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Word of the Week: Grout

11/17/2015

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grout

\ˈgrau̇t\
Picture
Illustration based on U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Kate Thornton-Maurer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
One of the highlights of our family trip to Paris this summer was our adopted neighborhood in the 11th arrondissement. We rented an apartment a bit removed from from the museums and tourist spots, on a boulevard with the leafy, occasionally gritty vibe of a slowly gentrifying urban center. Pensioners, students, young professionals, and immigrants mingled in the streets. Metal shop shutters were marked with multi-lingual graffiti. Interspersed with the groceries and halal meat shops and boulangeries were places selling electrical equipment, plumbing supplies, surgical scrubs. I told a friend how lovely it was to be in a part of Paris where, instead of souvenirs and guidebooks, you could buy a bag of grout.
Picture
Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. Photo by Clicsouris (Photo personnelle), via Wikimedia Commons.
​I don’t know why I am fascinated by grout. I’ve always loved watching people apply it, using that thin, soupy mortar to seal the gaps between tiles. And I just like the word: it is a old, plain word for an old, plain substance. It comes from the Old English grūt, meaning meal or porridge (which is after all what it looks like), and it harks back to a proto Indo-European root *ghreu- meaning “to rub or grind.” There’s a connection to beer as well (the other great permutation of porridge): in the Middle Ages “grout” referred to the fermented infusion of malt that settles to bottom of the brewer’s vat. It’s related to the Dutch word gruit, which means “dregs,” as well as to modern English “grits” and “groats.” 

I have been thinking a lot about Parisian grout, after the neighborhood we so briefly called home came under assault last Friday. In the past few days I have been mentally retracing our steps across the district, recalling people we encountered. The red-haired bartender at the café across from the Bataclan concert hall, where Everett and I stopped for a drink after buying food for our Bastille Day dinner. The lady at the nearby boulangerie who greeted me kindly every afternoon and grinned behind her hand at my bad French. The restaurant we visited on our first night in Paris, around the corner from Le Petit Cambodge, where we sat at a sidewalk table into the long evening. The middle-aged man at the table next to ours who rose, smiling, to greet his companion with a kiss. The knots of young adults—black, brown, white—lounging on the canal embankment, chatting, smoking, drinking cheap beer. I hope they are safe and well, and that they find healing.


One article I read in the aftermath of the attacks pointed to a possible rationale behind the terrorists’ choice of targets: this was the heart of young, progressive Paris, the author said, places where white Parisians and folks from the banlieues mingle and hang out. Where the bonds between immigrant and native are being hesitantly, imperfectly strengthened.  The terrorists could not have been blind to this symbolism, he said, when they struck here—not at government ministries or cultural sites or tourist magnets, but at ordinary life and the promise of a more integrated society.

Perhaps so. They struck at the young bartender and the baker and the restaurant goers and the young people beside the canal. At places where you eat and drink, where there is porridge and beer and good bread. Places where people rub up together. Where a community is bound together by a thin, fluid mortar that flows into the gaps between them. A smile, a nod, a can of beer. Music. A kiss. Grout.


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Word of the Week: Resolution

1/21/2015

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resolution

\ˌre-zə-ˈlü-shən\


I like Christmas. I like the tree and the presents, the carols, the Christmas Eve church service. I like the house full of relatives all waving their arms and talking at once. I like the constant edge of chaos in the kitchen, the endless procession of groceries and pots of coffee, the ongoing puzzle of meal planning and repurposing leftovers.  
Picture
By YVSREDDY (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons
The rituals around New Year’s are much less appealing, largely because I don’t like hangovers, I don't like crowds and noise, and I don’t like staying up late. If I have to participate, I'd prefer to watch the Times Square ball drop at 9 PM California time and then repair to bed with my book. And on top of it all we are supposed to make resolutions? Blech. 

Resolutions often seem to be about rigor – they are all about firmness, decision, conclusions, and determination to act. We have Congressional resolutions, judicial resolutions, and resolutions of difficult issues. Even musical resolutions bring things to a conclusion, taking an unsettling, dissonant chord and shifting it to a more harmonious one. (There is a fine, and almost certainly apocryphal, story about how Mozart’s mother, frustrated with her son’s propensity for sleeping past noon, discovered she could get him out of bed by playing the first seven notes of a scale -- Do re mi fa sol la ti….  – and then stopping. This was said to so agitate young Wolfgang that he was compelled to leap out of bed and rush to play the final note, thereby ensuring that he stopped frowsing around and did something useful with his life. Thanks mom.)

These kinds of resolutions are very much in keeping with the modern New Year’s scene. Pull up your socks, balance your checkbook, hit the treadmill.  Oatmeal for breakfast, and don’t even think about putting butter on it.

But when you go back to the classical Latin, resolūtiōn  is the action of untying or unfastening, or unravelling a puzzle – it suggests a limp or relaxed state, looseness. 

