That might not sound like such a big deal, but this particular anthology was inscribed to her by the Kansas City, Missouri branch of the American Association of University Women “For Highest Scholastic Achievement,” and given to her the day she received her diploma as valedictorian of the class of 1957.

It’s a little piece of my mother’s past that my sisters and brother would also have been very happy to receive.  It’s mine.

On the flip side of the page occupied by the University Women (whoever they were), my mom wrote out for me, in her own hand, a familiar poem featuring my name.  A sweet gesture, especially considering that she chose the name herself.

But, aside from that, who doesn’t like receiving a poem?  And who doesn’t like hearing her own name?

Since that day, I have been placing myself strategically in a chair next to the door, ready to meet all who enter.  Some perceptive folk have remarked that there is something studied about the way I jump up and greet newcomers with a kiss.

I have my reasons.

And yet, despite all my efforts and all the years that have passed, my mother remains the only person ever to present me with that poem. It’s discouraging.

But I still have the book.  A thousand pages of poems.  One in my mother’s handwriting.

Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!

We are reminded, in a recent book published by Riverhead, of a (disputed) quote by Eleanor Roosevelt:

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. The smallest minds discuss themselves.”

I became familiar with Hannibal and Me after sending a pithy letter to The Economist. My letter didn’t get printed, which is odd because it was brilliant. But Mr. Andreas Kluth, writer for The Economist, sent me an e-mail. Desperate for followers, Mr. Kluth pointed me to his Hannibal Blog. (This was Mr. Crotchety’s coming out almost four years ago.)

Loyal followers of the Hannibal Blog have waited a long time for Hannibal and Me. Recently, we have suffered the rave reviews of complete strangers. Those professionals will never love it or hate it the way We do.

Fair to my calling, I offer something shallow and negative.

I would like to see more maps in the next edition.

I dog-eared two places:

• One place was at the description of Jung’s symptoms of midlife crisis. What do I know about Jung? (you laugh) But I suddenly see a dear friend as a midlife train wreck. (It’s not Mr. Crotchety. Really.)
• The other place is the metaphorical center of gravity. I’ll be ruminating on that. You should too. There’s a whole other book. Right there.

The description of Wang Guangmei was just plain tragic. Don’t be Chinese circa 1966.

If I had not been anticipating this book, I might have put it down without finishing. Amy Tan is a badass, but introducing her at the early stages made me impatient. The first appearance of a list nearly scared me off. But, I gathered my wits, massaged myself with oil, and soldiered on. (You’ll understand after you read the book.)

I prefer a tedious read. H&M is breezy. I’m the sort who could sit in a meat locker and read The Pickwick Papers. I can spend days mining for something interesting. H&M has a nugget on every page. A lesser man could read H&M at the beach and return to the boardroom as an agile negotiator and a scholar of Roman history. No book club required. No embarrassing self-help books hiding on the Kindle.

It seems a shame to eat in minutes a feast that took days to prepare, just as it took only a few sittings to read a book that took years to publish. The good news is that Hannibal and Me offers a lifetime of sustenance.

By the way, I wrote this using only my left pinky.

Romney, grinning, threw his hands in the air: “I’m lost.”

He had good reason to grin.  Romney came off as your average guy.  Just one of us.

Huntsman sounded like a show-off.  I felt sorry for him.

At the end of my junior year, Meadville High School Student Council sent a few us (next year’s officers) to a leadership camp.  I think we got out of a day of school for it. The idea was to bring newly-elected student leaders from all over Northwestern Pennsylvania together for a day to network and, maybe, learn from each other.

I was our Student Council’s Lieutenant-Governor, second-in-command to a boy named Tim.  A smart and likeable football player with a full-on Animal House persona.  We represented Meadville that day.

Leadership training began with a break-the-ice game.  Introduce yourself: Tell us your name and an adjective that describes you.  Easy enough for the first person, but each subsequent player had to recite the blurbs about everyone who came before him.  Introductions and a test of memory, all in one amiable activity.

That was the year that I was in love with all things French (just before I fell in love with all things Russian) and because I was the only student in Advanced Placement French, I figured I could get away with stretching the truth to make myself more interesting:

“Hi, I’m Jenny and I’m bilingual.”

(I was not even remotely bilingual in French.  Not even close.  The most I can say in defense of my empty boasting is that I sounded (even then!) much better in French than Mitt Romney does.)

Next, it was my classmate Tim’s turn to introduce himself.  With a Mitt Romney grin, he said something forgettable about himself and then:

“. . . and this is Jenny, and she’s . . . what did you say you were, Jenny?  Oh, yeah, she’s bisexual.”

Remember, it’s high school.  This was a winning bit of wit and it stuck.  All the way down the line.  If it was funny the first time, it was freaking hilarious the fifteenth time.

In some happy retelling of this story, I am cosmopolitan beyond my years, and I grab the upperhand, by winking sassily at each repetition:

Yeah, that’s right, I’m Jenny, and I like boys and girls.  Got your interest?

But that is not a believable version for 1980, in the heart of Rick Santorum country, where there was nothing titillating to teenagers about lesbianism.

I was humiliated.  Flushed, on the verge of tears.  It’s the only thing I remember about that day.  The only thing I learned about leadership.

Back to last night’s debate.  A few things have changed since 1980.  Now, even Republican presidential candidates talk about the rights of homosexuals to form lasting relationships.  Nobody froths at the mouth.

