More Catlore Galore...

I’m still thinking about cats.
And writers.
And writers that loved cats.
One of my favorite writers of all time, Thomas Hardy, had a number of cats. Sadly, they seemed to live out the ill-fatedness that he loved to write about! Three were killed on the railroad in 1901, and another used up all of its nine lives in a similar fashion in 1904. Hardy’s last cat, Cobby, a grey Persian with orange eyes, survived him.
Hardy’s house (Max Gate) was a haven for cats. When a visitor called on him at teatime one afternoon in 1900 and asked if the cats were all his he replied:
“Oh dear, no. Some of them are, and some are cats who come regularly to have tea, and some are still other cats, not invited by us, but who seem to find out about this time of day that tea will be going.”

Ernest Hemingway was a rabid lover of cats. [Keep in mind, this is very different than being a lover of rabid cats!]
When living in Cuba, he kept about 30 of them. Like at once.
Some of the names? Princesca, Fatso, Furhouse, Thrusty, Bigotes, Alley Cat, Crazy Christian, Dillinger, Friendless, Uncle Wolfie, Barbershop, Ecstasy, Spendthrift, F.Puss, Christoper Columbus.
In fact, Hemingway had so many cats that he built a separate building, The Cat House, for them. The favorite cat was Boise, a cat with a bizarre appetitie. He was a four-legged garbage disposal unit. Cole slaw, cucumbers, mangoes, honeydew melon, Mexican tacos with hot sauce, raw celery, cantaloupe... Boise ate it all.

Charlotte Bronte had a cat called Tiger and a black cat called Tom.
H.G. Wells had a cat named Mr. Peter Wells.
Dorothy Sayers had a white cat called Timothy.
Irish born novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was the proud owner of a dearly beloved cat named General Butchkin.
Edgar Allen Poe had a large tortoise-shell cat called Caterina which inspired him to write the horror story “The Black Cat”. When Poe’s 24-year old wife Virginia was dying of TB in 1847, Caterina curled up on the young woman’s chest to keep her warm.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s cat was named Chopin.

Charles Dickens was a great lover of cats. In Gad’s Hill, the cats were not allowed in, because he also kept birds. The exception was a white tom called William, whom he was forced to rename Williamina when “he” had six kittens.
One of these kittens, apparently born deaf, became a favorite, and was named The Master’s Cat. She soon learned a trick all on her own. She would snuff out the candle when Dicekns would be awake late at night, reading and writing. As his daughter Mamie recalled, one night Dickens was reading alone in the drawing-room at a small table on which a lighted candle was placed:
Suddenly the candle went out. My father, who was much interested in his book, relighted the candle, stroked the cat, who was looking at him pathetically he noticed, and continued his reading. A few minutes later, as the light became dim, he looked up just in time to see puss deliberately put out the candle with his paw, and then look appealingly toward him. This second and unmistakable hint was not disregarded, and puss was given the petting he craved. Father was full of this anecdote when all met at breakfast the next morning.

Raymond Chandler had a Persian cat called Taki, whom he considered to be his secretary, as she was always present when he was writing his “private eye” novels. Usually, Taki would be sitting on papers he wanted or on a manuscript he wanted to revise. She would sometimes lean against his typewriter and ‘talk’ at him for up to ten minutes at a time or else would just sit ‘quietly gazing out of the window from the corner of the desk, as if to say, “The stuff you’re doing is a waste of time, Ray.”
Alexandre Dumas had a cat named Mysouff, which seemed to posess telepathic powers. While working as a clerk, he would set off each day at 9:30 a.m. accompanied by his cat up to a certain point. When he returned at 5:30 p.m. he would find the cat waiting for him at the same point. However, if Dumas was held up at the office, somehow the cat knew and would not wait. Incidentally, my own son Jack does a similar thing. When I get out of the elevator, which is a fair ways down the hall from my door, he begins meowing. Fairly loudly. I have asked all of my neighbors if he does the same when THEY get off the elevator. Unanimously, they have all told me that no, he does not. Even when my neighbor across the hall walks to within a few feet of my door... no meowing. Jack somehow knows if it is me or not.
Back to Dumas’ cat.... the telepathic cat’s successor, the white Mysouff II, was a less reliable pet. One day with the help of three of the family’s tame monkeys (each named after a literary critic), he broke into Dumas’ aviary and ate all his rare and valuable birds. Yep! A trial was held. The verdict? Mysouff II was sentenced to five years incarceration with the apes.

Victor Hugo had a cat named Chanoine and another named Gavroche.
Hmmm... isn’t this latter one the name of a character in his Les Miserables?
American novelist Patricia Highsmith had a cat named Spider.
British novelist Aldous Huxley was a cat lover, and declared “If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.” He went on to stipulate “Siamese by preference; for they are certainly the most ‘human’ of all the race of cats.”
‘Beat generation” writer Jack Kerouac had a cat named Tuffy and described his family as “my paralyzed mother, and my wife, and the ever-present kitties.”
Sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft owned a black cat that ate roast chestnuts and, Lovecraft believed, spoke in a language all of its own. This language, he held, had a variety of intonations, each of which had a different meaning, and even included “a special ’prr’p’ for the smell of roasted chestnuts, on which he doted.” The cat also used to play football and if Lovecraft tossed a rubber ball at him would send it flying back by lying on the floor and kicking the thing using all four paws at once.
Pulitzer prize winning U.S. novelist Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind) had lots of cats. One was named Piedy, and she was followed by Hypatia and Lowpatia, the latter being a male whom Margaret taught to stand up and salute with his right paw beside his ear, being rewarded with cantaoupe, his favorite food. (possibly related to Hemingway’s cat Boise, mentioned earlier?)

Mark Twain was a cat lover. He deliberately gave his cats difficult names to teach his children to pronounce unusual words. They were called Apollinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite and Zoroaster. (the cats, not the children). Others included Sour Mash, Buffalo Bill, Stan, Stray Kit, Danbury, Billiards, Babylon, Amanda, Annanci, and Sindbad.
Twain was very fond of cats, saying that “They are the cleanest, cunnigest, and most intelligent things I know, outside the girl you love, of course.”
Unable to be without cats, he once rented two -- Sackcloth and Ashes – when away from home. He once said: “A home without a cat and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat, may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how could it prove its title?”

I must get home to mine!
Soon, I will be stepping off the elevator, and I will hear his welcoming meow.

When Florence Nightingale died at home on August 13, 1910, at the age of ninety, it was found that she had made provision for her cats in her will.

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi --

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

When God made the world, He chose to put animals in it, and decided to give each whatever it wanted. All the animals formed a long line before His throne, and the cat quietly went to the end of the line. To the elephant and the bear He gave strength; to the rabbit and the deer, swiftness; to the owl, the ability to see at night; to the birds and the butterflies, great beauty; to the fox, cunning; to the monkey, intelligence; to the dog, loyalty; to the lion, courage; to the otter, playfulness. And all these were things the animals begged of God. At last he came to the end of the line, and there sat the little cat, waiting patiently. “What will YOU have”? God asked the cat.
The cat shrugged modestly. “Oh, whatever scraps you have left over. I don’t mind.”
“But I’m God. I have everything left over.”
“Then I’ll have a little of everything, please.”
And God gave a great shout of laughter at the cleverness of this small animal, and gave the cat everything she asked for, adding grace and elegance and, only for her, a gentle purr that would always attract humans and assure her a warm and comfortable home.
But he took away her false modesty.
-- From The Cat’s Pajamas, by Lenore Fleisher --

Have a great Wednesday!

Introducing..... Jack!

“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures and cats like authors for the same reasons.”
-- Robertson Davies --

Well, since I talk about him so much, I thought maybe it’s time I introduce you to my boyfriend.
I’ve been sleeping with him for five years. That’s him right there....
Jack!
Ain’t he gorgeous? Ain’t he a beaut?
Cats have served as both comfort and inspiration for many famous writers – W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy and Lewis Carroll all loved and admired cats. Ernest Hemingway once offered an explanation of the special connection between writers and cats: “A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
This non-hiding of feelings may include walking across your keyboard the moment your back is turned (and possibly improving upon what you were writing)! What my particular feline domesticus loves to do is get INTO my bookshelves and push the books outward, and then look at me quite innocently through the gaps in the wreckage!
Jack is a purebreed Ragdoll.
A Ragdoll cat is sometimes referred to as the “gentle giant.” This is because they generally have a placid disposition. They are genial, and relaxed. They tend to be almost flop-around-y.... (hence the name, Ragdoll).... they can be tipped upside down and generally roughed-up without flaring back in anger as most cats are wont to do! For instance, I can take Jack and sort of just shove him into the corner of the couch in a (human) sitting position.... and he will just stay there like that... looking over at me saying “Uh-huh? Is this amusing? Is that it? Is this a big deal for you? So what’s next Dad? Would you like me to wash the dishes? Do some ironing? Is that it?”
Ragdolls are a big, heavy, longhaired cat whose coat does not mat as readily as that of the Persian. They are born white and slowly develop color and pattern over the first few years, becoming “pointed” cats. Jack, in the picture above is about six months old. Since that time (he is now five years old) his coat has become more gold in coloring, but still, he is basically white.
His particular breed color is called “blue point mitted.”
There are also darker Ragdolls. The chocolate ones. Gorgeous!
And then there are ones with a bicolor pattern. Also gorgeous.
And all Ragdolls have one thing in common.
Blue eyes!

