Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

He Would’ve Been 86 (+ Two Days)

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[Twenty-year-old Dad-to-be applies an arc-welding torch to a tank, somewhere in Europe, 1944-45. Handwritten caption on back: It’s me again. Actually working. I told you so!]

For years, this has been a psychologically complicated few days — at least for those of us in my family given to psychological complication.

In no particular order:

  • Dad’s birthday was May 29th.
  • The Missus and I were married on May 29th. (About which, more later this week.)
  • Memorial Day — because of my parents’ fondness for and involvement in drum-and-bugle corps — was pretty much the biggest national secular holiday for us, throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s. (And of course, in that much different time, it was always held on May 31 rather than the vague albeit convenient “last Monday in May.”)
  • It was at a Memorial Day family cookout in the late 1980s that Dad took me aside and told me of the pain in his shoulder, which I was not to tell Mom about because she’d likely recognize it for what it was: a return of his supposedly gone cancer.
  • Dad died on June 4, 1988.

Although I’m sentimental about Dad (and many other things), I know — intellectually — that picturing him 20 or 30 years older, but otherwise unchanged, qualifies as just a comfortable fantasy. If he hadn’t died in 1988, he might have died later, in an even worse way. And even if still alive and healthy at this moment, he might (who knows?) be 22 years’ unhappier. So yes, I know.

But damn, I sure wouldn’t mind talking with him every now and then…

I recently saw a TV show in which a character continued, obsessively, to call his girlfriend’s cellphone number — long after she’d died — because her voicemail was still active and at least he could listen to her voice reciting something like, I’m out living my life and can’t talk right now. Leave it at the beep!

Yeah: that.

[Comments disabled for this post, obviously, and the title shamelessly ripped off
and altered from the title of a post at my kid sister’s blog on Saturday.]

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Starting Out Fresh

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From whiskey river (except for the last five lines; numerous other differences vs. the alternate source linked below):

Exercise

First, forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
and do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
and then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them
around after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backwards
starting with even numbers
with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
forgetting it all until everything
is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?

(Stephen and Ondrea Levine, from Who Dies? [source])

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Touch and Enter

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In a comment on yesterday’s Towel Day post, Marta said:

The miracle of the towel! The man who realized this was a man to be reckoned with indeed.

That got me thinking: how cool it would be to come up with a… a something — an in-joke, an idea, a catchphrase, a little fictional detail, an entire story — which lodges in readers’ minds, gets passed around even among people who never read the original, and becomes part of the culture’s stock of unchanging raw materials.

Like towels in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, say.

Or — to broaden the focus to the almost 100% universal (First World) level: The Wizard of Oz. Not the book, either (sorry, L. Frank Baum) — the movie.

  • “I’ll get you, my pretty.”
  • “…and your little dog, too!”
  • “I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks…”
  • “Professor Marvel never guesses; he knows!”
  • “Auntie Em! Uncle Henry!”
  • “Some, where—” (You almost don’t have to finish the phrase.)
  • “If I only had a brain”
  • “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”
  • “First they tore my legs off and threw them over there…”

(etc. etc. etc. — all of which I or other people have used in conversations in recent months.)

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In the Water

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[For information about this photo, called “Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida,”
see the Note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Adrift

Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, bap­tized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, win­ter, spring,
sum­mer. Leaves over­head, under­foot.
Waves arrive, buf­fets from friends
offended, ene­mies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.

(William Stafford [source])

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Take It Eeeeeeeeasy (Chorus of Strangers Edition)

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From Ze Frank (part of his “Songs You Already Know” series):

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:51 long.]

[audio:chillout_zefrank.mp3|titles=’Chill Out’|artists=Ze Frank]

…and the story behind it, which begins:

I received an email from a woman named Laura, who had recently moved to a new city for a new job.

She was overwhelmed with anxiety and asked me to write her a song to help her calm down.

Cool, eh?