Still, Huntsman’s Chinese went over about as well as my efforts to impress.  Americans still don’t like too much learning.  Or, maybe they just don’t like show-offs.  Or possibly both.

My day of leadership training (mercifully) did not end with a question about what I would rather be doing that day.  Watching football is always the right answer, but I would have flubbed that one too.

This morning at Caribou Coffee, Lance, the store manager from Walmart, bought me a cup of coffee.

I’ve never met him.

ACT II
THE GIFT OF SPECTACLE

I take a seat next to the cash register.  I can barely see faces from this spot, but I hear every reaction to unexpected Christmas generosity.

“Lance, the store manager at Walmart, is buying your coffee this morning.”

“Really?  Wow.  Thanks.”

“Lance, the store manager at Walmart, is buying your coffee this morning.”

“Who? Why would he do that?  Well, thanks.  Merry Christmas!”

“Lance, the store manager at Walmart, is buying your coffee this morning.”

“What a nice guy.  How long has he been manager over there?  Cool.”

Just ordinary words, right?  But, really, what can you say when a stranger picks up your tab?

It’s good enough.  We’re all in a holiday humor.

Act III
THE GIFT OF ASSOCIATION

No particular day.  Oberlin College mail room. Box 425.  A letter from my father.  A twenty dollar bill wrapped in a single sheet of paper: “For pizza with friends.”

No particular day fifteen years later. Salt Lake City.  A letter from my father.  A twenty dollar bill wrapped in a single sheet of paper: “For pizza with the kids.”

ACT IV
THE GIFT OF DISCONTENT

Why is he is Lance, the store manager at Walmart?

Couldn’t we leave Walmart out of this?  When Lance buys my coffee, it’s Christmas.

If Walmart buys my coffee, it’s more like customer relations.

Back to familiar melancholy.

ACT V
RESOLUTION, OR I SHOULD HAVE JUST SAID

“No.  Put your money away.  Lance, the store manager at Walmart, is buying this morning.”

“Really?  Awesome. Hey, could you ring up a handful of those caramels separately.”

“Something sweet with your coffee, huh?”

“Put them in a bag.  Give them to Lance next time he comes in.”

]]> http://sweatandsprezzatura.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/christmas-eve-morning/feed/ 24 sweatandsprezzatura http://sweatandsprezzatura.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/being-margaret-thatcher-with-one-hitch/ http://sweatandsprezzatura.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/being-margaret-thatcher-with-one-hitch/#comments Sat, 17 Dec 2011 03:47:18 +0000 jenny http://sweatandsprezzatura.wordpress.com/?p=2968 ]]>
I want to be Margaret Thatcher.  Just for a few minutes.

I want to be the head of the conservative party.  I want to be the first woman Prime Minister of Britain.  And let it happen in my fifties.  I want people to call me the Iron Lady and mean it.  I want to get tough with the Soviets and pal around with the Reagans.  I want to fight a little war in the Falklands.

I don’t have to agree with all of Mrs. Thatcher’s politics to appreciate her.  Here’s a woman who played an enormous role in public life.  Smart, accomplished, tough.

Just let me have a few short minutes as Mrs. Thatcher.  A few carefully chosen minutes:

Someone introduces me to a writer.

I recognize his name: he’s that cheeky fellow who quipped in the New Statesman, in an off-hand way, that he finds Mrs. Thatcher surprisingly sexy.

Everyone was outraged. Everyone was amused.

Pleased with himself, isn’t he?

And now here he is, picking a fight with me about Rhodesia?  I fight back, and eventually, he concedes the point with a slight bow. A bow that says: I concede, but I still know I’m right.

“Bow lower,” I say.  And he does.

“No,” I say, “much lower.”  And he does.

And I swat him on the behind with the parliamentary order paper, rolled in a cylinder behind my back.

Then, with a slight roll of the hip (or so Mr. Hitchens will have it in his version of the story), I turn and walk away.

Did I mouth the words ”Naughty boy!” over my shoulder?

It makes a nice story.  If he wants to tell it that way, why not?

That’s it. That’s all I want out of a being-Margaret-Thatcher fantasy:

A little banter with Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).

Who better than our new assistant professor?  He’s also a Jew.  Also with a dramatic European past.

So it was my husband who first presented this story to the public in 1994.  That’s why I remember it.

An administrator at a midwestern university grabs a cab with a young couple from Germany and strikes up a conversation with seeming strangers:

I asked if they knew of a small town named Bunde, thinking quietly to myself about this horrid little place where my father’s uncle Willie had been hanged in a storefront window and set afire. Why yes, they lived there! Incredible, I thought, someone from the small town where my family lived for generations.

“My family is from Bunde,” I said. “Is there by any chance a cigar factory that is still there?”

“Yes,” he exclaimed with amazement, “it is our factory!”

I’m not a terribly emotional person, but I experienced in the span of a few moments more emotions than I knew were possible to feel in so short a time. I was stunned by the coincidence, incredibly excited by the opportunity to be able to find answers to a hundred questions that clamored in my mind. I also experienced horror thinking that I was inches away from the person who inherited from his grandfather the very house and business that Hitler had taken from my grandfather.

