Rainy Day

Happy Saturday. Stay dry.

Friday!

I remember when Friday meant something. It’ s a fuzzy, dim memory, like differential equations or the theme song to The Joey Bishop Show. But it was real, once.

You got paid on Friday. A check that you brought to the bank after work. A slip of paper that represented a fiduciary obligation on the part of your employer; you know that sort of thing. You’d go to the bank… no, I’m not kidding, you’d actually go there and wait in a line between velvet ropes depending in caternary curves from chrome stanchions, like it’s an opening night on Broadway and not a crummy line to get beer money; and you’d stare at the clock and the neck of the person in front of you and remember lame jokes you saw on the Tonight Show about the little chain on the pen at all the stand up desks. Why, those jokes were funnier than airline peanuts, I’m tellin’ ya.

And you’d have that slip filled out to go with your paycheck– but never correctly; always with your deposit on the first line until you noticed that line was labeled “cash” or “currency,” and you’d scratch it out and fill it in a line lower, and then wonder if it was OK to have scratched out stuff written on a DEPOSIT SLIP. It’s like a legal document and all, and you can’t just have a do-over on that, can you? So you’d make out another and put the info on the second line, like a good doobie, until you noticed the “cash” line you avoided has a check box with it. The first one was correct all along, and now you’ve got one with the first line inexplicably left blank; and you’ do it over but you’re last in line again already and you need to get out of there — It’s FRIDAY!

After you wait and wait, the clerk behind the bullet proof glass that doesn’t even go up to the ceiling barely even looks at what you wrote, they just read the check and push a few twenties back and grunt at you anyway.

But it’s Friday! You don’t care. You need to find clean clothes that match. That’s only two variables. Why do you still end up inspecting your second clothes hamper — the floor –for stuff only lightly worn that looks slightly better than the Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax tee shirt that’s the only clean thing in your drawer? Who cares? It smoky in the bar anyway, and it’s Friday!.

Oh. You can’t go to that bar. She’ll be there, and you took her number and didn’t call it. You meant to… no you didn’t.

Who cares? It’s Friday! There’s many other places with a common victualler’s license, ain’t there? Your friends all have dates — or geez poor Steve got married fer crissakes — but you’ll find someone you know at the Irish Bar, won’t you? Yeah, but maybe it’ll be that guy you impaled with the dart two weeks ago. You keep asking yourself the same two questions about that place: Who walks in front of a guy throwing darts? That, and: What kind of person wears a sheetrock knife on his belt in an Irish Bar on… yup: Friday night!

What’s on TV? Remington Steele. A repeat. Hello Dominoes? No anchovies. No; no anchovies. The little fishes. No, I don’t want extra anchovies. I WANT EXTRA NO ANCHOVIES.

(fast forward)

It’s so much easier now. Friday! is still the best day of the week. There’s always clean clothes. They still don’t match, but you’re old and you don’t care. Who are you going to impress? Your wife? She bought you those clothes. The money is already in the bank of course. You only go to the bank to sign mortgage papers once every ten years now. The rest is just keystrokes. Where is the bank, exactly? You haven’t had money in your pocket for ten years. What would you do with money? Get pennies handed back to you. Who wants those? Even my children want quarters. Pay the plastic bill when it comes. Keystrokes. Stamps? What are those?

But it’s still Friday! and Friday! is still wonderful, because Friday! is the day you take the six plastic bags that have been lurking at the bottom of the stairs all week to the end of the driveway. Yeah, those bags. The ones with the diapers in them.

Happy Friday! to one and all!

Pelargonium? I Don’t Think So

We’re simple gardeners here at the Sippican Cottage. While we share your admiration for those whose gardens are overburdened with exotic cultivars, and on whose lips Latinate names trill, we just don’t want to pay too much attention to what we’re doing.

There’s more to it than that for me, perhaps. To be an expert, you have to know so much about something that you can’t even look at it for the pure joy that’s in it anymore. If you’ve ever been in the office of a really accomplished specialist doctor, you can always spot them looking at you — eventually, if not right from your greeting — as the bundle of bones and guts you are. As they say in the mafia movies, it’s not personal, it’s strictly business.

I worry about doctors that take too much of an interest in me personally anyway. I’d be in a tavern if I wanted commiserating companionship, after all. And the medicine in the tavern is more efficacious, generally. The best and most competent doctor I ever met told me the worst news in the most businesslike manner, and left the room to leave me alone with my wife. He tended to his business, and left us to tend to ours. We need more of that, and not just in the medical profession.

