The Wellington Files

  • The Refrigerator Light

    After a day off to refresh ourselves, Owl Chatter is back with the usual nonsense, I hope. We flew the owl coop and ran down to Baltimore, which called itself Charm City (in the past) — and we were charmed. Stayed in a neat historic downtown hotel — The Ulysses, and the folks were very nice. It was a real neighborhood with lots of hip young people around, music in the air at night, and interesting restaurants.

    It was a 30-minute walk to the ballpark and we took in a game. Great scene — big crowd, gorgeous stadium (see pic). I wore my bright orange rugby shirt and an O’s cap. Unfortunately, the Baltimore bats were moribund, with the sole blip on the EKG being a solo dinger by Austin Hays after the birds were already down 4-0 — until there were two outs in the ninth. Then a walk and two scorching doubles brought the tying run to the plate! But a strikeout ended the game. Texas 5, Birds 3.

    We popped out onto the street to go to dinner at the Nepal House, an Indian restaurant across from the Ulysses which got excellent reviews. Suddenly, this young gentlemen appeared before us and said: “Are you from around here? Is the Ethiopian restaurant on Maryland Avenue? I just told that couple it was, but I’m not 100% sure.”

    I said, “No, we’re not from around here, but wait – there’s an Ethiopian restaurant nearby?” He said, “Yes, just a few blocks away.” We thanked him, I located it on my phone and we had a great Ethiopian dinner – how’s that for blind luck? Breakfast today was even better — a little cafe with tables outside. Linda’s omelet was excellent, and I had a scrambled-up egg-and-veggie thingie with Maryland crabmeat mixed in. Wow.

    We were enjoying a cup o’ coffee at S’bux this morning, when I noticed this billboard right across the road:

    Setting aside the glaring who/whom error, what a nice job by someone! I sent a photo of it to Owl-Chatter-friend Norrie (who eats that stuff up) and she told me she was posting it on facebook. I replied that I’m posting it on my fat tuchas, so it’s getting some good exposure.

    Will the Maureen Dowd word-list become famous? Here’s what she wrote in her column today:

    My most precious possession from my time at Columbia University is a green Patrón box stuffed with slips of paper on which I scribbled the new words I learned.

    Limerence. Peloothered. Clinchpoop. Chthonic. Sillage. Agnation. Akratic. Leptodactylous. Chiasmus. Caesious. Pythoness. Pettifogger. Paronomasia. Dithyramb. Propugnaculum. Adumbrate. Remembrancer. Meridional. Prehensile. Aeternitatis. Scrupulosity. Supererogatory. Anagnorisis. Spatiotemporal. Sialoquent. Alterity. Floccinaucinihilipilification.

    Yikes — that’s one hell of a list. I’m going to start with the last one because it’s so out there.

    Floccinaucinihilipilification means the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. I think it could work like this: “Ned’s floccinaucinihilipilification of Owl Chatter was getting tiresome. So I shot him.”

    Let’s take propugnaculum next. It means bulwark, rampart, defense.

    Peloothered? That means totally intoxicated. How did I end up sleeping in that dumpster last night? You were peloothered, you moron.

    One more tonight (and we’ll save the rest for later).

    Akratic. This is a great word. “Characterized by weakness of will, resulting in an action taken against one’s better judgment.” “Felix wondered if his akratic lending of $10,000 to his deadbeat brother-in-law might somehow be claimed on his tax return.”

    Or — how about — raising a teenager is just one akratic act after another.

    Taking a walk today, I couldn’t get All Too Well, by Taylor Swift out of my head. So I tracked it down for you (and me) — the version she sang at the Grammys. (You’re going to want to skip it if you’re a hater.)

    ‘Cause there we are again in the middle of the night
    We’re dancing ‘round the kitchen in the refrigerator light
    Down the stairs, I was there
    I remember it all too well.

    A little tired from the long drive. Good to be home with Welly and Wilma though. Good night folks.

  • Deliberate as a Bride

    I was watching the Nats game last night, and an unusual play occurred; something I had never seen before. The Nats batter hit a low liner to third. The fielder dove for it and appeared to catch it. But when he landed, the ball fell out of his glove. No problem — he just picked it up and fired to first, in time to beat the runner. But the first baseman was not on the bag — he was nowhere in the picture frame — he was in absentia! So the ball rolled all the way to the fence and the batter/runner wound up on second.

    What happened was the first baseman, like the rest of us, thought the ball was caught. He was blocked from seeing it roll out of the third baseman’s glove when he landed from his dive. So there was no need for him (he thought) to cover first. It was his blunder, but the third baseman was charged with the error. (I guess maybe he shouldn’t have made the throw?) BTW, the first baseman was Jake Cronenworth, an excellent ballplayer who played college ball at UMich.

    OK, so you’re getting ready for a big date. Remember those? And you’re getting good and ready — it takes time. The hair, the clothing, the face. And then, Oh no! he or she suddenly shows up way too soon!! You’re still a mess —- everything’s ruined.

    According to the NYT today, that’s exactly what’s happening to arctic squirrels, and it’s a bigger problem than just for the squirrels.

    Here’s the deal. The male squirrel comes out of hibernation early so he can prepare for the mating season. It’s not just that he buys a new outfit and some hot cologne, his testosterone levels drop way off in the winter and it takes time for him to get them back up. Generally, the lady sleeps long enough for him to be ready. But not anymore! Due to climate change she’s getting up as much as ten days earlier. And things are not going well on those dates.

    For now, there are plenty of squirrels around. There’s one now! But if their population starts to decline it could send shock waves through the animal world — they are a popular food source for many predators like eagles and wolves. Yum! Here’s a tasty little fella (or gal).

    On this date way back in 1521 — yes, 502 years ago — a photo of Martin Luther went up in the Post Office — well, he was declared an outlaw. And just like Amanda Gorman’s poem, his writings were banned. Even outside of Florida. It all happened in the Edict of Worms. Gross. Of course, just like Trump’s indictments, it only made him more popular.

    Did you know how ML (no K) decided to become a priest? He was caught in a terrible storm and promised God that if he survived he would pursue a religious life. Seriously? You have to honor those? All those promises I made to God for parking spots in Manhattan — I’m supposed to do that stuff?

    Lots of good stuff in the puzzle today. Here’s a sampling of things I learned:

    36A: “Shared a workspace, in modern parlance,” HOT DESKED.

    23A: “Ones who live large, in slang,” BALLERS.

    11D: “Nonmelodic genre,” NOISE MUSIC.

    21D: “Jealous critics, in slang,” PLAYER HATERS.

    Also, loved these:

    30A: “Youth sports mismatch ender,” MERCY RULE.

    5D: “Words from one extending an olive branch,” I COME IN PEACE.

    54A: “Like some land no longer good for livestock,” OVER GRAZED

    27D: “Inelegant way to solve a problem,” BRUTE FORCE.

    Here’s a poem by Ted Kooser, from late December in Winter Morning Walks:

    A little snap at one side of the room,
    and an answering snap at the other:
    Stiff from the cold and idleness, the old house
    is cracking its knuckles. Then the great yawn
    of the furnace. Even the lampshade is drowsy,
    its belly full of a warm yellow light.

    Out under the moon, though, there is at least
    one wish against this winter sleep: a road
    leads into the new year, deliberate as a bride
    in her sparkling white dress of new snow.

    Good night, everybody. OC is heading down to Baltimore tomorrow for a few days. Special birthday for Linda! Thanks for dropping in.

