Periodically, Husband gets together with three of his old high school buddies for a boys’ weekend. Husband and two of the three friends enjoy similar modes of relaxation, chiefly urban and Scotch-fueled.
They have a fourth friend who is a musician. For unknown reasons they decided to let him plan their boys’ weekend this year. Where is the Rat Pack headed? You guessed it: the Renaissance Faire!
I have been trying to imagine what a lame version of The Hangover that particular Lost Weekend would inspire.
A: Zounds, but my head doth ache! O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.
B: O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into beasts!
C: What ho, lads! An infant, mewling and puking? The recollection of its arrival is in my memory locked, but I have not the key.
A: Men! I’ th’ jakes! A ravening Tyger!
B: But where is D? He is rendered lost.
C: Wait. Is D the one who made us come to the Renaissance Faire?
A: Yep.
B: Let’s get the hell out of here before he comes back.
I have always thought that listening to a book is like being fed through an NG tube: aces in an emergency, but not the preferred content delivery method.
The boredom accruing to a year’s worth of commuting, though, has come to seem like an emergency crying out for some audio relief. I looked into audiobooks; they were quite expensive, though, for something I wasn’t entirely sure I would enjoy. I wondered if there were any free audiobooks, much like free podcasts.
There are. Librivox.org records books in the public domain — old books, but that’s mostly what I enjoy anyway. I downloaded an English translation of a French nineteenth-century detective story, The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux. To my astonishment, I was completely captivated. It was pure police procedural, and I had to listen carefully to take in all the clues. The miles flew by.
Oddly, to my ear, different chapters were read by different narrators, and some of the narrators were clearly not native English speakers, although that was an advantage for some with all the French names in Yellow Room. I logged on to librivox.org to see if I could divine the reason, and as it turns out, all the readers are volunteers. Anyone with a pulse, a computer, and a microphone can contribute one or more chapters to the public domain audiobook of his or her choice.
Upon learning this, I had a crazy idea. What if I read a chapter? One the one hand, I’ve always loved reading out loud. On the other hand, I have something of a tortured voice. I can enunciate clearly and read fluently, but the sound, due to some biomechanical fault, is distinctly unmelodious.
But, hell. I don’t have to listen to it!
So the next time you’re on a long road trip, and the kids are clamoring for the next installment of the Palliser series (”Mommy! We’re dying to know…does Phineas Finn get back into Parliament?”) note that Chapter 12 of Phineas Redux is yours truly.
The parking garage at work is five blocks away from my office building, but there’s a really terrific coffee shop between points A and B. The proprietors are Moroccan, and because their dialect and demeanor are so close to Tunisian I feel very much at home there.
I usually stop for a hot coffee on my way into work in the morning and for an iced latte on my way home. I always get one of those cardboard jacket thingies for the cup because I don’t want to burn my hand as I walk to the office, or freeze it as I walk to the car.
Suddenly, today, that seemed so absurd. I thought about drinking coffee in Tunisia, where a cup was a sit-down affair, not a perambulatory accessory. I always had my direkt in a small glass, and on a cold day I would have wrapped my hands around it to draw out the warmth, storing it up against an evening in an unheated apartment. On hot days, if I ordered a Fanta from the refrigerator, I would have held the bottle against my wrist to cool the maximum amount of blood before drinking it and going out into the sun-parched streets.
I’m not discounting the wonders of modern HVAC, but sometimes I do feel my life has become a little too insulated.
During the kindergarten run the other day, I caught a snippet of an NPR segment that had me in stitches. The topic was the Catholic priesthood, and there was the usual discussion about the decline in numbers and the effect that rescinding the celibacy requirement might have upon the ministry.
One poor misguided soul maintained, though, that celibacy was NOT the thing keeping the young lads away in droves. The problem, he said, was that the Catholic church had grown too liberal, and this was scaring off men who might otherwise have a vocation.
Yes, you can just imagine that thought process: “Poverty, chastity, obedience….hmmm, not nearly medieval enough for me.”
This morning, when I walked out of the parking garage at work, I was confronted by a mother duck and eight ducklings, just hanging out together on in the middle of Cambridge.
“They’re standing on a curb, and I’m afraid they’re going to waddle into the street and get run over,” I said.
“Why don’t you call Officer Clancy?” he said oh so helpfully.
The mama duck looked very confused, as though she had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The funny thing is that the ducks were only about half a mile from the island near the Longfellow Bridge where the ducklings in the book make their original home. They had traveled in the opposite direction from the Public Garden, though.
