Funny, Not Funny

“I’ve had this duck since before I was born,” asserted my seven-year-old neighbor as she sat on her swing yesterday evening. Wow, okay, my mind stumbled back through the history of my current possessions. 

“I have a desk I’ve had since I was 12.” 

Fortunately I didn’t have my glasses on to see the look on her face. Her tone was enough. “That’s not from before you were born.”

Duly noted, thank you, future lawyer.

Perhaps that duck will be a family heirloom into the next century. Perhaps my desk will as well. Who knows.

What I do know is I have a lot of stuff in this house, stuff that at some point will have to be dealt with as in want it or don’t want it. Can give it away, can’t give it away. Pity my family if they have to bend shoulders to the task.

Maybe, if the timing works out, a niece’s child will want my garden tools because they are needed for a first yard—with a house, too, I suppose.

Maybe some will need to fill bare walls with prints and the collection of boat photos I have will work nicely.

Maybe some of the dishes will help a college student or a newlywed. Maybe they can go to Habitat for Humanity.

The heirloom cane back sofa that is more than a century old, somebody has to want that piece, right?

And the memorabilia, a beer stein from Germany, handmade pottery from family and friends, paintings, a collection of model clay soldiers from China, racing trophies—no, probably not the trophies. Anyone, anyone?

The recent surge to purge as part of the cultural zeitgeist makes me laugh. Take a look at the number of storage facilities coming to an area very near you. Not that there aren’t good reasons for renting one. But.

To believe we are not awash in a rising tide of stuff is for blinkered deniers. And consider the push to market the merch to the rest of the world. You think we have stuff here in the US, wait until 7 billion have the same amount of stuff.

Consider this cartoon from The New Yorker.

Funny, not funny.

Purge? Sure, that I will leave for my family when I am mortuus in lutum, feeding the garden.

Now, about the books. I’m am sure there will be quite the scramble for the 1640-page The Oxford Classical Dictionary.

Not funny.

Notre Dame, 1980

For me to use the phrase my Paris is absurd. I have not lived there, and so have not worked there, have not schooled there, have not loved there, have not faced the daily aggravations great or small that may come to be a part of living anywhere.

But.

If one measures time in a locale by sleeps, then as it turned out, I spent more of my life so far in Paris and its environs than Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, or New York. Even New Orleans. My first visit in 1980 was with a friend from LSU. 

Paris was an idea formed in my imagination in the decade before I set foot in the city. Because I was 27 that first morning rather than 17, I had expanded my expectations much further than my American-centric high school reading list prompted. Paris for me was created by Balzac, Stendahl, Rabelais, Proust, Rostand, Zola, and Hugo. By Sartre and Camus. And, not too surprisingly, so very much by Hemingway. 

My first destination in Paris early on a Saturday morning was Notre Dame. My friend was at an appointment to finalize paperwork for a teaching position in Toulouse. I was on my own for a bit.

Cool and humid, the sky gray, the morning was so very quiet. After taking a few pictures, I walked up to the cathedral’s entrance. I would be the first tourist admitted that morning, and no one would be tailing along.

For a moment, think of that possibility if you have some iconic place you long imagined—alone one morning on the Golden Gate Bridge or at the north rim of the Grand Canyon or the lookout from the Empire State Building.

Let me skip ahead to a small detail. The history of the cathedral is well documented, the church’s magnificent interior both meets and betters all expectations. For me, a living history was in worn stone steps leading up the left tower, connecting me to the parade of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who preceded me and would follow me.

Reaching the walkway connecting the towers, I stepped out as if into the sky. Below me Paris, the Paris I imagined. The muted colors of the buildings, the many chimney pots, the Paris of Balzac and Hugo.

In 1980, scaffolding was also in place. A workman perched just below me, and when we made eye contact, he and I nodded to one another. Perhaps he was too bleary-eyed to see how I saw his city or too jaundiced to care what the look on my face registered.

Yet—what I saw that early morning, from the height of Notre Dame was a personal Paris, the Paris of my dreams.

And now the fire of 2019. Some weep, some cheer, and many may be indifferent. Notre Dame still stands, for me, part of the personal lore that makes life worth living.

A Stirring Tale

My father’s people came from what was known as hill country long before political boundaries were established here. My mother’s clan lived along the eastern bank of the river and were part of the dozen or so families to first settle that area.

Of course, as part of tribal tradition, my father for his part stirred with his left hand and held the skillet handle with the right. Frying catfish, making French toast on Sunday nights, searing a steak before setting it on the grill—stir with the left, handle in the right.

So when he decided to walk the fifty miles and ford the river, he brought his ways. And when my mother against the wishes of her family and her neighbors decided to marry this outsider, she brought her tradition into the mix.

My mother stirred with the right and the left gripped the handle. Making a chicken-vegetable stir fry, or a roux, or braising beef tips. Stir with the right.

To their credit (or so I think), our parents allowed us—their five children—to decide which hand would handle the chore of stirring. But it wasn’t easy. Back then, long before phrases like inalienable rights came into our vocabularies, folks were more than touchy about such essential issues. Our barn was burned down three times, and I never met my father’s family until I made the trek when I was in my mid-50s.

Now, as we are enlightened, the law of the land allows either hand for stirring, and no serious challenge to this legal precedent has arisen in a dozen years. Perhaps my parents would feel vindicated. RIP, Mom and Dad.

Semper libero!