I suffered a silent rage as I contrasted the affluence of this young couple, who I learned were on a 10-city vacation-of-a-lifetime first-class tour of the U.S., with the poverty my father inherited, and I experienced, spending my first eight years in a working class neighborhood of immigrants on the South Side of Chicago. My father died an unhappy man, never seeming to transcend the reality of his lot, always aspiring to the affluence he might have had but never did.

This young man in the taxi was friendly enough, and I reminded myself that he, too, was a post-war baby. It was not his fault that he owned my family’s factory, I reasoned charitably.

“My grandfather built that factory,” I said with a mixture of revelation and tact. “His name was Gustav Spanier. He left there in 1941.”

“I know the name! Yes, I know that he was the founder.”

He was now a sticky kind of pale, and I felt the very same way. I learned that the factory came to his family immediately after my grandfather was forced to leave it. I learned that it employs 1500 people, and is still the major employer in the region.

. . . .

As the cab arrived at the hotel, I had asked only ten or twelve of my hundred questions. I wanted to know so much more. What did he personally know of the circumstances leading to his family’s acquisition of the company? What was his grandfather’s connection to the Nazis? How did he feel about this twisted injustice?

My husband (who left Soviet Russia in the mid-1970s) understood the story.  He read it, and connected with the audience.

Later that year, we left Lincoln for the University of Utah.

The chancellor, Graham Spanier, left around the same time.  He took up the presidency at Penn State.  And he flourished in that job. Until recently.

There’s a lot of twisted injustice in the world.  Let’s try not to add to it.

Let’s reason charitably: I don’t yet know what happened on the Penn State football team or what Mr. Spanier personally knew about it.  Perhaps his affluence at football-rich Penn State (reportedly over $800,000 in annual income) was deserved and had no bearing on his relationship to the football program. 

Maybe you sense my skepticism. But, I will say that back in 1994, my husband found him to be friendly enough and rather liked him.

For now, I think of Graham Spanier, sitting on the other side of the cab. Facing the silent rage and the horror that many will feel at being inches away from…what? Something.  Anticipating the hundreds of questions we want to ask.

Turning (again) a sticky kind of pale.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Did she–Mrs. Williams (or Mrs. Carlos Williams)–read it and laugh?  As she headed back out to the grocery, did she scribble her answer in the margin?

I have spoofed
the poem
that you wrote
about plums

and which
you were probably
saving
for serious readers

Forgive me
it was beautiful
so sweet
and so cold

And I spotted it in More Intelligent Life, so it’s sure to be smart and well-written. Perfect with my chai latte at Starbucks after Zumba.

Forget about fashion, I liked the article as a piece of writing.  And one paragraph made me laugh out loud:

If the maxi dress is a practical way of enjoying a fashion fantasy, brightly coloured tights are a sign either of total self-confidence, or disturbing self-delusion. For although they channel kookiness, they demand incredibly good legs to pull off with any aplomb. The wearer is probably either a supermodel, a fantasist or a potter.

If my Zumba friends ever read my blog (and they don’t), or if anyone who reads my blog came along with me to Zumba (and you won’t), I wouldn’t now have to describe how I am transformed every day after work into a totally self-confident, disturbingly self-deluded kook with chartreuse or majenta legs.

(Kooks, by the way, do many things with no aplomb, and it disturbs them not at all. Same goes for fantasists.)

I like to write, but I think my best genre is the humble and derivative blog comment; and, here, circumstances were ripe for my favorite variety of comment: short, light and a little flirty, making a tiny bit of fun of the author, but mostly making fun of myself. So I wrote to Mr. Luke Leitch, the author (and anyone else who will read):

Here I sit, in my hot pink tights, reading, and thinking that a man who writes about women’s clothes either has total self-confidence or is disturbingly self-deluded.

I applaud the author’s kookiness and imagine that he has great legs.

I finished my chai and packed up my laptop, feeling comfortable in my kooky skin. And kooky tights.

Then, later in the day,  The New Black Woman leaves poor Mr. Leitch a scathing comment, complaining of many things, including:

…the author only had a desire to analyze women from the upper crust–rich white women–as if their sense of fashion was only worth exploring and analyzing. Were the fashion statements of poor white women, women of color, disabled, transgender and GLBTQ women worth not exploring and analyzing for your article?

If I rolled my eyes the first time I read The New Black Woman‘s comment, it was a self-conscious eye-roll.

This New Black Woman, I learn from her blog, is fed up with the degradation and subjugation that black women face. She says it’s time for a revolution. Her current post is about confronting privilege.

I compared her comment to mine; her blog to mine; and I felt confused, and then a little guilty and then just weary.  Tired, as Dylan says, of myself and all of my creations. My winking, chai-infused kookiness in pink part of ”the wall of privilege, denial and diversionary tactics” new black women lament?

So far, this weekend, my comment on Mr. Leitch’s post has 20 likes;  New Black Woman has 16.

And I don’t know how to cast my vote.

It doesn’t help that the blogosphere is brimming with posts about travel.   Everybody’s having an adventure (and documenting it).
Why, oh then why, can’t I?

So, it was a desperate decision, this last-minute trip.   I knew nothing about Malta before I went.  I didn’t even know where it was, to tell the truth.

I’m betting you don’t know where Malta is either.  Don’t be embarrassed if you have to consult a map for this post.

Now, let’s get this travelogue on the road.

My Trip to Malta
(Please don’t skip the video at the end!)