  • Delusions

    If you need a clue for EMILY in your puzzle, there are various directions to choose from. Poetry? There’s Emily Dickinson, of course. Hotties? There’s Emily Ratajkowski, the model/actress/writer/entrepreneur who spoke at Hunter’s graduation last year.

    Phil!! Did you wake her up? We’ve spoken to you about that! You’re going to get in hot water someday. Sorry Emily! Go back to sleep. Phil will come back later and give you time to get ready.

    Or you can really class it up by going with Emily Greene Balch, as today’s constructors did. Balch was born on Jan. 8, 1867 and died one day after her 94th birthday. She was awarded the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), to which she donated her prize money. Although she was a long-time pacifist, she did not criticize the Allied war effort in WWII. She was an Economics professor at Wellesley College for 23 years and never married.

    Emily’s corner in the puzzle (NW) was pretty dramatic. Right next to her at 3D came the “International Day of Peace month,” which is SEP. But over at 1D was AT WAR, darkly clued with “Like much of Europe beginning in 1939.” And 26D was WWII, clued with “JoJo Rabbit setting,” and ELIE Wiesel was at 58D.

    Anthony Lane, the movie critic for The New Yorker, is often very funny. Here’s how his review of “Master Gardener” starts: As career moves go, the path from neo-Nazism to horticulture has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserves.

    In the same column, he also reviews “You Hurt My Feelings,” where the main plot revolves around a married couple. The wife has written a novel that she overhears the husband saying he doesn’t like. Ouch! Lane writes: Delusions of creativity are always funny, because they rely on such a spectacular lack of self-knowledge.

    I like that phrase “delusions of creativity.” It pretty much sums up the force behind Owl Chatter, no?

    Oooh, Emily R. is out of the shower, and she threw something on and is ready for you now, Phil. Let’s see what you got.

    Wow — gorgeous! Thanks, guys.

    Two writers were born on this date. First, Raymond Carver, back in 1938, in Clatskanie, OR. Never heard of it? It’s a bit southwest of Inglis. In 1957, he married his 16-year-old girlfriend Maryann Burk right out of high school (Carver was 19), and took a series of low-paying jobs. They had two kids. Working as a night janitor in a hospital, he wrote stories of the working poor: his people. But 20 years later, in 1977, he fell in love with Tess Gallagher, a poet, and divorced Maryanne. This is what it says on his tombstone (from his poem, “Late Fragment”):

    And did you get what
    you wanted from this life, even so?
    I did.
    And what did you want?
    To call myself beloved, to feel myself
    beloved on the earth.

    Here’s Tess.

    The second one is novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid, born in Antigua in 1949. Since she was a girl, she was less favored by her mom than her two brothers, and she took refuge in books. (She was able to read at age 3.) She read every sentence of Moby Dick twice because she couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. As a writer, The Talk of the Town columns she wrote for The New Yorker were greatly admired. She was married for over 20 years to Allen Shawn, son of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, and brother of actor Wallace Shawn. They have 2 kids: Harold and Annie.

    Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., said of her writing:

    “She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it’s a distinct departure that she’s making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does. So that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.”

    Kincaid converted to Judaism in 2005. Mazel Tov, JK!

    I learned something new in baseball yesterday. I was watching the Nats playing San Diego, and the Padres had runners on first and second. The batter bunted, and the Nats’ third baseman, Jeimer Candelario, pounced on the ball and threw it to second, to cut down the middle runner. So the lead runner advanced from second to third, and the batter made it to first.

    What I learned was, in this case, the batter does not get credit for a sacrifice bunt. He needs to advance both runners to get credit. Did you know that?

    Here’s Ty Cobb doing it. Is he wearing a scarf and a sweater? Was it chilly?

    See you tomorrow!

  • Spanish Leather

    When’s the last time you were swept off your feet? And don’t count that high school girl (or boy) on the subway whose button popped open.

    Here’s what Bob Dylan said about meeting Suze Rotolo in 1961:

    “Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard… Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness—a Rodin sculpture come to life.”

    She’s the girl on his arm on the cover of The Freewheelin’ album. She became pregnant with his baby in 1963, but had an abortion. They broke up in ’64. The breakup is credited with inspiring several love songs, including Boots of Spanish Leather.

    Well, if I had the stars from the darkest night
    And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
    I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
    For that’s all I’m a-wishin’ to be ownin’

    The breakup also led to his angry and bitter Ballad in Plain D. Twenty years later, when asked if he had any regrets about Ballad In Plain D, Dylan said: “Oh yeah, that one! I must have been a real schmuck to write that. Of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone.” Here’s how she looked when she was young.

    Rotolo, an artist, married Enzo Bartoccioli, a film editor who worked for the UN, and they had a son, Luca, who’s a guitarist in NYC. She was only 67 when she died in NY in 2011.

    It’s Dylan’s birthday today. He’s 82, kinahora. 

    Here’s a depressing comment by Jacqueline Donnelly on the puzzle today. (FYI, the clue at 51A was “Rapper with the 2010 hit ‘No Hands’” and the answer was WAKAFLOCKAFLAME. It ran across the whole grid.)

    Sadly, at 81, I’m beginning to feel I have aged out of the NYT crosswords, dependent as they have become on words from a pop culture I have zero familiarity with or interest in. That might be OK or even instructive if the crosses could lead to solution. I have trusted my kids (three of whom are rock musicians) to keep me “kinda hip,” but now that they are all in their fifties, even they probably wouldn’t know stuff like WAKAFLOCKAFLAME. And PACMAN is a game I’ve heard of but never played. Maybe my kids did, though. But they don’t live here anymore.

    Jeez Louise! Lighten up, will you? It’s just a crossword puzzle.

    Gary Jugert posted this reply:

    {Getting out soapbox.} Uh, you’re not supposed to know everything. It’s supposed to have a challenge. You’re supposed to fail sometimes. We’re supposed to be curious about words we’ve never seen and maybe go look them up and try to get smarter about the ever changing world around us. We ask young solvers to know Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi, so isn’t it fair to ask us to know something about Pac-Man? And when we don’t, we can open up our good buddy Go-ogle and a robot will help us for free. We have an enormous encyclopedia set sitting on our digital shelves.

    Sometimes, the crosses allow you to figure out an answer, but you don’t usually learn anything when you get the answer that way. It’s a normal occurrence for daily posters to say they’ve never seen a specific word, even though that word was in a puzzle last week or last month. They got it off crosses, they’ve seen it, but they learned nothing. I personally hate TV stars and Asian cooking ingredients in puzzles, but it’s not because I am aging out of the puzzle, it’s because Will Shortz hates me. Kidding of course. I need to learn that stuff, or go look it up. Many here would rather die than look up something, but that’s because they’re playing a weird game of chicken with the possibility they might be losing their minds. Be okay with not knowing once in awhile. There’s lots of beautiful things waiting for us to discover. {Descends from soapbox.}

    BTW, here are Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney. (Maybe not Chaney.)

    Remember Amanda Gorman, the young Black poet who impressed the nation at Biden’s inauguration? The poem of hers that she read was “The Hill We Climb.”

    Well, not everybody was impressed. A mother of two in Florida’s Miami-Dade school system, Daily Salinas, complained about the poem’s being available to elementary school students in the library. Salinas wrongly listed its author as Oprah Winfrey, not Amanda Gorman, and claimed the function of the work is to “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” Salinas is clearly what anyone with a working brain would call “an idiot.” So what did the school district do? It capitulated. The poem is no longer available to elementary school kids in the district. (They can see it in middle school.)