In the 1960’s, Californian breeder Ann Baker bred the first ragdolls from a white, probably nonpedigreed, Persian and a Birman-type tom. As far as cat breeds go, Ragdolls are the new kids on the block, winning full CFA [Cat Fanciers’ Association, the world’s largest registry of Pedigree cats] acceptance in the year 2000.
The very year Jack was born.
Way to go Jack!

His full name is really Jacksie. But he has sort of matured into “Jack”. As I mentioned, he is now well into his golden years.
I named him after the author C.S. Lewis. [Mere Christianity, The Narnia Chronicles, etc.]
When C.S. Lewis was six years old he told his parents he wanted to be called Jacksie. I guess he preferred this over his real name “Clive Staples”.
(Can we blame him?)
The name stuck, and thoughout his life, he was known as “Jack.”
I have come to realize over time that Jack (my cat) is only slightly less of a genius than Lewis. He has managed to live in some desirable digs for five years now without doing a single day’s work!
Even C.S. Lewis never accomplished anything so incredible!
I look at Jack. [Gorgeous. Carefree. Relaxed. Retired.]
And I look at me. [Not gorgeous. Bound by the alarm clock. Tense. Working all the time.]
I compare the two of us, and as I do so, I am reminded of the words of Mark Twain:
“Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
-- Aldous Huxley --
Have a great Tuesday!

Young Genius Hawthorne.

“What if the Devil himself should be at my very elbow!”
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown –

Today is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthday.
He is 201.
He was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, the descendent of a long line of Puritan ancestors, including John Hathorne, [no, I did not forget a “w” there] a presiding magistrate in the Salem witch trials. After his father was lost at sea when he was only four, his mother became overly protective and pushed him toward more isolated pursuits. Hawthorne's childhood left him quite shy and bookish, and molded his life as a writer. It is said that he chose to spend one-third of his adult life in self-imposed isolation. He is perhaps best known for his novel “The Scarlet Letter.”
By the time he came to write the story which I will be discussing today, he was 31 years old. The year was 1835.
And the story is called Young Goodman Brown.

It is my favorite of a collection of Hawthorne short stories I recently read. It stands out in my mind as being the best example in literature (that I am currently aware of) of what is most wrong (today) with moralistic and redemption-based, Western religion. Specifically Christianity.
The story is set squarely in the context of 17th Century New England Puritanism, and tells of Young Goodman Brown’s journey into the dark forest with the Devil as guide. Here, Brown’s illusions about the goodness of his society are crushed when he discovers that many of his fellow townspeople, including religious leaders and his wife, are attending a Black Mass. Was it a dream? A nightmare? Reality? Whether or not the vision in the woods existed as reality or dream does not matter. The important thing is the very real effect it had upon Goodman Brown.
Greatly summarizing here now, when he leaves his dear wife Faith (metaphorically named?) and enters the forest, Goodman Brown is filled to the brim, indoctrinated, if you will, with all of the Puritan ideals of his time and community. At the very foundation we might place the somewhat contradictory supposition that all of mankind, while inwardly totally depraved from birth onwards, is somehow outwardly perfected through conversion. In fact, “perfect” may be a better word than “perfected.”
Early on in the journey through the forest, Brown happens upon seeing the old woman, Goody Cloyse. He is scandalized at seeing her in a sort of tete a tete cohoots with the Devil [who is in the guise of Brown’s own father] and he exclaims “That old woman taught me my catechism.” The author tells us that “there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.”
What does he mean by “a world of meaning”?
What exactly was the catechism being referred to?
Well, Hawthorne was alluding to John Cotton’s catechism of the time. It was the Puritan belief that man must be instructed to realize his own depravity, and therefore at childhood the education began. An irreducible, and essential part of the catechism consisted of the following interrogation, for which only the foregone (prescribed) response was acceptable:

Q: What hath God done for you?
A: God hath made me, He keepeth me, and he can save me.
Q: Who is God?
A: God is a Spirit of himself, and for himself.
Q: How many Gods be there?
A: There is but one God in three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Q: How did God make you?
A: In my first Parents holy and righteous.
Q: Are you then born holy and righteous?
A: No, my first Father sinned, and I in him.
Q: Are you then born a Sinner?
A: I was conceived in sin, and born in iniquity.
Q: What is your Birth-sin?
A: Adam’s sin imputed to me, and a corrupt nature dwelling in me.
Q: What is your corrupt nature?
A: My corrupt nature is empty of Grace, bent unto sin, and only unto sin,
and that continually.
Q: What is sin?
A: Sin is the transgression of the Law [the Ten Commandments].

This catechism (to me) is the breeding ground of a life of mistrust and doubt. Especially when it is coupled to the idea that a conversion experience will (ipso facto) reverse all of the ill effects of such alleged inborn depravity.
Because it simply ‘taint so! Neither premise (the former or the latter) is so.
We may believe that is it so. Yes.
But oh! I declare that we will be disillusioned if we do so. If we really try to maintain a stranglehold upon these illusions, we will at some point, be disillusioned. The only other option available to us being a life of hypocritical delusion.
This story, is a story of not only the disillusionment, but how the maintenance of “religion” afterwards, only exacerbates the problem.

In short, and again greatly summarized, in the depth of the forest, Goodman Brown observes many persons familiar to him, here engaged in various degrees of deviltry. These are persons in whom he has placed an inordinate amount of trust regarding their inward (post-conversion) purity. He has the unhappy experience of even observing his dear wife Faith, among this revelling throng.
Dream or reality? It does not matter.
Hawthorne tells us that from that time forward, Goodman Brown became “a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man...”
And the important question becomes this: Why is this so?
Is it not mostly because of the unrealistic expectations that his “religion” had placed upon the other people in his life.... yea, and upon even himself? Is it not because he has adopted (ingested) these unrealistic expectations into his own perception of humanity in general? Have the people he goes home to become any different than they were before he went into the forest?
To this last question, the answer is obviously and emphatically, No.
But have they changed, in his mind?
Oh dear me yes, and irretrievably so.
Why?
Is it not because of the false religiously-induced expectations he had of them prior to his disillusionment?

We see in the story that as Goodman Brown goes home to his wife and tries to go on unconditionally loving her and his fellow man, he cannot do so.
What has changed?
It is incredibly important to realize that nothing in THEM has changed.
Only something in HIM has changed.
And that something.... is, and always WAS.... an illusion!

All he seems to focus upon is that they were all there in the forest.
What he fails to realize is that he was there too.
To see them.
And what (or who) led him there but the same temptation (or Tempter) to whom the others were susceptible?

It never ceases to amaze me that a religion (Christianity) that claims to consider as sacred the words of its leader, (Jesus) can so often fail to see the true depth of His words, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” [Matt.7:1-2]
Why is it that His followers (of which imperfected group I consider myself to be a member) can tend to be the MOST judgmental after they imagine that they themselves have been the recipients of grace and forgiveness?

Splash du Jour: Monday

When power leads man to arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
-- President John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963 at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library, Amherst College –
Happy 4th of July, America!

The Gospel, According To Homer.

I must confess that one of my favorite programs on television is The Simpsons. Also, I am greatly interested in theology.
As such, when I saw Mark I. Pinsky’s book entitled The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family, I bought it. And read it.
I realize that there would be a lot of people who feel that The Simpsons (the program in general) has little to say about spirituality. Some would probably go so far as to say that it has a certain “anti-Christian” slant to it. Then again, most viewers of the show probably have no opinion, one way or the other, about any overt OR covert Simpsonian moral agenda. But no matter who you are, you will be enlightened by this book about the "good news" according to the Simpsons.
It is realy well-written and informative.
Love it or hate it, the fact is that The Simpsons is definitely one of the most theologically relevant programs in prime time today. Pinsky points out that the unique thing about the show is that it does not shy away from exposing the religious underpinnings or "convictions" of its characters.
Each chapter of his book focuses on a different theme or character, and surveys how they react to their many moral dilemnas. How is that theme presented by the show's writers? It's very interesting. Most of us know that the Bible asks, "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Well, then there's Homer, who says in one episode "I'd sell my soul for a donut." What are we to make of this guy? Or Bart, for that matter? A lot of people turn the show off or avoid it entirely because of the irreligious worldview of these (and other) characters. But Pinsky shows us that the writers do not leave anyone in a favorable light until the moral dilemnas are resolved, usually in a way that is consistent with values we would all like to emulate. In other words, the show does not glorify sloth, irresponsibility, laziness, disobedience, gluttony, hypocrisy, or all-around "sin" as much as it appears to on the surface. There actually IS some "good news" to be found in The Simpsons.
Pinsky proves this with a simple question at one point. He asks, "Who would you rather have as a neighbor? Homer, or Ned Flanders?"
Exactly!

Poor, Poor Granny!

