A leap of faith

Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, where many heroes of Ireland's "terrible beauty"--the Easter Rising of 1916--rest. (Wiki Commons photo)

The single thing I've pondered more than any other about 9/11 is the people jumping from the roof or upper floors. Some held hands to start with. Some just went, floating down like heavenly butterflies, but faster. Becoming infinitesimal parts of their former selves when they landed.

I cannot imagine viewing it in person. It was frightful enough on television. It was, though, a frightful beauty, to borrow a concept from William Butler Yeats, who referred to the bloody Irish Rising as a "terrible beauty."

The frightful perfection of those falling humans brought to mind everything I have ever pondered in a single act. Everything I have ever pondered is what all of us ponder, beneath it all; life and death. How does one lead into the other, and when? And how? And why? We may obsess about our jobs, our families, our health, world politics, a pain in our big toe. But when all is said and done, what we are really contemplating is the continuum of life and death and when and how we will end up on the other side of that bell curve. And will it hurt?

The people who floated into eternity off the World Trade Center flew that bell curve from the upward slope to the downward, to the place where the line describing a life falls off the other end of the chart. I wonder if they knew, as they went, that they had reached the apex and were toppling over into the final curve. I wonder if they knew before they stepped into space. Of course they did. Of course.

Or does human hope transcend even the certain knowledge that a human being falling 110 floors through space and time into a concrete expression of the end of the graph cannot survive?

What knowledge those sainted people had convinced them that taking charge of their drop off the life-death continuum should be taken into their own hands, and not left to the vagaries of what might happen. Whether a helicopter might reach the roof before the buildings collapsed and save them? Did they know, intuitively or possibly from the sounds of explosions, that the buildings would collapse, and that nothing could survive--although miraculously, some people did? How could they have been sure of collapse, so sure that they took the first step of their descent into death, knowing full well they could not change their mind? They could no longer hope? How did they know?

How did they do it? I ask the question over and over. One doesn't go to work in office towers the same way Donegal fishermen went to work for centuries. Donegal fishermen purposely never learned to swim because doing so would just prolong the agonies of the North Atlantic if their ship went down. They also wore knitted woollen sweaters that would reveal, long after the fishes and tides had had their way with the insubstantial human flesh, what family or town the body was from, as a way of ensuring all recovered bodies were buried properly where they should lie.

There was nothing like that, not from start to finish, for the office workers whose lives ended at some nanosecond after they escaped a fiery death to choose a death of unknown parameters. As I understand it, there was nothing to bury.

Perhaps that was the ultimate statement, the ultimate revelation of where all of this--ALL OF THIS--ends up, no matter what. It ends up in neutrons, electrons--particulate pieces of particles--at some point. Bones long buried and excavated would appear to have given up the ghost but not, entirely, the substance. Eventually, though, even the particles of the bones must sunder; millions of bones have. It is the rare human whose long-buried bones turn up for wonder and study. Most are nothingness, a slow process except if one steps off the 110th floor of the world's tallest building.

Those who stepped into space, history, eternity, heaven or hell are also heroes of 9/11. They revealed to those who would look how evanescent the existence of all earth--all people, things, named places, ideas, all of it--is. They ensured that none of us could look life, or death, in the face again without feeling, all at once, that nothing is worth it, but everything is worth it. We must press on, we must carry out our work on all fronts, but we must be ever mindful that we may not have a choice about how it ends.

The skywalkers had a choice, but not much of one. Still, it was the complete one. A decision about when life ends, with incomplete information to base it on. They could not KNOW they would not be saved. They had to abandon hope, willfully, that they would be rescued.

What they decided, in each singular and particular case, was indeed--one can say no more--a frightful beauty, an elegance and economy of spirit almost unmatched in history.

I applaud and grieve for them.

27 Dresses. Not.

Well, it COULD be a thrift shop purchase, although it looks more like a nightgown with mosquito netting. (Wiki Commons)

Could you put in some pew de soy?

What?

During journalism grad school, I got a job copy editing the local morning rag. Glen, one of the typesetters, who had been an English teacher before the unruly kids almost destroyed his gentle soul, was getting married and had handed me the wedding announcement.

"Oh," said I. "Peau de soie? Well, does her gown entail any peau de soie? Probably; most do. Why don't you ask Esther and find out."

He did. It did have pew de soy and some Allan's son's (Alencon) lace as well. Still, I sent him to the Community Editor with the announcement, as it was her job to marshall all the laces and silks and satins into regimented rows, always ending in, "The couple will honeymoon in Myrtle Beach." Everyone who lived in Athens, GA, honeymooned in Myrtle Beach. I suspect they thought a passport would be required if they ventured farther afield.

I missed that wedding. I even missed the one wedding for which I was supposed to be a member of the wedding party. Lord, how I did not want to do that. I managed to get a strep throat a few days before that wedding, which was to be the day before my college graduation, and two days before my husband, who was getting his doctorate, and I moved to Denver from Binghamton, NY. So I bombed out. Whew.


I think I am phobic about weddings. It might have something to do with the wedding in the movie 16 Candles. Or maybe the 1978 movie, A Wedding, directed by Robert Altman and casting funnywoman Carol Burnett in an unaccountably bleak role. A wedding, it always seemed to me, was a prescription for one kind of disaster or another. So I avoided them. Even my own...and I've had three, or four if you count the last one.


Interfaith marriage? Problem solved

The first one was fraught with peril because the groom was Jewish and I was nominally Roman Catholic, although I had, by age 20, long since abandoned that nonsense. We could find no clergyman to marry us. After much dialing, I finally found a New York State Supreme Court Justice who agreed to do the deed as long as it could be on a Wednesday morning in March. OK.

The attitudes toward this happy event ranged from horrified to OK with it. Well, maybe a bit more. For example: 

• My father, the RC patriarch, was not happy. 
• My Episcopalian grandmother, my mother's mother, was happy. She liked Paul, my fiance. 
• My brother was 15. That is, he didn't really care. Sure, it was a day off from school--two because of the trip from Long Island to Binghamton. 
• My husband's favorite aunt--and mine too, as it would turn out--flew from NYC the night before and back the next afternoon. She was a grand lady, and also the able long-time cable desk chief at Time, Inc. She was happy. I think she was as happy a my grandmother. They were much alike.
  

There was also Paul's best friend as his witness and my best friend as mine. I think they were both on the negative side of the midline between ecstatic and horrified, but only just.


But if you value your belief that weddings are a priori happy occasions, do not look at that wedding picture. We all look like we've had the word from the stormtroopers and we're next. All of us.


Next time I got married, it was in Athens, GA. I was in grad school, had just divorced No. 1, and No. 2 seemed like a good bet. He was also a journalist, and, in fact, the marriage lasted 16 years, a lot better than the scant five for marriage number one. The wedding? Neither of us wanted clergy, so we trotted over, with our two best friends, to the offices of an elderly judge. At one point, we had to quietly snake the rings off each other's fingers because the old judge had forgotten we'd done that already. So we did it again. I think he got tired after that, or he might have gone round again.


The reception was a barbecue at a friend's house. We fell out of a hammock together after too many peach daiquiries.


Third time's the charm

Marriage number three (five years and counting) was supposed to be the first actual church wedding I'd ever had. I had become a nominal Episcopalian, mainly for the coffee hour as freelancing is lonely work, and my husband was Church of England, being a Brit. We even had the de rigeur conversation with the Rector who assured us it was very important to involve the church community, who would be there for us as marriage took its inevitable toll on us (he didn't put it that way.) We nodded. Then Simon ran off to fly to Africa or someplace on business, and I went home to wonder how I could ever even get through buying some kind of frou-frou dress, never mind figuring out how to involve Simon's three grown daughters in the ceremony, as the Rector had suggested. A dilemma indeed as at least one of them hated me (and still does.) And this is supposed to be joyous?