    Here’s Gorman’s response:

    “I’m gutted. Because of one parent’s complaint, my inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb, has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

    She continued:

    “Book bans aren’t new. But they have been on the rise–according to the ALA, 40% more books were challenged in 2022 compared to 2021. What’s more, often, all it takes to remove these works from our libraries and schools is a single objection. And let’s be clear: most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves. The majority of these works are by queer and non-white voices.

    “I wrote The Hill We Climb so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment. Ever since, I’ve received countless letters and videos from children inspired to write their own poems. Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”

    I like to think of the little coincidences the universe sends our way as little messages, — maybe signs that things will be okay. About 35 years ago, we were panicked about a little bump on Caity’s belly that the docs couldn’t explain. At the height of our worrying, I was riding home on a bus from the city, sitting up front, and the driver suddenly screeched to a halt for no apparent reason. The traffic coming towards us stopped suddenly too. The driver said “Look,” and what I saw was a Mommy Duck safely crossing a very busy Main Street in Chatham (NJ) with her little ducklings tootling behind her. I took it as a good sign. A few weeks later, a hot-shot surgeon in NY assured us Caity’s bump was harmless.

    So today it’s worth noting that the clue in the puzzle at 47D is “Bit of hair,” and the answer is HANK. I don’t recall HANK ever popping up in the grid before, though he may have. In any event, I’m taking it as a sign that he’s doing okay on his journey. Is it crazy to think he’s reaching out in this way to give us a thumb’s-up? Of course it is. But we don’t mind a little crazy from time to time at Owl Chatter. Hi Buddy — safe travels.

    Quack! Quack!

  • Meow

    Oh, it’s already a good day today! Rex, who makes no secret of being a cat lover, posted these beautiful pix of his duo on his site today:

    I miss our cats, Hank and Sophie. Still have Zoey’s Emily, who is beautiful.

    As regular readers of Owl Chatter will recall, the Monday puzzle is too easy for some of us. Rex solves it using only the down clues, and others of us struggle to come up with creative ideas for ramping up the challenge. Here’s an exchange I had yesterday with commenter Joseph Michael:

    JM: Since someone stole my eye patches and my blindfold is at the dry cleaners again, I had to do my Monday solve the old fashioned way with a grocery bag over my head. I used to use Jewel bags for this but decided to try a Trader Joe’s bag instead because 1) it’s larger, and 2) it’s easier to breathe inside of. I’m grateful for the challenge this added to the solve, but I should have looked at the bag more carefully before putting it on. Now I have to figure out how to get this pumpkin butter out of my hair.

    Me (Liveprof): JM – Glopulene Propanol is an excellent pumpkin butter remover. It’s available at most sex shops for just about $5,000 an ounce. No need to rush, though. If you can get your head into an airtight container, the PB should last for up to two weeks. If you have a walk-in freezer, that would be better — it would buy you six months.

    JM: Liveprof, thanks for the tips. I’ll keep the Glopulene Propanol in mind if this ever happens again. For now, I just took a shower and that seemed to do the trick, except that the Trader Joe’s bag is ruined. There must be an easier difficult way to do Monday crosswords.

    At 41D today, the answer was EPITAPH, about which I posted the following comment on Rex’s blog:

    “Steve Post, my favorite radio personality (WNYC) who died in 2014 said he planned to have his tombstone say ‘He didn’t wanna,’ because whenever his wife said there was some event for them to attend, his reply was always a whiny ‘I don’t wanna.’

    “And he invited his listeners to send in their planned epitaphs. He said he would read them over the air. I wrote the following to him: For many years, I was planning for my stone to say ‘Struggled with his weight his whole life,’ but more recently I’ve switched to ‘Suffered from rectal itching.’ He saved it to read last, laughed when he read it, and murmured ‘I can relate to that.’

    “It’s my one claim to fame in seven decades of living. And it’s enough.”

    After way-too-long a hiatus, Owl Chatter’s favorite commenter, LMS, returned this week, and in rare and wonderful form, to no surprise. This is from her post today:

    I haven’t been to many cemeteries, but do people still have EPITAPHS on their tombstones? I would want something funny on mine, maybe acknowledging my JESTERery. I resurrected my yogurt-in-the-mayonnaise-jar prank yesterday, and the response was electric. Kids gagged. Questioned me.

    Kid: You’re eating mayonnaise?
    Me: Yeah. I forgot my lunch, and I’m starving.
    Kid: But out of the jar?
    Me: [takes a huge spoonful] Sure. Why not? Want some?
    Kid: [gags]

    A couple of students came to my door during transition to ask if it was true, that I was eating mayonnaise straight from the jar. Ariyana tried to grab the jar to throw it away. Ms. Smith, I’m worried about you. Hah. I privately told Cyrus the truth, and he was delighted. So in front of other students, I gave him a spoon, and he took a bite. More gagging. I’ve refilled the jar, so Cyrus and I are gonna have us some more fun today.

    46A was ESCAPEE. It led LMS to share the following:

    On ESCAPEE, I have little posters with sentences like

    Nia Vardalos is full of envy.
    Don Knotts’ teeth were full of decay.
    Quentin Tarantino is a cutie.
    Irene Cara’s driveway is icy.
    Steven Karl Pifer is an ESCAPEE.

    When a student finally sees it, they’re like, Oh. Ms. Smith, you cringey.

    Two, Four, Six, Eight . . . What number comes next? There was a whole page in the NYT science section today devoted to “integer sequences.” A famous one that has even appeared in XW puzzles is Fibonacci’s. It’s 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. Starting with the third number, each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.

    This is the “eban” sequence, which is pretty neat: 2, 4, 6, 30, 32, 34, 36, 40, etc. I bet even our Owl Chatter mathematician can’t see why the next one is 42. [Judy — stumped?]

    It’s an ordered list of all numbers that lack the letter “e” in them when written out. (Eban — The “e” is “banned.”) You may note that all of the numbers are even — that’s because every odd number has an e. onE, thrEE, fivE, sEvEn, ninE, and so on. But not every even number makes the list — e.g., eight, ten, and all the teens, have e’s.

    If you are a sequences freak, you will be pleased to learn that there is an Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) that contains 362,765 of these (and counting). Neil Sloane, a mathematician (duh), of Highland Park NJ, is the founder, and it’s celebrating its 50th anniversary, thus the NYT story. When it started, there were “only” 2,372 entries.

    It’s run by about 170 international volunteer editors who “wrangle” 50 or more submissions a day. It’s seeking funding to hire a full-time manager.

    Sloane showcases his favorite “fun” sequences on Numberphile, an educational math YouTube channel. They include this one: 1, 4, 8, 48, 88, 488, etc. Give up? It’s a sequence counting the “holes” in numbers. An 8 has two “holes” in it, one on top and one on the bottom. A 4 has just one. So in 4 there is one “hole,” in 8 there are two “holes,” in 48 there are 3 “holes,” 88 has 4, 488 has five, and so on. Insane, right?

    One of Sloane’s current faves is the Sisyphean sequence. Here’s how it starts: 1, 3, 6, 3, 8, 4, 2, 1, etc. What’s next? Give up? Well, the deal is, if the number is even, divide by two, if it’s odd, add the smallest prime number not yet added. So the next number would be 8 (1 + 7), then 4, then 2, then 1, then 12 (1 + 11).