“Anything containing his prose and pictures deserves a low bow, a twenty-one-gun salute, and a bottle of champagne over the noggin.”
-- N.Y. Herald Tribune Book Review –

No, the above was not written about the wonderful stuff here at Bookpuddle!
It was written in reference to the beloved American humorist, James Thurber.
Thurber, whose work was published (mostly) in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, has been compared with the likes of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. His rightful place in the American pantheon of legendary essayists and short-storyists, is indisputable.
Today, I have whiled away part of the afternoon wading blissfully through a few Thurber stories, and I found his “Fables For Our Time” most enjoyable.
Here is one that I especially liked.
I think of it as sort of a Little Red-Riding Hood Redux!

The Little Girl and the Wolf

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. “Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?” asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.
When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.
Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

I would yet inject one more piece of realism into Thurber’s fable, by way of asking the following question:
Where’s Granny?

The Things We Do For Love.

I went to the supermarket this afternoon and picked up some bread, milk, cat food, and Mennen Extreme Speed Stick. This last thing, the under-arm stuff was most important. It’s what brought me there. Yesterday I was getting some dirty looks at work. Especially as I walked through the office area, saying “Whoo doggies! Someone’s deodorant has quit working! And it can’t be mine, because I’m not wearing any!”
Today, I’m fresh as a masculine-smelling flower.

The cat food was a last moment thing. My cat, Jack, is very picky about food.
He only likes this certain kind.... the high-end stuff. It’s $20.00 for a three pound bag and can only be bought at a certain pet store.
However, recently a friend gave me a half-finished bag of this plain old Purina stuff because her own cat had given up on it for some reason. I said “No no. My Jack will not eat this. He only eats this certain kind of expensive-as-hell food.”
Hah!
To my amazement, when I got home and sprinkled some of this cheapo stuff into a separate dish, he went wild over it. Now I have the reverse problem happening.... he will no longer eat the expensive stuff, made with the holistically nutritious brown rice and other top-notch ingredients!
His regular dish remains full of Royal Expens-O-Chow, but the other dish... with the junk-food in it?
Empty.
And meticulously so! Picked clean.
See. I want him to eat HEALTHY but I also want to be NICE!
And his plaintive meows and mournful look when I hold back on the Purina stuff... well, it is killing me. He makes me feel like I’m the wicked Master of the Orphanage in some Dickens novel.
“What? More Purina? Never. You eat what you are given young lad!”
The meows are killing me....
He has recently just finished off the bag of junk food.

So, as I was already in the cash lineup at the store, I looked over, and there was this display of Purina products. ON SALE!
With visions in my mind of a cat who “wants his fix” I gave up my place in line and sauntered over.
To a new and unexpected problem. TOO MANY VARIETIES.
[What did the bag look like? The one I threw away when he finished it. Did it have this picture on it? Or that one? Was it real chicken, or real turkey? Hairball control? He’s going to throw up in my shoes whether there is hairball control or not, so it doesn’t matter. But which one was it now? I want him to have the right flavour!.....]
You would not believe how long I spent over at this display.
I was scrunching the bags of cat food, trying to discern the SHAPE of the morsels inside.
[Maybe that would be a good clue? The ones he loved were perfectly round. Like little UFO’s. These ones seem sort of star-shaped. Can’t be it. How about this one?..... scrunch, scrunch....]
Anyone watching me would have thought that I was trying to choose my own snackfood!
Eegads!
Someone is watching me. When my eyes met hers, this lady to the left of me ran away!
Finally, I chose a bag of roundish-feeling catfood and went back to the lineup. I have yet to see if Jack will love it or hate it.

So now I am out in the parking lot, walking towards my car, proud as punch. My cat will love it, I know he will....
A car backs up right in front of me, and I stop to let it pass.
In the passenger seat is the most gorgeous dog I have ever seen. I just get a brief glimpse, and since the driver’s window is rolled down I blurt out, pointing with my eyes “Beautiful dog.”
He stops, and I instantly think.... Oh oh! Weirdo alert! I shouldn’t have said that.....
So I quickly seek to explain myself, bending down a bit, in fact, resting my two bags of stuff on the pavement, “Just noticed your dog. He’s gorgeous. Norweigan Elkhound?”
“Yes,” the guy says. “He’s been dead for ten months.”

If there is a screen in the mind whereupon we read the data of our incoming thoughts, my screen at that moment was flashing, in bright red, the word WHAT?
But at the same half-second I peered a bit further into the car and saw that the dog was indeed fixed to a sort of wooden platform, in a sitting position. His head was cocked a bit to the left, ever so playfully facing me. Ready to fetch a hundred sticks, it seemed, but without breathing. Not moving at all.
[Nor is the car..... is it my turn to say something....?]
“Wow. That is really really interesting. So well done. He looks very alive.”
The guy reaches over and pets the dog on the head a bit, and says, “Yeah! Him and I have been together a long long time. But he started getting sick about two years ago and there was nothing I could do for him. Just kept getting worse. The vet said his liver was shot. It was sad. I paid more in vet fees than I paid for this car!”
[The way the thing was idling in a cranky fashion, and the tailpipe rattling a backbeat, I wasn’t sure at that moment to be mentally charging this guy with heroism or negligence... but I said to him]...
“So you got him, sort of....”
He helped me say it.... “Stuffed, yes! I could not bear to be without him.”
“And you..... [I wasn’t sure if I should be talking to this guy]..... you still umm... drive around with him then?”
“Uh-huh! I rarely go anywhere without him. A lot of people think I am nuts, but when you love someone, you know....”
“What was his name?”
“No, no. Not was. Is.”
“Oh yes. I’m sorry. Is. What is his name?”
“Roscoe.”
[I’m guessing on the spelling. For all I know it could be Ross Coe. First name and last.]
“Well. Good to meet you Roscoe,” I said, in that special voice that we reserve for the moments when we are talking to animals. “I best be going now.”
I sort of hoisted my bags of groceries in a semblance of a farewell wave to the human occupant of the car, and he then continued to back up and let me pass by.
“Take care.”
“Take care.”

As I continued on to my car and then drove away, I turned the radio down to better concentrate on my visions of this guy lugging that dead dog around.
I pictured him sitting on a lawn chair in his back yard, drinking a beer. Roscoe beside him. A big pile of sticks that have never been retrieved, over in the far corner of the fence.
The squeaky wheels of one of those red Radio-Flyer wagons, a Norweigan Elkhound in the center of it on his little plyboard pedestal. Out for a “walk” with Dad, as the sun goes down. Roscoe ever watchful for oncoming traffic to the left!
A big round, deep, food dish on the kitchen floor of some dingy apartment. This guy leaning old Roscoe forward so his dead doglips can touch upon the Alpo in there.
I found it all very amusing.

But then I looked over at the grocery bags in my own passenger seat, the word “Purina” clearly visible out the top of one of them.
And then I quit smirking.
My time will come!

Splash du Jour: Friday

A Frenchman can humiliate an Englishman just as readily as an Englishman can humiliate an American, and an American a Canadian. One of Canada’s most serious literary needs is some lesser nation to domineer over and shame by displays of superior taste.
-- Robertson Davies –
HAPPY CANADA DAY, CANADA!

Superior.

Lake Superior: the most N.W. of the five Great Lakes, and the largest body of fresh water in the world.
-- Grolier’s Encyclopedia Canadiana, 1958 –

“I consider this whole region doomed to perpetual barrenness.”
-- Thomas McKenney, superintendent of United States Indian Affairs, 1825 –

What am I doing?
Drinking coffee at the mega-bookstore and looking at a book called The Wolf’s Head: Writing Lake Superior. It’s by Peter Unwin. Horribly interesting book. (Published by Viking, 2003).
To me, Superior is an ominous thing.
I have driven along the north-eastern shoreline of Lake Superior, for a full day.
Several times.
Endless, it seems.
It is an awe-inspiring freshwater ocean.
From Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie, 705 kilometres.
438 miles. And there is as much of the shoreline west of Thunder Bay, with no highway beside it.
It is crazily huge-normous. Lake Superior could contain all the other Great Lakes plus three more lakes the size of Lake Erie.
I just may pick up this book (buy it) and read of all the Superior / Ojibway lore.

I once wrote a poem.
An homage to the King of Lakes!
This is my tribute to the Big Ol’ Tub of H2O!
It’s called.... oddly enough...

Superior

The regular get-together rolls around.
Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario.
The Big Guy is invited, but he never shows.

Too busy… too many boats on his back, says Erie.
Too deep, murky, heavy for his own good, says another.
(Nodding all around, considerable turbulence.)
Unfriendly is what! Strutting his own endless shoreline
like he’s the King of Freshwater.

Then Michigan, silent until now, clears his long narrow throat:
Calm down lads. He is the King, but remember…
He’s only above us if we’re looking at a map!

Have you ever heard four lakes laugh?
I mean all at once?
It shook birds out of their trees in Buffalo,
And sent several quick waves to smack that Pier
jutting out into the Chicago harbor.

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Years ago, to say you were a writer was not the highest recommendation to your landlord. Today, he at least hesitates before he refuses to rent you an apartment – for all he knows you may be rich.
-- Arthur Miller –
Have a great Thursday!

Celestial Navigation.