"Why don't you just go get the license today and I'll marry you Saturday night. It will be fun. I'll get champagne," she said.


I called Simon at work and he agreed to meet me at the county office where marriage licenses could be procured.

On Saturday, we cleaned out part of the basement, took the stuff to the landfill, and returned the borrowed truck to its owner. It began to snow. Hard. Our return trip, from the mountains around Camp David where his friend lived, among the constant coming and goings of the presidential copter and 24/7 fighter jets on patrol, was really slow. But I really wanted to paint my toenails.

I have no idea why it was so important to me to paint my toenails.  For this wedding, I was wearing a purple two-piece dress I had gotten from my cousin's thrift shop.


Well, it wasn't really a thrift shop. My cousin manages a big apartment building in Washington, DC, and when someone moves out, they often tell him to take what he wants. One woman left a ton of books, a ton of clothing, a ton of kitchen equipment. He took it all. When my friend Noeleen and I visited, while Simon was in Africa, we each chose what fit us from the selection in Dennis's spare room. She got mainly shoes; I got mainly clothing.


Anyway, between trying to fluff up my hair after the snow experience and painting my toenails for the open-toed shoes to go with the thrift shop dress, we were late. Quite late. The cell phone call to Jane, the minister, produced ice almost as bad as what was on the roads. "If you're not here in half an hour, I won't do it," she said. "Noeleen is already here."


We got there. And it was fine. Short and sweet. Then Jane, her husband, Noeleen and we newlyweds had champagne, and then we drove through the blizzard to our favorite Indian restaurant in Baltimore.


Three weeks later, we had the reception on the date of the original, non-starter church wedding, since it was already booked and paid for. I would have gone through with that wedding itself, I guess, but when I called to tell the Rector that we had already gotten married, so it would just have to be a blessing and not a full wedding, he said that was all right. Civil weddings could be blessed.

"What? You were married by a bona fide minister? Then I can't bless it," he said. "It has already been done."


He wasn't too fond of us after that. The community seemed OK with it, though, as those we had invited all came to the reception. I wore some old black silk pants I had, a silk chemise I had bought at Nordstrom Rack, and the thrift shop Asian coat thingie in embroidered yellow silk I had found the week before. No, really. This time it WAS from a thrift shop.


But I did, the morning of the reception, decide maybe I should go have my hair done.

Horrible Bosses, Part Two: Chunky Skippy

Bosses are like peanut butter: Sticky and hard to wash away  (Piccolo Namek, Wiki Commons)

George W. Bush had just been selected by the US Supreme Court in one of the most bald-faced political heists in history. And I had decided, after cobbling together a couple of midlist books (The Unofficial Guide to Surviving Y2K and Beyond, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Natural Disasters), that it was time for a rest from the hunt. Time to rest from constantly thinking up new ideas to sell to the shrinking population of intelligent acquisitions editors. (Intelligent, as regards acquisitions editors, is defined as willing to buy my idea on the basis of an outline and sample chapter, and pay me half a year’s income to write it.)

Anyway, I had decided a change of pace would be nice. I was even willing to give up the part-time teaching of hunter-jumper riders, which I love to do, for the great bonus of health insurance and a sizeable paycheck―from which I might pay up my taxes from previous years (see midlist book mention above) and still have coins left for dinner out.

The first change of pace I sought was a job as a designer at Ethan Allen. Not so weird. I studied art at the Art Students League of New York, where William Merritt Chase had taught in a previous century and Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler and Maurice Sendak, among other more recent luminaries, had studied. I was even elected to membership. Between that and my scene design courses in college, drawing room designs and elevations would be no problem. I got the job. And that’s where the trouble began.

Locked in a box

Ethan Allen sent all new hires to a doc-in-the-box before their first day of work, I suppose for health/life insurance purposes. Or maybe just to be intrusive. Anyway, by the time my old car had broken down again, I had gotten an Enterprise rental car pronto and hauled my butt an hour to Silver Spring’s panhandler-laden downtown through suburban D.C. traffic, I was in a rare mood, and I had to pee.

When I got to the doc-in-the-box, the receptionist was behind a Plexiglas barrier--
and no, I could not come through to use the ladies room because then they’d have to unlock the door to the inner sanctum before my turn and that would apparently cause upheaval around the globe and hair loss among the local staff.

It got worse from there. By the time I was on my way back home, I had decided no job that made one go through that crap was worth it. I stopped at the barn, petted my horse, went home, picked up the phone, and declined the job I had just accepted. There went my visions of massive commissions as Bush’s cadre of bureaucrats moved into Maryland and redecorated the houses vacated by Democrats.

Oy. Back to teaching, sending out book ideas…

Shortly, I got a call-back for a job at an insurance industry magazine needing an editor. The publisher interviewed me at 7 p.m. one evening. He said he wanted me to do a writing and editing test, surely I had done them before, etc. etc. Actually, I hadn’t. And I shouldn’t have done them that time, either. If one could look at my resume and list of published books and conclude anything except that I was an accomplished writer and editor, one had to be an imbecile.

He was an imbecile.

His publication did nothing but “repurpose” the articles of other publications and run court case synopses concerning insurance agents in legal trouble for various things, such as stealing premiums. And it ran the drivel spouted by Maryland’s insurance commissioner. However, Chunky Skippy*, as I fondly called him, thought he was running the New York Times. The art director, a part-timer, was possibly the most arrogant living human being I have ever met, and that’s saying a lot. At that point, I had worked in publishing and advertising for 25 years in New York and Florida; case closed.

We didn’t get along, the Chunk and I. I didn’t care for the art director, needless to say. The single salesperson seemed OK, except that she didn’t actually sell advertising, but had certainly sold some sort of bill of goods to the Chunk, on which I’ll say no more.

The office manager was OK. I liked her, in fact. We actually stayed in touch for a while after I left.

Go in peace, but go

I’m not sure if I left or was fired. Part of my agreement was that on non-deadline weeks, if I wanted to ride my horse on a nice morning and come in late and stay late, that was fine. Chunk never really accepted it, but could do nothing about it. Anyway, one morning on my way in, I realized there was no way I could emotionally, mentally or ethically support my continued involvement, regardless of the state of my finances.

I had determined to quit that very morning, but I didn’t have to. The Chunk called me into his office and said he was laying me off, that business was slow (true) and he could do the editing job himself (also true.) But he would give me a good severance (yippee!) and support the effort if I filed for unemployment (better still.) With a light heart, I gathered my one photo (my horse) and two houseplants and left.

When I called my good friends Jeffrey and Don, who had been through the horrific previous five months with me, Jeffrey said,  “Let’s celebrate. Come to dinner tonight! But Don has the car at work, so you’ll have to take me to the grocery store.”

While we waited in the checkout line, I said, “Well, at least I won’t have to go into Chunky’s office to watch Jerry Springer every afternoon.”

Jeffrey fell about laughing. “You’re kidding! This calls for champagne,” said he, as we trooped next door to get some.

All’s well that ends well…even when one has had the boss from hell.

___

* Skippy was the name I had given a previous horrible boss, also encountered during one of my “rest cure” trips in from the cold of freelancing. His story next time.

Horrible Bosses, part one

First in a series of true-life horror stories about working in America. Check back often for tales that will entertain you, mainly because they happened to someone other than you!

Horrible Bosses. The movie. Also, the life of Americans, or at least, most Americans I’ve ever known. 