These days, very few resolutions seem to be about looseness. Based on an extensive search of the available literature (read: 5 minutes on Google) these seem to be the most common New Year’s resolutions:
  • Lose weight
  • Get organized 
  • Save money/get out of debt
  • Exercise
  • Quit smoking
  • Give to charity/volunteer
  • Floss
No wonder only about 8% of Americans keep them. I think it’s time we bring some looseness back to the New Year’s resolution. (Here are some of mine from the last few years that have worked out pretty well: Throw away the scale. Don’t work on weekends. Have some wine. Go outside when you can. Nap.) 

The best resolutions are not about forging a new and improved self. Instead, they are about looseness and unraveling and bringing things into proper balance. Fittingly,
 resolution also means reducing something to its constituent elements--like when things decompose. In about 1520, John Rastell wrote that 
Corrupcyon of a body..ys but the resolucyon..Of euery element to his owne place.
This actually makes decomposition sound quite pleasant: it’s just a matter of all the elements going to their own places. 

This appeals to me, because as lovely as the holidays can be I must admit that one of my very favorite parts is when it all ends. The relatives decamp. We take the extra leaves out of the table and wash the napkins and haul the tree out to the curb. The ornaments get put away in their little boxes and go back to their spot in the rafters. The turkey carcass is boiled into broth and stashed in the freezer.  The scattered pine needles are swept up and dumped in the greenwaste bin. The coffee filters and the can opener are at last put away in the proper drawers. The house feels spacious and quiet.

Loose.

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Word of the Week: Dinkle

11/17/2014

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dinkle

\ˈdiŋ-kəl\

There is a list of labels I never would have thought in a million years could describe me.  Sunday School Teacher.  Business-woman.  Geology buff.

And now: Band Mom. 


Picture
Not Grimbert's band: This is Liberty-High-School-Band-5713 by Loadmaster (David R. Tribble); via Wikimedia Commons
It started innocuously enough. When Grimbert started high school he signed up for marching band. Sounds like fun! I thought. He’ll play a little clarinet, maybe learn some John Philip Sousa. I envisioned him playing the national anthem and the school fight song at football games. Maybe they would even line up in the shape of a giant “W” on the field.

I had no idea.

The first hint I had was Grimbert coming home after the first week of practice announcing he needed Dinkles and a shako.

“Say what?” I asked.

“Dinkles, mom. It’s a kind of shoe.”

“Oh. OK. And a … spork?”

(Eyeroll) “Not a spork, mom. A shako.”

Turns out competitive marching band is not just school fight songs and giant initials: it is more like a cross between a Busby Berkley spectacular and a marine landing. There are props! There is precision drill! There is a color guard dancing and waving flags and twirling rifles and sabers. (Sabers?!)  There are hours and hours and hours of practice in the blazing sun and late into the night. There are drill books with indecipherable scrawls and grids and hash marks and squiggly arrows showing the triangle people moving HERE, while the square section moves THERE and the little circles weave in and out in between, and then all 150 kids end up in a perfect 10 x 15 grid thus opening a porthole to a new dimension. And they do this while marching backwards playing the 1812 Overture. Preferably with live cannon, if the band director could figure out a way to get them onto the field without damaging the artificial turf.

It’s all highly educational. Grimbert has gotten a lot out of it, and he seems to be having a pretty good time. I too have learned many things in my tenure as a Band Parent:

  • I have learned how to load 150 instrument cases onto a trailer in under 15 minutes.
  • I have learned how to make concession stand nachos on an industrial scale. (Start with five 7-pound cans of liquid cheese.)
  • I have learned to avoid the band room when the kids are changing out of their uniforms. (Imagine, if you can, the smell of several hundred adolescents who have been wrapped in polyester and marching in the sun for 3 hours. I take it back. You cannot imagine this.)
  • I have learned that when the kids put on their sporks (“Shakos, mom!”) with the feather plumes it changes the way they stand and move and makes it much more difficult to pick out one’s own kid from the crowd. It also makes them look like giant Q-tips.   
  • I have learned that nothing is sacred, musically speaking, when it comes to band music. Grimbert’s field show this year features the “Lacrimosa” movement from Mozart’s Requiem. Which they play while marching backwards, wearing Dinkles and shreks (“Mom!”) The first time I witnessed this, I laughed so hard I shot coffee out my nose. No one else in the bleachers seemed to think it was all that funny.
And of course I had to track down where the word “dinkle” comes from. My first thought was of “Crazy” Harry Dinkle, the band director in the comic strip Funky Winkerbean. (Actually this is untrue. My first thought was: “Isn’t ‘dinkle’ slang for penis?” Which in fact it is, though this seems to be an entendre that is studiously overlooked in the marching band world. And since I do not especially wish to Go There, we will instead consider Funky Winkerbean.)