Seasons Greetings from the Mega-Bookstore!
If it was one degree more hot today I would have melted like that witch on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz!
A big slimy bookpuddle!

Just minutes ago I finished reading a really good novel called Celestial Navigation.
Nope.
It was NOT about charting your astrological future.
It was NOT about building the perfect spaceship.
It was NOT about finding bigger and better coffeeshops by following signs in the heavens....
It was about artistic obsession. And other things, yes.
But mostly the artistic obsession of this reclusive artist, Jeremy Pauling.
Jeremy is the proprietor of a boarding house where all types of somewhat eccentric people can be found occupying the rooms. But no one comes close to being as eccentric as Jeremy himself. He can be holed-up in his third-floor studio for days at a time, working on his secret creations. His artwork sort of defies genre. It is part sculpture, part bas-relief sort of glue-together-parts-of-things-found-in-the-room thingamajigs.... but he has a remarkable talent for creating feeling in his work. His work, crazy as it is, seems to breathe, and evoke movement. It attracts buyers, mostly through the promotional efforts of his college friend, an art dealer named Brian.
The infrequent selling of his work, the winning of occasional contests, and the meagre rents he collects from his tenants, keep the house running.
The epitome of artistic reclusiveness, Jeremy has not been any further than the local corner store for years!
But soon, the young single mother Mary Tell moves in, with her daughter Darcy. And this changes Jeremy’s life. And it changes Mary's life. The novel is shaped around the effect that each of these people have on the other. As Jeremy will learn in retrospect, Mary has given his life an “eyelike” shape, rather than the never-ending flatline that it would have most surely been, had he never known her.
It is a brilliant book by an author that I know very little about.
Anne Tyler.
Celestial Navigation was published in 1974, and as such, it is by no means one of your modern novels. No one here is playing with the internet or looking for better deals at Best Buy! Often it seems quite dated.
Me, I like this. I am uncommon in this respect. I sort of like older books.
And it is definitely not an ACTION sort of book. Plus, there are no pictures, if you are into that. It is a book deep in its characterization. The examination of the inner workings of some fairly convoluted people.
As I said, I know very little about Anne Tyler, but picking up a few of her other books here in the store, I seem to get a sense of what it is she does best. And it is what she was doing best here, in Celestial Navigation. Showing us the inner workings... the cogs, the gears of what makes her characters tick and think and act. Or NOT tick, or NOT think, or NOT act.
And that second grouping of possibilities is much more difficult (I think) to write about well!
She does it. At times we are watching the paint dry on the walls, but she rewards an attentive reader who is willing to watch for a paragraph or two. The story is great. A lesser author would lose me in the depiction of some of the mundanity here. She kept me profoundly interested.
On the back of one of her books, the St.Louis Post-Dispatch says “Anne Tyler is a wise and perceptive writer with a warm understanding of human foibles.”
BINGO!
That’s it.
I want to read more of her stuff. She is still writing books, and her most recent work, The Amateur Marriage came out in 2004. It is her sixteenth novel. Her eleventh, entitled Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
If you have read her books, send me some comments on how you have enjoyed, or not enjoyed them, and why.
Do you have a favorite?
If she writes elsewhere, as well as she does here in Celestial Navigation, I want to go there.

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

When you’re a writer, you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you, and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human, and he responds emotionally, and at the same time there’s this cold observer who cannot cry.
-- Brian Moore –
[Note: Moore is one of my favorite writers ever, and in his novel An Answer From Limbo, the protagonist, writer Brendan Tierney, is the consummate example of the above principle: emotion vs. emotional detachment. The novel is superb.]
Have a great Wednesday!

Snortage Down Under.

One of the funniest books I have ever read, was a travel book.
Go figure!
It was Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country. A sort of literary travelogue account of his trip to Australia.
One of my goals in life is to be able to learn to write of everday events in as humorous a way as Bryson does.
There is a passage very early in the book, which I found so hilarious when I first read it, that I want to reproduce it here. In it, Bryson describes the first time he had ever been to Sydney Australia. It was a previous book tour, and he was being chauffered by a sales rep from his local publisher, the man’s wife and two little girls riding along in the back seat. What follows here is classic Brysonism......

At some unfortunate point, quite early on, jet lag asserted itself and I slumped helplessly into a coma.
I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside – tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air – decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling. And I snore, hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character, with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam-valve exhalations. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that bring to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown. Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within five hundred feet has stopped and all children under eight are clutching their mothers’ hems. It is a terrible burden to bear.
I have no idea how long I slept in that car other than that it was not a short while. All I know is that when I came to, there was a certain heavy silence in the car – the kind of silence that would close over you if you found yourself driving around your own city conveying a slumped and twitching heap from one unperceived landmark to another.
I looked around dumbly, not certain for the moment who these people were, cleared my throat, and pulled myself to a more upright position.
“We were wondering if you might like some lunch,” my guide said quietly when he saw that I had abandoned for the moment the private ambition to flood his car with saliva.
“That would be very nice,” I replied in a small, abject voice, discovering in the same instant, with a customary inward horror, that while I had dozed a four-hundred-pound fly had evidently been sick over me. In an attempt to distract attention from my unnatural moist sheen and at the same time reestablish my interest in the tour, I added more brightly, “Is this still Neutral Bay?”
There was a small involuntary snort of the sort you make when a drink goes down the wrong way. And then with a certain strained precision: “No, this is Dover Heights. Neutral Bay was” – a micro-second’s pause, just to aerate the point – “some time ago.”
“Ah.” I made a grave face, as if trying to figure out how we had managed between us to mislay such a chunk of time.
“Quite some time ago, in fact.”
“Ah.”
We drove the rest of the way to lunch in silence.
________

Maybe it’s just me.
Maybe I should be sent to the looney bin (wherever that is).
But the first time I read that little vignette I was sitting in the mega-bookstore, and I started laughing so hard that when it was time to breathe again....... I snorted!
[Several people looked up from their books, like startled deer.]
And then I cried. From laughing, like.
I am not exaggerating to say that I nearly feel off my chair in a heap of residual snortage.
Bryson is always sure to include moments of snortage and tears for his readers.
I recently read an interview with him where he describes an upcoming book which he claims is deliberately humorous from start to finish. Not a dang thing serious about it.
It is healthy to laugh like this sometimes.
Anything Bryson.
Highly recommended summertime reading, from yours truly.

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.
-- Ray Bradbury --
Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
-- Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. --
Have a great Monday!

Imitations.

My best friend wears a Rolex watch.
But it’s not real. It’s one of these knock-offs, an imitation.
Seriously though, you would have to be some sort of Rolex expert [Rolexpert?] to detect the difference. You know how a Rolex does that sort of double-clicking of the seconds hand? Well, his fake jobby does this too.
Me, I am sporting a Tag Heuer. And it’s just as fake as my friend’s Rolex.
We bought these imitation timepieces from the same big-city street vendor. This old guy has an open suitcase of watches and rings, set out on a little table. And he is no fly-by-night retailer. He is as permanent a fixture as any of the surrounding high-rise buildings. Set and immovable, like an old grandfather clock, on this one section of Yonge Street. He’s got a lot of nice stuff.
I bought my “Tag Heuer” [nudge, nudge, say-no-more] from him a couple of years ago.
For twenty-five bucks.
That very same day I went directly from his Suitcase-Stand into a top-notch jewellery store that sells Tag Heuer. I handed my watch to the man behind the counter and asked for his opinion. He sought the counsel of several colleagues who were soon gathered like a flock of crows around my imitation. Soon, with their glasses half-way down their beaks and still peering with professional precision, they were all muttering combined conclusions of “I cannot tell the difference between this and the real thing.”
I should add, that several good examples of the real thing were right there to be seen, too. Behind locked glass cases and without price tags attached, because they were of that special echelon of items which have a PRICE... but no price-TAG! Because if you need to see the price-tag [say it with me now]..... you probably can’t afford it.

So this past spring, just a few months ago, my friend and I found ourselves back at the Suitcase-Stand. Back on Yonge Street.
And there was Father Time himself, standing there like an immovable sequoia.
So I told him of how impressed I am with the Tag-Heuer. It was right there on my wrist, ticking away like a charm. I told him how the flock of crows could not find one critical thing to say about it. By now he was beaming with pride in his fake products.
And he reached behind the suitcase, from whence he retrieved his piece de resistance!
The Rolex.
My friend, who recently suffered the loss of his [real] Gucci watch that he had worn for half his lifetime, leaned in for a closer look.
I could see the glint in his eye. And yes, this wrist-watch was gorgeous.
There was only one thing left to do.
Bargain.
Try to haggle the guy down in his price. My friend made an offer which Father Time said was not acceptable. So we walked away.
And came back a while later with some cold hard cash! Sort of waved it in Father Time’s face there a bit until he got a bit dizzy.
Long story short? All things are negotiable!
My best friend wears a Rolex watch.
And who’s the wiser?

When it comes down to it, knock-offs, imitations, are at times a wonderful thing.
But I’m sure there are instances where the rule is less applicable than in the realm of wrist-watches.
For instance, you’ll want to be sure that what you think is Hugo-Boss, is not really Hugo-Bass. It could seriously ruin an otherwise perfectly good evening if you have inadvertantly hosed yourself down with something that was meant to be sprayed on a fishing lure!
Or, when you drive that new car off the lot.... you may want to make double-sure that the final letter in the Mercedes-Benz you just bought is a “z”.
Not a “t”.