It took me precisely two jobs to figure out that working for someone else was a prescription for insanity. My first job wasn’t so bad. One might think it was horrible, knowing it was waiting table at a divey bar on eastern Long Island. I had replaced a humongously overweight woman who, so the owners told me, used to swing her legs up on the bar from time to time to treat the regulars to a vision of her oozing scabs. What were they from? Shit knows, and shit cares.

Anyway, the owners were so happy I was of normal size and had no scabs on my legs that they paid me fifty bucks a week extra under the table; Scab Lady had told them the tips were horrible. The tips were not horrible. At least, my tips were not  horrible. Pretty good, actually. Plus the wonderful daytime bartender took me under his wing and protected me from the horror shows that sometimes frequented the establishment.

One such used to ask me for a kiss every time I walked by his perch at the end of the horseshoe bar with food for a table. One day, he grabbed my arm and said he wanted a kiss right then. I yelled to the bartender, “Uncle Al, this guy wants a kiss.”

Uncle Al―not a real uncle, but it sounded more serious that way―rose to his full 6’6”, reached across the bar, picked the guy up by the shoulders and planted a big one full on his lips.

The guy never returned. Al wasn’t the boss, just an employee. But the bosses, both named Ray, were great. I would never have believed in horrible bosses until the next summer. When I came home from college that year, I got a job in a very popular restaurant, not a mile from our house, on the way to the posh Hamptons. And that’s when I began to learn about horrible bosses.

Next, a laundry list of horrors, including:

• Knocking a plate out of my hand and stepping on it, food and all.
• Checking the bottom of one’s shoes for dirt
• The window curtain patrol
• Being forced to watch Jerry Springer (No, I’m NOT kidding.)
• And more.

These were not all from one job, needless to say. My longevity record in a job is three years; the boss was one of the few great guys. Of course, some of the other staff…well, anyway, they didn’t control my life and were therefore tolerable for three years. Just.

I can hardly wait to see Horrible Bosses. I just know I’m going to wish I had written it.

Next: Horror stories from the front lines -- New York

Chocolate

Yesterday, in Tavistock, I saw a cute little sign in a “stuff” shop: “Some things are better rich: Men, coffee, chocolate.” It put me in mind of a pillow I used to have with the same sentiment needlepointed on it. A good friend gave it to me when we were both between husbands 20 years ago; we both liked coffee and chocolate, if not men for a while as we were both recovering from the effects of marriage to a couple of substandard models.

That beloved pillow became, ludicrously, a bone of contention with one of my stepdaughters. She carried on about it several times, accusing me of marrying her father for his money. Simon is brilliant and does well, but he doesn’t have MONEY. I did, in fact, date a very nice and decent millionaire as well when I was first dating Simon…but I chose Simon. So no, I didn’t marry for money; I married for love. 

And, indeed, the only person who wanted her father’s money illicitly was that very stepdaughter who proceeded to steal from Simon over the next year before we discovered it and put a screeching halt to her access and her excess. Needless to say, she is not named in his will. 

But…back to a much more pleasing subject than family rancor, chocolate.

Chocolate has been much on my mind since I saw that sign yesterday, the pillow of contention notwithstanding. I awakened thinking about a chocolate cake I made for one of the other stepdaughters, Julia.

Julia seldom ate sweets, but loved the chocolate cake at The Olive Garden and asked if I could make one for her birthday dinner about four years ago. Sure. Well, maybe. It was an almost flourless cake—3 tablespoons of flour, I think, and a ton of chocolate. The thing had to be baked in a spring form pan wrapped in aluminum foil and plunged into a Bain Marie. A water bath. Yipes. However, I did it, and it was delicious. I haven’t done it since.

I might do it when Julia visits with her husband and baby in the fall. They can’t stay long, as her husband’s job is very demanding. So, I’m trying to make sure I fatten them up in every possible way in the scant week we have to work with. Chocolate never goes amiss, ultimately.

Sometimes chocolate gets a bad rep from those who equate pleasure with sin, as did the hard-shell Baptist wannabe townspeople in the movie Chocolat. Chocolate is, I think, a sacramental substance that can do good or evil, depending on how it is used. Like wine. Like any of the transcendent creations of humanity. Coffee. Tea. Rosewater. On that last, I’m admitting here that I adore Turkish Delight. I would say I especially like it coated with chocolate―as manufactured by Fry’s and purveyed in every Spar store in Britain―but I don’t. I prefer the two heavenly substances pure and unsullied by other equally seductive flavours.  Turkish Delight is an acquired taste, I admit. But chocolate...or chocolat, if you prefer.....ah....

Chocolat is a film worth seeing more than once. Although many of the characters are caricatures, such caricatures help us to more clearly see the gifts we have by seeing such gifts simply and clearly drawn. The caricatures also show us the gifts we might ignore if, like a caricature, we should attempt to close off any part of ourselves―especially our desire for flavour (the British spelling seems so much more appropriate to the word used this way). Our desire for beauty, for real spirituality―that is, enjoyment of the wonders that are here for us. For friendship. Delight. Laughter. Wonder. Appreciation. And love.

In Chocolat, Vianne Rocher (played by Juliette Binoche, magically) brings all that to a small French village through her Mayan-influenced chocolate shop. She opens the doors at the beginning of Lent when the townspeople, held under the boot of a loveless nobleman far more than they are coerced by the young priest’s bemused attempts at religious rigor, are desperate for signs that the world is, after all, a delicious place to be. In the town, two elderly people need to fall in love at last, having denied themselves the pleasure for decades. An abused woman needs freedom and peace from her vicious spouse. A sour young widow needs to make peace with her mother, her child, and the man she loves quietly from afar.

I must admit, finally, that I love Chocolat because it presents to me all those things my journalist’s discernment ignores in its apparently endless quest for the unethical, the unconscionable and the distressing. I came by that trait honestly, though. When I was in kindergarten, the teacher asked me why I never smiled. I said, “Because I don’t see any reason to smile.”

Before you conclude that I had a miserable childhood, I didn’t. It was quite fine, in fact, with a doting grandmother whose special project I was, and lots of lovely little friends to play with. The fact was, I just had a sort of “glass half empty” mentality, and still do. So it is with some wonder that I find myself volubly appreciating sappy films such as Chocolat. Or wondering how we can pack more than a year’s worth of love into a scant week with Simon’s daughter Julia and her family. How to tell her how glad I am that she and Kevin and little Austyn have found their life together in a very nice first home near the beach in Maryland. How to tell her I wish her all the chocolate in the world, as I still wish chocolate for her two sisters who went wildly astray into theft and drugs and other very non-chocolate things. If only chocolate could return them to themselves and to those who love them.

Maybe it can. Maybe if I wish chocolate for them hard enough, they will repair their frightened souls. Or maybe not. The only thing chocolate can do, really, is open the pathway to delight, to the recognition that there is a deep richness, a just-right sweetness, a soft silken path through the universe that any soul can use to achieve, if not greatness, love and joy.

And on that note, to salve my inner crying for the two lost sisters and the yearning to see Julia, the stepdaughter whose inner beauty and outer grace make up for so much, I’m going downstairs for some chocolate.

Who do women sleep with?

Wikipedia reports Tristane Banon is the god-daughter of Strauss-Kahn's second wife. Sheesh. Curiouser and curiouser, but then, her mother, Anne Mansouret, is only a minor  contender for the Socialist nod to run for the French presidency, and politics makes strange bedfellows. (Wiki Commons photo of Banon in 2001)

My late stepfather was a wise man. He often told other men, when they were wondering whether to agree with their wives/SOs on household matters, "Give in. You will eventually." I liked that.