For those of you who do not read the comics (I hear newspapers are dead), Funky Winkerbean is a long-running strip that centers on staff and students at a high school in an unnamed small Midwestern city. It’s supposed to be one of the “comic” strips
--at least the last panel often includes a joke of some kind--but since the mid-90s it has been taking on Serious Real Life Issues. The result is an unnerving mix of bad puns, cancer, snarky comments, alcoholism, PTSD, and crushed dreams. Characters age in real time, so you can use the career of your high school avatar as an index of your own decay. (Former editor of school paper hopes to land the anchor spot at a local news station. Whoops! Instead she gets laid off & replaced by a younger, sexier woman promoted from the weather desk! Hilarious! And then her husband leaves her! Ha ha ha!!) 

At any rate Band Director Dinkle is supposed to be lovably obsessed with his apathetic and marginally talented band. Their anomie may be due to the fact that their team is called the Westview Scapegoats, or it may be because they always have to play in the rain. Dinkle dreams of brilliant shows, ablaze with fireworks and pageantry; his students trudge around the field, dent their instruments, and occasionally sneak off to sniff glue behind the gym or get each other pregnant. In recent years Dinkle has moved on to some kind of district management position, but he reappears periodically to offer advice to his successor (who is missing one arm because of a car accident caused by her drunk-driving high school boyfriend. What a riot!)

I was fairly certain that Dinkles are cognate with Band Director Harry: the question was, were the shoes named for the character or the was character named for the shoe? I figured the latter, but it turns out I was wrong: the Savoca family, a Pennsylvania outfit that has made marching shoes since the 1940s, revamped their line in the mid-1980s and named their flagship product after Harry Dinkle, whose beaming mug now adorns every box. 
Picture
Of course back when the Savocas made this arrangement FW’s Westview High was a pretty happy-go-lucky place. Characters hadn’t started aging yet, and so they frolicked on their Grecian urn, forever young and fair, or at least until Batuik unleashed the grim indignities of mortality on the poor saps.

Actually the more I think about it, the more I realize that there is a certain melancholic sweetness to this whole Band Mom thing. Grimbert’s high school, like the one in FW, is named Westview. And while I devoutly hope Grimbert won’t be subjected to the full range of miseries that Batuik inflicts on his characters he will certainly grow older. He will struggle. He may be thwarted in love. He will probably lose his hair (sorry sweetie, but the genetic die seems to be cast on that one).

But here on YouTube he will remain in Keatsian glory, a “happy melodist, unwearièd / For ever piping songs for ever new.”  You’ll know him when you see him. He’s the one in the spork.
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Repost:  Election Day

11/3/2014

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Hello Readers! Sorry for the long silence: I got unexpectedly busy this month. New posts are in the works. But in the meantime, in honor of Election Day, here is a re-post from earlier this year. 

Originally posted June 5, 2014
For many years we have hosted a polling place in our garage. And for about as many years Everett and (more recently) I have also been serving as Precinct Inspector for good old 110270-Garage-Howe-Residence. 

Picture
By Cary Bass (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons
Maybe I watched too much Schoolhouse Rock at an impressionable age, but I find the whole thing almost unbearably touching.

Take the Election Supply Box.

Here we are in a major democracy, the largest economy in the world, a SUPERPOWER. We are going to exercise our most sacred civic responsibility, evoking Lincoln and Jefferson and marble halls and lofty ideals about human equality and the right of self-determination. There are ballots and procedures and safeguards designed to make sure people can vote freely and securely and have their vote count. And that is WAY cool.

But along with the ballots and pens and Official Seals I also get a stapler and a roll of masking tape and a little packet of thumbtacks. Because you also need these things to make democracy work. 

A week before Election Day I will be sitting in the midst of the unpacked supply boxes, taking inventory and filling out paperwork, and suddenly I will find myself clutching a packet of thumbtacks and fighting back tears. Because the Big Important Things like how we run our community and the future of our nation depend not only on ballots, but also on tiny mundane things. Like making sure the poll workers have some thumbtacks to post the street index so a campaign volunteer can get out the vote. 

And that just about kills me Every Single Time.

So Monday night we prepped the garage as we have so many times before. I pulled out the bikes and assorted impedimenta (I forgot we even HAD a wading pool!). Everett hung up a set of old tablecloths (red white & blue, of course) to conceal the shelves of tools and paper towels and weed killer. I swept up the dust and grit that had accumulated since the last election, dragged in a table, a few chairs, and a lamp, and set up the booths.

We had our thumbtacks.

We were ready for democracy.
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Word of the Week: Drive

10/9/2014

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drive

\ˈdrīv\

We have been teaching Arwulf to drive.

Drive is a very practical, utilitarian verb, brought to us unambiguously from the Germanic. There’s Old English dríf-an, High German trîban, Old Norse drîfa, and the Gothic dreiban, all with meanings quite similar to our English word.

