Where Are My Teeth?

Why I don't live in Germany

OK, there are other reasons, like not knowing the language any more, and Julie having to put up with lousy cheeseburgers, but now and again the idea has occurred to me, especially when the US seems to be running off the rails in particularly ugly ways.

And then you get things like this, in which a german member of parliament argues that, because there were jews in the ranks of the bolshevik secret police, the jewish people (ahem) bear the same relationship to genocide as do germans.

I can't even begin to count how many bigoted assumptions you would have to make to think there's any kind of logic there. My jaw just drops.

Of course, over there you can consider legal action against people who spout garboage like that, rather than just applauding their freedom of speech as we do here....

Boy this is one weird tree

As far as we can tell, that's what the downy woodpeckers are thinking as they sink their beaks into the suet. We seem to have at least four -- a large male and female and a smaller pair ditto. They're pretty fearless as birds go (except for crows, which are downright rude): if you go out in the yard they chirp loudly for a while at the interruption, but if you don't move around too much they're right back at the feeder.

News from the Hinterland

While I was getting my hair cut late this afternoon -- my cane provided a mere few minutes of conversation -- the red-shoed customer in the seat next to mine was abuzz with the story that a freshman at the local high school had jumped off the Bailey Avenue bridge into the Winooski.

"At least he didn't jump at high water" opined the barber in the third chair.

Oh, but he did. It was the day after the last big thunderstorm, the customer averred. With his friends making a video to send to MTV's Jackass, of course. And he was arrested, of course.

Odd that it didn't make the Times Argus, commented the barber. Maybe it was because he was a juvenile. Maybe it was because his family was well-known or rich enough to keep the story quiet.

"I'd hate to be the reporter assigned to write that story," I put in: "Stupid Kid Jumps in River for No Good Reason."

Conversation switched mostly to a recent episode of some home-redecoration show that was filmed in Burlington, but not before my haircutter had a chance to add darkly, "I bet it had something to do with drugs." As if a 14-year-old with a bunch of friends needed drugs to do something stupid like that.

Holy Crud

Thanks to NASA for the imagery, and a bunch of idiots for the flames.

Nasty, british and long

After proceeding through four volumes of Hornblower (Mr. Midshipman H., Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line and Flying Colours) I am taken by how miserably Hornblower is portrayed as spending most of his time. He worries about moneyfor outfitting his ship, about his paunch and recding hairline, about money for retirement, about what his men and superiors think of him (sure that it must be bad), about the shabbiness of his uniform, about money to buy clothes for his wife, about whether he will get to sleep, about whether he's slept too much, about money for retirement... Forester makes it seem that the naked fear of being drowned, torn asunder by shot or splinters, burned, crushed or hacked to death by a cutlass is nothing less than relief from months of green water and weevily bread.

Ioan Gruffudd is going to have a heck of a time playing the later volumes (albeit at the rate they're doling out text he might be too old for Hornblower's 37 by the time Beat to Quarters comes around).

Meanwhile, I was struck, while reading the descriptions of naval battles, by the degree to which the authors of a couple of science-fiction series have cribbed from either the society and naval organization described by Forester or from the interchange of broadsides and relative courses and speeds. (Forester himself, of course cribbed much of his scene from the Naval Chronicle.)

For one of them, whose leading figure shares Hornblower's initials, I'd been wondering why he'd invented such a twee propulsion technology for his starships, but now I realize it enabled him to borrow more easily from Forester's descriptions of ships trying to outmaneuver one another while trading cannon shot. That author did not, however, borrow the lovingly pornographic descriptions of people being killed and maimed from Forester; those are all his own.

Almost as long a history as my cavities

As I was hobbling around the house yesterday it came to me that there's an aesthetically pleasing symmetry here: the last time I ripped out this ankle was the week before I signed the contract on the loft, and it was an act of deep faith in the medical profession to proceed with the purchase and renovation of a fifth-floor walkup. Now the loft is just on its way out, and damned if I'm not hobbling around on a cane again.