Agriculture is big in Malta.  Lots and lots of corn.  And soybeans.

But city life thrives too!

I ate lunch here!  All authentic Maltese cuisine!

And you can’t beat Malta’s manageable size. You can take it all in, even on a short visit.

But you’ll want to come back anyway.

Next summer, I think I’ll go to Genoa.

This lady holding up the line today, she shops every day.  Every day.  Maybe that is how they do it in France, but I think she’s just disorganized.  It’s ridiculous how much money (and time) she spends on groceries.  Sad.

Take today, for instance.  She’s got a whole two items in her cart: a honeydew melon and a something from the deli with no price on it.  Does she happen to know the price?

Uh, no, sorry, no she doesn’t. 

You don’t have to be sorry to me, lady, you’re not being careless with my money.  And this happens all the time.

Now, I would never have paid $7.95 for two paper-thin slices of ham, even if it is called prosciutto.  How dumb.  It’s just food.  I could get two pounds of ground beef, hamburger buns and potatoes and feed my whole family for that kind of money.  But I don’t say that to her.

Be the change you want to see in the world, right?

I make conversation with my customers.  It’s the polite thing to do.  So I ask her about the prosciutto and melon combination.  Just to be nice.  These foodies, with their fancy coffees, imported cheeses and organic produce, always turning their nose up at what the rest of us eat, she says:

You like ham and pineapple, don’t you?

You like ham and pineapple, don’t you?  That’s the line that gets a laugh at my kitchen table over a glass of wine, if this is a story about snobs in the Midwest who think about food too much.

At Hy-Vee or Brown’s County Market, I can often find a good melon.  Especially in August.  We grow them around here.

But I’ve never seen prosciutto at Brown’s before.  For a split second, I think about taking all six packages on the shelf.

Be the change you want to see in the world, right?

I’ve totally forgotten why I came to the store now.   All I’m thinking  about is my paper-thin slice of prosciutto with some melon and a glass of wine.

The cashier looks tired.  And now she’s annoyed because my prosciutto has no price tag.

– Ma’am, you wouldn’t happen know the price on this, would you?

– Uh, no, sorry, no, I don’t.

The boy who bags groceries will have to ask the manager.   I’ll have more conversation with the cashier than I expected.

– So, what is this stuff anyway?

– It’s a kind of ham.  Sort of.

– Yeah?  Is it any good?

– It’s delicious.  Especially with melon.

– Seriously? With melon?

– Sure, you like ham and pineapple, don’t you?

The grocery bagger hollers: SEVEN DOLLARS AND NINETY-FIVE CENTS.

– $7.95?   That’s not much ham for $7.95.  You sure you still want it?  I can put it back on the shelf for you.

– No, no I’ll take it.  It sounds expensive, I know, but you only need a little bit of it.

– Really, it’s that filling?  It plumps up when you cook it, I guess, huh?

It plumps up when you cook it.  That’s the line that gets a laugh at my kitchen table over a glass of wine, if this is a story about provincial Midwesterners who don’t know what prosciutto is.

Anna and I walk past a cemetery on the way to preschool.  She looks at the markers, beaming:

“Mama, we don’t have any dead people in our family.”

That’s right, dear: no teenage mothers, no drug addicts and no dead people.   That’s the kind of folk you come from.

Can you blame her for feeling lucky, maybe even a little smug?

We have a few crazies, and a couple more rich uncles would be nice, but at least we don’t produce dead people.  Count it among our immutable characteristics: Medium-sized, middle class, educated family of live people.

That’s one of our beloved family stories starring my daughter.  And it sums up her outlook.

I am her mother: Brown hair, hazel eyes, fair complexion, reasonably intelligent, young.

I am sitting at the bar by myself, waiting for the DJ to start the music.  I’ve got to have a break before I hear another person tell me that I haven’t changed a bit.  And I need a drink before I hear (again!) my ecstatic: “Neither have you!”

Just let the music begin.

Jeff comes over and sits down next to me.  He starts to talk.  I remember him immediately.  We never had a class together, but our parents were friends.

He talks and talks and talks.  Just as I remember him. It’s a torrent of whatever is running through his mind, I guess.

I try to pay attention, but it’s a struggle: his intonation doesn’t change much.  I ask a question from time to time to register participation.

I catch his eye, just for a second:

I haven’t seen you in 30 years, I say.

Jeff says, “I remember John Cunningham from school.  John Cunningham went to school with me.  But I haven’t seen him…”

There’s more about John Cunningham, but I’m checking out fast.

I try this: It’s nice to see everybody after so many years, isn’t it?

“I remember John Cunningham.  He was in school with me…”

I start to plan my escape.

I throw this out, partly as a good exit line: You know what, Jeff, when the music begins, we should dance.

Then the world stopped.  John Cunningham vanished.  Jeff looks at me.

He looks at me:

“I would like to dance with you.”

And I look at him.  And I believe him.

Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day

Recipe for Discontent Khabarovsk  Or Anyplace
sweat and sprezzatura

One distractible reader with wanderlust
with one letter missing a vertical line,
making one oh! instead of ah!

One not necessarily very beautiful woman now dreaming
of going to Khabarovsk or Khaborovsk or Anyplace

One fine day.

A fiction.  Not the actual Mr. Kanasawa’s words.