Just One Sentence.

I am just sitting here in the mega-bookstore on a hot hot HOT humid day.
Drinking a hot coffee.
Interestingly enough (or not), even when it is hot outside, I still drink hot coffee.
Go figure!
I never indulge in any of the plethora of cold drinks available. All of the iced-frappuccinos, and coldahoozits, and whatchamafreezings that are now the rage in all of your high-end coffee emporiums.
Nope.
It can be 450 degrees fahrenheit outside (incidentally, one degree more, and paper ignites) and I still order coffee made with water from the river Styx!
What can I say? I am a coffee purist, and coffee was meant to be HOT.
To me, cold coffee is as absurd as hot ice cream!

But on to more important matters.
Today I am thinking of a really interesting phenomenon that takes place in mega-bookstores, especially in their coffee-drinking areas. Think of it as a wee study in human nature. If monkeys did the same thing that I am about to describe, Jane Goodall and a team from National Geographic would be right in there documenting it.
Here it is.
Invariably, if you are going to spend any considerable amount of time sitting in a mega-bookstore (like, let’s say.... ¾’s of your entire waking life.... not to say that I KNOW anyone that does this or anything...) but, invariably, there will be moments when you have to... (ahem)... abandon your post, so to say.
Umm.... go and sort of drain off some of that coffee, for instance, OR... go and get another cup of it.
Or go and use the payphone. Cut your fingernails. Get a haircut. Iron your clothes. Stuff like this.
But the thing is.... you’ve got a couple thousand dollars worth of laptop-computer sitting there, and you don’t want to pack up all this gear for such a trivial matter as a quick trip to the loo!
Are you getting a visual here?
So... you sort of look around.
Then, you look at this guy sitting at the next table. You sort of half-cough, and say “Excuse me? Can you watch my stuff for me? I’ll be right back.”
Nineteen times out of twenty, the person will nod and oblige you.
And you walk away.

My question is this.
How do I know that this isn’t the VERY GUY that wants to take my laptop home with him?
I mean really.
Is he not as much of a random stranger as..... the next guy?
Have I taken his drivers license with me, and promised to return it to him when I am safely re-united with the belongings I have entrusted to his care?
Not at all. And the thing is, if my laptop were stolen (God forbid) while I was blissfully tinkling the time away elsewhere, I would want to go directly out into the street with my eyes closed in hopes that a bus flattens me! That is how serious this whole issue is folks!
Yet I do it. All the time.
I can think of only one time when a person flat out responded with “NO!”
As in, “No, I will not watch your stuff. I am not a security guard!”
Well excuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me!
Almost always though, you get the nod, and even a smile.

OK, so here is what I have concluded. It says something positive about human nature, really.
JUST ONE SENTENCE BETWEEN PEOPLE CAN BUILD TRUST.
There is really no other explanation for the fact that I can walk away and “do my business” with nary a worrisome thought as to my dearest possession being out of eyesight.
I have asked a fellow human being an optional question, they have responded in the affirmative, and I have trusted them.
Isn’t that neat?
I think so.
JUST ONE SENTENCE!

And with it the stranger has become.... not so strange.
I know this because I have so often been the person who was ASKED the question by another.
“Excuse me, can you watch my stuff for me? I’ll just be a minute.”
I have never said “No.”
So I know what it is like to be on this end of the computer-watching racket!
As much as I would never steal a laptop computer in the first place, (even if there were a big sign over it saying “Steal this computer”).... how much MORESO would I not steal it when a fellow humanoid has asked me to guard their own?
And when they return, there is always this little smile.
It is an acknowledgement that together, just the two of us, in our co-operative collusion, have warded off a slavering band of marauding Computer-Mongers.... look, four of them are still slinking away among the Cookbooks even as we non-verbally speak of it....
And we say, “Thank you.”
And we say, “No probs.”
Hope for the human race.
We just need to talk a bit more.

Everything Is A Poem.

For the past couple of days I have discussed a few of my reading habits and told you of some of my favorites in the areas of fiction and non-fiction. Tonight I want to say a few words about yet another kind of reading.
Poetry.

Any reader who omits or neglects poetry in their diet is going to be living a literary life that is malnourished. That is the long and short of it, and of course, it is also opinion.
However, I would be suspicious of any serious reader who said to me “I just cannot find any poetry that is worth reading.”
I would ask such a person only one question and it would be quick and direct. I would look them in the eye and I would say, “Really?”
Because I believe that there is poetry out there for everyone.
I would interrogate the person until they admitted that they do not LIKE poetry, but I would never let them off the hook with a claim that there isn’t any poetry worth reading!
There is!

Having said all of the above, I must confess that I am not in any way a poetry expert, nor do I even read that much of it. If I went for a literary checkup [and they say that around forty years old, every male ought to have one done]... I think the physician would probably say “Your fiction levels are OK, but you could really use more poetry.” I am writing of it tonight, as much to remind myself, as anyone reading.
In no real hierarchical order, here are some of my favorite poets:
Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Rupert Brooke, Emily Dickinson.
There have been other poets that I have enjoyed, like Shelley, and Carl Sandburg, but really, I have not read enough of them. Name-dropping, because I have read a few poems.... that is not what I want to do here. But the above list of poets have really SPOKEN to me, in significant ways.
On my list of Things To Do Before I Die From Poetry-Malnutrition there are three names.
Robert Frost, William Stafford, and e.e. cummings.
These are three poets that I think have something to say to me, but whom I have not given the time to do so..... yet!
One of my goals is to read them.
OK, this has been all preamble.
Now I get to the name of a poet, a modern-day poet, that I want to unequivocably recommend to everyone out there.... especially anyone who says they have yet to find any sort of poetry worth reading. I have the answer for you!

Billy Collins.

Billy Collins was the American Poet Laureate for 2001-2003. The guy is simply amazing. I love his work, and reading him has revolutionized (no exaggeration) my own life as a fledgling poet. My own poetry output has benefited both quantitatively and qualitatively since I discovered Billy Collins. One of the main reasons is that Collins has taught me that everything is a poem.
More correctly, everything is a poem asking to be written.
If you don’t write it, it won’t be one. But if you do, it will.
There is a simplicity and a directness (as well as a direction) in his poetry that is very liberating. Collins writes in free verse. Usually the poems are quite short. Always understandable, in a pithy sort of way!
They are so simple that it is stunning. I have read his poems and then stared at my coffee cup, thinking “What a wonderful coffee cup this is.”
Perhaps that sounds a bit nutty.
Like, you could think “Have you considered that maybe you are nuts?”
Yes, I have considered this. Even sought the opinion of others.
But the coincidence (my nuttiness – my reading of Collins) is too frequent to be brought on by anything other than the sheer marveling over such exquisite use of language. Words so wonderfully arranged that they bring about a lovely sense of nuttiness, when read.
Collins was given to me. A gift.
My dear friend sent me the collection entitled Questions About Angels. I devoured it.
Then (I forget the order) I received, in the same manner, Nine Horses. Then Picnic, Lightning. Then, The Art of Drowning. Followed by The Apple That Astonished Paris. And finally, a copy of Sailing Around The Room SIGNED by the author himself on the page that holds my favorite Collins poem, Osso Buco.
All in all, it is the kind of stuff I would run back into a burning house to retrieve!
I have read, and re-read all of these, and I look forward to his next book of poems, due in the fall of ’05. The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems.
I know that not all poets appeal to all readers. But I am so sure of Collins, that if you buy this book and do not like it, I will PERSONALLY refund your money!

I close my comments today with a random sample of what Collins does.

On Closing Anna Karenina

I must have started reading this monster
a decade before Tolstoy was born
but the vodka and the suicide are behind me now,
all the winter farms, ice-skating and horsemanship.

It consumed so many evenings and afternoons,
I thought a Russian official would appear
to slip a medal over my lowered head
when I reached the last page.

But I found there only the last word,
a useless looking thing, stalled there,
ending its sentence and the whole book at once.

With no more plot to nudge along and nothing
to unfold, it is the only word with no future.

It stares into space and chants its own name
as a traveler whose road has just vanished
might stare into the dark, vacant fields ahead,
knowing he cannot go forward, cannot go back.

-- Billy Collins –

Now, when you go to your own bookshelf (as I did) and turn to the last page of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina you find that the last word in the book is “it”.
IT!
So, re-reading the Collins poem with that in mind makes you realize that he has written something wonderful about the word “it”.
What better example can there be of the idea that everything is a poem.
....Asking to be written.

Splash du Jour: Friday

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.
-- Margaret Atwood --
Have a great Friday!

Freelance Monotheism.