What I liked even better was Ed's contention that, "Men sleep with whomever they can; women sleep with whomever they want."

He was not speaking of forcible rape, with bruises and contusions both inside and out. He was speaking of the usual run of male/female relations. And he was right. A man will try it out as often as possible with a desirable woman on the off chance she will say yes. All a woman has to do, in essence, is say yes or no. A man may persist; a woman may persist. Must persist, in fact, if she expects to control her own destiny. Except in the case of forcible rape, the woman wins. Always.

If the woman says no, she has made the decision. No problem.

If the woman says yes, she has made the decision. No problem. Well, almost no problem. What if, later on, the woman is mad at herself for accommodating a particular man? Might she not then blame him for imposing his will upon her, as a coward's way to refuse to recognize her own culpability for failing to be discerning? I have in mind various cases of celebrity men taking advantage of offers by hotel maids and the like and the maids later regretting their loose behavior and falsely accusing the men of rape.

If the woman says maybe--recall, the "tease" has been with us as long as men and women figured out what to do with each other in the privacy of their caves--then there's a problem. The modern knee-jerk feminist will say that the man SHOULD have known she really meant no despite the flirting and provocative clothing.

Knee-jerk feminism
The modern knee-jerk feminist will say that women don't act like teases anymore. (Really? Consider what all the skanky clothing on females from 8 to 80 signifies. It advertises the goods, leaving the price thereof open to male interpretation. Men might well be excused for thinking little clothing means a little price for the goods barely contained therein.)

And now comes the case of Tristane Banon, 22 years old when she claims--eight years later--that Dominique Strauss-Kahn attempted sexual contact with her when she interviewed him, alone, in an apartment. She didn't complain to the police then; her mama, Anne Mansouret, told her not to and she obeyed. Mansouret was a Socialist Party functionary at the time, and Strauss-Kahn was a more important Socialist. As he still is. Only now, apparently, Mansouret would like him out of the way so she can run for the French presidency.

What to do, what to do? Ah. Remember the heavy flirting business the kid raised all those years ago? Trot that out and see if it flies. After all, Strauss-Kahn is on the ropes--right?--because of some sexual exploits in New York.

Except that the New York woman doth protest too much. She protesteth so much--attempting to convince people with brains and five senses that a 60+ man could force a 30-something woman to clean his magic wand--that finally someone got a whiff of something smelly.

Ripe for the plucking
I think the Banon thing is just a bit too ripe, too. Eight years too ripe, if indeed it would ever have borne fruit at all. Let's see: sweet young thing goes to apartment to interview powerful older man. She complains to her mother that he attempted--what?--with her. Eight years later, she doubtless recalls every detail perfectly; anyone would. (OK. Tongue firmly in cheek.)

Eight years after the fact, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Banon has decided to press forward with bringing a case in French courts contending that, "Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her during a book interview" and so she is filing a complaint "in order to clear her own name of suspicion that she had fabricated the accusation."

If the shoe fits....Tristane, darling, no one had ever heard of Strauss-Kahn putting the moves on you back then. So you really didn't have any name to clear, until YOU brought it up. And why would you need to clear your name, if Strauss-Kahn is supposed to be the culprit?

Indeed, no one had ever heard of Tristane Banon before she decided to recall, in stunning detail after eight years, a pseudo-attack on her by a man more than twice her age at the time. What is it with these young women? Did they spend too much time in front of the TV, so much that doddering old fools can pin them to the carpet and fondle at will because they are too weak to fend them off? I mean, how embarrassing. If I were 22 years old and couldn't find some way to shift a geezer older than my father--if indeed I had stupidly allowed a ludicrous flirtation to get to that point--I think I'd just pack it in.

Serial whiners
Or maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the ethical basis of all womanhood has descended to the level of the serial whiner or paid shill. Maybe the filing of completely insane charges against Julian Assange by the two CIA hired guns in Sweden has set a new low precedent for trumped-up innuendo. Even MSNBC once referred to Assange as an unlikely babe magnet. No kidding.

On the other hand, fame and fortune seem to be the major draw for women involved in trafficking in sexual innuendo these days. Nothing to do with pecs, abs, great hair or a large salami at all.

Banon said she had waited eight years before filing her complaint because "it's very difficult for any woman in this situation ... and it's even more difficult when you know in advance that it's doomed to failure," according to the Atlanta paper, cited above.


Strauss-Kahn will likely be free sooner than later
Let us pray. Let us pray that all this female-perpetrated sleaze is doomed to failure. The latest word from New York is that all charges against Strauss-Kahn will be dropped no later than July 18. Then he's free to head home to France, and see his name bandied about once again for something sex-related.

With an EU passport, though, he need not actually go back to France, even if the US shows him the door. Any EU country will have to take him. And that, in essence, may be what Mansouret is after. If Strauss-Kahn is parked elsewhere, for reasonable fear of having to go through the New York exercise all over again in France, the way is clear or Mansouret to climb over whatever bodies are in her way, including that of her own daughter, apparently a serial shill for her mother's ambition.

I can't make this stuff up; it's not fiction; just read the news and read between the lines.

Aside from wondering where politicians draw the line regarding stretching the truth for their own purposes, I have also concluded three other things out of all of this. They are that:

• America has exported its insane Puritan viewpoints of sexuality to once-reasonable France, and locals there are now acting as nuts as the entire US population, almost, did when Bill Clinton engaged in a extra-marital adult relationship and was pilloried for it by the paid-in-full efforts of Linda Tripp.
• America has exported its penchant for turnip-minded female politicians to France. That's probably OK; the French like root vegetables. They also like organ meats...but I won't go there.
• Women have forgotten who has the upper hand in ALL sexual matters except forcible rape: Women.

To repeat: Men sleep with whomever they can; women sleep with whomever they want. Teach it to your daughters, and keep it in mind when these anti-feminist greedsters crawl out of their holes and try to pervert men's ordinary conduct into something more. 

Blood lust denied, for once, in Mississippi: Cory Maye to be freed

Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom: An admirable choice for a household god*

Huffington Post has just reported on the story of a man who opened fire on people breaking into his home where he had just put his infant to sleep, only belatedly realizing they were cops. He killed one. The one he killed was the police chief's son. In a small town in Mississippi. The man was black. The cop was white. A death sentence was handed down.

Fortunately, there were so many errors in that particular rush to judgment that a judge first commuted the sentence to life without parole (whew) and now the man in question, Cory Maye, has been re-sentenced to ten years for manslaughter, years already served. He is on his way home. Mayes did not premeditate killing the cop. Indeed, the cops were in the wrong to begin with. They should have been invading the home of a criminal who lived nearby, not Maye's home, but had a rotten tip from a drugged out informant.

What does that have to do with the nominal subject of this blog, the household gods? The ancient Roman gods supposed to protect those who dwell in a particular place?

Everything. Appended to the Huffington Post story was the following comment:

 He shot a cop and now we are supposed to celebrate that he got only 10 years.

The person posting the comment, who goes by the screen name Turukano, has 668 fans on HuffPo, and uses the line "Obama 2012" in his/her profile. If I were Mr. Obama, I'd be embarrassed to acknowledge such bone-deep ignorance in a supporter. Turukano did, moreover, apparently jump onto the story the instant it was published to bandy his aggressive stance around; Turukano's is the first comment. (Maybe that's a good thing; the two that came in next were compassionate comments.)

Turukano's comment bespeaks both the incredible ineffectiveness of American academic education, and the totally absent spiritual education provided in American homes and churches.

How can any human read this story and fail to realize that a man may have lost his life because of a Rube Goldbergian series of errors and ineptitude, not to mention craven duplicity and professional incompetence, on the part of any number of the people involved?