    Some numbers appear more than once, as you can see. But does every number appear at least once? Sloane says they don’t know, but there was a massive struggle over “36.” The sequence was carried out to a billion terms but there was still no 36. Sloane said this was “really worrying.” If 36 were missing it would be like a flaw in the universe. Thank God, it was eventually discovered to pop up as the 77,534,485,877th term. Whew.

    When Sloane’s not in pursuit of important issues like that, he’s working on his book: “The Joy of Seqs.” (not kidding)

    Stunning actress Lupita Nyong’o was in the puzzle today.

    Lupita is Kenyan-Mexican and lives in Brooklyn. She’s 40 years old and not married. She won an Oscar in 2014 for Best Supporting Actress for her work in 12 Years a Slave. In April of 2014 she was named People magazine’s “Most Beautiful Woman,” and in November was named Glamour’s “Woman of the Year.” She has appeared on the cover of Vogue numerous times, as well as on the covers of leading magazines such as Vanity Fair and Elle.

    In November 2017, she appeared on the cover of Grazia UK magazine, but expressed her disappointment with them for altering her hair to fit European standards of what hair should look like. Photographer An Le later apologized, saying it was “an incredibly monumental mistake.” [Owl Chatter photographer Phil was aghast at the chutzpah.] They’re lucky she didn’t sue their white asses.

    In October 2017—in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal and the MeToo movement—Nyong’o wrote an op-ed for The NYT divulging that Weinstein had sexually harassed her on two occasions when she was a student at Yale. She vowed never to work with him and turned down an offer to star in Southpaw, a Weinstein film. Nyong’o’s op-ed was part of a collection of stories by The Times and The New Yorker that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

    See you tomorrow folks.

  • Farmer Cheese and Lox

    Have you ever tried to fix something but only made it worse? Me neither. Here’s what happened at Uber.

    We’ve been seeing the initialism DEI more often. It stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Uber placed its longtime head of DEI, Bo Young Lee, on leave due to complaints that a recent event she moderated was insensitive to people of color. Wow — isn’t the whole idea behind her position to be sensitive to exactly those people? What happened?

    The event was called “Don’t Call Me Karen.” For those of you who live under a rock like I do, a “Karen,” according to the NYT, is slang for a white woman with a sense of entitlement who often reports Blacks and other minorities to the authorities.

    The problem was that the presentation came across as a lecture on the difficulties faced by white women that was insensitive to the concerns of minorities.

    Several weeks later, a Black woman asked how the company would prevent “tone-deaf, offensive and triggering conversations” from becoming a part of its diversity initiatives.

    Bo Young Lee fielded the question and said “Sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing to do.” The comment prompted more employee outrage and complaints. To paraphrase Mike Birbiglia: What she should have said is . . . . . nothing.

    But, apparently, Bo don’t know. She’ll be on leave for a bit.

    Today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac had me drooling pretty quickly. It’s called “Market Day” and is by Linda Pastan.

    We have traveled all this way
    to see the real France:
    these trays of apricots and grapes spilled out
    like semi-precious stones
    for us to choose; a milky way
    of cheeses whose names like planets
    I forget; heraldic sole
    displayed on ice, as if the fish
    themselves had just escaped,
    leaving their scaled armor behind.
    There’s nothing like this
    anywhere, you say. And I see
    Burnside Avenue in the Bronx, my mother

    sending me for farmer cheese and lox:
    the rounds of cheese grainy and white, pocked
    like the surface of the moon;
    the silken slices of smoked fish
    lying in careful pleats; and always,
    as here, sawdust under our feet
    the color of sand brought in on pant cuffs
    from Sunday at the beach.
    Across the street on benches,
    my grandparents lifted their faces
    to the sun the way the blind turn
    towards a familiar sound, speaking
    another language I almost understand.

    Laurence Olivier was born on this date in 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, England. He died peacefully, in his sleep, in 1989, unless he was just acting. Olivier was working with Dustin Hoffman on the movie Marathon Man, and one scene called for Hoffman to be out of breath. Hoffman darted out of the studio, ran around the block several times and returned, out of breath, to shoot the scene. Olivier was surprised that Hoffman did that and asked him about it. Hoffman replied, “What would you have done?” And Olivier said, “I would have pretended.”

    The theme of today’s puzzle was AS SEEN ON TV, but you had to read the AS as A.S., and the long answers were each a TV personality with the initials A.S. I.e., AL SHARPTON, AMY SCHUMER, ADAM SAVAGE, and ANDY SAMBERG. (Short answers also included Fashion designer Anna SUI, and Darth Vader via his childhood name ANAKIN Skywalker.) egsforbreakfast noted if the theme had been ASS SEEN ON TV, Tucker Carlson would have been an answer.

    Impressively, the constructor was a young (18-year-old) gentleman from Vietnam. Here’s what he said:

    “Greetings from Vietnam! I started solving crosswords two years ago to improve my English and thought crossword construction would be the perfect way to take my hobby to the next level. As a non-native English speaker, my puzzle being published really boosts my confidence in my English proficiency!

    “I first used AS YOU KNOW as the revealer [of the theme], but later scrapped it because I felt it was too simple — and because the revealer would not apply to everyone, as not everyone knows ADAM SAVAGE. After some more digging, I uncovered AS SEEN ON TV, which is much snazzier and makes the theme tighter.

    “I am not familiar with American pop culture, so to decide which A.S. was crossword-worthy, I relied on the frequency of Google Search results and looked for past appearances in crosswords. Further crossword constraints led me to drop some notable names with the initials A.S., such as AMANDA SEYFRIED and ADAM SANDLER. However, in the end, I am pleased with the diverse final set of theme entries. Some others, like ANAKIN Skywalker and Anna SUI, managed to sneak in!”

    If that doesn’t impress you, try putting a puzzle together. I tried once and gave up after just a few minutes. Ain’t got the chops.

    Here are two young lasses sporting Anna Sui dresses. Good shot, Philly! — Owl Chatter needs to keep up with the latest fashions. And then some purple woman is hawking her perfume.

    More nonsense tomorrow. Thanks for popping in.

  • The Sisters

    Let’s start today with a nice shot of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

    Here’s what they say about themselves on their home page:

    The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns. We believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty.

    Since our first appearance in San Francisco on Easter Sunday, 1979, the Sisters have devoted ourselves to community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.

    We use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.

    The Sisters have been regular invitees to the LA Dodgers Pride nights, honoring the LGBTQ+ community. This year, they were going to receive a special Community Hero Award in recognition of their good work. But then the Dodgers reversed direction and told the Sisters to go f*ck themselves.

    According to the NYT, the decision came after heavy pressure from conservative Catholic organizations, including the Catholic League and CatholicVote, and after Senator Marco Rubio wrote to MLB Commish Rob Manfred questioning whether the inclusion of the Sisters would be “inclusive and welcoming to Christians.”

    The Sisters released a statement expressing their outrage. Owl Chatter reproduces it in full below, but wishes to highlight the following:

    “To be condemned by representatives of the Catholic Church is particularly ironic, given that organization’s long history of condoning and concealing the sexual abuse of children. It’s a statistical fact that children are at less risk in the company of drag queens than clergy.”

    Here’s the entire statement:

    The Dodgers capitulated in response to hateful and misleading information from people outside their community, who target not only the LGBTQQ++ community but also women’s autonomy over their bodies, people and communities of color, and other faiths and nationalities.

    Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote, condemned the Sisters as a “blatantly perverted, sexual and disgusting anti-Catholic hate-group.” This is simply not true. The Sisters began in 1979 in response to the AIDS crisis, when gay men, who their faiths and families had abandoned because of their orientation, were sick and dying. The Sisters were among the first to raise money to help care for people with AIDS and to create and distribute safer-sex information.

    In the decades since, the Sisters have grown with chapters across the world. They are a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that annually raises thousands of dollars to distribute to organizations supporting marginalized communities. They support other groups, including several mainstream churches, in their work. Sisters are regularly called upon to minister to the sick, the dying, and the mourning.

    “Our ministry is real. We promulgate universal joy, expiate stigmatic guilt, and our use of religious trappings is a response to those faiths whose members would condemn us and seek to strip away the rights of marginalized communities,” said Sister Rosie Partridge, abbess of the San Francisco Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

    The Sisters are not anti-Catholic, but an organization based on love, acceptance, and celebrating human diversity. To be condemned by representatives of the Catholic Church is particularly ironic, given that organization’s long history of condoning and concealing the sexual abuse of children. It’s a statistical fact that children are at less risk in the company of drag queens than clergy. Yet, the LGBTQQ++ communities are consistently targeted by the right, because it is easier to foment fear of the unfamiliar than to take a hard look at very real threats ranging from gun violence to global warming.

    Do not let people who hate us all decide that some parts of our community are more tolerable than others, that some shall be seated at the table while others are locked out. We all stand on the shoulders of brave souls who endured much to get us this far and we owe it to them, and those yet to come, to condemn the voices of haters at every turn. The struggle continues, but we look forward to a better, more inclusive world where human diversity is seen as an advantage, not something to fear.

    With their craven and idiotic decision, the Dodgers stepped on a hornets nest. Other groups are dropping out in support of the Sisters.

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has pulled out. The ACLU pointed out that the Dodgers, who broke baseball’s color line with Jackie Robinson in 1947, had previously been “champions of inclusion.”

    LA Pride, organizers of the LA Pride Parade and Festival, said that their organization will also not attend the event. The group, which claims to have organized the world’s first permitted parade advocating for gay rights in 1970, said it was “very disappointed” in the team, which it described as a longtime partner.

    “This feels personal for me both as a queer person but also as someone from East L.A., as an Angeleno,” said Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist, public intellectual and “multigenerational Dodger fan” who protested the team’s action. “It feels humiliating to be a Dodger fan right now.” And here’s a nice touch: “I saw someone tweeting that they hoped that the Giants would invite [the Sisters] to throw the [first] pitch,” the physicist said. “You can’t let the Giants upstage you.”

    For the Dodgers, Pride Night has become a growing and essential component of each season. Last year, the Dodgers wore custom-designed, rainbow-colored logo caps (see below) for a game during what Eric Braverman, the club’s senior vice-president of marketing, communications and broadcasting, said “has become one of the most anticipated nights of the season.”

    It is still possible the Dodgers will reverse course and do the right thing. The ghost of Jackie Robinson is watching.

    I had several exchanges with students during the final exam in my Business Law class. The first one was my favorite type of exchange. A young woman came up and asked me about one of the True/False questions: It was about a negotiable instrument, and the question was: True or false: Once an instrument is “order paper,” it cannot be changed to “bearer paper” via an endorsement.

    So she comes up, points to it on the exam paper, and asks me: “If an instrument is order paper, can an endorsement change it to bearer paper?” I looked at her for a second. Then I said: “That’s the question I’m asking you. That’s what you have to tell me.”

    That happens once every few years and I cherish each time.

    The next one involved a young man. The question was on the point that an instrument must be in writing to be negotiable, but the definition of “writing” is very broad. You can write it on a banana and it passes that test. It can be a negotiable banana. So my question on the test was, can an instrument be negotiable if it’s written on the side of a cantaloupe. And it was driving this one very good student nuts. He came up to me twice about it. The second time went like this:

    Student: “What do you even mean by a cantaloupe?”

    Me: “You know, a melon.”

    Student: Was it cut in half?

    Me: No.

    Student: How do you even do it?

    Me: You’ve never written on a cantaloupe? I’d use a Sharpie.

    Student: Did you cover this in class?

    Me: Yes, but in class it was a banana.

    It turned out that was the only question he got wrong on all three tests. I gave him an A+.

    We went down to Philly today to pay our respects to Judy in light of Hank’s passing last week. It was great to see her, and her beautiful new apartment. Judy — that Michigan beer in your fridge is from us. In case any of your guests might enjoy one. I forgot to mention that we brought them.

    Judy played a video for us. Hank recorded it as a birthday greeting to mutual friend Jack during the pandemic, when they couldn’t get together. It was wonderful — funny, well-executed, and very Hank. It warmed our hearts. We didn’t get to see Hank during his illness — this video left us with a very good last image of him.

    We stopped at Dallesandro’s nearby for cheesesteaks before the visit. What a great place! There are constant lines down the block and the wait is a good half hour. But so what? The cheesesteaks are huge and perfect. I’m not exaggerating — there must be 50 billion pounds of meat on each one. Totally not greasy. You’ve got to figure out the system — what window to go to when, and what to order, but if I could do it, you could do it. Everything takes place outside — you order, you wait, you pick up your order. There are a couple of tables outside, but mostly people take their orders away. We will certainly make it back there again at some point.

    Good night everybody! See you tomorrow!

  • Synesthesia

    I didn’t think I’d like the poem in The Writer’s Almanac today. The title is a little weird — “Widnoon.” It has to be pretty simple to get through my thick head, and that didn’t seem simple. But I was wrong, though I did have to read it a few times to appreciate it, so here it is. It’s by W. S. Merwin.

    On the green hill with the river beyond it
    long ago and my father there
    and my grandmother standing in her faded clothes
    wrinkled high-laced black shoes in the spring grass
    among the few gravestones inside their low fence
    by the small white wooden church
    the clear panes of its windows
    letting the scene through from the windows
    on the other side of the empty room
    and a view of the trees over there
    my grandmother hardly turned her head
    staring like a cloud at the empty air
    not looking at the green glass gravestone
    with the name on it of the man to whom
    she had been married and who had been
    my father’s father she went on saying nothing
    her eyes wandering above the trees
    that hid the river from where we were
    a place where she had stood with him one time
    when they were young and the bell kept ringing

    I liked Met Diary today too. (I get the Sunday MD on Saturday.) It was full of pieces where absolutely nothing happens, like the parody piece I sent in where I get into a cab, reach my destination, and get out. Here’s the one I liked best, by Rebecca Chandler.

    As I sat on the subway on a Wednesday morning, my eyes drifted from the clock on the upper left screen on my phone to the charge signal on the right. I was going to be late for a meeting, and my phone was at 1 percent.

    I looked up to see how many stops I was from my Midtown destination and realized I had gotten on the wrong train. I sighed and got off in the heart of Chinatown.

    With my phone now asleep, I removed my headphones and headed toward a different station, listening to the bustle and murmurs coming from a sidewalk fish market as I started to walk.

    When I got on the next train, there was a young couple with a stroller sitting across from me. As my eyes drifted to the right, I saw an older woman sitting near the couple playing peekaboo with the baby in the stroller.

    I smiled.

    The young couple smiled at me smiling at the woman, who was smiling at the baby, who was smiling at the woman.

    I got off at 42nd Street.

