few weeks ago, searching for M&Ms.  I couldn't find them, but I said to myself, this is America.  I'm an American, and if there's one thing I know it's that there are going to be M&Ms in this place.  I poked around a little more and sure enough, just a little out of the way, there they were -- five different kinds of M&Ms.  I went for the classic multi-colored ones.  Am I the kind of person who's going to experiment with peanut butter M&Ms?  It wouldn't be me.  But I'm off the point, which is, that when you're a native of the place, you know more or less what to expect.  You're not likely to be taken by surprise.  But every once in a while, something hits you right between the eyes, and you say, where am I?  I had such an experience today when I read a flyer from the West Fairlee Center Church, which is right over there on Middlebrook Road, not more than three or four miles from here.  I have no quarrel with the "Old Fashioned Community Hymn Sing" on July 12 or the "Shape Note Singing" on August 2 -- it's what I would expect from the West Fairlee church.  I'm a little puzzled by the "Blessing of the Animals" on July 19, but I remember St. Francis, in some ways my favorite saint, and I know that he preached to the birds and that when he was dying, he thanked his donkey and (this is a bit hard to believe but what the heck) his donkey wept.  So I'm OK with blessing the animals, although I myself would feel hypocritical blessing the particular animals that I was preparing to transform into lambchops or hamburger.  But what makes me feel like a stranger in a strange land is the event that is scheduled for August 9 -- the "Blessing of the ATV's" (sic).  ATVs, for those of you who don't know, are all-terrain vehicles, and are very useful if you're out in the west patrolling miles and miles of barbed-wire fence, but are used mostly for "recreation," which seems to involve tearing up private land (someone else's private land, that is) or government land, making a whole lot of noise, and sometimes driving underage and illegally, and much too fast, on our usually peaceful "unimproved" dirt roads.  No mufflers, no insurance, no license.  So what's with "the blessing of the ATVs?"  St. Francis has become the patron saint of environmentalists.  Is "the blessing of the ATVs" supposed to be a rejoinder to St. F and to ecological thinking?  Are we experiencing a Christian sanction of anti-environmentalism?  Or have these churches long been blessing tractors and balers and pickups and backhoes, and I've just not noticed?  WTF is going on?  Am I in the America I know and understand?  Why am I feeling vertiginous?  Would St. Francis have thanked his ATV?  Would his ATV have wept?  

Updike

I've shamefully neglected the writings of John Updike.  I read the first Rabbit novel when it appeared in 1960 and was struck by its vigor and authenticity.  A talent to watch, I said to myself -- but then I lost track.  I loved one of the Bech books, devoured on an airline ride from somewhere to somewhere else twenty years ago.  I've been dazzled by short stories in various anthologies and by art criticism in the NYRB.   But for a writer considered an American master, nominated for a Nobel  -- well, I've been inattentive.  And now Updike is gone.  I'm late (as usual).  To remedy the personal deficiency, I hastened to the Bradford Public Library, where, sad to say, the only Updike on the shelf was one I'd never heard of,Villages, published in 2004. 

Villages is billed as an autobiographical novel and appears to be so.  It's eminently readable, slickly written (sometimes so facilely that it crosses into self-parody).  But, my-oh-my, what an embarrassingly bad performance.  It's no more than a sexual history of "Owen Mackenzie" in which the succession of women Owen encounters are diffentiated only by the size and shapes and degrees of mucosity and erectility of their reproductive organs.  It's an adolescent novel written by a seventy-year-old eminence.  What the heck was Updike thinking?. Why would he waste precious time on such unambitious, indulgent stuff -- unless he took a long-ago manuscript out of a drawer and fooled around with it a bit?

Disappointing indeed. A few years ago, I read through the novels of Philip Roth, who is an exact contemporary of Updike.  My conclusion:  that Roth (see Books over there on the side of the page) was a writer of arrested development.  Oh no, not again!

Let's see if the BPL has anything else by Updike today.  Let's hope for the best.  Villages has got to be an aberration. 

The Love Song of Gov. Mark Sanford (in his own 'eamailed' [sic] words).

                                                                           -I-

 

You were basking

in what seems a great spot.

 

I am most jealous

of  your salad

under the palm trees.

 

I do not want to raise expectations

about feelings

and things.

 

You are special

and unique

and fabulous

in a whole host of ways.

 

I will write you a longer note

with a few more profound thoughts

tomorrow

or

Wednesday.

 

It won't be worthy of bedside placement.

 

                                                           -II-

 

I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up.

There is something wonderful

about listening to country music playing in the cab,

the air conditioner running,

the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background

the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness

of trees and marsh,

the day breaking

and vibrant pink becoming alive in the morning clouds.

And getting to build something with each scoop

of dirt.

 

It is admittedly weird.

 

                                                                    -III-

 

Do you really comprehend

how beautiful your smile is?

Have you been told lately

how warm your eyes, and how they softly glow

with the special nature of your soul?

 

The rarest of all commodities in this world is love.

You already had

a full tank of love

in the emotional bank account.

 

Since our first meeting there in  the wind-swept

somewhat open air

dance spot in Punta del Este,

I felt that you had that same rare attribute.

 

You have a level of sophistication that is so

fitting

with your beauty.

 

You have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses.

I love the curves of your hips.

I love your tan lines.

 

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore.

In the faded glow of night's light

that we spoke of

at the steakhouse.

 

                                             -IV-

This soul-mate feel

I alluded to

is real.

 

How this lightning strike snuck up on us

I am still not sure.

 

My heart wants to get on a plane tonight to be in your loving arms.

My head says how do we put the genius back in the bottle

 

The bottom line is two fold.

----------------------------------------------------

(Words by Mark Sanford with the assistance of Maria Belen Chapur;   poetastical typography by Vivian de St. Vrain.) 

Latest News from Nightmareville.

I had to dispose of the corpse.  My choice was either to take it to the dump, piece by piece, weekly, or bury it on the property.  Whose body?  Don't know.  How did it get into the freezer?  I put it there, in a black plastic bag, after I killed him.  I gave careful consideration to the pros and cons of each method.  If I took it to the dump, there might be fingerprints or perhaps pieces of paper with my name on them.  And it might take weeks to complete the process.  If I buried it on the land, it would always be here.  Who knows what excavations there might be in the future.  I started to bury it, but just as I put a shovel in the earth, a small, yappy dog started pestering me.  

Time to wake up.  Hey, good deal.  I didn't murder anyone.  I'm clean.