How can any human being read this story and contend that for shooting a cop mistakenly--while defending property from an invasion launched in the night when confusion reigned and alertness was compromised--a person should get more than ten years? How can anyone be so moronic as to divorce the action from the impetus to that action, and issue forth a blanket demand for blood?

How? Because a certain segment of America is all about blood lust. That same segment seems to be all about placing some people above others. Why should it be worse and demand a greater punishment when a cop is killed, than, for example, when a teacher or clergy member is killed?  Or when ANY innocent person is mistakenly killed. 

To quote an old song, there is an answer to this: Teach your children well.

Teach them that blood lust is the province of ignorant people, of people who have barely climbed out of the primordial ooze.

Teach them that the benefit of the doubt is due to those caught in webs of incompetence, bigotry and malevolence, regardless. Eventually, the truth will out, and it is nice when ALL of those involved are alive to see it.

Teach them that there is a higher calling than applying punishment to miscreants based on technical demands; that higher calling is applying punishment tempered with wisdom, justice and impartiality.

I would suggest that an admirable household god to enshrine would be this one: The god or goddess of anti--capital punishment.

In honor of this god, refuse to espouse the ultimate punishment for any man or woman. Because it may be that that man or that woman is innocent, wholly or substantially, and if you impose the ultimate punishment, you can never undo the evil you have done. And that would offend most gods.

* Wiki Commons.Sculpture displayed at Roman Baths, Bath, England.

Rules for fools

 Above, the Fool on the Hill: Too bad there were no rules for him 

Two weeks ago, when I was preparing for the second coming of the UK Driving Test in Norwich, the classroom instructor answered a student's question as follows:

"Rules are for the obedience of fools, and the guidance of wise men."

After the class, I asked him for the origin of the quote, and he wrote it down and attributed it to Douglas Bader.

I had no idea who Douglas Bader was until a few moments ago, when I looked him up on the endlessly useful, not-much-less-accurate-than-Britannica, Wikipedia. (Truth: someone studied it and found little discrepancy.) Bader was a WWII British flying ace who brought down many German aircraft before being brought down himself and spending time trying to escape from a German POW camp. Amazing enough to survive and badger one's captors, but Bader had two prosthetic legs to contend with, one of which was damaged when he was ejecting from his plane. He had the prosthetic legs before he became a WWII flying ace.

I suspect Bader broke a lot of rules, although he broke them carefully. He successfully made his case for his flying ability despite having lost his legs in an earlier flying accident, and was returned to the air in time for the Battle of Britain. Courage, it would seem, must accompany wisdom when one wants to break the rules. But wisdom sometimes accompanies age and experience; when he was a flying cadet, in 1928, Bader was almost expelled because of his fondness for forbidden romps in motorcars. Racing motorcars.

One can see how Bader might have developed his attitude toward rules, though. It would seem a bit ridiculous to forbid energetic young men engaged in the dangerous pursuit of flying airplanes to cavort in cars.

By the time he engaged German airplanes in battle, Bader had developed three additional beliefs. They were:

• If you had the height, you controlled the battle.
• If you came out of the sun, the enemy could not see you.
• If you held your fire until you were very close, you seldom missed.

These apply as well to life in general. You are foolish to "attack an enemy"--that is, proceed in some adversarial contest--unless you hold the high ground, ethically, monetarily or whatever pertains to the situation in question. The concept is often more mundanely rendered as, "Don't piss into the wind."

You are also foolish to show an enemy your position in a negotiation. If you want a good deal on your new house, do not flash your money around, nor by the same token, present yourself as a penniless sad sack. In either case, you are giving away your position, which the other side may then use to its advantage. Again, there are mundane versions of this concept. Keep things close to the vest is one.

If you can hold your fire, you will prevail in life as in combat. Do not prematurely fling your talking points at others; the longer you wait and let others talk, the more likely you are to gain the information you need to succeed in any negotiation. Years ago, a woman I was interviewing for an article used the term, "Ears open, mouth shut." It works. Every time. And it's simple, but not easy, especially if you have a tendency to let your ego gain control.

Which is precisely what Douglas Bader must seldom have done. His ego didn't seem to enter into his thought processes. He paid attention to business, not to his growing reputation as the British answer to WWI's Red Baron. As a POW, he took it as his mission to bedevil his captors as often as he could. After the war, he became CEO of the aircraft division of Shell.

He wasn't, however, perfect. Another of his great quotes, on entering a gathering of former Luftwaffe pilots in Germany after the war, was, "My God, I had no idea we left so many of you bastards alive," according to a Wikipedia-cited source. He was a political conservative, Victorian in his beliefs and just a tad bigoted. He absolutely objected to Rhodesia gaining independence, for example.

Still, one needn't throw out the baby with the bathwater--since we are on the subject of pithy sayings--and so may consider Bader's best quote for what it is, a darn good prescription for a reasoned life by anyone except morons.

I was going to take a cheap shot and note that thereby, Bush, Bachmann, Palin et. al. are left out of it, but I won't.

BTW: I passed the driving test, despite telling the examiner, when he asked what I'd like to be called, that he could call me Your Grace. 

The American car god has at last caught up with me...in England!

We all know how I HATE photos of myself: I'm supposed to be on the other end of cameras. But this is the least I could do for my instructor, Andy. (Used by permission of Five Day.)

Whew!

Briefly, after an incredibly agony-filled two months, I took the UK Driving Practical Test on Saturday in Norwich, and passed.

Correction: I did not simply pass, I passed with a miniscule 2 minor errors. One is allowed 15 of those and can still be awarded a license.

How can this be, considering that less than four weeks earlier, in Cornwall, I had failed?

Correction: I had not only failed, I had failed miserably. Although the examiner could manage to find only 10 minor faults, he rearranged reality and made them into THREE, count 'em, THREE SERIOUS DRIVING FAULTS. During the debrief, he also delivered a little lecture about how endangered he had felt when my directional signal flipped off of its own accord on a curve up a hill to an intersection and I chose to shift first and reapply the signal second in order not to stall on the FREAKING MOUNTAIN because I had an Audi on my tail! My Cornwall instructor (one must have one of those to learn those hinky backing-around-corner things and to rent a test-worthy car) was aghast when he heard the examiner deliver the "fail" verdict. I was aghast, and as angry as I've ever been.

No points on my license
In 46 years of driving, I have had NO POINTS on my license. None. In any state. You're welcome to check. No accidents, except for a deer hitting me, and a woman bashing my bumper when I was stopped at a light. Total lifetime auto damage? Under $2000, all in.

So...that gormless examiner in Cornwall drove me to several things. To wit:
1. I joined the Association of British Drivers so I can put my two cents in.
2. I decided to retake the test at a more sophisticated venue where the examiners might possibly have seen aliens before, and had become unafraid of us.
3. I decided on an intensive course with test at the end, far from home for two reasons: no demands by husband, dog and cat, and I wanted some time in a city.

I found Five-Day online, chatted online, phoned and talked with a live human, and booked a week's tuition in Norwich.

Five Day intensive driving course deals with a riled Yank
As it turned out, I was still so emotionally scarred from the Cornwall experience, I wanted Simon to turn around and fetch me home after he left on the Monday morning of the course after driving me there on Sunday. I managed to persevere, but went to the first session in a rare foul mood. (Not that my foul moods are rare; it was rare in its intensity.) Each day was one hour of classroom work followed by four hours of driving.

The classroom teacher was ex-military, and he--Bob--gave as good as he got. And brother, he got some shite from me that first day. To his immense credit, by the end of the week, we were having fun sparring with each other, and giving each other favorite quotes and so on.