At the time, of course, it was just stupid. I was at one of the last few renditions of my friend Carlo's dance parties, which had moved from the top of the gowanus arts center in the taxi-garage Brooklyn lowlands between Boerum Hill and Park Slope to the St. Ann's school theatre space in Brooklyn Heights. And I had a crush on a red-headed co-worker whom I was desperately trying to impress. So after she left the party I took another few turns around the floor, and a spin, and a leap...

As I remember it, I didn't even try to get up and walk -- I just crawled off the dance floor and sat on a folding chair savoring the pain. Some friends eventually come over, helped me hobble outside and get a cab, and recommended a doctor who was open saturday mornings. So the next morning I learned about the verb "to Schwarzkopf", as in "You really Schwarzkopfed that ankle" and the fact that ligaments take longer to heal, so that I was actually in worse shape than if I'd broken the ankle.

Twelve weeks of rigorous wrapping and exquisite sensitivity to the slightes change in pavement slope later, I was fine, except for a the callouses and a little residual nerve damage in my cane hand. I even thought at the time that it was the kind of thing that every able-bodied person should go through at least once, just to get an idea that those reserved-for-the-handicapped signs aren't kidding.

Now if you're really good I won't tell you about the first time I tore up that very same ankle back in college, and spent a week walking a a mile each way to classes before I got it looked at, thus missing the chance to be on crutches for a week. (And how limping eregiously didn't attract anyone's noticed, but walking with a cane drew instant sympathy.)

Effing useless

That's how I feel with the ankle I sprained tripping over a log. I'm doing my best to stay off it, and using some camera equipment as an improvised cane, and admiring once again those new modern self-stick ace bandages. (I would go out to the shop to improvise a better cane, but that would involve walking and standing and such.) And that's about it. A nice bracing walk in the park to clear my head is right out.

Thus far I have read The Black Mountain, The Falcon at the Portal, Death in Paradise/, and Midshipman Hornblower. Later we may go out and get me a real cane and some more books. What excitement!

Things I remember about my aunt

She wasn't my aunt. She was my first cousing one generation removed, maybe my grandmother's littlest cousin, two years old when grandma was eighteen.

At 57 she had Betty Grable legs, standing in the surf at Hammonasset beach when she and Eberhard came to visit us. And a couple of varicose veins.

She was a ballerina at the Frankfurt Opera House until it was bombed out during the war. Thirty years later you could see trees growing through the top of the building's shell. (Wherever you went in Frankfurt in those days there was a pattern to the pockmarks in the facades: deeper and more frequent from building to building to building and block to block, then square modern new construction.)

Much later she told me about the flying harnesses she and the other Rhine Maidens wore for Wagner's Ring. The hoisting lines ran through pulleys on tracks, so that the peformers could fly from side to side as well as up and down, as long as nothing went wrong.

When she and Eberhard came to visit me in New York, I took them to the wrong subway stop on Canal St.

After the war, she performed at USO shows on US army bases, and part of the payment for local performers was dinner in the mess tent. She and her friends would wear the baggiest coats they could find, even in high summer, and fill them with all the food they could take or the cooks would give them. She even carried her own bowls.

She could switch from High German to farm dialect in the middle of a sentence.

Along the right side of the steeply sloping driveway up to her house was a vegetable garden, with strawberries near the bottom. My mother questioned her judgement when she put the strawberries in, because the plants took two or three years to start bearing.

She kept a rubber plant in the living room/dining room/study and supported it as it grew along the top of the picture window, until it was nearly thirty feet long.

She taught me how to panfry a trout, in plenty of butter fresh out of the creel. And how many eggs to put in pancake batter.

In her late 70s she stopped teaching the low-impact aerobics class for seniors at the local community center.

The way her voice curled around the word "Narbe" when she mentioned having a mole removed from her face.

I rolled up a bunch of 11x17 prints from my trip to New Mexico and Arizona in a mailing tube and addressed it to her and Eberhard, but I never mailed it.

I remember a bunch of other things, some that I was told, some that I saw, but some of them slip my mind and others are private. I remember expecting that if anyone in our family lived forever, it might be her.