In a parallel universe, Satoshi Kanasawa gives this exclusive interview to our very own Sweat and Sprezzatura correspondent about his recent blog post:

“Why are Asian Men Less Physically Attractive than Other Men?”

sweat and sprezzatura asks:

Mr. Kanazawa, tell us about your process in researching and writing this post?

SK responds:

I was interested in exploring racial differences and the relationship between race and physical attractiveness.

My first impulse was to court controversy by focusing my findings on black women.  Black and women: It’s a winning combination.

Scientific findings of black inferiority have the air of daring in the politically-correct West. But, really, it’s just good business. Both sides of the culture war mobilize, and that means buzz!  Eventually, the buzz subsides, and both sides go home even more entrenched, but my name is on everybody’s lips.

As for women, I know what I’m doing when I talk about women.  Women have beauty, and beauty is power.  And men, at their most vulnerable, resent the power of female beauty.  I successfully harnessed that resentment in a blog post called “Are All Women Essentially Prostitutes?”

Great title, huh?  And, by the way, they are all whores.

And so are popular writers.

For this post, I intended to advance the thesis that black women are less attractive than other women.  Our male frustration at female beauty, and its inaccessibility, is assuaged by reminding women that some of them are dogs.  It’s a reassertion of power.  That’s the marketable concept.

sweat and sprezzatura:

And, yet, Mr. Kanazawa, that’s not the post you wrote.  Why?

SK :

I remembered David Chappelle’s Black White Supremacist, and how Chappelle used humor, even a self-deprecating humor, not to exploit prevailing controversies swirling around race, but to force people to think about race and racism.  It’s funny, unexpected, perverse and effective.  And I thought I could do the same, if I turned my own theory against myself.

Everybody likes an Asian girl, as t-shirts proclaim.  But on the hierarchy of sexy, Asian men rank fairly low.   I point out that Asian men have less hair than men of other races.  I throw in the cringe-worthy assertion made by Psychology Today that Asian men have sex less frequently than men of other races.  Asian men, I conclude, have less testosterone than other men.

Men with lower levels of testosterone have less masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. The race differences in the level of testosterone can therefore potentially explain why Asian men are less physically attractive.

And the sad truth is that I don’t stand a chance with Beyoncé.

Mr. Kanazawa, that’s the blog post you could have written.  It would have made your point with humor and elegance.  Beautifully, really.

Beauty: we yearn for it.  In women. And in writing.

Imagined by a woman with enough testosterone to enjoy competing in the arena of taking A Look at the Hard Truths About Human Nature.

Maybe.

I like the William Carlos Williams explanation of xanthopsia.

A Love Song

What have I to say to you
When we shall meet?
Yet—
I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,

It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

_____________________________________________________________

Added as a postscript, on the fine recommendation of Dafna, who kindly reads:

If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good
blog needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes;
and good blogs prove the better by the help of good epilogues.

What a case am I in, then, that am neither a good epilogue nor
cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good blog! I am not
furnished like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become me: my
way is to conjure you; and I’ll begin with the women:

I charge you, O women,
for the love you bear to men,
to like as much of this blog as please you.

And I charge you, O men,
for the love you bear to women;
–as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them,–
that between you and the women the blog may please.

If I were a woman,
I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me,
complexions that liked me,
and breaths that I defied not;
and, I am sure,
as many as have good beards,
or good faces,
or sweet breaths,
will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy,
bid me farewell.

OK, it’s not necessarily my last post ever, but I am taking a break, and I can’t resist posing (briefly) as Rosalind on the way out the door. Humor me.

Thanks for reading and commenting. Perhaps something along the way was as you like it.

That’s how it looked in September of 1998, when my children, then 5 and 7, chased seagulls and ate ice cream cones in the shadow of the Christchurch Cathedral.

One afternoon, we came downtown with a bag of cut-out squares and triangles and circles. And against their will, my children gave in to my hopeful lesson in architecture and geometry.

Lots of red and gray construction paper blew away with the wind, but we built a cathedral.

And, now, on Thomas Stasyk’s blog, I read about the earthquake that rocked Christchurch earlier this week, leaving the cathedral in a rubble, as if we had forgotten to paste geometric shapes securely to the page.

While we were in Zealand, we took a trip up the coast to Kaikoura for the world’s best whale-watching expedition ever. Whales: even mightier than a cathedral.

Here is that day, exuberantly memorialized by my son.

Let me get back to Thomas Stasyk’s post “Something to Think About” for a moment.

Tom refers to a theory linking beached whales with earthquakes. Evidently, there were large whale beachings in New Zealand in early February, with more than 80 whales stranded on shore.

Why would we think we can master Nature?

Even if you’re not Jewish, you probably know that the Passover Seder is a ritual retelling (and reliving) of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

All good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, and so does this one:

• Israel arrives in Egypt
• Israel is enslaved by Egypt, and
• (finally! triumphantly!) with a little divine help, Israel is freed from tyranny.

More prayers.  A few more songs.

But, the narrative part of the Seder ends on that ecstatic note.

Sort of like that moment in The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman bangs on the window of the church, Katharine Ross turns from the altar, and the two of them make a run for it, the Egyptians trapped in the Red Sea, crucifix barring the doors.

But, the story of a free Israel didn’t really end that way.

And I’m not talking about the whole catastrophe of modern Jewish history.  I mean the Exodus itself didn’t end with that moment.  It wasn’t all milk and honey right away.

