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Snippets

She had served the NBP and me at a local restaurant for a year, but then she disappeared. We had assumed that she had moved on, but another server told us that she and the restaurant owner were living together. A week ago, the NBP and I went to the restaurant for the first time in over a year, and we learned that the owner and the server had become engaged. “I gave her a ring last month,” he said. I asked when the wedding would be. He confused me by indicating that the two were not going to have a wedding, but eventually I realized that “wedding” to him meant the reception. Instead, they were planning a City Hall marriage. When she had waited on us, she was studying for a graduate degree in international relations. The owner told us that after an unpaid internship for a year, she now had a job at the United Nations and was thrilled. “She even thinks the UN pens are marvelous,” he said. The owner is stocky and dark. He was born in Jordan. The former server is tall, willowy, and blonde. When years ago we had asked where she was from, she replied, “From Siberia. Near Kazakhstan. The best part.” The Siberian and the Jordanian falling in love at a neighborhood Mideast restaurant in Brooklyn is perhaps something that could happen in many places, but to me this is a New York story.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The friend confidently reported that if the HBG (Has Been Guy) were convicted of the crimes for which he is being investigated, he could not become president again. I asked why he thought that, and replied, “A convicted felon can’t be president.” I told him—in the nicest way possible–that he was wrong. The Constitution does not forbid a felon from the presidency. Instead, it has three restrictions: the president must be a “natural born citizen”; the president must be at least thirty-five years old; and the president must have been a resident of the United States for fourteen years. The friend, convinced that I was blowing smoke, pulled out his phone and said, “I am going to look that up.” I said, “Go to Article II of the Constitution.” (The qualifications provision is Art. II, Sec. 1[5].) He could not get a signal and that ended the discussion, but I still wondered how he got this piece of “information.” I considered that he must have thought that because convicted felons could not vote, they could not be president. I had said that the BL (Big Loser) might not be able to vote if he were a convicted felon, but he could be president. He said that I was wrong; felons could now vote in Florida. (In all but two states, felons are disenfranchised, but the length of disenfranchisement varies. As I understand Florida law, felons can now vote once they have completed all the terms of their sentences. If the BL is in jail or on probation or parole, as I understand Florida law, he could not vote.) Apparently, the friend’s belief that a felon was ineligible to be president was not a mere extension of the fact of the disenfranchisement of felons, but I did not find out the source of his “knowledge.” I did learn, yet again, however, that misinformation is not the monopoly of the right.

In the fair and balanced department: I wrote recently that reading A Farewell to Arms in my maturity, I found it unreadable—vapid, jejeune, and simply bad. However, I recently reread Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is a good book. Perhaps a very good book.

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Was it War?

          Hamas fired missiles into Israel killing a few people. Israel dropped bombs in Gaza killing many more people. Was this a war?

          That question came to mind because of a brief discussion I had had months earlier. I don’t remember the book under consideration in the history book group, but it, as many things do, prompted condemnations of Trump. In my personal efforts to be fair and balanced, I said, “Say what you will about him, Trump did not start any wars unlike his immediate predecessors.” After a few moments, one of the participants indicated I was wrong and said, “Obama did not start a war.” I wanted to say in Clintonesque fashion, “That depends on what your definition of ‘war’ is,” but I let the comment slide because our main topic was something else, and I did not have my relevant research in front of me.

          When it became widely reported that our military efforts in Afghanistan had become our longest war, I started wondering how much of my lifetime the United States has been in a war. As I do for most of my research these days, I turned to the internet and found sites, not all entirely consistent with each other, listing our wars. One of them I found on iPad’s version of Wikipedia entitled “List of wars involving the United States,” which starts with our Revolution and continues to the present. What’s your estimate of the total number? I thought of our Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq twice, and Afghanistan. Then I thought further and remembered the Mexican War, but then I began to wonder what was the definition of war. We fought Indians frequently. When, if ever, were these actions war? I knew that we had troops in the Philippines for a long time. War? I knew that several, maybe many times, we had troops in Caribbean islands. War? And then there were our actions to overthrow or destabilize various governments—Guatemala, Iran, Nicaragua, and probably many others. Were these wars?