The part on the road was wonderful, too. The driving instructor, Andy, is possibly one of the nicest, wisest, most knowledgeable people I have ever met.  He, too, got a dose of my wrath that first day. But we went for a drive, and after an hour, he asked why I was there, said I drove just fine, and should just tell the office to book my test so we'd get it booked by week's end. (The company has a full-time person who trolls for cancellations so they can book tests WAY faster than the timing the DSA--Driving Standards Agency--offers.) I told him about Cornwall, and I told him I really did need to learn how to back around a corner, because of being a Yank and therefore not having the DNA to permit it. (There are four maneuvers an examiner can choose from to test applicants: backing around a corner, parallel parking, backing into a parking bay and a three-point turn.)

To make a long story short, Andy and I had a great week driving and became friends out of it all. When Simon showed up to get me on the Friday--they could get no closer than Tuesday for a test booking, so I decided to go home for a week and take a Saturday, June 18 slot, instead--he chatted with Andy. We all decided that it's a shame we are six hours away...but sometime, Andy and his wife and Simon and I will get together for some dinner and a laugh, we have all agreed.

But the test. Ah, the test. Andy said at least a few times every single day, "If you drive like that, you should have no problem passing."

Professionalism at the DSA, Norwich
On the appointed morning, my nerves were shot--as they had been since the horror of that first test. At the test center, Andy was positively shrink-like in his efforts to chill me out, showing me photos of another instructor's new puppy since he knows I love dogs, assuring me that either examiner I got, Michael or Harry, would be a decent human being--a nice guy, in fact, who just wanted to see if one could drive safely and not whether one would wither under jackbooted and illegal commands, a la Cornwall.

That would be a change.

Harry was a great guy. Not only was he great, but he was charming. We had a nice drive, interspersed with conversation about cars, England, his job, my job. At the end of it, when he delivered those lovely words, "I'm pleased to tell you that you have passed your practical driving test," I was so delighted that I told him he was a lovely man, which Andy--approaching the car for the debrief--overheard, and laughed about. Then Harry thanked me for an enjoyable, confident drive. Amazing!  And then Andy took my picture for the company website--I submitted, with better grace than I had shown a couple of weeks earlier when the mental, physical and spiritual erasure of the Cornwall experience began--and it appears currently on the second page of student photos. (Look by date and name; I passed the test on June 18, written 18/06/11 in British usage. You can "like" the photo if you want.)

How, one wonders, could this experience have been so different from Cornwall? In the interim, I had not driven at all, except for the days with Andy. Basically, after the backing stuff was through my skull, that was just getting the lay of the land. Norwich is a real city, lots of traffic, cross-hatched boxes, every kind of pedestrian crossing, narrow roads, country roads on the outskirts, motorways...everything. Cornwall? Not so much. Simple, by contrast.

When bureaucracy goes rogue
I finally realized, driving back home yesterday after a lovely weekend in Norwich (great shopping, and the cathedral is magnificent), that I had been verbally abused in Cornwall. I recall every instant of that examiner's remarks to me. I recall his fumbling around about the parallel park, asking me whether there was a person sitting in the target car and deciding for me that I didn't want an audience. Why not? Did he think I could possibly have parked for the previous 46 years with never a soul on the street to watch? In NYC? I recall him telling me to go straight when it was actually a left turn and all the left-turn things needed to be done, and I did them. I recall his snorts, and his lousy directions that sounded as if he wanted me to go into a car park when he really wanted me to go downtown, and his following up my ALMOST taking a wrong turn with, "Did you think I wanted to go shopping? My wife drags me shopping enough." And those were the good parts. I recall that he said nothing about my perfect emergency stop, not at his bidding as can be required at a test at examiner's discretion, but because a motorcycle shot out from between two stone walls into the roadway. I made a textbook emergency stop, and a textbook departure when the incident was at an end.

My conclusion is that the Cornwall examiner was a gormless creep, at best, and possibly too incompetent to be judging the competence of others.

Harry? A total professional, competent, looking for what one wants on the roads: safe driving, good decisions, control of the automobile according to DSA standards, knowledge of British roadways...all that sort of thing. The same things any good driving examiner on earth would be looking for, not the ability of  already tense applicants--especially foreigners--to endure waffling, imprecision, illegal requests and derision, which is what the Cornwall examiner delivered.

So...is the car a god in England? Yes, much as it is in America. There are a few false prophets around who have tarnished that god well and truly, and have meaninglessly made experienced American drivers into shuddering hulks. You doubt it? Just read the stories by Americans on the internet about their UK driving tests.

But there are also true priests serving the god of the internal combustion engine, and I am thankful I found several in Norwich.

Thanks to Andy, thanks to Bob, thanks to Peter and the rest of the Five Day staff ..and thanks to the DSA's  Harry, too. I'm proud have met all of you, and not to have been judged lacking.

New York Moments

Don't even THINK about ordering decaf in this neighborhood's cafes; it's for sissies...and they don't like sissies. (Wiki Commons photo)

I probably should save these for my long-awaited memoir.

OK, now that the first laugh is out of the way, here are a few true gems from the World's Greatest City.

@  When I was in college in Binghamton, NY, and already married, we went to Long Island to visit my parents, and then to Manhattan to visit my husband's aunt. We drove. We were broke, of course. We forgot that the bridge back to Long Island--or perhaps I should use the local patois and call it Lawn Guyland--cost 50 cents.  We pulled off the highway, scrounged around in pockets and car seats (the old bench seats, down which coins regularly disappeared) and came up with a fifty-cent combination of coins, mainly pennies. When Paul put them in the toll both attendant's hand, the guy asked us, "How long you been savin' up for dis trip?"

@  After college, I moved back to The Big Apple. The most obnoxious teller at the Bank of New York branch where I did my banking was named Mrs. Rascal. A toll-booth attendant at the Newburgh exit of the New York State Thruway was named Mrs. Bovine.

@  One day, the escalator from Columbus Circle down to the subway stop 50 feet underground was broken. Most people just took the stairs, steep ones, while a mechanic worked at the top on the escalator. One guy stopped and when the mechanic looked up from the becalmed grated moving stairway, said, "I lost a quarter down there last week. Did you find it?"

@  When I owned some "gentrification ready" rental housing in Newburgh, NY, I joined the local Landlord's Association. The president thereof told me, when I collected the rent, to stand to the side of the door, not in front of it, when I knocked. Why? "Because sometimes they shoot through it."

@  Walking up Eighth Avenue on a Wednesday, matinee day in the nearby Theatre District, on a late winter afternoon, I heard two women from Queens (one of the boroughs, NYC and yet not NYC) talking. The younger one said, "Look, Ma, dere's only buses and taxis here, no caws."

@  While having breakfast in a diner on Manhattan's West Side one morning, I overheard a couple of German tourists ordering breakfast from the Puerto Rican waitress. They asked for dark bread, soft eggs in their shells and some fresh fruit, using whatever English they had to make these requests. When the waitress yelled out the order to the kitchen, staffed by Greeks a la Saturday Night Live, she shouted, "Two eks over izzy, hull whit toast an' a slice of candle lope." Lord knows what the Germans had for breakfast; I had left before their order came.

@  Later that day, in another diner, a waiter told a patron that the special was lantalzoup.

@  One night at Larre's, for a long time an institution among pseudo-French NYC restaurants (but closed now for many years), I came back from the ladies' room to find my husband laughing quietly. While I was away, the waiter had come back to inquire about the vegetables we would like with our order. "You like piss?" he asked. Peas.

@  While trying to rent an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY, as Step One on our trek back to Manhattan from Newburgh, we went out to have coffee until the rental agent, who had called the doorman to say he would be late, arrived. I also needed a toilet.