I can’t enjoy recorded music if it’s a selection I’ve learned to play myself. I see the bones and the guts of it, arrayed like cadavers in the music morgue, when I should be getting the lilt. I have gone way out of my way to avoid ever deconstructing any of the music of a certain soul singer, because I never want the magician to show me his trick after he performs it, and I don’t want to peek either. I don’t want to ruin it by understanding it.

I don’t want to ruin it by understanding it. Hmm. Music. Gardening. Love.

It’s a geranium. It not the genus Pelargonium of the Kingdom of Plantae of the Division of Magnoliophyta of the class Manoliopsida of the order Geraniales from the family of Geraniaceae.

I think, when the sun comes out, I’ll sit on that brick step, next to my wife, and open the window a little so we can hear, indistinctly perhaps, Al Green sing on the box, next to the pots of geraniums.

End of story.

Mo Momo

(I’m recycling text again today. I didn’t even bother to put the letters in a different order than I did last year, when I wrote about Momo:)

In an obvious attempt to lose half my readership, I write today about cats.

It doesn’t matter what I write. If I write that I like them, the dog people … (crickets)

See, they’re gone already, they didn’t even stick around to see if I was going to link to the haha funny home video of the cat grabbing at a string on a ceiling fan and going helicoptering around for a spell before being hurled into the sliding glass door. But they’ve all already seen it ten times, and e-mailed it to their friends, they know if you’re not in on it already, you’re not in on it at all. You are an apostate. You like those cats.

Yes, yes I do. When I was growing up, I wanted a dog. My dear mother was petrified of animals, and disliked untidiness, so no go. And your parents know you better than you know yourself, after all, and knew I couldn’t care for such a beast. Not for more than a week. Now, the information available about dogs is very sketchy, too patchy for me to make a valid assessment really, but I gather the creatures live longer than a week. No dog for you.

No cats either, a creature that gave poor mom the willies more than a dog, even. At least a dog, well, how do I put this? The dog goes outside. Any Venusian who visited our planet would know who’s in charge around here immediately, by observing which one craps in a box, and which one empties it.

And so as a child, we had a succession of wildlife that taught you nothing about the wild, or about loyalty, or about ferocity, or greed or want, or anything else. Goldfish, gerbils, that sort of thing. For a while, we had little turtles in a dish. You can tell you’re through with them when they turn white, by the way.

And so my mother was right of course. I’ve killed more fauna than a hunter gatherer tribe. But the desire is not a slave to the intellect. I needed another mammal around the house, one that wouldn’t do anything I’d tell it to, and the best I could hope for is predicting its behavior a little. No I’m not referring to my wife, although the description is an apt one. Cats.

Cats are the pet for you, if you must have a pet, but don’t deserve one. They are what all housepets are, animated furniture. They become part of the fabric of your lives, no question, and fray all the fabric in your life, it’s true, but they’re in the background, and don’t bother. Feed them in a desultory fashion, and every twenty five days or so, they’ll deign to sit in your lap and go prrrrrrrrrr. I’m up for that.

My friends have dogs. They never go anywhere, or do anything, without first thinking of how this will affect their creature. They’re better people than us, it takes so much tenacity of will to sign up for that kind of responsibility, to be trusted so supremely with the wellbeing and care of another being. One that will never grow up and mow the lawn for you, I mean.

Get up one half hour late one morning, and go to the door to let the cat in, and he’ll be gnawing the head off a rodent outside the door, and look up at you and you’ll know what he’s thinking: “I had to do this myself, you big stiff; and I’m going to throw up parts of this on your couch later, that’ll learn you to sleep in.”

And so I like the solitary nature of the cat, and its mystery, and the fact that the minute he goes outside, he reverts to his feral self, and the only difference between the little beast and a tiger is its size, and the pink collar he’s wearing. He’ll shred my wife’s clothes for saddling him with that, I bet. Ruins his feral vibe with the woodland creatures.

Two cat is best, three cats is madness, four or more and you’re a newspaper article. We got two black cats at the animal rescue place, to replace the two beloved animals we buried in our yard after living at our new house for a short while.

Of course they were dead before we buried them, what are you, dog people? Anyway, they had lived a long and happy life, and dreamed every night by the fire of mice with lead shoes, and passed away old.

The Big One was just a little lad then, and we asked him to name the new ones. Moonshine and Sunshine he said. I laid some groundwork for editing by pointing out that they were both identically black, and neither was likely to answer to “Sunshine.” He liked “Lady Godiva,” for the chocolate color, not the streaking incident, and so it was Moonshine and Lady Go.