    It was like that scene in Reservoir Dogs where everyone is pointing a gun at someone else, except with smiles.

    Peekaboo!

    Have you heard of SYNESTHESIA? The clue for it was: “Neuropsychological trait in which one might ascribe colors to numbers or tastes to words.” It’s new to me and fascinating. (Oliver Sachs wrote about it in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”)

    Wanderlust posted this comment, which initiated a short back-and-forth:

    “A friend was describing this strange phenomenon he’d read about regarding people who associate colors with letters and numbers, and I said, ‘Doesn’t everybody?’ We decided I have SYNESTHESIA. I do think of every letter as having a color and some have textures. To pick a random chain, J is light purple, K is orange and L is kelly green … for me. Another synesthete might have different colors for those letters. I’ve read a lot about it and some people feel it much more strongly than I do. The colors are leaping off the page as they read. Others incorporate sounds. It’s not a bad condition to have.”

    Weezie wrote:

    “I have a mild version of it; a dear friend refuses to hear about it on the grounds that her four years of art school was more than a lifetime’s worth of listening to people talk about what colors numbers are.”

    Then Wanderlust:

    Hi, fellow mild synesthete. Since I posted what colors J, K and L are for me, I’m curious what they are for you.

    Weezie’s reply:

    “I actually don’t have colors for letters! I do for some numbers, like 4 is definitely a rich spring leaves green, but it’s more about colors and certain sounds, especially music. Like, the red-eyed vireo that’s endlessly chirping right now? That is so clearly a faded salmon pink. Letters have personalities in my head but not colors. J is someone taking a nap in an armchair, K is a toddler having a tantrum, L is an accountant. Brains are strange and fascinating!”

    Pete chimed in next:

    “My nephew has SYNESTHESIA, he’s an accomplished musician who sees music in colors. He’s also on the autistic scale, so when I ask him if the synesthesia influences his playing in any way, he really doesn’t get my question, he just plays. He just got called into a Prof’s office for a plagiarism issue in an essay in his master’s program – the prof fed his essay into an automated checker, and a previously published paper came up with the same content but without a citation in the essay. He had to ask the Prof what that paper was, the Prof didn’t know, so my nephew pointed out that he was the author of the paper in question. So, can you plagiarize yourself? Discuss.”

    Here’s a song by Mayonnaise called Synesthesia. [Mayonnaise are a five-piece Filipino alt-rock band. Very good. Reminds me a little of Mumford and Sons.]

    Here’s a light and jaunty poem Owl Chatter would like to send up to Vermont Lizzie. It just came in via email from the Poetry Foundation. It’s by J. Patrick Lewis and is called What to Wear Where.

    When I was a boy
    In Looziana,
    We wore blue jeans
    And a red bandanna.

    My folks moved up
    To the state of Maine,
    We wore duck shoes
    In slicker-suit rain.

    My folks moved down
    To the state of Texas,
    We wore brand names
    Like Lazy X’s.

    Now that we’re living
    It up in Vermont,
    We wear pretty much
    Whatever we want.

    And, speaking of Vermont, the clue at 43A today was “Vermont municipality SE of Montpelier,” and the answer was BARRE. pabloinnh says he lives not too far from it and that it’s pronounced “berry.” Wow — good to know! When it partners with Wilkes, it’s pronounced “bair-uh.” (In connection with GLOAT, he also said: “Both my sons won sportsmanship awards in HS and I told them the downside was they couldn’t brag about them.”)

    Here’s what Pete had to say about BARRE:

    “And who doesn’t know BARRE VT? It has a population of over 8,000 for cripes sake. It’s the only hamlet+ sized area east of Montpelier until you get to Maine. It’s also the self-proclaimed ‘Granite Capital of World’! I know, being self-proclaimed anything doesn’t amount to much, but still, these 8000 people at least have the gumption to make grandiose claims, and you don’t want to ignore 8000 with gumption. They’d probably like to tell you that if you have granite counters in your kitchen you have them to thank, but their lawyers have advised then not to do so, as all the radon that’s seeping out of those counters and killing you and your family represents a huge liability for them. Gumption alone ain’t going to erase that fact.”

    Do you know the symbol for Capricorn? I thought I did — after all, it’s my goddamn sign — but I’ve been wrong all these years! Well, half-wrong. It was simply clued at 32D as “Capricorn’s symbol.” So I thought “goat.” When I saw the answer had seven letters, I figured it might be “the goat.” But it turns out to be SEA GOAT. In fact, the original animal associated with the sign is the mythological sea goat — half goat, half fish. How did I not know this? Am I half moron? Don’t answer that!

    There was a pair of SKORTS in the puzzle — you know, those combination skirt/shorts. The clue was “Golfing attire,” and it was near CUTE and ER NURSES, in the SE corner, where the dirty old men hang out, apparently. That’s the same corner where the miniskirt and ASCEND appeared a few days ago. My extensive research reveals that skorts are generally less sexy than miniskirts, to no surprise, but one of my tax students looked pretty good wearing this pair to our final exam last week.

    There was so much wonderful stuff in the puzzle today — a real FEAST, which was the answer at 27A, for “quite a spread.” Even curmudgeon Rex liked it.

    I learned what an LOL CAT is — it’s a photograph of a cute cat on the internet accompanied by a humorous caption that is usually misspelled and grammatically incorrect. They are uniformly terrible, so I’ll spare you an example.

    There was BEARD OIL, clued with “muttonchops moisturizer.” Where else but in Owl Chatter can you run into great stuff like this! I couldn’t get this one because I wrongly thought muttonchops was a mustache and kept thinking of mustache wax. It’s more “beardy.” Here’s a famous eggsample.

    And if you’re a Wizard of Oz fan, the clue at 31D was “Dorothy, to the Wicked Witch of the West,” and the answer was MY PRETTY.

    Welly tells me his pretty is Wilma. He’s very romantic.

    Owl Chatter Sports Dept. After chattering about umpire Don Denkinger recently, I went on eBay and spent a few bucks for his autograph to add to my collection. It’s not very valuable, but “The Call” played such a big part in baseball history, I wanted to have it. It came with the autograph of another ump, John Shulock, who is still alive, and just turned 76.

    Shulock umped 3,050 games over 24 years. He got his start as a replacement ump during the 1979 umpires’ union strike (a different type of strike from the ones they usually call). When the strike ended, Shulock was one of seven replacements offered a position. But his crossing the picket line left a sour taste. Fifteen years later, Denkinger said  “To this day, there are still hard feelings.”

    Shulock was involved in an ugly scene in Sept., 1999, when he was struck in the mask by a fastball from Tampa Bay pitcher Wilson Alvarez. Thinking he had been intentionally targeted and that the catcher DiFelice made no effort to catch the ball, Shulock charged toward Alvarez until he was intercepted by DiFelice. He was cited by league officials for display of temper, overly aggressive behavior, and physical contact with DiFelice. He was also disciplined for inappropriate public remarks when he told reporters, “I hope somebody smokes a line drive off Alvarez’s head. I’ll be the first to laugh.”

    I think he’d be the only one to laugh, no?

    See you tomorrow, everybody! Thanks for poppin’ by.

  • The Story of Aram

    About twenty years ago, back when Caity was in high school and just sixteen, she came bouncing down the stairs one day and announced that she had a new boyfriend.

       “Great!  What’s his name?”

       “Aram.”

       “What an unusual and beautiful name!,” I said.  “What’s his second name?”

       “Kachadurian.”