But as is so often the case, this simplicity is deceptive. By my count the OED offers more than 50 different definitions for drive (and that’s just for the verb). 
Our goal has centered around the most common modern sense of the word: we want Arwulf to learn to drive—“to direct the course of a vehicle.”


Picture
Image via Wikimedia Commons
This is supposed to be a quintessential part of the American Teenage Experience™. You can’t have Rebel Without a Cause or American Graffiti, or Back to the Future or Ferris Bueller or even Bill & Ted, if you don’t drive. Teenagers are supposed to yearn for their licenses and that breath of freedom and independence (not to mention the chance to canoodle in the back seat). 

It looks like it’s not so much that way any more. Freedom and independence (and even canoodling) can be had on the internet: a car seems more trouble than it’s worth. In the face of Arwulf’s indifference, we had to resort to a different, earlier form of driving: We drove her to it. We chivvied her along like a recalcitrant musk ox, with the switch of Noodge and the goad of Parental Pressure. 

I get what she’s been driving at: for her the incentive to drive is sorely limited. It does not mean freedom. It means chores. If she is going to have to run to the grocery store or chauffeur her brother to karate she’s going to drive a hard bargain. 

Some moments have driven me to distraction. As we clock hours in the car preparing for her behind-the-wheel test, I have learned that heavy traffic inspires Arwulf to extremely animated discourse about historical mayhem: Roman emperors! Plagues! Great Power Intrigues! She drives her point home about how the Hapsburg emperors were all LOSERS, as I the supervising parent watch the blind curve and the semi in the next lane and the sudden slowing up ahead and clutch the passenger-side panic handle until my teeth creak. It could drive a person to drink.

Other modes of driving seem quite soothing by comparison.
  • Lumberjacks drive logs down rivers.
  • Beekeepers drive bees into new hives.
  • Artists drive media like paint or gold leaf, spreading it out quickly and very thin. 
  • Washerwomen “drive a buck of clothes,” soaking a batch (or “buck”) of wash repeatedly with lye or soap in a “bucking tub.” 
  • People drive feathers, using a current of air to separate them by lifting the lightest ones away and collecting them by themselves. (Do this a few times over, and you get the sort of extra-fluffy result that Othello is referring to when he says The tyrant custom … / Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war / My thrice-driven bed of down.”)
  • This also happens with wind over fresh snow. The tiniest cleanest flakes blow into drifts—so, “pure as the driven snow.” 

[deep breath]
In the end, Arwulf showed some drive. She finished her training hours, mastered the three-point-turn, and went to the DMV, where the State of California declared itself satisfied with her competence.

In Arwulf’s words: 
i acquitted myself Well and Mightily and now have one whole drivers license with which i can send 2000 pounds of metal and plastic careening down the public thoroughfare on the power of liquefied dinosaurs at speeds humanity was never meant by nature to attain.

Or, in the words of another modern sage:
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Word of the Week: Juror

9/29/2014

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juror

\ˈju̇r-ər \ 



It’s been a while since the last word, and this week’s word is the reason why. I’ve spent the last two weeks serving as a juror in a criminal trial. And one of the things about being a juror is that I am not allowed to talk about it. This does not come naturally to me, the not talking about it. I want to ask questions and make comments from the jury box, or at least nudge my neighbor when I hear a particularly preposterous piece of testimony. And when I’m not in court and THAT TOPIC comes up in conversation, I sometimes have to physically stop myself from blurting out, “Hey, wanna hear a story?”

But I keep my mouth shut. 

I am sworn. That is the very nature of a juror: the word comes from the Anglo-Norman jurour  from the Latin word iūrāre “to swear.”  I have promised to hear all the evidence and to judge the facts, and well, I’ve got to live up to that.
Picture
"The Jury" by John Morgan. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
It took a couple of days to recognize the feeling the rituals of the courthouse rouse in me. It’s the same amazed fascination I feel in an airport, or a hospital, or a theme park, or any other complex human system.  There are hundreds or even thousands of people swarming around, each engrossed in some fragment among the hundreds and thousands of fragments that give the place its meaning. 

And like an airport or a hospital or a theme park, it’s a place that involves a lot of waiting, which gives me ample opportunity to watch the other creatures in the hive going about their business.

Attorneys, clients, and translators huddle in little knots, clutching file folders and conferring in English, or Spanish, or Vietnamese. Anxious women wrestle children in and out of strollers. Stray words float among the dust motes in the morning sun: arraignment, plea bargain, subpoena.  Sleek-suited lawyers eel through the crowd, wheeling luggage carts overflowing with banker's boxes and binders and reams of printouts. A family gathers in a quiet corner and prays. 