Am I the only person in the Boston area who is not that fond of Make Way for Ducklings? I find the back-ing and forth-ing of the ducks kind of confusing. They visit and reject the Public Garden, then end up at some nameless island in the river, and then…why did they go back to the Public Garden again? Why not just set the whole thing at the Public Garden and contrive some other reason for the ducklings to cross the street?
Sometime in the late eighties, I was invited to a New Year’s Eve party given by my roommate’s new boyfriend’s parents. They lived in a big Society Hill rowhouse, which was utterly fascinating to me; I had never met adults who lived in the city who weren’t poor. (Where I was from, when you made enough money, you always moved to the suburbs.) The boyfriend’s mother was an artist and his father was a partner in a big law firm. “A senator is going to be there!” my roommate told me, to impress upon me how rare would be the air at this shindig.
I may have brushed past the Senator on the staircase, but I had eyes only for my roommate’s boyfriend’s younger brother, who was dreamy. He was tall and thin with thick dark hair and a beard. He quoted poetry and wore a leather jacket. He was an English major. To me, he was like a Jewish Byron. Later that evening we walked down to Penn’s Landing, and he kissed me for the first time at midnight under the fireworks. I was smitten.
We dated for a year or so, hanging out in his parents’ house while they traveled, and in their beach condo when they were at home. He was a lot of fun, and the real estate perks were not unwelcome to a young woman living with two human roommates and a colony of rats. I can’t remember why we broke up. We never fought. We just sort of moved on.
Seven years later, we were both in the same city briefly, and we got back in touch. He had graduated from law school and was working as an assistant district attorney; I was commuting back and forth to a consulting gig in Chicago. We started dating again. He was still fun. Something had changed, though; he had become a Republican, and I, after three years in the Peace Corps, was more or less a Liberal.
I tried to ignore his conservative rantings, but one day he was going on and on about how wonderful Newt Gingrich was, and he went too far. I looked at him and just knew it wasn’t going to work out this time, either. “I can’t believe you’re on their side! Who ever heard of a Jewish Republican, anyway?” I said.
“Arlen Specter,” he shot back, thinking of course of his father’s friend who had been at the New Year’s Eve party where we first met. “He’s Jewish and Republican.”
Happy Evacuation Day to all the Bostonians and Cantabrigians out there!
For the uninitiated, Evacuation Day is a public holiday celebrating the retreat of British forces from Boston during the Revolutionary War. It is a completely serious, totally not-made-up holiday; the fact that it falls on St. Patrick’s day, allowing your public servants to spend their day off bending their elbows at their respective local pubs, is totally coincidental, and anyone who suggests otherwise is probably high on triphenylmethane (green dye #3, ingested with St. Patrick’s Day beer).
This morning, as I was listening to my new favorite radio station, I heard “Valerie Plame,” a new song by the Decemberists. It was pop-y and sweet, like one of those sixties’ girl-name songs, but with topically relevant lyrics (”Hey, Valerie Plame/If that’s your real name”). As I listened to the tale of the CIA agent who became a household word, I suddenly realized that I’ve never told the Internets about the time I applied for a job with the CIA. It’s a story in three acts, and each act features (bien sur) a different guy.
Act 1 opens my senior year of college, when I had a part-time job as an aerobics instructor at a health club. Wait, wait: that statement gives such a false picture of me, I have to digress a bit to explain how I found myself in that position. I had been hired to work the front desk, a job well within my capabilities (take membership card, hang on hook, take locker key off hook, hand to patron). Then my roommate, let’s call her Jenna, also got hired to take some front desk shifts. The club manager developed a thing for Jenna, and I suppose she thought her chances of enticing her into a threesome with her and her boyfriend would be improved if Jenna were at the front desk more often, so I was moved downstairs to the workout area, where I became the most incompetent aerobics teacher in history.
No one can teach do leg lifts to Huey Lewis and the News for a whole eight-hour shift, so in my down time I was assigned to the weight room. One of my co-workers was a man with the last name of Bond; we’ll call him Steve, just in case he is Googling himself. Steve Bond. We always referred to him by both names: “Is Steve Bond working today?” “I saw Steve Bond at the Gingerbread Man on Saturday night.” Steve Bond was thirty, divorced, and ripped. Steve Bond drove a Camaro. Steve Bond had reddish hair and a big Tom Selleck mustache. In every way, Steve Bond was thoroughly different than the Theta Chis I had been dating, and I soon developed a huge crush on him, which thrived on long hours spent with him in the weight room, chatting about this and that in between Nautilus appointments.