       “Aram Kachadurian, Aram Kachadurian.  Why does that name sound familiar to me?”

       “It’s a classical music composer,” she explained.

       “Caity, you’re going out with a classical music composer?!?  Those are all older men.  And they’re dead!  You know your mother and I don’t want you going out with older men, especially dead ones!”

       “No, it’s just the same name as the composer.  Aram’s not dead.”

       “You’re sure of this?  He’s not dead?”

       “I’m sure.”

       “Okay, then, that’s a relief.  Kachadurian sounds like an Armenian name—is he Armenian?”

       “Yes, his dad’s Armenian.”

    Now this was terrific news.  We had a friend in law school—Ed—who was Armenian, and he was a great guy.  Very funny, smart, not bad-looking, good manners, etc.  And rich!  His folks were, like, bazillionaires, I think!  They’ll pay for the wedding!!  I’ll chip in for the flowers.  This is fantastic!  These thoughts ran through my brain in about 2 seconds.  But all I said to Caity was—“Sounds great – I look forward to meeting him.”  And she said, “I’m sure you will soon.”  And that was that.

    A couple of days later I met Aram.  I could tell pretty much right away that he was very different from Ed.  He was nothing at all like Ed.  He was the exact opposite of Ed.  He was “Op-Ed.”

    First of all, he arrived on a blazing red motorcycle.  This is not good.  You do not want your 16-year-old daughter appearing in the same paragraph as a motorcycle.  (He also had a truck.)

    Next, there was his head.  It was shaved completely bald.  This is not necessarily a disaster.  It’s a style these days, and he could be on his high school swim team or something, but it was certainly striking and made me hope he wasn’t one of those skinhead-Nazi types.  (As it turned out, he was on the high school wrestling team, though that doesn’t completely rule out the Nazis.) 

    There were some tattoos, but these weren’t too bad – just a couple, and fairly tasteful.  No swastikas or snakes, and nothing gang-related, thank goodness, not that I could know for sure.  The piercings, though, were quite numerous and all over the place.  Eyebrows, lips, tongue – just all over the place.  I cast my thoughts back to the the great men of history:  Thomas Jefferson . . .  George Washington . . . Ben Franklin . . . Derek Jeter . . . . none of these men were pierced.  (Alright, maybe Jeter a small tasteful earring, but you get my point.)  There was no association of greatness with piercing.  I put this on the debit side, no question.

    He joined us for lunch.  I never saw anyone eat like him.  He looked at the silverware like he never saw a spoon or fork before.  It was like in “The Little Mermaid” when Ariel found a fork at the bottom of the sea and had no idea what it was.  He ate everything with his hands – even things like rice.  I gave Caity a look that said “What’s with his eating?” and she gave me a look back that I’m fairly certain I interpreted correctly as: “I don’t know, but if you say anything about it I will kill you in your sleep tonight and you know I’m not kidding.”   

    I let it go.

    His language was as you might have guessed.  “Hey, can I get the fucking salt?”  I said, “Aram, you should be economical.  Suppose you could buy something for ten dollars or get the exact same item for eight, you’d pay eight, right?”  And he said of course.  “Well, ‘can I get the salt’ and ‘can I get the fucking salt’ will both get you the salt – you don’t need the extra word.”  “I get it,” he said, “that’s good.”  Two minutes later:  “Hey, can I get the fucking mustard?” 

    We were out once and when we came home we found that Aram had left a note for Caity on the front door.  I was just going to glance at it to make sure there was no emergency, but the horror of it drew me in.  Every word had something terribly wrong with it.  I sat down with a pencil and paper to try to work out what it said, like when the British captured a German document during World War II and turned it over to their cryptographers to decipher.  It took me a good fifteen minutes to come up with the following essential points (with only about 70% certainty): (1) Aram had come by earlier. (2) No one was home.  (3) He’ll call or visit later.  I showed it to Linda incredulously.  “Look at this!  If you held a gun to his head I don’t think he could spell “cat” correctly!”  

    We had absolutely nothing in common.  He wasn’t a sports fan.  We had nothing to talk about.  If I was trapped alone with him it was torture.  I had to make up some excuse to run away.  “The upstairs closet, the hinges, I have to, you know . . . make yourself at home . . .” and I’d flee upstairs, or sometimes just drive away with absolutely nowhere to go.

    Our initial response to the relationship (insanely), was to wave it off.  A little teen romance.  It couldn’t possibly last.  She’ll end it in a matter of days.  But the days and weeks turned to months, and it was only getting worse.  Finally, Linda said I had to talk to Caity, to convince her how wrong Aram was for her and to break up with him.  I said, “Linda, has it ever happened in the history of Earth that a father talked a teenage daughter out of a boyfriend?”  “Well, we have to do something,” she “reasoned,” and she thought I stood a better chance than she did.  So I picked a time when Caity seemed in a relaxed mood (a “window of lucidity”), and we had a little talk.

    “Hi Beaner.  Got a minute?”

    “Hi Dad. Sure, what’s up?”

    “It’s about Aram.”

    “OK”

    “Let’s take a moment and visualize Aram.  Like pretend he’s standing right here near the couch.”

    “OK”

    “Good.  Now on this other side of the room, let’s pretend we have Claire’s boyfriend Tommy, and Meredith’s boyfriend Greg, and maybe Tricia’s boyfriend Billy.  Got it?”

    “OK”

    “Good.  Now, looking calmly and objectively at all of these fine young men, doesn’t it seem clear to you that Aram is very different from these others, and in fact FROM EVERY OTHER PERSON ON THE PLANET EARTH??!!??  HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY BE DATING THIS GUY?”

    But all she said was, “No, Dad, you don’t really know him.  He’s good.  There’s a lot to him.”  And I said, “I DON’T KNOW HIM? (I was still speaking in capital letters.) WHAT IS THERE TO KNOW? HE CAN’T SPELL CAT! HE DOESN’T USE SILVERWARE!

    But she just repeated that I don’t know him, that I was wrong about him.

    I finally just told her to be careful.

    “I will Dad,” she lied.

    “I know you will Beaner,” I lied right back.

    And the months stretched on.  They spent all of their free time together.  Caity went away with Aram and his mom to West Virginia for a weeklong summer trip.  Aram joined us on a winter ski weekend.  She skipped school on his birthday so they could “hang out.”  Stuff like that.

    And the dark clouds of Aram settled over us and we were very concerned.  I’d say we settled into a long-term “Level 3” depression.  “Level One” is something like a kidnapping.  The police and local media get involved.  Your life is a relentless shrieking nightmare and you can only eat or sleep with the help of medical intervention: intravenous or prescription drugs.  “Level Two” is when the doctor tells you she found a “bump” on an X-ray.  “Bump” is the happy term, like, “Oh this ride is bumpy, or Look at the clown’s bumpy head!”  But the word they write on the chart that you glance at is “lesion,” and then they say the most frightening words in the language:  “It’s probably nothing.”  Then they say, “But let’s just run about $15,000 worth of tests to rule some things out, all of which involve certain death.”  So for the next few days until the biopsy results come back (negative, of course), you can think of nothing else.  In a Level Two depression, though, the police and local media are not involved.  You can eat and even sleep with maybe just some over-the-counter help. 

    “Level Three,” what we had with Aram, allows you to eat and sleep okay, and there are stretches during the day when you don’t dwell on it.  But there’s a dark cloud overhead at all times, and it’s what you fall asleep worrying about at night, and it’s what you think about first thing in the morning.  (Level Four depression, BTW, is all other times – it’s how things are with teenagers in the house when everything seems to be going well, at least on the surface. It’s the best you can hope for.)