          I did not number my personal list of American wars, but I doubt it would have reached the total the Wikipedia article gave: “Currently, there are 93 wars on this list, 4 of which are ongoing.” About half of them were wars with Native Americans that I know little about other than the general knowledge that there were “American Indian Wars.” In the 1870s, for example, American soldiers were killing different groups of Native Americans—Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Modoc, Lakota, Dakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Nez Perce, Palouse, Bannock, Shoshone, Paiute, Apache, Ute—in many parts of America in a dozen different military campaigns.

          I knew that we had sent troops into neighboring lands, but I had not known how often or how long they stayed. The United States troops went into Cuba in 1912 and into Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. We occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. And we sent troops again to such places after World II as well as to Grenada and Panama. The list went on and on.

          As to our most recent past, the compilation said the U.S. was involved in a war starting under the Obama administration: “American Intervention in Libya (2015-2020).” If you are like me, even though you have lived through it, you may not remember us being at war in Libya. Perhaps our actions did not strike you as a war because we did not send ground troops into the country, and we did not occupy it. But we did have over two hundred airstrikes and drone strikes on Libyan targets in the course of several years. Perhaps many of us don’t see it as a war because of the military tactics employed. Infantry make it a war not airplanes alone. Imagine, however, our northern neighbor strafing and bombing Rochester, New York, a hundred times and firing rockets from drones into Chicago dozens of times. Wouldn’t we think that Canada had gone to war against us, or might we say these were only warlike actions?

          Or do people in my circles, such as the history book group participant, not register the military actions as war because Obama was president? Would they have been perceived differently if W or Trump had then been the commander-in-chief?  My guess is that the killing of American citizens by drone strikes in foreign lands would have drawn much more debate in non-conservative realms if a Republican had authorized them instead of Obama.

          When I look at the list of American involvements in war, whether I agree with all the classifications or not, I am reminded that while we cherish an image of being a peaceful nation, military bloodshed is firmly embedded throughout our history, including under Obama.

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Wonder from the Octopus

I just watched the Academy Award–winning documentary My Octopus Teacher. It is a remarkable film and story. Like many documentaries, I wondered how many hours of filming were required to make this beautiful piece as well as who did some of the filming. I often want a documentary about the documentary I have just watched, but this time, at least, I will never know.

I saw the film on Netflix. Even in a non-Covid year it’s unlikely that I would have seen it in a movie theater. I seldom watch a feature-length documentary anywhere other than on my own TV. On the other hand, this past year I missed seeing the various Oscar-nominated shorts that in past years I would have seen at a local movie palace. The animated, live-action, and documentary shorts get packaged together and are shown in “art” houses in the weeks before the Academy Awards ceremony. Not this year, of course, so I did not see any of the nominees in these categories, but perhaps that’s just as well. These short films, even the animated ones, are often touching, and routinely sad, unless they are about war, and then they are both sad and horrifying. This past year, in particular, I have tried to avoid books, movies, and TV that were likely to make me feel even worse about the world than I already did.

My Octopus Teacher, happily, is a movie that produces wonder. The octopus that is the focus of the film even had, bringing to mind Richard Starkey’s lyric, “A little hideaway/ beneath the waves/ resting its head/ on the seabed.”

This wonderous documentary about inner space made me think not only about the Beatles but also about outer space and our obsession with it. We look up at the night sky, and like all who have preceded us, we naturally wonder about what we see. Humans apparently have always speculated about the moon and the stars, the sun and the planets. We want to explore what is out there. We want lunar and Mars missions. Humanity has spent untold riches and risked fire and death in such endeavors. And we don’t stop. The Swedes are now building a spaceport in the Arctic, and many countries have been sending up rockets and satellites. We even have private ventures, although the commercial possibilities of space other than as a weird tourist attraction seem limited—at least to me. (Am I alone in being able to live happily without another scent of Elon Musk?) Space fascinates; we long to reach for the stars.

We don’t have similar clichéd, inspirational injunctions about the seas. We did have Jacques Cousteau who tried, like My Octopus Teacher, to tell us that we have a lot to learn about this water-covered planet. Sometimes it seems that our only concerns about the oceans are whether we can grab all the fish out of it, build wind farms above it, or find oil beneath it.

In showing how much we can learn about the octopus, the film reveals how much we are in the dark about the oceanic depths, a place of beauty and wonder as well as commercial enterprise. We have manned orbiting space stations and fantasize about colonizing the moon and Mars. Why don’t we have something comparable for under the water?