I am back at the same place, same table even, and feel like reviewing once again, some great books. This time, in the area of non-fiction.
I like to have a book of non-fiction on the go at the same time as I am working through novels.
I carry around both types of books so that I can alternate from one to the other as my mood dictates. My non-fiction interests are varied, but they tend to gravitate towards books concerning religion and spirituality. I also like to read literary travel books (love Bill Bryson), medical/scientific stuff (love Sherwin B. Nuland), psychology (love M.Scott Peck, Viktor Frankl), history in general.... really, there are not too many aisles of the bookstore that do not interest me on some level.
But as I view my Reading List this evening, I can see that in the past year I have been immersed in some reading along the religio-spiritual lines.
For instance:
Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, as well as his Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor and his Pathways To Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation.
Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus’s excellent memoir As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning.
Marcus J. Borg’s Reading The Bible Again For The First Time.
John Shelby Spong’s A New Christianity For A New World.
Bruce Feiler’s Walking The Bible: A Journey By Land Through The First Five Books of Moses. [Interestingly enough, Spong and Borg both argue that these “first five books” are not BY Moses in the first place! Ahh... reading is such fun!]
M. Scott Peck’s A World Waiting To Be Born: Civility Rediscovered.
Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections On Life's Final Chapter.
When Jesus Came To Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today, by Harvey Cox.
And, a book that definitely spurred (kick-started) a neo-religious revolution in my own life, The Pagan Christ by Tom Harpur. One day, I must write about the effect this last book has had upon my understanding of faith and spirituality.

Tonight however, I want to briefly talk about two books not listed above.
A memoir and its sequel.
Karen Armstrong’s Through The Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Life In And Out of the Convent, and The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness.
I have seldom read anything that has been as insightful, moving, honest, and downright captivating, as these two books.
I inhaled them. Ate them.
They made me forget about fiction, for a while.
Publication-wise, they are separated by 23 years. 1981 and 2004, respectively.
In the first book, written twelve years after Karen Armstrong left her life as a nun, she describes the genesis of her vocation or “calling” and reveals how reluctant her parents were about letting her embrace a life of ascetism. She was a mere seventeen years old at the time.
What follows is a chronicle of what it was like to go through the rigors of becoming a nun. The nine months as a postulant, the two years noviceship, the two years of the scholasticate.... the mind-numbing discipline of achieving full-fledged nunnery-ness (my word).
She was one of the last people to go through the old system before it was reformed by the Second Vatican Council and Pope John XXIII. In what I consider extreme generosity, she admits that her own immaturity was the cause of many of her difficulties, but ultimately what happens is that Karen finds out that she is simply not suited for the life of a nun.
In the convent, God was conspicuous only by His perceived absence, and confessing this to her superiors was not helpful. It only sent her back into herself and confirmed her theory that God’s silence was her own fault. In all of the seven years on the inside, never once did she “hear from God” nor realize the pre-convent aspirations of her heart. It is a powerful story of religious devotion gone awry.
I could talk forever about how IMPORTANT I think this book is, but, moving on to its sequel....

Karen now describes her post-convent life in The Spiral Staircase.
After leaving the convent Armstrong became, basically an atheist.
She felt that she was done with God.
She knew almost nothing of the changed world she was entering, and she was tormented by panic attacks and inexplicable seizures. Her struggle against despair was fueled by a string of discouragements -- failed spirituality, doctorate and jobs, fruitless dealings with psychiatrists -- but finally, in 1976, she was diagnosed with epilepsy and given proper treatment.
The outside world did have something invaluable to offer Karen Armstrong. Freedom.
Freedom to explore her potential as a writer, which is what she would later come to understand as her true vocation, and place in the world. Through many circuitous events and experiences, Karen re-entered the personal quest for spiritual understanding by way of what can be termed “comparative theology.”
Focusing her studies on the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, her own true inner story began to emerge. In her writing she experienced the moments of transcendence that had eluded her during her years of intense nunnery-ness.
And the world has been the richer for the wonderful books that Karen Armstrong has produced, and continues to produce. She has become one of the world’s foremost religious scholars, her work having been translated now into more than forty languages.
Her memoirs are among the most gripping and hopeful of life histories I have ever read.

I love this comment that has been made concerning The Spiral Staircase:
“Opening this book is like sitting down for coffee on a first date with someone who is interesting and odd. Your conversation becomes unexpectedly intimate: painful tales of bafflement and illness, gleaming crystals of self-discovery and joy. By the time you get up from the table, you have fallen in love.”
—Rabbi Arthur Waskow, author of Godwrestling–Round 2: Ancient Wisdom, Future Paths.

I agree.
Truth be known, reading these books have made me feel as though I too..... no, I won’t say it.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Karen Armstrong was asked:
Where are you in your own journey? You're not a practicing Catholic, are you?
She answered:
No. I usually call myself these days a freelance monotheist. I draw nourishment from all three of the religions of Abraham, uh, I spend my life studying these faiths, in a sense I'm still a nun. I live alone, and I've never married, and I spend my life writing and talking and reading and studying spirituality and God. And I can not see in essence any one of these three faiths as superior to any of the others. I suppose one of my hopes in life is to try to get Jews, Christians and Muslims to realize the profound unanimity, the unanimous vision that they share, and to join hands together to stop the kind of cruelty, violence and obscenity, moral obscenity that we saw on September the 11th.

I just love that.
A freelance monotheist.
This is what I want to be when I grow up.
A freelance monotheist Booklord!

These books are incredibly good.
I have gone on too long about it.
My coffee is cold.....

Splash du Jour: Thursday

Powers of observation heightened beyond the normal imply extraordinary disinvolvement: or rather the double process, excessive preocccupation and identification with the lives of others, and at the same time a monstrous detachment... The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer.
-- Nadine Gordimer, Introduction, Selected Stories –
Have a great Thursday!

Maggots & Mayhem!

I’m just sitting at the mega-bookstore coffee shop after work.
I’m thinking about how grand it would be to own a mega-bookstore and be a sort of Book Mogul.
Book Baron!
No.
Book LORD!
I want to be a Book Lord when I grow up!
OK, in all seriousness, this is probably not going to happen. [I’m referring mainly to the “growing up” part!] But I am allowed to dream. Right?
Dream of my future booklordship?
There was never a time in my life when I did not love books to an inordinate degree.
Books are a part of my very DNA. [Deep-rooted Novel Addiction]!

Anyhoo... I’m sitting here looking over my Reading Record, my meticulously kept record of literally everything I have read over the past dozen years or so. And I’m just looking at this past year, with its forty or so books in there.
And I’m wondering [wasn’t yesterday the first day of summer?].... what would I recommend to someone as a good summer read? Talking novels, here. Hmmm.....
Currently I am reading a little book of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories. Really great, but not beach blanket stuff. Just a few days ago, I finished Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Good book, but I only have one to recommend and so this one is not it.
Hmmm, in the past few months I have read Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace [super-excellent], F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night [very good], Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! [quite good], two by Jose Saramago: The Gospel According To Jesus Christ [mesmerizing, wondrous], and The Double [stupendously great], Marilynne Robinson’s award-winning Gilead [very good], Ian McEwan’s Saturday [horridly good, awesome even]..... all of these books have been great!
But one book stands out in my mind as being not only very memorable, but exciting, thrilling.... and yes, beach-blankety with a literary thriller-ish sort of twist to it that I think would be good to read through your Ray-Bans while you are soaked in Coppertone and iced-tea.
It is Matthew Pearl’s excellent debut novel, The Dante Club.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The neat thing about reading Matthew Pearl is that you do not have to be familiar with his style, don’t have to be well-versed in what he has written previously (as, say for instance, one may have to be with DeLillo, in my opinion). This is Pearl’s first book! There is an excitement in that, for me. Like diving into a pool without testing the water first.
The author is a graduate of Harvard and Yale Law School and a Dante scholar.
The novel takes place in Boston – 1860’s.
That’s right!
EIGHTEEN-sixties! Don’t run and hide.
The book is about a series of truly horrific and grisly murders that take place in Boston, and specifically, in and around the “Boston Brahmin” society of the day. In the first one, after being somewhat bludgeoned (but not to death) a judge is eaten alive by maggots. Uh-huh!
In the next murder, a minister is buried upside down, and his feet, which are sticking out of the ground, are set aflame.
This other guy gets severely (and I mean, quite really severely) sliced up into ribbons and is left hanging like a side of beef in this deserted castle type place.
Doesn’t this all sound wonderfully beach blankety?

Truthfully, there is a lot of gore in the book. No doubt. But the plot of the book turns upon the fact that the authorities are baffled as to any connectible evidence regarding these crimes. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to motive.
Little do they know that this wild spate of violence is in fact, motivated by reason and rhyme!
The killer has been fashioning his crimes based upon the punishments described in Dante’s Divine Comedy (specifically the “Inferno” section), and at the same time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has been engaged in the production of the English translation of Dante. This is where Pearl’s novel dovetails with history.
At this time in Boston society, there was a Dante Club. It consisted of Longfellow, J.T. Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and George Washington Greene. They were literary giants in their own right, who met as friends frequently, and officially met once a week to discuss that portion of the Dante translation that was currently being completed by the leader, the venerable Longfellow.
As the murders continue to wreak havoc and mayhem and incite terror in the populace, these scholars become embroiled in the case.
All leads lead to Dante! Since Dante’s work was virtually unknown in America at the time, this band of bookish litterati emerge as the only hope in deciphering the connections, anticipating the killer’s next move, and zeroing in on his/her identity. They alone possess the esoteric wherewithal to link the details of the crime with the epic poem itself.
Even though we as readers are on the inside track, the ending is shocking. A surprise.
Pearl blends a wealth of historical fact with this debut novel, but the thing is so wonderfully embellished that I would hesitate to call it “historical fiction.” I would rather call it an intelligent, thrilling, whodunit! It has been compared to Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and equated with the scholarly density of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

It is my pick for a dangity-good summer read!
My hope is that Matthew Pearl will abandon his career in law and focus on writing one hundred more novels.
Don’t we have enough lawyers?