Two black cats. Bad luck perhaps. Moonshine was headstrong and roamed far afield, and I found her after a short spell by the road, where curiosity… well, you get the picture, and I buried her in the woods next to the others. Tears were shed. Lady Go was sad, if cats can be sad.
My wife loved that animal. She is kind to all things great and small, and raises we three male beasts in addition to the cat. Pets are tests of your kindness and reliability, and Moonshine tested our hearts.

He appeared out of the woods that surround our house not long after, skinny, sickly, disheveled, wild. White with gray and black, mottled. He’d pace around the perimeter of the lawn like a panther, lean, hungry, feral. My wife considered it a sign, so soon after Moonshine’s demise, and she fed that beast. She’d put out food at night, though I told her it was crazy; raccoons and possums and foxes and god knows what else would show up each night looking for the buffet. No matter, HE might get some of it, and that was enough for her. Occasionally we’d see him, closer now, but you couldn’t approach him or he’d disappear for days.

My boy remarked the patch of grey atop his head made him look like he had a page boy haircut, although he didn’t know to call it that, he just said: He looks like Moe!

So Momo it was.

My wife is kind, and animals know “kind” when they see it. But a cat is cautious, oh yes. After nine month of patience and caution, he allowed her to touch him once, while he ate greedily from the bowl, still nowhere near the house. Just like me, he was finished.

Soon he was eating on the back step, and sleeping on a pile of straw left over from a Hallowe’en display, at the corner of the house. And then one day, when a year had passed, she put the food in the back hallway, and left the door open.. He came in over a period of ten minutes, still terrified, but curious. She closed the door behind him. And he went CRAZY.

He made that traverse of 38 feet from end to end of the house over and over, launching himself at the windows in the doors, crashing to the floor, and racing to the opposite end for another leap and collision. My wife and little boy scurried around shrieking and trying to reach the doors to open them before he got there, but he was everywhere, and frantic, and they were trapped in the house with a wild beast. They finally got one open, and he was gone.

As my wife recounted the tale to me when I arrived home from work, I had to stifle a smile. She thought she had blundered, and he was gone forever. She doesn’t know men very well, I thought to myself. Though all she gets all day is we three men, men, men. She had become the sun around which that little creature orbited, as had we all, and sure enough the next day he was back.

And shortly thereafter, he was sleeping by the fire, and making that prrrrr noise, a little peeved about THAT UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT AT THE VETERINARIAN, but exhibiting to this day the only attitude that cat owners generally envy their dog friends.

Gratitude.

Trying To Bat .400 For The Season

Ben Franklin was an interesting fellow. He had a wide range of experience compared to many of his contemporaries, who were educated farmers from Virginia, for the most part. Having experience in many facets of life is very useful, I think, if only for one thing: It reminds a person that they don’t know very much about any particular thing, never mind most things. I find people who are scholars tend to think they know a great deal more than they actually do, and it’s because they’ve mistaken the library for the whole world. There’s a whole world of books in a library, but that’s not the same thing. Oh, and politicians: You can’t run the whole world if you’re bright and expend “sleep on the couch in your office” effort. Scholars don’t know much; you don’t know anything.

Franklin and many of his peers wrote lists and papers and folios and whole books filled with advice on mundane matters. I have a wonderful book written by George Washington as a young man called Rules Of Civility, and while it’s great fun to read, advice like “don’t stick your knife in the salt cellar if it is greasy” is of dubious utility right now.

George was only thirteen when he wrote his book on civility, and he really wasn’t writing, per se, he was copying imperfectly lessons he was being taught, in French, which were just tradition forms of etiquette. You can easily trace Washington’s lessons back to Il Galeteo, written by a Jesuit priest named Giovanni della Casa in the mid 1500s in Florence. Renaissance Humanism manifested itself in many more ways than naked statues and paintin’ on the ceiling.

Anyway, there’s lotsa dopey stuff mixed in with perfectly good advice in Washington’s book, which is interesting but not useful, and explains why Washington bowed instead of shaking hands, for instance. But you can still read Franklin — lots of Franklin — and use almost everything to your advantage, and it probably will continue to be useful 300 more years into the future.

In a way, you can simply hold up your life to Franklin’s advice and make your comparison. Rank your success as a human being on a sliding scale and it will have an uncanny correlation to how closely you adhered to his advice:

1. TEMPERANCE.
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. SILENCE.
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. ORDER.
Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. RESOLUTION.
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY.
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY.
Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY.
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE.
Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. MODERATION.
Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS.
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
11.TRANQUILLITY.
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY.
Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY.
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

You can refrain from sticking your greasy knife in the salt cellar all day long and be a wastrel jerk. Franklin listed the thirteen bones in the decency skeleton, right there for you.

Me, I’m just trying to beat Ted Williams’ batting average.