There are prisoners in County Jail jumpsuits and shackles being led to court appearances. Most look stoic, some resigned, a few are cheerful. The deputies keep others from getting too close, but every now and then a passer-by calls greetings or words of encouragement to a friend jingling past. Waiting for the elevator, a pair of young women, chained together, nudge each other and laugh at some whispered joke. I can’t quite see, but I think they are holding hands.

One morning a large crowd mills about in the corridor. Most are young men in the standard dudebro uniform of baggy shorts and polo shirts. “DUI Day,” a deputy tells me. By noon they are all gone.

A toothless old man in flip flops walks out of a courtroom, beaming. His daughter trails behind, deep in conversation with a translator and a lawyer: this piece of paper is a dismissal of charges, they tell her, show it to the clerk and they’ll be able to process the application. “Green card! Ha! Yes!” the old man crows, clapping his hands. He bows his thanks to the attorney as his daughter tows him off toward the stairwell.  

There’s a small army of custodial workers, who keep this dingy, battered building incongruously spotless. The floors gleam. The baseboards are dusted. The cramped and inconvenient bathrooms are immaculate, with plenty of toilet paper. I’ve never seen a trash can more than half full.

The jurors on my case are the usual varied bunch: there’s a business owner, a sales clerk, a couple of managers, a cable technician. A retired professor, a landscape architect, a personal trainer, a programmer, a new college grad, a zookeeper. And me.  We are of different ages, classes, races. We have almost nothing in common beyond language and citizenship. Yet through the peculiar alchemy of the legal system we motley twelve have been transformed into a jury and charged with the responsibility of rendering a verdict--literally “to state or report the truth”—about the question before us.

We act out the required rituals. When called, we all file in under the bailiff’s watchful eye and take our assigned places. The evidence is presented in an orderly gavotte: swearing-in, initial evidence, cross examination, re-direct.  We watch and listen, taking notes in our steno books with cheap ballpoints.  Whenever we return from a break, someone has refilled the dented water pitcher set on the edge of the jury box.

As I’m writing this, we are waiting in the corridor for the attorneys to work through a wrangle of some kind.  We have fallen into our usual break-time habits. The business owner is on the phone trying to coordinate a carpool for a Cub Scout event. The personal trainer is immersed in Things Fall Apart; the zookeeper is reading Suze Orman. The landscape architect and the programmer are swapping barbeque recipes. The cable tech has slipped downstairs for a smoke. 

A few dozen prospective jurors are assembling for voir dire in a trial just getting underway in the courtroom next door. They look anxious and uncertain, and the bailiff herds them into line. We old hands view them with the tolerant condescension of long-haul backpackers encountering a busload of day-trippers.

In a few minutes we will be called back to our case. We will file back into the courtroom and reassume our assigned places and our prescribed roles. The pitcher will be full again. The gavotte will continue.


That's all I can tell you. I swear.
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Word of the Week: Swelter

9/12/2014

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swelter

\ˈswel-tər\
It is one of the crueler ironies of life in Southern California: September rolls around, with its iconography of crisp apples, changing leaves, and new school notebooks—and we get brutal heat waves and Santa Ana winds. 

For the last couple of weeks, temperatures have been regularly in the 90s and 100s. Even worse, and unusual for this part of the world, it has not been cooling off appreciably at night. A series of hurricanes has been swirling about in the Pacific and while Arizona is being pummeled by flash floods we get only giant thunderheads piling up over the mountains, taunting us with the possibility of rain that never materializes. 

Picture
"Ase o fuku onna" by Utamaro - Library of Congress. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
So we sit in front of the fan. And we swelter.

Swelter is a great Old English and Germanic word, meaning to sweat, languish or faint because of heat.  It comes from the Germanic verb swelt, meaning to die or perish, though also with a connotation of languishing, starving, or burning away. This word pops up in Old High German as swelzan (meaning to burn away), and also in the Old Norse sulte or svelta (to starve). In English, swelt also gave rise to sulter (a spell of hot weather), a word that has since wilted into obscurity, but not before giving us “sultry.” 

I must confess to a certain peevishness while reading the OED’s usage notes. All these medieval and Renaissance folks enjoying their Little Ice Age. What the hell do they know about living in Southern California without air conditioning in the era of global warming?

Nothing is what. Fellas like John Jewel go swanning about in their velvet doublets asserting that it is “Better … to Marrie, then to swelter inwardely with filthy affections.” (An Apologie in Defence of the Church of England (1571)).

But if Johnny boy knew ANYTHING about sweltering, he’d know that “filthy affections” are among the first things to fall by the wayside when the mercury rises and sharing a room with another living human is unbearable. As Cole Porter observed, far more pithily, “It’s Too Darn Hot.”

Then I saw Caleb Trenchfield’s 1662 description of “Physitians who, willing to appeare richly clad, swelter in Plush in hot summer”—and I was suddenly catapulted back to the sartorial trenches of middle school. 