Problem is,  even the wimpiest seder is long enough as it is.

Who has the strength to talk about forty years in the wilderness? We can either have dinner, finally, or keep talking.  Tales about cranky, rebellious, ungrateful Israelites and that nasty incident with the golden calf would just bring everybody down.   Nobody wants to remember that Moses “saw the people were out of control…so that they were a menace to any who might oppose them.”

So, this night is different from all other nights, in part, because we let ourselves graduate from bondage without the postscript; we skip that after-the-mad-dash-to-freedom scene on the bus, when the young couple looks scared and confused and uncomfortable as they enter the world of their choices.

To be fair to our traditions, we do extrapolate a good deal from our literal Pharoah to the infinite varieties of oppression in the world today.

The invocation to our Seder ends with these words:

We are reminded this night that we cannot truly be free as long as others are enslaved.  The message our Haggadah proclaims is a song of universal freedom.

It’s obvious how we must extrapolate this year.  So I’m thinking about it.

Today, I asked my son: “Now that Egyptians have fled their metaphorical Egypt, where do you suppose they’ll go?”

In other words: Yes, but is it good for the Jews?

“Mother, if you are suggesting anything but rejoicing at Mubarak’s resignation, you’re just a hypocrite.”

This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt.

Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat.

    

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
     have seen your cars stranded on Lake Shore Drive
     helpless against the winds of Lake Michigan.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
     is true I have seen backs bent under the weight of a shovel
     laden with wet snow.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
     faces of women and children I have seen frost-bitten noses
     and chapped lips.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
     sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
     and say to them:
Come and show me another city with 700 billion pounds
     of accumulation in twenty-four hours.
Flinging snow into the Chicago River and piling it high
     as skyscrapers, here is an awesome Yeti set vivid against the
     tepid soft cities;

Fierce as a snowthunder, at once clamorous and silent, cunning
     as a flurry pitted against the month of May,
          Bareheaded,
          Shoveling,
          Scraping,
          Plowing,
          Freezing, thawing, refreezing,
Under the snow, frost all over his mouth, laughing with
     white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of multiple layers laughing as
   a midwestern Winter laughs,
Laughing even as a naïve Southerner who has
     never seen our Snowpocalypse, our Snowmageddon,
Bragging and laughing that under his wool sweater is the pulse,
     and under his thermal undershirt the heart of the people,
               Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, raspy, brawling laughter of
     Winter, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Butt
     Freezer, Slush Maker, Stacker of Snow, Player with
     Wind chills and the Ice Box to the Nation.

Liberal! I know that’s bad.

As a typical woman, I shrink under criticism.

However, I recovered from hurty feelings by recalling this Israeli joke:

A young woman asks her rabbi for advice:

— Rabbi, is it a sin to keep a secret from my fiancé? You see, back in Romania, I was a prostitute. If I tell him, I’m afraid he won’t want to marry me.

– Well, my dear, the Good Book says we must tell the truth, but it doesn’t say we have to tell the whole truth. Tell him that you were a prostitute…

…but don’t tell him you’re from Romania!

I cop to liberal, but I’ve never even been to Romania. Niciodată!

(Romania, for the literal-minded, represents “typical” here.)

When I think about senseless, inexplicable violence, I remember the character created so brilliantly by Peter Stormare in the Coen brothers’ Fargo. The flat affect. The vacant eyes. The silence. 

Remember, Proudfoot did not vouch for him.

And now Mrs. Lundegaard is dead. And those three people in Brainerd.

Look, this guy is just plain nuts. How else can you explain that wood chipper?

This is absolutely not what Jerry Lundegaard intended.

Certainly, Wade Gustafson, Jean Lundegaard’s father, is not to blame. Though I can’t shake the feeling that he contributed somehow to this mess.

And he’s not the only one. There is so much that is cold and desolate in the landscape of Fargo.

And now, with Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, we bring in our own mysterious perpetrator.

We look at him through the rearview mirror, and wonder what it was all for.

Stormare is extraordinary in that scene, and, for a moment, I imagine a flicker of understanding in his expression. And I feel sorry for him.

And here you are, Jared.

And it’s a beautiful day.

I just don’t understand it.

The whole way there, I kept thinking about what I would say if she had gotten fat and old. Of course, I would tell her that she looked great.

I learned long ago, through hard experience, that no matter what, you always tell a woman that she looks great. When I saw her, standing there at the entrance of the Pekin hotel, I couldn’t believe how good she looked. How had she maintained her figure all these years? After two kids. Molodyets, I thought. I didn’t even have to lie.

After Berkeley, I got married and had kids, she said, “because that’s what one does.” In addition to raising a family, she had also gone to law school, practiced law, learned and taught Hebrew.

Molodyets, I thought again.

We talked about old times, about Russia, about what had become of so and so. Just like old times, we still picked up on the same things and found the same things funny. And she still had the same thought-provoking ability to articulate things that I felt but hadn’t quite been able to figure out.

“You know, all of Shakespeare’s comedies have a dark side,” she said. I suddenly remembered being depressed after seeing a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, as I thought about how often it seems that there is a demon that makes us fall for the wrong people and how many are condemned to unrequited love.

At some point, there came the question I was dreading: “So. You never got married?”

How did she know that, I wondered.

Moscow is a good place to be a single man, I said. She rolled her eyes with disdain. It was embarrassing.