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Two Things

I have been reading Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer. This book gives advice similar to all the books I have read on usage: “Go light on exclamation points. . . . Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime.” Dreyer continues: “We won’t discuss the use of ?! or !? because you’d never do that.” And double exclamation points should be left for comic books.

Even so, readers of this blog (I assume all read carefully and have excellent standards) may have noticed the high rate of exclamation points and even an occasional use of those double punctuation marks. Almost all have been inserted by my editor—the spouse—who does have high English and copyediting standards but believes that if a punctuation method exists, it should be employed. (The exception may be the en dash. She claimed to know its proper use, but not necessarily how to create one in Word on a PC.) When I get back my draft from the editor and she has again inserted an exclamation mark, I almost always leave it in. It is my concession to our version of marital bliss. But that dozen-in-a-lifetime mark was passed long ago.

Our Brooklyn house has a backyard. This is not apparent from the street where all that is visible is a block-long stretch of rowhouses. The width of the lots varies slightly, from eighteen to twenty-five feet, but the lots are routinely one-hundred feet deep while the houses are usually about fifty feet in length. Thus, as in our case, a backyard of fifty by twenty-five feet.

Our yard may not be big, but I feel that I have spent an inordinate amount of time through the years working on it. A patio of bluestone was reconfigured, causing sore muscles. A stand of lilacs was divided and replanted, causing sore muscles. After many unsuccessful efforts to grow various things (we don’t get much sun and we don’t have bottomland soil), English ivy was planted and divided by a stone walkway lined by rocks imported from Pennsylvania, all causing sore muscles. Hedges lining the boundaries were planted, some by me, causing sore muscles and some by a nursery, causing a sore checkbook. The yard may not be Instagram material, but it is satisfactory.

It is not a high-maintenance place, but it still requires some tending. The ivy has to be cut back several times a year, causing sore muscles. Leaves from neighboring trees have the gall to fall into our yard and occasionally have to be dealt with. And the hedges periodically should be trimmed. Now, however, that I spend most of the summer in Pennsylvania, that maintenance is a real pain since I have fewer days to force myself to do it.

Last fall I realized that the aforementioned hedges were out of control. The original thought was to have them grow as high as the stockade fence behind them, part of which was installed by me, causing sore muscles, and part installed by a company, causing a sore checkbook. The hedges, which I had not dealt with for quite a while, were higher than the fence, straggly, and not what you’d call level. They had grown horizontally impeding the useful patio space. I decided a serious cutting was necessary, and it would give me a chance to use a seldom-used power tool, a battery-powered hedge clipper that replaced the manual ones I had used for decades, which had caused especially sore forearm muscles.

I charged up the clippers and hauled them and, because the hedges were so high, a step ladder out to the yard. I decided that now that I was undertaking this long-delayed project, I was going to be ruthless in hopes that I could ignore the bushes again for quite some time. I cut them way back. This did yield a lot of green boughs for Christmas, but the hedges now showed more brown, chopped-off branches than green ones. They did not look good. Ok, they looked as if I had killed them. I had undertaken severe pruning in the past, and the hedges had always come back. I was (reasonably) sure that would be the case again. However, looking out the back windows during the winter, it was not a pleasant sight, and the spouse and the NBP (nonbinary progeny) did not have my (reasonable) confidence in their health.

On the first days of spring, I went out to the hedges for a closer inspection. A lot of them looked–how shall I put it–dead, but a few weeks later, with a close, almost microscopic, inspection I could see the tiniest green needles on hacked-off branches. They are going to be fine, I said to myself with (reasonable) assurance, and that is how they still looked when I shifted my locale to Buck Hill Falls for the summer season. Only the true believer—I was the only one and my faith was not strong–could see that the hedges would again be a sight of Brooklyn beauty.

Although I spend most of the summer now in Pennsylvania, I return to New York every week or two to have dinner with the NBP. After we exchanged communications to find a convenient time to go to Black Iris, our usual neighborhood restaurant where we have not been since the pandemic began, I got an additional message. I told the spouse that although only ten words long, it contained three pieces of good news for her.

The first piece of good news for both her and me: The NBP wrote that “I just did the yard.” My now always-sore muscles eased a bit and gratefulness spilled out of my heart to the NBP for relieving me of a backyard maintenance day.