[Hat tip to Mark Hurst of the Good Experience newsletter]

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Sorting Through an Old Hive

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As some of you on Blogger-based weblogs may know, a fraction of those sites recently had to convert from a particular old technology to a newer one. The owners of affected blogs received a series of email notifications from Blogger tech support, and by now any such sites have been converted over to The New Way… or can no longer be updated.

Running After My Hat is my first non-Blogger blog. But over the years — for myself and for others, some paying and some not — I have built and otherwise had a hand in contributing to a total of twelve Blogger sites. I got notifications that four of them had to be converted to Blogger’s current service level, and somehow managed to get them all switched over about a week before the May 1 deadline.

One of the four was a real relic — one I’d almost forgotten about.

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Identity Crises

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[Image: ‘A Little Family History,’ by B. Kliban]

From whiskey river:

Moment

A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.

This happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.

Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.

How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

We don’t have to hate ourselves for our own vulnerability. We don’t have to hate ourselves for what life has done to us. We don’t have to hate ourselves because hurt or loss or longing has gotten to us. Our desires will always be with us in some form, keeping us firmly attached to a world that will hurt us. We must come to love ourselves, love our life, in its vulnerability, in its impermanence, not in spite of all its flaws, but because of them. Because the vulnerability, the changes, the flaws make us who we are.

(Barry Magid)

…and (italicized portion):

Making art and viewing art are different at their core. The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. […] Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare. Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product; the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.

(David Bayles [source])

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Medical Update

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The Stepdaughter and The Missus: both doing fine, albeit exhausted.

The immediate crisis — borne mostly by the former, although vicariously by The Missus and the rest of us — finally passed last night, sometime after midnight. Now begins a loooong period of physical and psychological recovery. This has been a sad, scary, tiring week. So very glad to have finally put this much behind us.

Thanks so much to Facebook and Twitter friends for your support over the last few days.

Whether or not you “know” me from those other online milieus, whether or not you have any idea what crisis I’m talking about, I encourage you to learn at least a little — via Google or other resources, online or offline — about the term partial molar pregnancy. It’s not very common; The Stepdaughter’s very good, very experienced doctor said he has seen only three in his long career. But its real and potential impact on a mother-to-be and those around her is wildly disproportionate to its rarity.You, too, may never encounter it firsthand — even second- or third- — but it may not be a bad bit of information to have tucked away in the back of your mind.

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Real-Life Dialogue (Household Hints Edition)

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The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. Family gathering for Kentucky Derby viewing: gambols and gambles. Much food and beverage being prepared and consumed. He has just returned to house after walking Pooch. Everyone but She is in the living room, talking, laughing, watching TV.

He: [entering kitchen, where He knows She must be] We had a productive walk— What?

She stands before open pantry, laughing madly, pulling things from shelves and dropping them on floor.

She: I can’t find my baking soda!

He: [mentally running through menu items, not remembering any which involve baking soda] Your, uh, baking so—

She: Yes! Baking soda! I can’t find it!

She shuts pantry door, which immediately springs back open because of heap of boxes, cans, and canisters on floor.

He: What do you need baking soda f—?

She: [reaching back into pantry, emerging with familiar dull-yellow box; running around to front of stove, and still bursting sporadically into demented giggles] I need it for the fire!

He: Er, the fire—?

She: Yes! [yanks open oven door] The fire! The potholder fire!

She points, needlessly now, to a flaming mass of thick furry dark-blue fabric on bottom of oven. The oven is filled with smoke, and also with a pan of oven-broiled sandwiches for the Derby Day crowd. She dumps half the box of baking soda on the erstwhile potholder, and shuts the oven door.

She: I dropped a potholder in the oven.

He: Yes, I noticed. But the—

She: I knew baking soda would put it out safely.

He: But the, uh, the pan—

She: [leaning back against counter, sipping at mint juleps] You should never use water on an oven fire.

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