Carroll Gardens is, to New Yorkers, well-known as a middle-class Italian neighborhood--clean, safe and family-oriented. (Only sometimes, you don't ask what they mean by Family.) It is also the location for the movie Moonstruck, despite the fact that most people, including Wikipedia, think Moonstruck was filmed in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn Heights lacks the essential element: front gardens with lots of flowers and a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It also lacks Italian families, which Carroll Gardens has in boatloads. In Moonstruck, you can see the very streets on which we ended up walking our dogs, eventually, and the front-yard shrines, just like in the movie.

Anyway...with about an hour to kill, we found a corner coffee shop and went in. I asked for the ladies room, and Burly Hulk behind the counter--gold religious medals peeking out from the pelt on his chest above his half-open silk shirt, knuckles groaning under the weight of gold and precious stones--ushered me to the back room. To the far side of the back room. Past all the adult men looking down at the cards in their hands and the piles of money on the tables. At ten in the morning on a weekday in October. Don't ask. Wouldn't be healthy.

I relieved myself behind flimsy pine panel walls, and hurried back to my husband, looking neither left nor right on that rite of passage. I didn't want to be able to identify anyone later, if asked.

My  husband drank only decaf at the time--Sanka--but astonishingly was sitting over a cup of espresso, while another tiny cup of black gold awaited me. I asked about that.

"I did order an espresso for you and Sanka for me. The guy leaned over the counter and said, "Yiz want two espressos. Sanka is for sissies."


@  And my all-time favorite: My brother, my husband and I were walking from the car park to the entrance of Smith Haven Mall, a large enclosed shopping center on eastern Long Island, or perhaps I should use the local patois, on eastern Lawn Guyland. We were following a woman with a baby stroller holding one brat and a few other kids in tow. Another lady--with oversized rollers in her hair, the better to create  a Married to the Mob hairdo--pulled her station wagon,  crammed with half a dozen bambinos, alongside.

"Where ya been?" asked the stroller mom.

"We was at da pizza parlah," replied stationwagon mom.

"Yere, I could see. Yiz got saw-ace all ovah ya face, ya little piggy."

OK. One more. Not New York...except Larry (my brother) and I are in it. So it is.

@  About 13 years ago, I was staying with Larry, his wife Donna, and daughter Caitlin for a couple of months until I found a place to live for myself and my dog. It was almost Christmas. Caitlin was in bed, but Larry, Donna and I were watching the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree on TV. One of the performers was Rosemary Clooney (yes, George's late auntie.) She was telling tales on herself, one of which was about her tremendous weight gain. (We particularly enjoyed the 96 yards of electric blue sequined dress she had on.) Clooney said, "I went to my doctor last week. He took one look, and said, 'Rosemary, what have you been doing'?"

As one, my brother and I replied, "I been eatin'."

Moral: You can take the kids out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the kids.

STD: Sexual disease? Or Save the Date...a disease in its own right

A wedding of this magnitude might rate an STD...but real royals wouldn't do anything that common! (Wiki Commons)

I am pleased to announce that from the following date onward―from June 15, 2011―any “save the date” notice that enters my house will be immediately immolated and its sender consigned to the column in my address book called “Hopelessly Crass Humans.”

The first time I got a “save the date” card regarding a wedding, I was appalled. It happened about six years ago, and to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t addressed to me, but to the man I was about to marry. Nonetheless, as I was now essentially the co-head of household, I was within my rights to deal with the thing as seemed best to me in the running of my household. I tossed it in the bin because it was so cheeky.  No, it was tacky. And crass. Mainly, it was presumptuous. Yes, that.

Still, I guess I should have figured such things were in the wings the first time I heard of a pre-engagement ring some years earlier. What the heck is THAT? When one becomes engaged, it means the man has asked the woman to marry him. (I am not dealing here with other combinations of humans agreeing to love, honor, cherish and set up house. It’s bad enough sorting out the excesses in traditional marriages in a single column; other permutations will have to wait until the oldest is out of the way.)

What, then, does a pre-engagement signify? That the man has told the woman that if she wears this semi-precious ring, later on he’ll probably get down on one knee and pop the question? Although popping, at that point, would seem the wrong image entirely. What ever happened to going steady? What about shacking up? I realize going steady has been gone since Ozzie & Harriet left the TV screens of America. But shacking up is still around, and indeed, as far as I can tell, most people who engage in pre-engagement and engagement are already quite fully engaged, so to speak.

So now there is the “save the date” card at some time before the bona fide wedding invitations go out, which is traditionally six weeks before the wedding. These days, when one’s family and friends often live a couple of plane rides away, perhaps six weeks is a bit short notice. But why not just send the invitations at, say, eight weeks? That “save the date” thing we received came in February, a week or so before our own wedding. We didn’t want too much fuss for ours―being older―so we booked a venue, ordered a cake, and sent out some hand-written invitations about three weeks before. Amazingly enough, two cousins made a long-distance trip anyway, although I was not expecting to see them. Not getting too wound up in all this does allow one some nice surprises.

That first ever "save the date" card, arriving in the dead of winter, was for a wedding in December, almost a full year hence. We didn't attend.

Is a "Save the Date" card appropriate for a Princess Bride?

What, though, is wrong with sending a “save the date” card if one is planning a big, extravagant, expensive wedding and the last thing one wants is surprises? Simple.

Sending a “save the date” card is assuming far too much. It is assuming that seeing Ms. Kerr wed Mr. Wang is the most important thing on one’s entire social calendar for the year.

And yes, it would be announced in the paper as the Wang-Kerr wedding, which might almost make it worthy of being the most important event on one’s yearly calendar.  As an aside, I always loved the wedding announcements Leno did on the Tonight Show. (Loved them more than bits about the Stupid Criminals who demanded money from banks by handing the teller an envelope with the criminal’s own return address on it.) Other favorite weddings include the Large-Beaver wedding, the Lovegrove-Butts wedding, the Phillips-Bragh wedding, the Small-Johnson wedding….

The sniggers engendered by surnames aside, there apparently is some etiquette surrounding the execrable cards.  On the iVillage website, a short article is devoted to this. The author contends the cards developed as a way to respect guests’ time and “make sure they can attend the wedding.”

Oh? I was of the opinion that attending a wedding or declining the invitation was purely a matter of personal choice, and not something for the person doing the inviting to worry about. This making-sure aspect seems to violate the age-old conventions involving issuing invitations and awaiting the positive replies of those who choose to attend―which is true for any event, not just weddings―and the regrets of those who cannot or will not attend.

In a world in which the least desire of the Princess Bride must be catered for, the making-sure aspect of  “save the date” cards doesn’t even come under the faux pas as enumerated in iVillage.

Advice from the iVillage sage

Here is, abbreviated, the iVillage sage advice:

One is advised not to send the “save the date” cards immediately upon the engagement due to vagaries in family relationships and pressures on wedding budgets.

One is advised not to send a card that’s off-color or seems to celebrate drunkenness and so on. One is advised to be tasteful. (Hasn’t that horse already left the gate if one is even thinking about sending a tacky, obnoxious, imperious card in the first place?)

The best part of it the STD card

One is advised to boldly inform recipients of the “card” when it isn’t a card at all but a fridge magnet, lest they inadvertently lay it down on a computer component and erase memory.  This was my favorite, actually―such total tackiness―until I read the next bit of advice: Senders are advised to give complete information about the wedding venue in the miserable s-t-d card because “Guests need to know how many days they'll need to take off of work.”