She had gotten married and raised two kids, one of whom was already studying theater in Moscow. I was still at the social maturity level of a college sophomore. Even worse, I have to live in a country where the women all complain that the local men are drunk, lazy and unfaithful because I had never had much success getting women in the U.S. to go out with me.  [Sw&Sp editors recommend the Russian verb  прибедняться, as the key to understanding this last sentiment.]

But despite the eye-roll, she didn’t really seem to care.

As I walked home, I thought about how great it had been to see her. It would be a shame to let another twenty years pass. I was sure that she felt the same way.

A few weeks later, on Christmas eve, she sent me a blog entry about our meeting entitled “What Matters Most.” I expected a touching story about the importance of old friendships. To my horror, she had presented the evening as a contest in one-upsmanship with me apparently trying to top every one of her achievements.

But as I thought about it, I realized that I had misunderstood and that she was writing about herself and her own insecurities and about how meetings with old friends always force us to be introspective and to take stock.

I started thinking about the evening again, and what I had been insecure about, and decided to write about it from my perspective. This is the result. She had done it again – as I said, she still had the same ability to make me think. And for that I am grateful. 

An (actually) touching story about the importance of old friendships.  In no way earned by my blogging shenanigans.

These mortals…Lord…

I did not imagine that the combination of the word sweat from my blog’s title and the phrase naked woman from the Thurber post would attract so many unsuspecting and unlikely (many of them spelling-impaired) visitors to my site.

Daily, I let them down.  

This calls for an apology:

I know you must be disappointed, dear,
Who googled woman naked in a sweat,
at 2 AM, alone with half-drunk beer,
to find that Mr. Thurber’s all you get.
Small recompense for clicking on this link:
One lame cartoon, with enigmatic text;
No steamy photographs? You surely think:
“Dude, sprezzatura, doesn’t that mean sex?”
But, gentle would-be reader, hear my sighs:
You come, you go, (you read?) unmoved, unheard;
Not one among you heeds my bootless cries;
No comments, no subscriptions, not a word.
Though I with perspiration readers earn,
My nakked, necked, nekkit soul you spurn.

In Moscow.  In front of the Peking Hotel, a hulking reminder of the days when Russia and China were friends, but competitors.

So far from a student apartment on Telegraph Avenue with bookcases made of cinder blocks and plywood.

He’s in an expensive, navy blue, wool overcoat; but I wore snazzy two-tone pumps.

Round One

Oh my god, you look exactly the same!

Oh my god, so do you!

Round Two

So, what, you live in Moscow now?

Yeah, four years already.

Wow, that’s awesome. Chicago’s a great city, too.  It really is.

Round Three

OK, so what became of you after Berkeley?

I went to law school.

Really? Me too!

Round Four

Yeah, I went to Harvard.  Classmates with Barack Obama.  Hahaha.  How bout you?  Where did you get your law degree?

Oh, well, y’know, I knew I was going to practice poverty law, so it didn’t make any sense to look at expensive schools.  Legal aid work: it doesn’t pay anything and I don’t get to live in Moscow, but I feel good about what I’m doing.  Helping people.

Yeah, that’s god’s work.

Yeah.

Round Five

And, you’re married, right?

Twenty years now.  What about you?  You never got married?

No, never did.  There are lots of beautiful women in Moscow.

Right. That’s very true.

Round Six

You know, I’m never moving back to the U.S.  It’s so boring.

I have two children.

Round Seven

So, I’ve seen a lot of theater since I got here.  Last night I saw the visiting production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theater.

Sure. I saw it on Friday!

Round Eight

I’ve been keeping a blog for a few months now.  Trying to write a little bit about this Russia obsession we have.

Really?  Interesting.  I’m thinking of writing a book about Khodorkovsky.

Round Nine

This is it.  I’ve been saving my strength.

I lean in close, and almost in a whisper, I say: I’m amazed that museums in Russia are still charging foreigners higher entrance fees, but (can you believe it?) I guess my Russian is still OK, because I haven’t been charged the foreigner’s rate once since I got here.

Friday night, he says, I was at the theater.  It was packed.  At curtain call I bolted for the coat check. I think I knocked a couple of people down along the way.  The babushka checking coats said to me: At first, judging by your clothes, I thought you were a foreigner, but then you behaved so rudely, that I decided you were one of ours.

I slink back to my corner.

At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

According to a paper co-written by Jan Souman, a research scientist in Germany, and featured on NPR,

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

people, when blindfolded,  

And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.

cannot walk in a straight line; 

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.

We naturally walk in circles;

And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.

around and back again,

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

ending up where we started:

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

This is the War Gallery of 1812 in the Winter Palace, now part of the Hermitage Museum in Sankt-Peterburg.

Here’s the story:

Alexander I commissioned portraits of some three hundred military heroes who achieved the rank of general in the Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon.

English artist George Dawe, with a couple of Russian assistants, completed portraits of all but thirteen, who (I have been told) died before any likeness of them had been preserved. For each of the thirteen faceless generals hangs a canvas covered with green silk, framed, and bearing the general’s name.

The whole of Russia knew the names of those whose portraits were placed in the War Gallery of 1812.

One could write a heroic ode to each of them.

So says the Hermitage website.

Now, if you’ve ever gone to a Russian museum, you know that a Russian babushka (an old–frequently, very old–woman) militantly guards each exhibit.