I was a teenager, not a 'Physitian.' But I had a similar appreciation of the need to appear richly (or at least fashionably) clad. So every September I would peruse the pages of Seventeen, hoping to find the right look for the new year. This being Southern California circa 1980, plush and ermine were not often featured on the “What’s Hot” pages. But there were glossy depictions of all kinds of other finery that the editors insisted were a good idea.  Khaki and Lace! Legwarmers! Qiana jersey! Suspenders!  Each year I would carefully curate a few back-to-school outfits and look forward to the start of classes and the possibility (alas, not realized until much later) of scoring a few filthy affections.

The nice shiny clothes never quite fit right—a little too tight here and too gappy there—but what was worse was the creeping self-doubt, niggling like an itchy label.

I didn’t have a full length mirror, so the last day of vacation would find me standing perched on the ledge of the bathtub, trying to get a good view of my first-day outfit in the medicine cabinet over the toilet.  



Cute shirt! I would think. Sleek! Fashionable! 

     [long pause]

     [teeter. wobble]


Maybe it would look better tucked in? Like this?

     [tuck. teeter]



Or like that?

     [re-tuck, wobble]

     [long pause]


No, too dorky. Untucked then.

     [try to stand on tiptoe. slip into tub]



Monica tucks in her shirts…

    [tuck in. stagger. retuck.] 


That looks good, right?

     [long pause]

     [wobble]



Oh God that looks stupid stupid stupid stupid.

     [stomp. wobble]



Wait. Maybe like this.

     [long pause]

     [teeter]

 

That’s probably OK.

     [wobble]


     [pause]



Do I look like I’m trying too hard?



The next day I would head out the door into the blazing heat. In among the new books and the Pee-Chee folders, I’d discover that the lace was scratchy and the khakis stuck to my legs and that smudges and stains really show up on Qiana.  By the end of the first week everything was completely wilted and I’d be back to my usual uniform of jeans and nerdy T-shirts. 

I was never very good at fashion.

I’m still not, but one of the many advantages of middle age over middle school is that I don’t care. I have spent much of the last week alternating between two cotton shift dresses I got at the thrift store. These are cool and comfortable and flattering and they do not require me to balance on the edge of the tub. I still don’t have a full-length mirror, but I do have plenty of filthy affections.


When it cools off maybe I will get me a pair of legwarmers.
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Word of the Week: Protest

8/26/2014

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protest

\ˈprō-ˌtest\

My mind has been rolling on a double track. There’s the day-to-day where nothing much seems out of place. And there’s the part of me watching Ferguson in a stew of helpless anger. 

There is much to protest. When a teenager walking down the street in the middle of the day can be shot dead. Again. When the apologists shake their heads and say, well there must have been a good reason for it. Again. When the police force denies accountability and casts forth a smokescreen of innuendo: he was a suspect, he may have been on drugs, he had it coming. Again. When the we wearily embark on another investigation that will mostly likely decree that the killing of this young black person was justified. Again.

A protest is a formal pledge or public declaration. It comes by way of Old French from the Latin protestari, which means to declare or swear publicly. It’s related to testari (to testify), which in turn derives from testis, or “witness.”  

Picture
"Ferguson, Day 4, Photo 26" by Loavesofbread. Licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons
Protest. Testify. Witness. Ferguson is protest in the purest sense of the word: people stepping out into the street. The signs, the shouts, the hands upraised, saying: “This. This is my truth. This is my life. It matters. Listen.”  
I sympathize with those who long to throw a bottle, smash a window, curse an armored cop. This is my truth. My life. It matters. Listen.
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"Ferguson Day 6, Picture 12" by Loavesofbread. Licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.


The machinery rolls out to shut it down—in the streets, the talking heads, the trolls. Again. Get back. Disperse. Get inside. Stop talking. You are an unreliable witness. Again. 
My own truth, my own life, is insulated from so much of the grief and the rage and the pain. I have the hideous luxury, most of the time, of being able to look away.  So in the last two weeks I have been trying hard to see. To bear witness. To listen. 

And when I do look back to my everyday life I try to hold on to the double vision. My witness: I have access to employment, to health care, to housing, to capital, to social power. Bank managers lend me money. People usually assume I am telling the truth. I have never been stopped by the police except once, doing 80 in a 55 zone. He gave me a ticket and told me to slow down.

I am called to witness. I am called to be useful.

At night, I go running down a dark street. An officer passing in a patrol car raises his hand in a casual wave.

I protest.