My answer to that would be “None.” Regardless. None.*

Finally, one is advised not to fill the envelope with confetti or sparklies as people get annoyed when they must vacuum after opening the mail. “A better enclosure is a sheet of vellum with a poem or something that can be kept - or tossed - with ease,” says the iVillage writer.

If the sender is clever, the recipient can display that poem on the fridge, held in place by the magnet with the smiling pre-nuptial faces of Tiffany and Scott.

Or, if the recipient has any sense, he or she can toss the whole lot in the bin, and spend any time off on something more enjoyable than toting a hundred bucks worth of Pilsner glasses wrapped in white and silver paper to an event where they’ll have to eat cold food, totter in high heels at the non-free open bar trying to kill the pain of the feet and the fête, and pretend to enjoy flapping their wings when Wedding Band Willie cranks up that all-time favorite, The Chicken Dance.

If you’d like to read the entire iVillage instruction article for sending “save the date” cards, click here.

*We did take a day off to attend my nephew’s out-of-town wedding. But his fiancée had not sent the tacky std cards…and they were both surprised when quite a few of us who lived far away chose, without coercion, to attend a lovely small lakeside wedding at an historic hotel in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

Bluefus' first venture outdoors

Bluefus enjoys his first al fresco breakfast in Cornwall. (SP Tiley photo)

For a while--a very long and unfortunate while--I was married to a man who had virtually no discernible sense of humor, little appreciation for the cultural aspects of life, and absolute disdain for those small ceremonies that seem to cement relationships, as large ones cement nations. Thank goodness, that's in the past.

Moving on...I am now married to a man who delights in all the little ceremonies we have, in the six short years to date of our marriage, invented. I thought it was his Britishness; my father once told me that the British are sentimental, and if I didn't want that, don't marry a Brit. (He also told me that the Irish were unreliable, despite the fact that he was half Irish and the most reliable person I've ever known...but then, he was of a generation that tended to generalize facets of a race into the entirety of that race. He can be excused for that. And he would have liked Simon.)

For his birthday, the first year we were married, I gave Simon a spitting fountain made of metal and in the shape of a dog. We named him Rufus, and put him in the gazebo, where he held sway until we moved to England. He was pretty bunged up by then, what with water splashing his little metal feet continuously for about seven hot Maryland months a year. So we buried him, up on the hill behind the house we've since sold, surrounded by the cats, one of whom--Tootsie--existed into my time and whom I loved dearly until he died of great old age.

When we bought this house in Cornwall--or not long after anyway--I saw an advert online for a metal dog sculpture, not a fountain this time, but a planter. Corny. Yes. Corny. But the animal face looked so much like Rufus, the name of our late gazebo fountain. So I ordered him, have filled his planter with lobelia, and given him a shady spot to guard beneath the hedgerow out back. Of course, his name is Rufus II.

Today, he had a visit from another non-canine dog in our house, Bluefus.

Bluefus is a coffee cozy. For a bit more than a year, since we found him in a store in Padstow, Bluefus has been keeping our morning pot of French press coffee warm. Today was the first day it was warm enough to have breakfast on the deck. We hadn't breakfasted outdoors since at least mid-September 2009, a couple of months before we moved to England. While there were days warm enough when we lived in the flat in Devon, and we had a small seating area behind our living room windows, the table was uncomfortably close to the windows of the Gorgon who lived next door, so we simply didn't do it. While I don't mind if people know about our relative nuttiness...or possibly British-style eccentricity--I didn't think she needed to hear our early morning secrets, or natterings as the case may be. So we didn't, simply didn't, use the table more than three or four times for afternoon coffee and a time or two for cocktails.

Bluefus quite liked his excursion. He is hoping for another one tomorrow, and the weather from the Met Office says he will probably get it. And possibly...just possibly...Sunday as well.

And then it appears that March will return. No matter. I'm sure Bluefus is better off for his serving of fresh air, bearing today the scent of new-mown hay from across the Tamar Valley. I suspect we all are.

Writing to sell ain't what it used to be

Could THIS be a search engine? (Wiki commons)

There can be little doubt that one of my household gods is good writing. Mine (I flatter myself), my friend and colleague Judy Carmichael’s (see her blog here), and the great authors of all times, places and styles. I have altars to those gods, myriad bookcases that overflow faster than a stopped up sink. I have prized every unique phrase I’ve ever read. And as a result, I have expanded my vocabulary if not to the point of an Oxford scholar, at least to a serviceable magnitude for all the kinds of writing I do, from journalism to junk.

SEO

And now, learning more than I ever wanted to know about keywords and SEO (search engine optimization), I have begun to understand that soon, Susie will not only be unable to read, Susie will have a vocabulary driven to drivel by the need of authors to construct their offerings around those few words and phrases the internet gatekeepers say are the ones searched for most often.

Morons, because it's a good key word...and also fits Bush

In short, if one wishes to be read, one will have to stuff one’s pages with repetitive―but not TOO repetitive―terms that the lowest common denominator of internet searchers will find. Duh. Maybe I should use that term again. Duh.  OK. So now I have at least one repetitive term that should appeal to morons and is used even by people of normal intelligence when imitating morons. And no, this is not about George Effing Bush, although I suspect he wouldn’t do well on the internet, despite his miniscule vocabulary, mainly because his vocabulary has no repetitive terms. How could it? He made most of them up, or at least, the incompletely firing synapses within his cranium made them up and his monkey mouth spit them out.

This is about making sure every page on one’s website or in one’s blog contains high visibility words, and that the same words appear enough times for a search engine spider to find them and properly catalog (not the right term; still in actual writer mode, sorry) the pages so that googlers will discover them and read them and click on the ads and enable the writer―who used to write as opposed to spending precious hours of intellectual life learning geek-crap―to earn a few measley bucks.

Journalists' tools? Not so much

OK. Journalists have been warned for years not to use the term yellow elongated fruit when banana will do. But this goes beyond repeating banana in the second and third references and avoiding the use of yellow elongated fruit. It means choosing one’s subjects according to what various “tools” will tell you are popular terms in the public’s so-called imagination at present. I actually bought such a tool. It’s called Traffic Travis, and is has a cute little cartoon of a nerd. Uh huh.  Also, one can use Google’s own tool, the Wonder Wheel…if one can only recall how to get to it from one day to the next. (As far as I can tell, you actually have to do a search, which still won’t put it onscreen. You must also open one of the websites arrayed and then, if you’re lucky and the stars are not in Jupiter or something, it will appear.)

So let’s assume that one of the best search terms for me to use would be Cornwall acommodation. Yup, misspelling and all. I mean, can I really write an article about Cornwall acommodation rather than Cornwall accommodation? How illiterate. But that’s how the peckerheads* that apparently know or think they know a word longer than hotel will search for it.

No, I can’t do it. I’ll use hotels. I’ll use lodgings. I’ll use hostelry. But I won’t use acommodation. I suppose I could try accommodation and see if search engine spiders can correct misspellings when they crawl my work. (Isn’t that, in itself, a bit creepy?) Might as well. Hotel, lodgings and hostelry are WAY under the search engine radar.

More search engine points to ponder

I must also remember to use a bunch of H1 headings; is that the same thing as a larger point size? And I must remember not to stuff my pages with the chosen words too much; apparently, spiders get full after about five helpings of each word per page and spit it out thereafter. Their keepers can even ban your site if you try to force feed the little arachnids too much. Oops. Sorry. Fifty-cent word in a two-for-a-penny world.

I really only have one question. It was going to be, “Whatever happened to librarians and recommendations of good books?” But instead, I think I’ll cut to the internet chase, and just ask, “WHY?”

* I'm not sure the journalistic debate over whether dickhead or peckerhead is the preferred term has been definitively decided. Votes?