I dare you to put your dirty boots on that velvet-covered bench. Or sneak a picture with a flash. Ha! Or forget to check your coat at the garderob, god forbid.

That is nekul’turno. And babushkas will tell you about it.  Forcefully. The whole of Russia knows that they are in charge.

I swear, one could write a heroic ode to each of them.

More than twenty years have passed since my first visit to the Hermitage, and the babushka brigade is unchanged. Still wrinkled, stern, frumpy, and often barrel-shaped.

Except that the brigade has totally changed.

My Hermitage babushkas have long since retired; most, I suspect, are dead.

They were the Greatest Generation of babushkas.

Forget the Patriotic War of 1812, our 1980s babushkas had lived through the Great Patriotic War, the one we call (prosaically and impersonally) World War II.

They had survived the blockade of their city. For nearly three years, Leningrad was under siege.  No public transportation.  Often, no heat, no water, no electricity.  Mass starvation. Rumors of cannibalism.  Countless deaths.

Real war heroes.

I’m sorry to say that the babushka pictured above is more recent, part of a terrific photography project called The Guardians of Russian Art Museums. I love what the photographer has done.

But, he was too late to capture the likenesses of the women I try to remember.

I am invited to observe class on a November morning, still a little jet-lagged from yesterday’s more-than-trans-Atlantic flight.

I listen to my Anna sing a Turgenev poem called On the Road, set to music, and now more widely known as Misty Morning. A classic. One of those Russian romances about the inescapable, irretrievable past.

In the 1980s, at Leningrad State University, we sang it, too, usually around the table, with exaggerated pathos, after a couple of shots of vodka:

Misty morning, grey morning,
Sorrowful fields covered with snow;
Unwittingly, you recall times past,
faces, forgotten long ago.

You recall effusive, passionate words,
glances so eagerly, so timidly espied;
First meetings, last meetings;
the beloved strains of a quiet voice.

You remember parting with a strange smile;
You remember so much: so distant, so dear,
listening to the relentless murmur of wheels,
gazing, lost in thought, at the broad sky.

I know that Anna came to Moscow to study acting. She knows that I sent her to Moscow to learn Russian.

So, after class, we put on our coats, scarves and mittens, and head up Tverskaya (in my day called Gorkovskaya) Street, taking the words of the song apart: why the instrumental case in this phrase, the proper pronunciation of that unstressed o, and, finally, a bit about how (I think) this simple poem works.

Look here, Anna. Two things I like:

Turgenev, the poet, is remembering his past: faces, glances, words. But all of the verbs are in the second person. And (though this is lost in the translation), in Russian, the verbs are all in the future tense. Whose past are we talking about here?

This will happen to you, too.

And, notice that by the end of the poem, the past and present have intertwined: Did you smile strangely at the time of parting or do you smile strangely now recalling it?

That’s the way it feels to be back there and here at the same time.

Endless cars rush by us on Tverskaya/Gorkovskaya, as always. We talk over the din.

The foot traffic is pretty scary, too. Walking here demands your full attention.

Eyes straight ahead, no gazing at the sky.

Even if I write very few, I guess.

He tells me that on-line readers pay attention to the first few sentences, and then they skim the rest of the post.

OK, then.

I’ve written you a post
A beautiful routine.
(I hope you like it.)

My technique can’t be wrong
I learned it from the screen.
(I hope you like it.)

I studied all the themes that all the bloggers ply;
Then just for you I give this text a try:

Blah, blah, blah, can’t stand,
Blah, blah, blah at all.
Blah, blah, blah, blah Rand,
Blan, blah, blah, blah Paul.

Tra la la la,
Tra la la la la
Sarah’s here to stay:
Tra la la la,
Tra la la la la,
Cure you of ‘the gay’.

Blah, blah, blah Glenn Beck,
Blah, blah, blah blah Bill:
Blah, blah, blah, blah dreck
Blah, blah, baby drill.

Tra la la la,
Tra la la la la
Tea Party blues,
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah
All on Fox News.

My own (garage band) version soon to come.

Last Tuesday night, the times were a changin’.

Still, it felt perverse, even a little cruel, for my iPod to shuffle to Bob Dylan as the election results came in.

There is a battle outside.
And it is ragin’.

What does it matter that I don’t like what’s shaking my windows
and rattling my walls?

I have to admit that if the Tea Party had a mind to break into Bob Dylan, it might have found a legitimate anthem (and, in the same breath, seriously tweaked liberal sensibilities) by joining hands around the campfire, kicking off Birkenstocks, and calling to its supporters to

come gather round people, wherever you roam.

I don’t think that happened. But, thematically, it fit.

Actually, I wish the Tea Party would co-opt Bob Dylan to commemorate their success in the mid-term elections.

There’s more to Dylan’s song than a message of social and political inevitability:

Bob Dylan found inspiration for his music in the collaborative work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, especially The Threepenny Opera, or the Beggar’s Opera.

That’s the musical about what to expect from the abandoned, the destitute.  

When I think about cuts to unemployment benefits, food stamps or medical care, I always remember the second act finale of Threepenny:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position,
Then start your preaching: That’s where it begins.
…

So first make sure that those who now are starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving.

I hope that our newly-elected politicians will keep that in mind for the next two years.

After that, who knows?

For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.