The second piece of good news: The NBP followed the introduction with three dots and then “you didn’t murder the bushes.” Marv Albert–like, I muttered a yes.

And the third piece of good news for the spouse: The NBP concluded the text with an exclamation mark.

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Glory Days (concluded)

Reading old clippings from the Sheboygan [Wisconsin] Press, I found a remarkable listing of cultural events. For example, the visual arts were going to be the topic at the Sheboygan Branch of the American Association of University Women. Their guest was one Gerhard C.F. Miller, who painted in watercolor and sketcher’s pen “realistically but also imaginatively and creatively.” His talk “Painting to Travel and Traveling to Paint” would describe how he and his wife, the former Ruth Morton, “a nationally-known interior decorator,” who lived three miles north of Sturgeon Bay, traveled widely and painted, drawing inspiration from “the weathered houses, the gnarled cedars and the rocky landscapes of the Door County Peninsula as well as in the moonlit silhouette of a Biblical village, in the fortified Crusaders’ Harbor of Malta and in the jungles of South America.”

The Junior Woman’s Club announced a full slate of programs and activities for the coming season. Mrs. Jacob Fessler would speak and “show scenes” from her trip to the Far East, and a month later Wayne Jung would illustrate his talk with his decoupage creations. In April of the new year, Mrs. Emil C.A. Muss would exhibit and talk about her doll collection. I was especially intrigued by Mrs. Marion C. Fox, coming all the way from Milwaukee for a presentation entitled “History in Hats.”

However, the cultural event I most missed attending was the presentation at the Kewaskum’s Women’s Club by Manitowoc’s Mrs. Conrad Daellenbach, who gave humorous readings in Norwegian dialect including “one entitled ‘The Telephone.’’’ The accomplished Daellenbach—she was past president of the Manitowoc Women’s Club and the present secretary of the Civic Music Association—“has given readings and his written special monologues for church groups and social and fraternal organizations, featuring the brighter side of life. Many women’s clubs have booked her and these included Rhinelander, Marinette, Oconto, Sturgeon Bay and Manitowoc.” I’ll bet Garrison Keillor knew of her.

If I had read this paper when it first was published, I probably glanced at the ads, but now my eye is drawn to them, both for the products and for the prices. One hardware store offered an O-Cedar sponge mop for $2.44 and a two by six feet carpet runner for $1.98. In the new technology department, a 6 transistor radio using “2 penlight cells,” weighing 10 ounces, and promising to play up to 100 hours cost $12.88.

Ads in September anticipated winter, and fur trims were stylish. One store offered a fur boa “in quality mink only” and said that it was “fashion’s most flexible, most fascinating, most fabulous accessory.” It had clips and ties that allowed many uses. “Loop it, twist it, twirl it into the glamorous Neckline Décolletage shown above, [I am a little surprised this was not censored but perhaps many unsophisticated readers like me would not have known what décolletage was. On the other hand, in the accompanying drawing, it was hard to tell that the woman had breasts under the fur], a Shoulder Scarf, a Draped Hat, a Neckline Ascot, plus the many ways you will discover.” The price: $69.

Another company offered a coat that the spouse still considers attractive, perhaps because it is similar to one she once owned. Even though the offered garment may not have been the most practical outerwear for a Wisconsin winter, it was the “epitome of elegance. Slim clutch coat on Eininger’s famed Grandura, bracelet length sleeves; in walnut or topaz with huge bolster collar of rare Fromm natural pedigreed Golden Amber Fox. Also available in Fromm’s natural Ciel Fox on white Grandura.” It carried a price tag that few Sheboyganites could have afforded for what had to be a special-occasion wrap: $169.98. (Over $1,700 in today’s dollars.)

When asked about Sheboygan, I have often given the clichéd answer: It is a good place be from. Looking at these clippings returned me a little to that time and place, which was a good environment for me to grow up in. I do sometimes wonder what my life would have been if I had stayed in that place of glory days. I know that the prices have changed, but I don’t know how much of the rest of it has endured. My visits once I left have been brief, and the last was more than a decade ago. I am curious about that small town, but that curiosity is not strong enough to consider a permanent return. Somethings should stay in the memory or, in my case, in a file tucked in the back of a desk drawer.