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Word of the Week: Rapture

8/18/2014

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rapture

\ˈrap-chər\

I often see divers when I am out swimming. Usually my first clue is a wodge of bubbles swirling up from the depths below me—perhaps a glint of metal, a lamp beam, or the flash of reflective tape as they lumber slowly about. Every now and then, though, I will catch a glimpse of a sleek human shape slipping silently through the kelp forest. No air tanks, no bulky gear—just fins and a stray bubble or two. Free divers. They look like mer-people, occasionally sparing me an upward glance as I churn my way across the glittering margin between the deeps and the air above. 
Picture
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Free diving is done without breathing apparatus. Mostly these divers stay near the surface, exploring the kelp for a minute or two, then surfacing for air. The most extreme form of the sport, though, is another thing entirely. It’s also called “competitive apnea” and that’s pretty much what it is: the diver submerges for as long, or as far, or as deep as s/he can on a single breath. Sometimes for minutes at a time. Down to where it’s dark and dangerous. Just the thought of it scares the hell out of me. 
So I had to take a deep breath (as it were) when I watched the new short Narcose. This 12-minute film is a real-time depiction of a dive made by world apnea champion Guillaume Néry (really there is such a thing! he has a medal!)   in which he dons a monofin, dives 125 meters straight down, and then returns to the surface. It’s amazing enough that he can hold his breath while swimming for five minutes and not die. And the shots of him descending and ascending are extraordinarily beautiful. But the heart of the film is the visions Néry experiences on the way, which are based on his own accounts and are reproduced in eerie and loving detail. 

It turns out divers at great depths can have vivid hallucinations, as the nitrogen in their body tissues interferes with their brains in ways still not entirely understood. The result is euphoria, exhilaration, time distortion, confusion, and (eventually) unconsciousness and death. Afflicted divers drift and play in the water until their air runs out. 

I learned about the phenomenon as a kid, in my many hours spent riveted to The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I loved everything about that show: the ocean creatures, the ship Calypso, the Zodiac rafts, Cousteau in his red watch cap squinting out over the waves—and especially his gravelly accented voice-overs. His invocation of “ze RAHP-tuure of ze DEEP” was the most terrifyingly enticing thing I’d ever heard.


Rapture of the deep!


Leave it to a Frenchman to come up with such a poetic and evocative phrase. Left to ourselves, we practical Americans would no doubt persist in calling it “nitrogen narcosis.” (Or worse, the “Martini effect”—so called because someone likened the sensation to drinking one martini for every 50 ft of depth beyond the initial 100—a phrase that evokes nothing more exalted than getting sloshed at an ad-man’s lunch.)

Rapture, though! Rapture can mean ecstasy, joy that sets us outside ourselves. But it also means being snatched up, transported, carried off.  There is a lot of violence to the word: it comes from the Latin raptus, which means to tear up or carry away, to abduct—the word that also gives us “rape.”  It’s related to modern English “raptor,” meaning a hawk or predatory bird—something that stoops down from above, talons outstretched.  
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Image by Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK; via Wikimedia Commons
Rapture is not simple happiness. In fact, it's not happiness at all. It swoops down and seizes us, carries us someplace we do not recognize, where we may be transformed, or torn to pieces and devoured. That’s scary stuff—stuff I usually prefer not to consider as I splash along the surface of my life.

Except in the last two weeks, three people I know have died very suddenly. I seem to be spending a fair bit of time going to memorial services where we all stand around shaking our heads: “Well I guess he didn’t suffer….” “I saw her last week at the planning meeting.” “God, I’m going to miss him.” They are gone, just like that—leaving only a few widening ripples on the surface. What was it like for them, diving so quickly into not-knowing? Did they see it coming? Could they snatch one last deep breath?

I am no diver. The weight of the water above, the ache in my lungs, the pressure in my ears: the thought of going deliberately into that makes me panicky. I prefer the bright surface of sun and foam and water and air. 

And yet, rapture of the deep! It swoops down, talons outstretched, in a blaze of brilliant light. Sharp teeth arcing up from the blue-black shadows below. 

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Word of the Week: Badger

8/11/2014

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badger

\ˈba-jər\

Those who have followed this blog for any length of time may have noticed that my children appear here not under their real names but as “Arwulf” and “Grimbert.”

I have discussed the origin of Arwulf’s name elsewhere, but my husband pointed out recently that I have yet to say anything about Grimbert.  People are probably wondering, he said, seeing as how Grimbert the badger is much less well known than his companions Reynard the fox and Chanticleer the rooster.

Being a persistent fella, a couple days later he emailed me a raft of links to French folktales involving Grimbert—perhaps I could set the record straight? And write about badgers? Say, maybe “badger” could be a word of the week? Because if I hadn’t done the word of the week yet, “badger” would be a good choice. “Hector” is also a good word. But “badger” is better. If I hadn’t yet written a word of the week, I should really consider “badger”…  

All right, already! I set out in dogged pursuit. And as so often happens I found that the burrow leads someplace rather unexpected.  