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

I don't like sitting on a beach reading. When I go to the beach, the kids and I, we're gonna go in the waves, we're gonna go for a hike. I want adventure.
-- Tom Cruise –
OK, now I’m done with it... I swear!
Have a great Wednesday!

Tom Cruise: Revisited.

There are many other things I could go on about tonight, and I’m sure that some readers are probably thinking by now “Isn’t this blog supposed to be about books?”
But, well, last night I sort of “threw the book” at Tom Cruise, speculating that the water incident in Leicester Square (London) was a media-stunt and somewhat staged event.
I should have probably done a bit more research on the thing before blabbing my yapper like Matlock on steroids!
Thing is.... subsequent research has revealed to me that The Perp [The Squirter-Guy] was NOT a reporter as I had assumed. Turns out that the whole thing was a planned Ashton Kutcher-esque style deliberate squirtage segment for a British comedy show. It seems that Mr. Cruise really did NOT know that the thing was going to happen.
And the Squirters WERE arrested!
So.... there goes yet another pillar of my Media-Stunt Theory.
[I am surely going to lose my Private Investigator license over this...]!

Here are the scenes we didn't see:
There were four people on the Squirt Team and they were quickly whisked away for a quick tour of the Tower of London, whereupon they were threatened with a Henry the Eighth-style beheading and then released on bail within hours but ordered to return to a police station on Monday, (yesterday) where one was detained for further questioning as authorities consider whether to file charges.
"They are being investigated in relation to an alleged assault on Mr. Cruise," a police source told London's Independent newspaper. "It was just water, but that can be very alarming when it comes from a crowd out of nowhere."
No kidding.
Especially [as I made note of yesterday in MY investigations] when that "water" may have been.... who knows.... anthrax-urine or whatever!
Tom Cruise’s sister and publicist, Lee Ann DeVette, was not immediately available for comment Monday. But the London Times quotes her as saying Cruise might seek retribution.
"He is not just going to forget about it. He wants to make sure we get to the bottom of it," DeVette said. "We want to know who was involved and what it was all for. We have not received an apology and are still waiting to get hold of the people at Channel 4 and at the production company [behind the TV show].
"Tom does want to take action, but we don't know precisely what until we know more about the people we are dealing with."

The people in question are the practical jokesters behind Britain's new Entertainment 4 series, which has also ambushed the likes of Paris Hilton and Sharon Osbourne. Mrs. Ozzy, waylaid by a squirt earlier this month, was apparently less forgiving than Cruise. Apparently, she dumped a champagne bucket filled with ice and water over one of the offending cameramen.
You go girl!
Yesterday (Monday), a rep for Channel 4 issued a statement on behalf of its show: "The water squirting was not intended to cause offense and was very much in a spirit of fun. The stunt was intended to be lighthearted rather than malicious, and we would apologize to Mr. Cruise for any offense caused."

So, I just wanted to publish this retraction. My theory seems to be a real washout in the damning evidence that has surfaced since!
Matlock would not be proud of me.
And Columbo.... he would just shiver in disgust, squint, and wave that cigar of his....

My question now is this.
What should be done with Exhibit-A.... the squirt-weapon itself?
In this instance, I am in favor of a public beheading of the microphone.
Tomorrow.... book talk!

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Speaking of his career as a writer, Modecai Richler once said:
"You wanna know what I do for a living? There's twenty-six letters in the alphabet. I jumble them up."
Have a great Tuesday!

Tom Cruise in London.

Congratulations Tom & Katie!
Unless you’ve had your head (literally) in the sand for the past couple days, you’ve probably seen Tom Cruise somewhere in your living room. Most likely he’s been in that square thing that all of your furniture is pointed towards!
I love Tom Cruise, in as heterosexual of a way as I can say it! I think he is a great actor, and if I were a girl, I guess I would like him for other reasons too. But I’m a guy. My theory that I am about to talk about here on the blog is in no way a criticism of Tom Cruise, or the Tom Cruise industry. It’s just..... a theory.
OK... you know how we’ve all seen the incident of the past few days where Tom Cruise is calmly giving an interview in London, flashing those whiter-than-whites and just being all around genial.... and then.... SQUIRT!
He is blasted in the face with water from a fake microphone?
If you have not seen this, then, not only do I feel dorky about going on with my theory, but also, the rest of this blog won’t be very interesting.
But, suffice it to say, our Tom gets splooshed with water in as rude and unexpected a manner as possible!
Orrrrrr..... was it?
Was it as unexpected as it appears to be?
This has been bugging me all day at work, because I saw the clip once again while I was having my morning coffee, actually as I was just leaving my apartment. As I drove to work, for some reason I kept re-playing it in my mind, and something does not seem to quite..... fit.

Let me re-create the scene as I recall it on TV.
It happened yesterday. Sunday.
Here is perhaps THEE most powerful man in Hollywood, a movie-star mogul.... a monolith of the modern motion picture industry. He is giving an interview when a jet of water splashes him in the $20 million-a-picture face, and he sort of lurches back a bit, half-laughing, and spluttering some of the water out of his mouth, wiping his eyes and so forth.
He then asks the interviewer, “Now why did you do that?” or “Why would you do that?”
The guy sort of turns to leave, and Tom says “No no no no no, don’t leave. Don’t run away. I asked you a question? Why would you do that? I’m answering your questions, I’m giving you an interview, and then you do that. That is extremely rude. You know what? You are a jerk. That was very jerky.”
Camera fades to the flustered bodyguards and whatnot....

The above is not verbatim, but this is essentially the gist of it. Of what transpired.
Now... my questions are as follows?
In today’s world, where (germ-wise) you could literally put liquid death in a syringe if you really wanted to, isn’t Tom’s reaction a bit bland? The stuff went right in his mouth! WHO KNOWS what it might have been? Nowadays, such an action is tantamount to attempted murder. If you do not believe me, ask any police officer of the procedures that instantly go into effect if someone being apprehended spits on them! I can tell you one thing. It involves quite a bit more than making note of the fact that the perpetrator is a jerk!
My theory is simply that Cruise’s bodyguards would not have left Tom to verbally fend for himself in this instance. NO WAY! That reporter would have been hauled away. We would have SEEN “the war of the worlds” all right! Way before it hit the theatres!
Secondly, if the holder of the microphone (hereafter referred to in cop-lingo as “The Perp”)... if The Perp really had it in for Mr. Cruise, wouldn’t he have made some sort of statement when invited by Mr. Cruise to do so? Let’s say he hated Tom Cruise, and this is why he did what he did. Well, why didn’t he SAY SOMETHING? In other words.... what kind of a POINT was he trying to make (other than possibly ruining his career and/or getting his Press privileges taken from him).... HERE WAS YOUR CHANCE TO SAY IT BUDDY.... AND YOU SAID NOTHING!
These two things, coupled with Mr. Cruise’s overall Gandhi-like unretaliative equanimity about the whole affair, make me suspicious that this entire episode was a media stunt geared at redeeming public opinion about Tom Cruise, as of late.
In a word, I think we’ve been SPUN!
My theory? The only words missing in the snippets we will see on Entertainment Tonight (tonight) are “Action” and “Cut”.

To back up a bit, what kind of negative public opinion am I referring to?
Well, lately the world-at-large has been somewhat critical of Tom’s outspoken views of Scientology, for one thing. Secondly, when he started jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch the other day, people thought maybe he lost his marbelios!
And then, the horrifically romantic (I’m not being sarcastic) engagement to Katie Holmes after a mere seven weeks of courtship... the spin doctors may have been prescribing some footage of examples of emotional stability to offset some of these things, and if they were doing so, they could not have procured a better visual example of it than “MAN’S MICROPHONE SPLOOSHES INTO TOM CRUISE’S FACE!”
Cool as a very expensive and well-dressed cucumber he was!
I’ll admit, I was, and remain, impressed.

On the show I was watching this morning, amid the banter after showing the clip, the weather girl was asked for her opinion of how Tom handled the situation and her response was:
“Well, the microphone man is just lucky he didn’t do that to Russell Crowe!”
BINGO!
That is the spin! That is exactly the desired effect. Cool cool Tom.
And you know what? He is cool.
What I am suggesting here is in no way a criticism of the person of Tom Cruise. If anything, if my theory has more than speculative hypothesis to it, I think it is a sad indictment upon the viewing public, moreso than on the actor or his industry.
It is sad that we make these people go to such lengths to try and demonstrate to us that they are people too. It is unfair of us.