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Glory Days (Continued)

In looking at old newspaper clippings about my hometown, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, from my high school days, I found that the town had disputes that I did not remember. One clipping reported the start of a trial where a local realtor claimed that a Greek Orthodox Church had misused his gift of $4,800. It was a multi-day proceeding, and I don’t know the outcome, but I am curious.

Of course, there were also glorious occasions. One newspaper section had lengthy reports of four weddings. Each had a picture of the bride captioned with the married woman’s new name in the then-accepted style, such as “Mrs. Willard D. Bouwman” or “Mrs. Nevin J. Grasser.” All were church weddings, and the music, heavily religious, was listed for each wedding. At one the father of the bride sang, including “Wedding Prayer” and “The Lord’s Prayer.”

Each story had a detailed description of the bridal party’s dress. At one, “they appeared in delustered [what is that?!?] satin gowns in a turquoise shade with three-quarter length sleeves and bateau necklines that had a V in the back. The sheath skirt cascaded in back tiers of satin. Headpieces, satin pillboxes [this was the day of Jacqueline Kennedy], each centered with a rose, had silk illusion veils attached. Their colonial bouquets combined puffy white carnations with red garnets that were surrounded by filicifolia [?!] foliage with satin streamers completing their arrangements.” (In some ways I have changed little from those days. I doubt that I read about these weddings back then, but I would have only vaguely understood these descriptions, and my understanding of them is not much better now.)

Of course, the brides’ dresses were described in exquisite detail. At one, “the bride entered in a gown of peau de soie fashioned with sequin-trimmed lace appliqué detail at the sabrina neckline and down the front of the dress which featured a full, chapel train. A bustle arrangement at the back was another style note of the long-sleeved style topped by a French illusion veil and jeweled pillbox. Her bouquet combined white cymbidium orchids and stephanotis.”

I was not surprised by the attire or their descriptions, which were probably common in many small-town newspapers, but I was surprised at the size of the weddings. The ceremonies and receptions were not for the country- club crowd. All of these families were working class; none of the brides or grooms had college degrees, but these were not scaled-down weddings. While one had “only” 100 guests, two others each had 275 and the fourth had 300.  But then I remembered the few wedding receptions I went to in that era. There was limited alcohol or a cash bar and a buffet dinner with only a few selections. No swag bags. They probably cost a tenth per person of the weddings I attend today.

Perhaps I would have stayed in Sheboygan if I had known of all the cultural opportunities it offered in my high school years. For example, I was not familiar with the Irish History Club, which tackled the rather ambitious one-evening topic of the “Irish in America.”

I was amused that the D’Werdenfelser Schuhplattler Club was holding a public dance to music by Delbert Dicke’s Orchestra at which there was going to be three guest clubs from Milwaukee and one from Minneapolis and all were going to “combine for a mass performance to climax the entertainment.” I imagined this spectacle and thought of the father. We lived next to a neighborhood tavern frequented by many including bachelor brothers who lived across the street who sometimes could be seen carrying a pail of draft beer home. (The father never drank at this tavern; he had a different favorite across town.) Behind the tavern was a dance hall, which was infrequently used, but on occasion schuhplattlers (you can look it up) danced there, and the resultant sounds from the stomping feet, the slapping of the lederhosen, and the accompanying shouts and yips drove the father into one of his frenzies. I could only imagine what his reaction would have been if five clubs had performed at once next door.

(concluded May 31)

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Glory Days

          She emailed a picture of me and a group of other guys on our last day at Washington Grade School. If Carol had not told me the names of those standing casually in front of a wall, I am not sure that I would have recognized any, even me, although we had all been classmates and would be for four more years in high school.

          I replied to Carol, and we struck up a correspondence. Each time she would attach a picture with me in it and would ask about my memories of some event—the safety patrol picnic, for example—which I hardly remembered at all. Recently she said that she had only one more picture to send, although she had Sheboygan Press clippings that mentioned me. She felt certain that I already had these. I assumed that her assumption was wrong. I don’t dwell much on those “Glory Days.” After all I did not have an outstanding high school speedball, though I did hit a walk-off home run in my first Little League game. But…but…but then I vaguely remembered that I had a file in a rarely-opened drawer labeled “High School.” I dumped its contents onto my desk and a flotilla of faded newspaper clippings floated across it. This unexpected volume of paper was misleading. From handwritten notes I realized that aunts and friends and even the local bank had sometimes sent my parents an article they had clipped out of the evening paper if it mentioned me, so my high school file had many duplicates.