The word “badger” in English originally did not refer to the animal: instead it meant a peddler or trader who sells grain. This might have been a person with a bag, or possibly a person with a badge (for example a license that allows the bearer to sell goods in a given marketplace). This activity was not always entirely ethical. Here’s the first entry in the OED, from the Statutes of Ireland in 1467:

Diuersez aulters persouns appellez Baggeres ount vsez de aller a vne marchee & ount achatez..frument & blee a vne price et puis apres ount prisez lez ditz g[r]aynes a vne aulter marchee & illeosqes lez ount vendeuz pluis chierement par ii d. ou iii d. en vne Boshelle...

I am not sure why this is in Franglish, but here’s the gist: various persons called “Baggeres” would go to a market and buy wheat (frument), then afterwards take this grain to another market and sell it for 2 or 3 shillings more per bushel.

As a result of their (shall we say) entrepreneurial enthusiasm, these mercantile badgers inspired a fair bit of hostility.  They are frequently referred to as hucksters or swindlers. In 1592, the preacher William Cupper described them as an actual plague:

Vserers, also brokers, badgers and hucksters, and such like locusts that eat vp the poore and cause the markets to be inhaunced should bee bridled to the ende the poore may haue things better cheape.  (cited in James Davis’ Medieval Market Morality: Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace 1200-1500)
Local authorities shared the view that keeping grain prices low helps the poor, but probably with a more practical rationale: expensive bread is a good recipe for civil unrest. Many laws were passed prohibiting the sale of grain anywhere but in approved and regulated markets—in part so that taxes could be properly assessed and paid, but also to keep a tighter lid on speculation—to “bridle the badgers,” as it were.

Making the leap from the locust-like trader of grain to the burrowing quadruped requires another form of speculation. While it is tempting to say that the animal was named for the peddler because it is similarly tenacious and combative, this is (alas) unlikely. The OED says that the name for the animal more likely derives from “badge” or “blaze” – a reference to the white stripes on a badger’s head.  Others say that “badger” comes from the French “bêcheur” or “digger.” 

Whatever you call them, they are pretty cool creatures. They are closely related to weasels and otters and they live in burrows (called “setts”) that are often quite extensive and can be hundreds of years old. Mostly nocturnal, they eat rodents, eggs, fruit, grubs, small rabbits, bulbs, and whatever else they can find.  And they are also reported to be quite clean: unlike many other underground creatures, badgers will not shit in their burrows, and instead use communal latrines outside. 
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Badgers travel under many different names, including “dasse,” “brock” and “bauson.” (Image by Killianwoods (Template:University Observer) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
But as Everett reminds us, “badgering” is central to the badger experience. It can mean “haggling” or “driving a hard bargain” (another nod to the unbridled grain sellers). More commonly, though, to badger means to hound, harass, or nag. Experts agree that this derives from the practice of badger-baiting, but exactly how depends on whose side you are on. 

The “badgerer” could refer to the humans and dogs harrying the cornered animal—badger baiting was a popular sport through the early 20th century. In fact the Dachshund was bred as a badger hunter (the German “dachs” means “badger”). It's a little hard to imagine your average wiener dog taking on a desperate 30-pound creature equipped with sharp teeth and long claws, but there it is. The Brits started trying to ban badger baiting as early as 1835, though it stubbornly persists under the table even now.

On the other hand, it may be the badger itself that does the badgering. The animal is by nature peaceable but will fight fiercely when provoked. Some say that when it fights it will bite until its teeth meet and then hang on until its adversary gives up. (Ferrets and weasels are known to do this too—see, for instance the famous Annie Dillard essay, “Living Like Weasels,” which in turn inspired a Laurie Anderson song I like very much.) 

This seems to jibe with the character of Grimbert. While Reynard is clever and unscrupulous, and Chanticleer is vainglorious and thin-skinned, Grimbert is honest, diligent, and very stubborn.

And it’s not just a “get out of my face and don’t bother me” kind of stubborn. At one point in the story, Reynard gets in hot water with the other animals and asks his nephew Grimbert to hear his confession. (I don’t know how a fox ends up uncle to a badger. It is a mystery.) Grimbert does so and grants absolution, only to see Reynard leap right back into sin at the sight of the next henhouse. You’d think he’d give up, but a few episodes later, the exact same thing happens again. Reynard asks Grimbert to shrive him of a lengthy catalogue of sins (including theft, adultery, and murder), Grimbert agrees, and again as soon as he is absolved Reynard goes right back to his old ways.

The author presumably wanted us to laugh at the folly of a priest who keeps on absolving sinners even when they have no intention of changing their ways. But I can’t help but admire Grimbert’s tenacity: all evidence to the contrary, he cannot let go of the possibility that maybe—just maybe—this time his uncle can be brought to the good. Faced with usury, swindling, or wanton cruelty, the badger keeps the faith. He keeps that shit out of the burrow. 


He bites down hard and does not let go.

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