The links page is finally up.
*Actual quote from my father.
Monthly Archives: June 2002
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts” (1940)
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Peter Breughel, the Elder (1525-1569)
Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
We were at the park this afternoon
just swinging around and having a mellow eleven-and-a-half-month-old time, when about fifty ten-year-olds on some sort of day camp trip invaded our scene and started playing tag. Fifty people playing tag! Pandemonium! The Nut sat on my lap and clung to me. All these kids were screaming their guts out for twenty minutes or so before the head supervisor blew a whistle and started herding them toward their buses. One of the sub-supervisors was wandering around looking like Ron Jeremy and he came up to me.
Ron Jeremy: “I seem to have lost some of my children.”Me: “Well, don’t look at me, I don’t have them.”
R.J., considering my tits (and believe me, they looked a lot better before I gave them over to nine months of breastfeeding): “That’s okay, I didn’t really like them anyway.”
Remind me not to send the Nut to this day camp.
What’s the difference between a violin and a viola?*
Dragons are just a part of growing up
My old school has Giant Relay Day at the end of every year. Classes are over the day before, so it’s sort of an optional day with activities and a picnic and a band, and at the end of it all you have the Giant Relay race. Each grade races alone, starting with sixth and moving up through faculty and alumni. Instead of just running and passing a baton (really, how tedious!), for the first leg of the relay the person walks on stilts (almost everybody blew it); then he slaps the hands of the next people, who do a wheelbarrow, then the next people do a three-legged hobble, then the next person has to run ten yards while blowing up a balloon and then pop it before he can slap the hand of the next racer. About ten more ridiculous things happen, then the last six people have to form a human pyramid and hold it. Needless to say, much hoo-ha ensues.
I sat in the bleachers above the field with the Nut and a bunch of parents and students realizing that I was actually watching the Giant Relay for the first time. When I was a student I always just skipped the whole day, school was over so I just fucked off. And Lance, the alumni organizer, had asked me not ten minutes earlier if I’d race on the alumni team and I said NO because I thought I’d just have to run, I didn’t know I’d get to do something anxiety-inducing like fill a bucket by carrying water in a spoon.
Anyway, some kids were sitting in front of me signing each others’ yearbooks, and I noticed that one girl was drawing an intricate Boris Vallejo-type dragon for one of her friends. When she finished, another kid came by and she started on another dragon for her. She was drawing quite well and she was totally into it, with her little flourishes and such, but I couldn’t help thinking, Aren’t dragons kind of passe? Like, aren’t they so seventies? But then I realized that dragons are just part of growing up, like reading science fiction, smoking Shermans, throwing toast at Rocky Horror, and writing essays for English with references to Harold and Maude. Or whatever it is you did that made you feel smart and cool.
May I just say:
My father’s a real pack-rat.
When I asked him if he wanted help moving some of his old stuff into the garbage, he looked kind of helpless and told me how he’s heard that some people whose houses burn down feel relieved that they’re freed from their possessions.
When we flew out of Denver last Sunday, the sky was filled with smoke. Even though the fires were hundreds of miles away in the mountains, announcements on both TV and radio asked people to quit calling 911 to report a fire in their neighborhood, it all seemed that close. Breathing was hard so we stayed inside until we absolutely had to get in the car to leave for the airport.
Then we got back to California and I kind of forgot about it, thinking that it would all be under control by the end of the day. But it’s not — it’s worse now, it was on the cover of the New York Times, which, for me, makes it “real.” I called my dad this morning after I heard that residents on the border of Jefferson County, the county where my parents have lived for the last forty years, were starting to evacuate. I expected him to say something reassuring like, “Oh, it’s shifting direction and the firefighters are getting it all under control.” Instead he sighed and said, “It’s a real bearcat.”
I’m worried now that he’ll never get the chance to go through all his stuff piece by piece and remember how it came into his life and think about what it means to him now and decide what to throw out and what to pass on to us; that a lifetime’s accumulated trashes and treasures will all go up in flames. But maybe that’s what he wants.
This is a link to the National Fire Information Center.
Reunion Round-up
My high school buds, twenty years after the fact!
S
Then: Pleasant, stoned expression
Now: Still looks baked
A
Then: Hated C because she stole P away
Now: Didn’t invite C to the reunion; still in love with P
P
Then: Sold me film canister full of speed senior year
Now: Swears that it was really Dexatrim; still not in love with A
B
Then: Played guitar, studied
Now: Became a Muslim; sense of humor submerged below surface of placid wisdom
S
Then: Charmingly bubbleheaded
Now: Changed name to another name that starts with S
N
Then: Goofy, gangly, bad skin
Now: Sweet, paunchy, good skin
R
Then: Had some sort of preppy yachtmaster/private jet aesthetic
Now: Out of the closet
C
Then: Quoted Earth Wind & Fire in the yearbook
Now: Works for insurance company, has a cute husband
M
Then: Rumored to have had mature but inappropriate relationship with geology teacher
Now: Did not talk to me about group sex in suggestive manner
A
Then: Duuuuude!
Now: Duuuuude!
M
Then: Unnervingly matter-of-fact
Now: Exactly the same; divorced from “psycho bitch from hell”; John Denver glasses
J
Then: Nice, but never really had much to say to her
Now: Looks the same, still not much to say to each other
T
Then: My best friend; funny; loyal despite (or perhaps because of) my flagrantly immature behavior
Now: Is herself, only moreso; love her to death
J
Then: Charmingly befuddled
Now: Made N apologize to M for calling him “Lupus” in ninth grade
Me
Then: Either happy or suicidal; read pretentious books without understanding them
Now: Surprisingly happy, never suicidal; reading confined to take-out menus and TV schedule