          On the other hand, the Press published articles about high school students that a paper in a larger town (Sheboygan had a population of about 45,000) no doubt would not have, and thus the clippings did contain a fair number of separate stories. Even though I played high school sports, there were no mentions of my athletic accomplishments. There were good reasons for that. My four-point basketball average did not draw much attention. The athletic glory days ended in grade school.

I remembered many of the events chronicled in the clippings, but there was one that surprised me. I did not remember winning the Constitution Contest sponsored by Sheboygan Elks Lodge 299, although I remembered placing third in the state constitution contest sponsored by the Elks. The story said I had won $150. How could I forget such a thing?! That was a significant amount of money to me, and my parents, back then—the equivalent of about $1,300 today. By comparison, I had my first forty-hour-a-week job that summer. I was paid the minimum wage, which was $1.25 an hour. Work a day and get paid ten bucks. Work three weeks and get $150 — the same amount I got for taking a two- or three-hour test. (That $1.25 an hour minimum wage translates to about $11.10 an hour today, a paltry amount but still more than the national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.) I don’t have the vaguest notion of what I did with my $150 largesse.

          What I found most interesting was not reading about me or my classmates, but the stories on the back or surrounding the clippings. They revealed that I did not know as many things about Sheboygan as I thought I did. Growing up, I thought of the area as safe, but there were more hazardous happenings than I was aware of. For example, a driver struck and killed a 500-pound black calf on County Trunk S. “He said that two calves suddenly ran across the road in front of his car and he was unable to avoid striking one of them.” The story did not report any damage to the driver or damage to the vehicle.

Cooking oil on a residential stove ignited and the fire department was called. “The blaze was extinguished by the time firemen arrived, but they used fans to ventilate the home.”

A truck ran into a road barricade, and the driver was charged, but the clipping cut off the rest of the story, so I did not find out with what.

A man not feeling well left his work at a furniture manufacturer. He felt worse as he was headed to the hospital and flagged down a patrol car “to take him the rest of the way. He apparently suffered a slight heart attack.”

A 9-year-old “suffered a bump to the back of the head and bruises to the left arm in a fall from his bicycle.”

A warning went out about a poisonous bean used in necklaces, rosaries, and as dolls’ eyes.

          The town had crime unknown to me. Six weeks after a night of vandalism that included dragging a swing set and garbage cans into the street and opening car doors, twenty boys and girls were apprehended and referred to the juvenile authorities. A Mr. James Prigge discovered that windshield wipers, the radio aerial, horn ring, steering wheel, gas pedal and floorboards were ripped out, a tire was flattened, and the cigar-lighter was missing from his seven-year-old car that had been parked in his company’s parking lot. (A disgruntled employee? General labor trouble? Or just vandalism? I did not have a follow-up story.) An owner of a plumbing supply company reported that in the last two days chrome pipes were stolen from a storage area. “He valued the missing supplies at $4.20.”

“Vickie Fintelmann reported her J.C. Higgins bicycle, valued at $15, stolen from the Kuehne Court playground.” This surprised me. I went to that playground on my bike almost every day during the summer. We left the bikes unattended, and there was no thought in those days of locking them. I had never heard of one being stolen. But perhaps Vickie’s bike was tempting because it was a J.C. Higgins. Almost everyone, both boys and girls, rode a single speed bicycle with wide tires, often with a basket on the front. Then a few people showed up at the bike racks with the fancy “English-style” bicycles with narrow tires and three gears, and I think the J.C. Higgins fell into that category. My memory is that my correspondent Carol, on whom I always had a crush, was the first I knew to have such a bike although hers may have been a Raleigh.

(Continued May 28)

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Snippets

That blue and red produce purple makes sense. That orange comes from yellow and red also seems right. But that green results from mixing blue and yellow always strikes me as an unintuitive miracle.

Why is it that sushi tastes better when eaten with chopsticks than when consumed with fork or fingers?

I never learned a musical instrument. Sometimes I regret that. If I were going to learn one now, I would choose the bagpipes. Listeners can’t tell if it is played well, if notes are missed, or even if it is close to the supposed tune.