    Sam’s bar mitzvah was coming up and Caity said she’d like Aram to come.  I started in about how he’d have to dress up a little and watch his language, and she said, “Don’t worry, he has Jewish neighbors.  He’s been to bar mitzvahs and knows all about them.  He’ll be fine.”  And he was.  He looked quite sharp and was quite respectful, as far as I could tell.  But he must have made a bit of an impression, because the following week we received from quite a smattering of aunts, cousins, etc. a good half dozen of what I came to call “that young man” phone calls.  The calls would start off saying what a wonderful time they had and how beautifully Sam did (blah blah blah).  Then, about 5 minutes in there’d be a pause followed by: “That young man with Caitlin . . . are they serious?”  “Aram?” I’d respond innocently. “Nah, it’s just a teen romance.  How long can it last?  Why?  Didn’t you like him?”   

    And the months rolled on and they celebrated their first anniversary.  They fantasy-talked about getting married (eventually), but no kids – Aram didn’t want to have kids.  Caity was now a senior at Chatham High (Go Cougars!), and Aram graduated from Watchung Hills High School (for those of you who don’t believe in miracles – he graduated!).  He was working part-time at a nursing home nearby and going to Raritan Valley Community College.  Caity would graduate HS that June.

    Then, one day something happened that changed everything for me.

    The event started as this story did with Caity bouncing down the steps. 

        “Dad, can you drive me over to Aram’s?  His truck’s being fixed.” 

        “Sure.  When do you want to go?

        “Well, I still have to put my makeup on . . . but I can do that in the car.  Let’s go now.”

        “Fine.”

    So she gathered up a huge bag of powders, creams, various implements, etc., and we jumped into the car.  It was an eight-mile drive.  She set a mirror up on her lap as a base and put a whole array of little things around.  Then she took a big dark pencil out of the bag and started writing on her face.

    “Caity!  What are you doing?  You’re writing on your face!?!”

    “Dad.  How long have you lived in America?  This is eye liner.  Everyone uses it.”

    “Everyone?  You mean to tell me your mother writes on her face with big pencils like that?”

    “Of course she does.”

    “Alright, I guess.  It’s your face.”

    She refrained from a more abusive response to my moronism either out of pity at my hopeless obtuseness, or since I was at that moment in the act of doing her a favor.

    In any event, we arrived at Aram’s, and Caity said she wasn’t done, but she could finish up at a table in the front yard—there was no need for me to wait.  So we said our goodbyes, and I told her to call if she needed a ride later.

    Now Aram’s driveway isn’t the narrow type that you drive up and then back out of.  It’s wide.  So you actually turn entirely around so you can leave facing the street.  This was good because the traffic was heavy sometimes and it could be hard to back out into it.  So I maneuvered around to face the street.  At this point, by pure coincidence—I don’t think I could have managed it if I tried—my side-view mirror was exactly angled so it faced Aram’s front door.  And as I glanced at it, the door opened and out popped Aram.  He couldn’t tell that I could see him because the car was facing away from the house.  And Caity didn’t see him since she was still busy finishing with her makeup.  So what I saw could not have been a little show he was putting on for anyone.

    There was a very small front porch with three steps leading down to the front yard.  He took the first step, and then noticed Caity at the table in the yard.  At that point he stopped, and before walking down the last two steps he did a little dance: A little happy dance, with his arms swinging sideways and his legs buckling at the knees.  It was nothing really.  It looked silly.  It probably lasted under two seconds.  But those two seconds changed everything for me.  I suddenly saw him through Caity’s eyes.  And I began to think, maybe we were wrong to be looking for someone who can spell—everyone uses spellcheck these days anyway, right?  And maybe we were wrong to be looking for someone with good table manners.  I mean, really, what could be less important than that?  Maybe we should be looking for someone who, when you come to visit on a lazy Sunday morning with nothing special going on, is so happy to see you, is so brimming with joy at the mere fact that you exist, that he can’t walk down three stupid steps without exploding into a paroxysm of flailing arms and legs.  Maybe that’s not so bad.  Most people do a lot worse.

    And from that moment on, I was perfectly fine with Aram.  The dark clouds parted and lifted.  Because I knew that he would never do anything to hurt Caity; that he would always, in his crazy way, try to make her happy; and that if he and I had nothing in common, then we had one thing in common: we both appreciated to the core what an extraordinary gift it was to have Caity in our lives.

    * * * * ** * * *

    They were together for a few more months, but then Caity broke it off.  She would be heading off to college in the fall and didn’t want a relationship at home to hold her back.  She was pretty shaken up after she told him.  They got together a few times after that, as friends.  He helped me pick up a couch with his truck.  He graduated from Raritan Valley — good for him! — and the last we heard of him, he was somewhere in the south with Homeland Security (I’m not kidding – feel safe?), in a position, I would bet, that is not overly dependent upon writing skills.

    Thanks for dropping in. See you tomorrow!

  • No Strings Attached

    Puppets for sale: $50 each, no strings attached.

    These puppets are so lifelike, I bet you can’t tell which of these four is a real person, amirite?

    Give up? It’s the one on the left. And it’s Ralph Lee, who created the others, along with many many others and many amazing masks. Sadly, Lee died last Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87. The obit in the NYT called him “a creator of giant crustaceans, lizards, skeletons and sorceresses.”

    His puppets appeared in productions of his own theater company, Mettawee River, and in those of, among others, the Metropolitan Opera, the NY Shakespeare Festival, NY City Opera, and the Theater for the New City. His most famous puppet may be the “land shark” that devoured Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, et al, in SNL’s early heyday (starting in 1975).

    In 1974, he created and staged the first Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village with the help of some theater friends. It started small but has grown into a major annual NYC event. He won an OBIE for it.

    Lee was born in Middlebury VT and his first few years of education were in a one-room schoolhouse. He went to college at Amherst. He taught at Bennington in the 70’s and one of his first productions was called Casserole. Its scenes, which incorporated his puppets, were staged all around the campus, with the spectators transported from one scene to the next in hay wagons.

    His first marriage ended in divorce, but he married Casey Compton in 1982 and they stayed married until his death. She also worked with him, and last February they jointly received a lifetime achievement OBIE award.

    Lee is survived by Ms. Compton, as well as by three children from his first marriage, Heather, Jennifer and Joshua Lee; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. Much of his work survives him as well — the countless extraordinary characters. Which is good — “The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,” he said. “I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.”

    Today’s puzzle had a special “dirty old man” section. At 55D, the clue was “Mini display?,” and the “mini” was a mini skirt, because the answer was KNEE. Get it? A mini “displays” the knees. And placed right next to it, droolingly, was ASCEND.

    Here’s a scary-looking woman wearing one.

    Remember that episode on Cheers when the bar held a charity auction of the guys and a real man-eater type, chain-smoking cigarettes, won the bidding for Woody? “You better be good,” she tells him. Woody asks Norm if she seems “a little scary,” and Norm says, “The electric chair’s a little scary.”

    Alana HAIM was in the puzzle, the co-star of Licorice Pizza. Hi Alana! She’s also in a rock band, Haim, with her two sisters. She’s from LA, 32, Jewish, and single. Her dad is an Israeli-born former professional soccer player.

    It’s been a long, tiring day. Too pooped to chatter any more. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.