Since this was my senior year, I was trying to decide what I would do with the rest of my life. I was an English major who spoke a little German, and was therefore qualified only for positions as 1. Nanny 2. Yellow page salesperson in Amish country or 3. Government service. I applied to take the CIA test, which was scheduled to be given near my college during the winter break. During one of my long shifts at the health club, I learned that Steve Bond was also applying for a government position, as a cartographer, and his exam was being offered on the same day as mine.
This was a sign from the gods that we were meant to be together, the break I had been waiting for. I asked Steve Bond for a ride to the exam, and I vowed I would parlay a shared trip to Harrisburg into a closer connection that — who knows? — might end in the two of us moving to D.C. together after graduation. So I drove up to college during winter break, spent the night of my birthday in my sorority apartment, and waited out on the curb the next morning for Steve Bond to pick me up in his Camaro. We were both wearing formal suits, because that’s what you did in the eighties, even if you were just going to sit for an exam where no one with hiring authority was within a hundred-mile radius.
I don’t remember too much about the day except my thrill at being alone in a car with Steve Bond, and what seemed like forty consecutive multiple choice personality tests. I don’t think there was one item about the gross national product of Burundi or the political situation in the Middle East, but I responded to seven variations on the question, “Do you like tall women?” with either “Strongly Agree, Somewhat Agree, Agree, Somewhat Disagree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree.” (I am a tall woman. What does any of those answers say about me?) I imagined that all those tests would successfully separate the bold, adventurous, resourceful, innovative candidates from the dull, plodding chaff. I’ve since realized that the CIA is built on dull and plodding. Their ideal candidate is respectful of authority and unlikely to engage in any behavior that would leave her open to blackmail.
On the way home, I told Steve Bond that the previous day had been my birthday.
“And you were up here all by yourself? You should have given me a call.”
I was gobsmacked. Steve Bond? Would have taken me out on my birthday?! I spent the whole ride trying to come up with some follow-up that would get him to ask me out that night, but I had nothing. With every mile I could see our future together in a cute little apartment in Georgetown receding further into the distance.
If I could travel back in time I would go back to that day and kick my own ass. Any twenty-one year old girl in the best physical condition of her life who couldn’t figure out how to put the moves on a thirty-year-old newly divorced man doesn’t deserve a college diploma, much less a career in our country’s intelligence service.
Yesterday, I went searching for the school district’s web page to see if they had posted a school cancellation notice. There was nothing yet, but there was a list of places where cancellation information could be found — radio stations, TV stations, and so forth. Apparently, the fire station also rings its bell in a certain pattern at 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. to signal weather-related school changes: two dongs for two hours late, four dongs for no school. I had not been aware of the fire bell code.
The late news did not report that the school district was closed, but at 6:30 the next morning I was awakened by four bells, saving me the trouble of sitting through the display of 400 school closings until they got to the Ns.
I was charmed by this display of analog non-verbal mass communication, and I tried to think of some other modern-day examples. Here’s what I came up with:
Emergency sirens
Clock chimes
Call to prayer
Skyscraper lights that indicate weather changes
With the prevalence of electronic networks, this type of communication might be dying out. Any other examples?
This afternoon, I got two e-mails from book club members alerting me to John Updike’s death, and I promptly e-mailed another friend. We all felt like we knew him in a minor way: I was born in the same town as Updike; my friend L. and he went to the same dentist; J. is helping put together the local literary festival that was planning to honor him in 2010; and then there were his books. At 76, and still so prolific, he was too young to go.
Another writer I’ve covered in these pages, Harold Pinter, also kicked off recently. These things tend to come in threes; who’s next?
Apropos of nothing (really), what IS David Brooks smoking these days? He obviously can’t come up with anything interesting to say about the Obama administration, because he’s back to these “social criticism” columns. Today’s topic: a liberal arts education is nice, but all that questioning the status quo is so tiresome; the real heroes are those who “think institutionally,” those with the great courage to live life strictly within the confines of the rules laid down by the institutions in which they find themselves.
No, really.
In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft. Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do…. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of.
Institutions, like family. Marriage. Slavery. Patriarchy. Damn those liberal arts-educated yuppies with all their damn questions.
Sometimes, I think Brooks is trying to become the Stephen Colbert of the New York Times.