A friend told me that he had just talked to his son who had settled in Australia. The son was pleased with his new Sydney apartment, but he told his father that his neighbors were weird. At nine every evening, the attractive, young woman in the next flat started moaning, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.” The distinguished, elderly gentleman on the other side of the son’s apartment sounded at that time as if he were pounding his head against the wall. The father asked, “What do you do?” The son responded, “I just ignore it and go back to practicing the bagpipes.”

Conservatives in many states have been passing a wide range of election “security” measures including requirements that voters show an identification to cast an in-person ballot. They do this even though instances of voter identity fraud have been shown to be rarer than rare. However, even though fraud problems have been few, showing an identification to vote has intuitive appeal, and polls have shown that voter ID laws are popular among the populace. Those concerned that the real goal of the legislators passing such laws is voter suppression should not spend capital opposing the laws. Instead, they should agree that the legislation could be a good thing as long as acceptable identification documents can be obtained easily and efficiently by all voters. Many forms of government identifications should qualify, such as public housing IDs as well as Medicare and Medicaid cards. (Why would I give you my Medicare card so that you could vote in my name? The card is precious, and normally I would use it myself to vote. What is the likelihood that such cards would be widely forged with fake names, and then people would register under those fake names, and then would vote under those fake names?) In addition, advocate for making it easier to get government IDs. Couldn’t we have mobile DMV offices traversing all parts of the state for the purpose of obtaining identification cards. In addition, college identification, employer identification, health insurance cards should all allow access to the voting booth. Those fervent for voter ID laws often express distrust of the government, and they should agree not to restrict the necessary identification documents to government ones. If you are concerned that voter identification laws will lower the number of voters but you know that the bills are going to pass anyway, support the proposals but advocate for a broad range of appropriate identification methods and find ways to make them easier to get.

“In that moment, silently, we agreed that we were indeed in the presence of an exceptionally delusional white man—which is of course one of the most dangerous things in the world.” Mat Jonson, Pym.

You can’t make some stuff up. Representative Kevin McCarthy who opposes a January 6 commission was a prime mover behind the 432 (or so it seemed) Benghazi hearings.

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Romanian Venice

          We stayed on the Lido across the lagoon from Venice. The spouse was attending a scientific conference there. I would ride the vaporetto to Venice and take long walks through the city while she was at her meetings. I went to the lesser squares and on one of them heard from a church a soloist rehearsing for an evening concert. I stopped at markets and, being without Italian, pointed to foods to try. I saw apparent immigrants selling apparent knock-off goods outside fancy shops. It was late September, and the weather was generally beautiful, but on a few days, I saw some of the rising water which is common in autumn, and it was interesting to see how the Venetians coped. A movie scene with Heath Ledger was being shot next to San Marco, and it was fun to watch it–a rescue from a hanging for the movie Casanova.

          Other times I walked throughout the Lido that was simultaneously part of Venice and separate from it. Here there were cars and buses, a bit of a shock. I went to the aristocratic, but aging hotel of Death in Venice and tried to picture the beach, empty at that time of year, as it was a century ago when Thomas Mann must have studied it.

          Our hotel made good recommendations for restaurants in what were said to be the non-tourist parts of Venice. I doubted non-tourist places existed, but since we often appeared to be the only non-Italians in the restaurants, or at least we heard no English or German, we weren’t in the usual Venetian places.

          But most memorable was a dinner at the end of our stay with other scientists from the conference. My job had been to scout up a restaurant, and I picked a place on a small canal on the Lido. It definitely was not a tourist place. The staff did not speak English. We were outside on a beautiful night and through nods and pointing and much laughter and wine, we selected local fish, which was wonderfully prepared. This was a night for Venetian memories, but the night became more memorable because of the stories of D and M.