Comments

tastytastebuds: Stop! You’re making me hungry!

masonmcwhorl: Go back to you own damn country!

historyhound; The founding fathers through their brilliant dialogues anticipated the ever-changing environment that would be created by such an amalgam of tribal traditions.

pollyforpeace: CARNIVORES are DESTROYING our ENVIRONMENT!!!!!!!

gerta47: Your why are homeland is a cesspool nation.

saintx: Justice for Left-handers!

ghaws: Beautiful!

littlebiddy: @masonmcwhorl No, you leave!

gardendelights: Recipe for stir-fry?

william86: Explains why kids are so screwed up these days and getting worse.

masonmcwhorl: @littlebiddy No, you leave!

acamustoo: Life is the sum of all your choices.

Citizen K

Along with around 87% of my current fellow US citizens, I was born here in this country. And so when I just a wee, wee lad—as for cherubic, I have some doubt (as many others do surely)—the rights and laws of this nation I duly inherited. I say inherited in the sense that I have not written a law, passed a law, or for that matter voted for a law.

No, I have gone about my life’s business as one of many, paying taxes, obeying said laws, keeping my property reasonably tidy. Perhaps some fellow citizens would want me to do more, although I can’t imagine anything of such magnitude that they would be harping at me about it. Some think my role-playing just fine, and the vast majority never give my performance as citizen a second thought—heck, never a first thought most likely.

My take on being born a US citizen is premised on an obvious point: The moment of my birth was also a moment of birth for hundreds of others around the globe, each a citizen of where brought into this world. I surely must have a Chilean “cousin”, a Cambodian “cousin”, and a Canadian “cousin” along with the rest of an international lineup born August 11^th, 1953.

I wonder if any of these birthdate cousins migrated here and became fellow US citizens. Odds to the affirmative must be reasonably good, I think.

I am here, historically speaking, via some ancestors who arrived well before the birth of the US in 1790 with the ratifying of the Constitution. However, the ratification happened only after Rhode Island first rejected the document by popular vote, and then, by way of a constitutional convention, caved by a margin of two votes under threat of being identified as a foreign country otherwise.

I skip past the Declaration in 1776 because anyone can declare pretty much anything about anything. Let me see, then, what results.

The Rhode Island example is instructive. The popular vote regarding the Constitution, an example of democracy in action. The convention delegates’ vote, a republican act—overturning the popular vote in this instance.

The Constitution is the elemental homeland document conceived in a very particular time and place, coming on 230 years ago in Philadelphia. But what interests me as we bat and batter the document about is population.

According to the first census in 1790, 3,893,635 was the count. Now, estimates have us 84 times larger. Think of a town of 1000, for example, now a small city of 84,000. 

Or think of Virginia in 1790, the most populous state then by more than 12 times tiny Delaware. Now consider California today with 69 times more folks than Wyoming.

Right there, then, begin your mulling over the Electoral College. Of course, without taking account of the state where you now reside. Of course.

Maybe—most likely—my yard could be, should be tidier.

To the Sea

I have returned to take in the sea,

to listen, to have a look.

Tide just beginning to turn,

I am only steps away from the dunes.

And, yes, the morning air smells of the sea.

I have sailed these waters. I turn my head

a few degrees south. I feel the breeze

across both ears,

and so, right on the nose.

A bus arrives. Long-distance travelers, they

file along the sandy path between sea oats

and scattered patches of beach amaranth.

A wintry geography escaped,

they have landed here,

all ooo’s and aaa’s, these good folks

from Cedar Rapids and Waterloo.

They shade their eyes from the low sun.

Such an expanse of water, they have not seen.

I want them to hold their arms

out wide as if to embrace water and sky.

I want them to close their eyes

and to inhale deep, deep—

then, something

more to be carried home—

ever in them, this sea. 

Breaking Leaf

Perhaps my use of the word amazement is too easily triggered. In the sense of wonder I mean. And ‘tis the season for me daily to shake my head—spring, you know.

Despite decades of planting trees and shrubs and flowers, I am amazed at what returns from winter-induced dormancy. Despite a lifetime of seeing the process over and over and over again beyond the limits of my yard, I marvel at the sights.

Recently I made the drive from home to the Charleston area, and the flowering redbuds and dogwood along the way, those untended by human hands, out in the woods, startle me. Yet, I have seen this process along this road—oh, I don’t know—hundreds of times?

The paradox for me is that I am well aware of the biological drive in these living things to survive, but I have no expectation of the annual greening, the flowering, this reawakening.

Look to the woods, no humans pruning or mulching, but a thriving community of trees and plants and wildlife. I get that. And still I am struck by this springing forth.

As a matter of course, I walk my yard and check on what I have planted, waiting for the first sign of leaf or blossom. The nodes swell, another day goes by, another week, and then, finally—yes! The tiniest bit of color, the beginning of an unfurling. Amazing.

This year my daily checklist includes keeping careful tabs on the first apple blossom in my little orchard, the cuttings I have potted, and a Japanese maple I transplanted in mid-February. I put the tree in the ground in Ladson, SC 5 years ago, and now here it is after a 3-hour drive to the NW.

Of course, the root system was deeply developed, and I had my doubts about this uprooting, which I would have anyway.  Weeks, nothing. Then some swelling. And two days ago, voila!

Okay, a small thing, perhaps, so go with awe, an even smaller word. Surely, the daffodils are enough to astound. The first signs of the perennial sunflowers I planted by seed last year? Get out!