What’s my personal verdict?
Well, I want to flip the TV on and see if I can catch Entertainment Tonight. I want to see that clip one more time, because I think it involves some of the finest acting since.... well, since that courtroom scene in A Few Good Men.

Splash du Jour: Monday

“...the part of any poem or novel that makes it a work of art doesn’t derive its value from the realm of market exchange. It comes from the realm of gift, which has altogether different modes of operating. A gift is not weighed and measured, nor can it be bought. It can’t be expected or demanded; rather it is granted, or else not. In theological terms it’s a grace, proceeding from the fullness of being. One can pray for it, but one’s prayer will not therefore be answered. If this were not so, there would never be any writer’s block. The composition of a novel may be one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration, but that one part inspiration is essential if the work is to live as art. (The parts vary for poetry, but both are still involved.)”
-- Margaret Atwood, in Negotiating With The Dead: A Writer on Writing --
Have a great Monday!

Still Smitten.

I once fell in love with a bird.
I wish I were kidding.
We met in Victoria, as in Vancouver Island.
I was on holidays, and she was living in the downtown zoo at the time.
I guess it was just one of those things, written in the stars and all.
We were destined to meet....

Earlier that day, my family and I, half a boatful of us actually, had gone whale-watching out on the Pacific. Have you ever done this? It is absolutely awe-inspiring. Plus, you get utterly drenched. It is wild fun.
The whale-watching outfit made us sign documents wherein we stated that if we died, hey, that was cool! Then they dutifully suited us up in these bright red rigamarole deals that were designed to keep water off of us.
Hah!
Very soon into the trip, I was convinced that we were only wearing these neon suits so that they can find us bobbing like apples when we go overboard! We were soaked through and through, and I don’t mean just externally, in the normal cracks and crevices. I mean on the inside too! Like spleen and liver soaked!
I think our boat-driver purposely hit the waves slantwise so that on our way out to where the whale pods were, all of us in the boat would have already tasted half the ocean! My niece was sitting in the row ahead of me, and all I know is that by the time our boat went into a calm neutral free float, I was wearing her mascara!
But wow!
There were the whales, sure enough. All over the place. “Breaching” as they do... launching themselves into the air around us. At one point, two whales surfaced and then rolled together, as though they were hugging, and then they submerged.
Our guide said “Well I’ll be danged” or something to that effect.
Then he explained to us that we had just witnessed a very rare sight indeed.
Two whales making out. Getting it on. Doing it old school.
Skinny dipping.
Two killers having whalecourse!

I mention all of this only to say that by the time we returned to the harbor and squelched ourselves out of this boat.... I was feeling quite romantic.
We walked around for a bit, drying off in the sun, and then ended up at this indoor zoo.
As we walked through, pausing momentarily before each exhibit to gawk at these poor caged-up beasts and whatnot.... I turned and saw.....
HER!
The toucan.
I was transfixed.
As I remember it, all peripheral sound dimmed! Just like in the movies. The Civil War can be raging three feet to either side of two characters... but because one of them happens to have a spear through his head, the other guy can all of a sudden hear him whispering his final words as if they were both sitting in a Starbucks. You know what I mean?
That’s what it was like, minus the gunfire and smoke!
It was just me and her. This bird and me.

She was in a huge-normous cage, and quietly eating.
It was a wordless, holy moment.
Speaking would have chased angels away.
So I just stared at her. And she stared at me, looking away now and then only to pick out a morsel of food about a foot distant, pick it up at the end of her gi-normous shnozz, and then flick it back into her mouth.
“Kissing would definitely be difficult” went through my mind, but true love quickly displaces such negative thoughts. Don’t you agree?
The rest of my family went squishing away on to other exhibits. To my knowledge, no one really noticed how smitten I was. If they did, they let me be. Maybe they whispered to each other, behind cupped hands... “He’s having one of his moments.”
I’ll never know.
But I stayed at that cage, by her side, until they made a circuit of the whole zoo. And then they came and pried my hands from her steely prison, and I left the place backwards.
Years later, I wrote the following poem for her. Not knowing her name, I titled it:

Toucan

Blue-rimmed eyes and black dress.
You were lunching. For the life of me
it looked like croutons
you were munching. Mixed with fruit.
Silent and beautiful. Wondrous,
the distance you tossed dinner
to your throat. So long
you had me staring.

Does it flatter you to know,
that after all these years,
I still remember
what you were wearing?

Nowadays, even seeing a Froot-Loops box can make me misty.
People... well-meaning people, have asked me, “How do you even know that she was a her?”
And I turn to them, almost in pity, and I say “Please. There are times when you look into the eyes and you don’t need to look anywhere else, to know who it is you are looking at.”

How high? How HIGH?

Why have umbrellas, and all things umbrella-ish, been so lacking from my life?
Seriously, I am now well into my fourth decade of existence, and I have yet to really own an umbrella.
What is wrong with me?

At lunchtime today, and again after work, walking from my car to the mega-bookstore downtown, I got soaked.

You’d think I’d learn.
You’d think I’d mend my ways.
But neither thing has happened.
I’m soaked on rainy days!

Can I be honest here?
I have always felt real stupid carrying an umbrella.
Can I be even more honest?
I’ve only carried one once!
And man did I ever feel stupid.
Found it leaning on a bench, near a souvenir store.
So I took it.
I didn’t just “take it.”
I looked around a lot first. Whistled a bit. [It’s always good to whistle a bit before taking something that is not really yours]. Waited for the rightful owner to come by.
It was a sunny day. Finally I realized what this was all about. I mean, I was born at night, but not last night!
Why is there an umbrella leaning so provocatively against a bench, on a SUNNY day.... nearly inviting me to take it home with me? Well it became quite obvious.
This umbrella belonged to no one.
It was being given to me by God!
So I took it.

I placed it in the closet.
About a week later, I found use for it. Looked out the window on a Saturday.
It was raining. No probs. I have an UMBRELLA now! I am one of those people who HAVE AN UMBRELLA!
I exited the building.
SWOOSH!
In an impressive display of mechanical ingenuity, it kicked its legs out and flapped open at the mere push of a button. Nearly took my eye out.
This is obviously one of those “rites of passage” things right? To know that “YOU ARE NOW FULLY HUMAN?”
You have unswooshed an umbrella..... fellow humanoid.
Immediately, I was disoriented.
How high do I hold this confounded thing? Like sort of far up, or just close down over my head?
Where are the instructions?
I felt like some kind of.... pterodactyl was hovering over me, and I holding its one leg!

But, true enough... it is raining. I’m as equipped as the next guy now, I guess.
I start walking.
I am amazed at how immediately disconcerting this whole thing is.
I am not kidding you when I say I would have felt more comfortable walking down the street clad only in underwear. [Not that I’ve ever done this, I swear].
But seriously now, it becomes apparent to me that there are a myriad of options bombarding my brain.... and the most immediate one is simply HOW HIGH DO I HOLD THIS THING?
Like sort of.... way up there? No. Closer down to my head?
Should my arm be sort of away from my body.... or like this... with my elbow resting on my side?
I have never felt so abandoned. The innocent pitter-patter of rain on the thin plastic is as foreign to my ears as advanced Sanskrit. Both being languages I’ve never heard....
[By now I am a fair ways from my apartment building.... cannot even see the shoreline, I am committed to this thing now... I am walking in the rain with a stolen umbrella and I don’t know how to do it, I swear for the life of me.....]
OK, hold on now..... how about looking at that bloke across the street... seems like he’s doing it fairly normal like.... a bit higher then? No probs. There we go.
That’s feeling pretty good. I can live with that.
I AM AN UMBRELLA CARRIER!
But the euphoria is short-lived. The guy turns the corner ahead of me and I am on my own again.
Worse!
As I’m looking around for another example of pterodactyl-holders I pass by a building with mirrored glass.... and there I am..... looking at me.....
My confidence is dashed to shreds. I can’t possibly look that dorky. BUT I DO!
I’m RIGHT THERE! Look!
I AM MARY POPPINS!
But I can’t stop walking... that would be too weird. I keep going. You’ve gotta keep going.
Regroup. THINK! What would Tolstoy do?
My poor shivering umbrella is undulating like a 747 in serious turbulence! I literally do not know how high this thing is supposed.....
Oh good. Oh good. Two people across the street under one umbrella. Walking towards me. This is a prime example of at least intermediate umbrella skill..... “watch, but don’t stare” I whisper to myself... [they are getting closer].... hmmm... nice elevation he’s got going there, much more natural looking than me [I quickly adjust my own umbrella-altitude]... to my surprise I am struck with some sudden sense of camaraderie as they pass by and I have this strange urge to identify with them... “Look, I’ve got an umbrella too!”
But I don’t say it. And just then, as they pass by and are gone, I see myself again in the reflective glass of another building.
I have never looked stupider.
Even in previous appearances of the same day!

Soon, I begin to weigh my options.
Looking like a wet dog. Or looking like Mary Poppins.

It was there, at the entrance to the mega-bookstore that I threw the whole crazy squawking mess into the rubbish bin. Snapped its wings and legs!
And concluded, once and for all.... umbrellas are not for me.

Splash du Jour: Friday

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970:
“Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."
Have a great Friday!
The weekend is soooooo close!