          D was a colleague of the spouse and M her husband. M and D were born, raised, and wed in Romania. Romania was still a communist dictatorship when they tried to leave some thirty years before, but permission was denied. They protested; they cited the Helsinki Accords; they spoke on a pirate radio station. The Romanian response was to imprison M. D, now alone with a new baby, had no idea what to do. She did not know how M was being treated or when or whether she would ever see him again. Out of desperation, D contacted the American embassy, and some official there got word back that D should visit the embassy. D was afraid to do that. The embassy was ringed with Romanian security, and she expected to be arrested if seen approaching it. She called the embassy and told an official, whom she had never met, of her fears. The disembodied voice on the phone told her, “Meet me under the street lamp at this intersection at this time. I will be wearing such and such, and I will take you into the embassy. The Romanian military will not arrest you if you are with an American from the embassy.” Not knowing what else to do, D took the leap of faith and did as the voice instructed. The man was there at the appointed place and time. With an American at her side, she walked into the embassy and told her story of how she and her young family just wanted to leave Romania. Apparently American diplomats worked behind the scenes, and after a few months, M was released. Permission to leave, however, was not granted; instead, the Romanians “punished” the couple by expelling them from the country. No punishment was more gladly received.

          It all sounded like cloak and dagger out of a modern Alan Furst novel, but not the way they told it. They wove it into an amusing story, concentrating on how naïve they were and how lucky. They elicited much laughter under the stars by the Lido canal. But surely anyone in a Ceausescu jail had to wonder about the possible fate that awaited the prisoner.

          I thought, once again, whatever my country’s flaws, how lucky I am to be an American. And I wondered how harrowing times should best be preserved. In their memories, was it as humorous as they presented it?

          Their story, of course, had a happy ending. Not only did they get to leave the country as they desired, M made a lifelong friend while in jail. After the conference, he and D were driving up to Austria to see again his cell mate.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Wit of JFK

Is wit necessary to be a good president? I thought about that as I read The Kennedy Wit edited by Bill Adler, a book published eight months after the assassination. My paperback copy, which I found in an antique store in a Pennsylvania village, was printed in February 1965. Its cover proclaims:

THE LANDSLIDE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

110,000 COPIES IN PRINT AT $3.00. NOW ONLY 60¢!

 Reading this, I could not remember the last time I saw the cent sign. However, written in pencil on the first page was a three, so I paid the proprietor the cost of the original hardcover. That seller, in handing back a couple singles, said, “He was the last good president they produced.” (An inflation calculator tells me that $3 in 1964 equals $25.84 today, so I guess my purchase was still a bargain for an antique book.)

All presidents try to be witty, but in the age of the speechwriter, it is hard to know how much a president should get credit, or blame, for attempts at wit, which too often fall embarrassingly flat. Perhaps we can only gauge their delivery. E.g., Obama had great timing and Reagan told a good story. Both of them, I suspect, were truly witty, as was President Kennedy. JFK delivered droll, often self-deprecatory one-liners with a confident deadpan, and it was fun to read many of them again. Some of them:

“I do not think it entirely inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”

To the National Industrial Conference Board: “It would be premature to ask your support in the next election and it would be inaccurate to thank you for it in the past.”

“There is no city in the United States in which I get a warmer welcome and less votes than Columbus, Ohio.”

“Politics is an astonishing profession. It has enabled me to go from being an obscure member of the junior varsity at Harvard to being an honorary member of the Football Hall of Fame.”

“Those of you who regard my profession of political life with some disdain should remember that it made it possible for me to move from being an obscure lieutenant in the United States Navy to Commander-in-Chief in fourteen years with very little technical competence.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, I was warned to be out of here in plenty of time to permit those who are going to the Green Bay Packers game to leave. I don’t mind running against Mr. Nixon but I have the good sense not run against the Green Bay Packers.”

“We had an interesting convention at Los Angeles, and we ended with a strong Democratic platform which we call ‘The Rights of Man.’ The Republican platform has also been presented. I do not know its title, but it has been referred to as ‘The Power of Positive Thinking.’”

“Last week a noted clergyman was quoted as saying that our society may survive in the event of my election, but it certainly won’t be what it was. I would like to think he was complimenting me, but I’m not sure he was.”

“You remember the very old story about a citizen of Boston who heard a Texan talking about the glories of Bowie, Davy Crockett, and all the rest, and finally said, ‘Haven’t you heard of Paul Revere?’ To which the Texan answered, ‘Well, he is the man who ran for help.’”

Explaining to a little boy how he became a war hero: “It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat.”

“When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.”

“My experience in government is that when things are non-controversial, beautifully coordinated and all the rest, it must be that there is not much going on.”

At the Gridiron dinner before he was elected: “I have just received the following telegram from my generous Daddy. It says, ‘Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.’”