Gloat

Just in case you were wondering what things are looking like up here at the moment. I didn't have the heart to put up a smaller version.

What bird is this?

It acts very much like the regular doves that root for seeds and insects in the yard, but it's got a custom trim package. Its wings also make a somewhere deeper whirring when it flees.

After this bird had left the second time I went out on the deck and sat very quietly, listening to the leaves clattering one by one to the ground, until it came back. It foraged some more, but as soon as I raised the camera it was off.

UPDATE Turns out it's a Northern Flicker. The last line of the guide entry says: "...the only woodpeckers in North America that commonly feed on the ground, searching for ants and beetle larvae".

RIP Amanda Cross

Just saw the news that Carolyn Heilbrun died last Thursday, reportedly at her own hand. Sad, but her choice. I enjoyed her mystery novels for the usual glimpses of academia, and was in awe of Writing A Woman's Life, the most perfectly structured book I've ever read, right down to the no-comma title.

She inspired a generation or two of feminist writers and critics, and worked to help their careers -- Chris among them. My own most enduring memory of her has always been from a lecture she gave in the Columbia library rotunda about the work that needed to be done in literary criticism to open up the canonical boys' club. Above the columns and the capitals stood all the classical world's great men in their togas, statues bellied forward a little as if they were geadying themselves for one great pissing contest. And there she was, everybody's short, stout jewish aunt, perfectly comfortable in her authority.

I was young then.

About that flowerbed

Sometime in the spring of my second junior year in college, I was wandering Branford's main courtyard when a small plaque set in the ground caught my eye. It was the typical notice that something -- the plantings in that bed -- had been donated to the college in memory of...

And then the world changed for me in a small way, because I recognized the name. When I was midway through elementary school, there was a hush one morning because a girl had died suddenly the night before. She'd had an asthma attack and been rushed to the hospital, but not in time. And the plaque I was looking at was her memorial. It was a weird feeling, realizing that I was one of the few people who would ever take a look at that inscription and know what it actually meant.

(Just for the record, the asthmatic boy in my own class in elementary school -- a scrawny kid who would offer to pick his scabs and let you watch him bleed -- grew up to be hale, fit and six feet tall. The asthmatic girl in my class in college went on to row in the olympics.)

So why is that more than 20 years later we still get idiocy like this where school officials would apparently rather see a student die than be helped by a friend who has every reason to know what he's doing?

Yet again

Let us all give thanks for the inventor of the ultrasonic scaler. I'm not going to claim that it makes getting one's teeth cleaned a pleasant experience, and it reduces the use of chisels, broaches and mallets considerably. For the moment we seem to be going with plan C, which is pretty much throwing chewing gum and baling wire at the suff most likely to break in the immediate future (don't laugh, one of the proposed treatments is in fact a chewing gum that claims to reduce the number of cavity-causing bacteria in the mouth by feeding them a sugar they can't digest).

I was almost late for my appointment ( which was delayed half an hour anyway) because on the way over to the dentist's office I had to stop and look at this:

I was almost late for my appointment ( which was delayed half an hour anyway) because on the way over to the dentist's office I had to stop and look at this. Almost makes it worthwhile.

Lucky Fill

If the tree-delivery guy hadn't been a busybody (or at least extra helpful) we'd still be breaking mirrors around here.

Yesterday I dug the holes for the new trees: down through the four inches or so of real topsoil, then through a foot of round-rock dirt fill with a bit of shale mixed in, and down to the clay pan that seems to underly most of the yard. Today, Julie and I were out at the farmer's market buying pounds of butternut squash and brussels sprout on-the-stalk when the trees arrived (The truck was on its way down as we were coming back up.)

Holes needed to be six inches deeper, Ann reported. "And the sides have to be straight." Uh-huh. Did someone never hear of angle of repose?

Turns out that the clay was mixed with rocks just like the dirt above it. And with some other trash, to wit, a rusted-out horseshoe. Julie held it up and talked excitely about wirebrushing it and hanging it in the garage, until her mother told her to at least hold it with the ends up so that all the luck wouldn't run out. The things they don't teach the younger generation anymore.