Dr. Metablog

This Old House

"It was irresponsible for me to have bought this house," he thought. "And yet it is so glamorous, so desirable.  I should have inspected it more closely.  There are many parts of the building that I've never even looked into. Take this room, for example.  It's far too long and narrow to be useful  I must have been attracted to the bookshelf and to the books. But now that I look closely, I see that the books are tattered and  worthless. I thought that they were valuable, but they're just thrift store discards. And the kitchen -- I don't think it's functional. These hand-carved boards, which I thought were so beautiful -- they obstruct the sink and the stove. I'll have to remove them. And in this room -- what is it, a bedroom? -- the murals are nothing more than the scrawls of children. What could I have been thinking? I have purchased a house that is a shambles. It's going to cost me a fortune just to make it habitable. Look, in the living room the wallpaper is pulled off and the lath is exposed. And here, in the grand ballroom, there's been leakage around the window frames. This huge fireplace is falling in. This passageway, which ought to go to the nursery --it's been blocked off. And this sitting room has no outside wall. No protection from the weather at all. The wind could blow right through. It was self-destructive of me to buy this house. It's financial suicide. What could have attracted me to it? Let's walk around the outside. There are entrances that I didn't know existed. Anyone could come in. It's not secured; there are no locks, no doors. And a garage -- but the garage floor isn't concrete or paved -- it's just sand and rocks. And this outside wall, which I took for marble or granite -- it's just old loose, cracked, unpainted stucco. The yard is a complete wreck -- all concrete and razor-wire, nothing alive. Who's that strange man prowling around?  Why was I attracted to this place?  Why do I still find it alluring, despite everything that I know about it?"

Later, we all went for a drive in the mountains. It was cold and the roads were completely covered with snow and almost impassable. We arrived too late for the party. "Let's all meet at the Unitarian church," one of the other guests said. "I'm going to kill me a chicken," said another. 

Compliment/Complement

Here is a sentence drawn from a contract for new condominium construction. "The laundry room flooring is a composition tile called Stonewalk; it is a warm light color that compliments all of the wood floor options." And here's a second sentence from the same contract: "bedroom carpets are a warm light color that compliments all of the wood floor options."  Compliments?  As every schoolchild is taught, "to compliment" means "to praise."  The wording of the contract therefore asserts that Stonewalk, a composition tile, speaks highly of the wooden floor. The bedroom carpets join in the chorus of adulation. No doubt that it's a praiseworthy floor, but are the warm light carpets and the warm light tiles fully qualified to make so positive a determination?

Surely the highly-skilled and well-compensated lawyers who drew up the contract meant to write (if they subscribe to conventional canons of usage) that "the color of Stonewalk complements the color of the floors." That is to say, the one color "completes" or "makes perfect" the other.

For example:  you may compliment the sommelier, but the sauvignon rouge complements the rosbif or the biftek. Them's the official rules. 

But should they be?  Is the distinction between compliment and complement meaningful? Or is it pedantic and arbitrary?

What can history tell us about these twins?

In Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, Don Adriano de Armado is "a refined traveler of Spain..., /That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;/ One whom the music of his own vain tongue/ Doth ravish like enchanting harmony;/ [He is] a man of complements."  But is a "man of complements" a courteous man who offers gratuitous compliments, or is he rather a fulfilled or a complete man.  Clearly, Shakespeare's word conflates the two meanings. A second example, this one from King Lear:  "There is further complement of leave-taking between Burgundy and [Lear]."  Does "complement" mean, "politeness" or "formal civility," which would be "compliment";  or does it mean that Burgundy and Lear have finished or completed or brought to perfection their parting sentences?  Once again, both meanings are possible. Examples of such blurring can be multiplied. Falstaff (in The Merry Wives of Windsor) says this: "I see you are obsequious in your love and I profess requital to a hair's breadth; not only, Mistress Ford, in the simple office of love, but in all the accoutrement, complxment, and ceremony of it."  Complement, compliment; take your pick.  Either is possible;  both make perfectly good sense.   

It's obvious that the doctrinaire distinction between the spellings has been imposed since the time of Shakespeare. In fact, the dictionaries tell us that the introduction of a second, separate word is an example of learned Frenchification. OED:  "Compliment (Fr) is a doublet of complement (the form directly from Latin). The latter was in use before the introduction of the French form, which slowly took its place between 1635 and 1715." The twins have been, and still are, closer in meaning than traditionalists allow (which is why the condo contract writers got it, so to speak, "wrong").

What to do?  My suggestion: let's overleap the conservatives and embrace the truly reactionary. Let's declare that from now on, "compliment" and "complement" are, just as they used to be, one and the same word.  No more racking the brains over "i" and "e," no more anxiety, no more guilt. 

Let the word go forth that from this moment on, tiles and carpets are free to complement or to compliment floors -- just as they prefer.

Reposted: Salinger

J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is an anti-bildungsroman -- a "novel of education" without the least shred of moral, intellectual, or spiritual growth. Holden Caulfield, the novel's naive yet jaded narrator, learns absolutely nothing either about himself or about life. Unable to profit from his various encounters, he dismisses almost everyone he meets as "phony." That one adjective, repeated incessantly and ad nauseam, might lead a reader to hope that Holden will find authenticity somewhere in his horizon, but The Catcher in the Rye is not a novel that rewards optimism.  It concludes with a vision of Holden's pre-pubescent sister Phoebe going "round and round" on a symbolic carousel-- going nowhere, it would seem -- and in a brief coda Holden himself has been institutionalized and placed under the care of an unsympathetic psychoanalyst. Nor does the whiff of Humbertism in the relation between Holden and young Phoebe contribute any last-second learning or cheer.

Even in the 1950s, The Catcher in the Rye enjoyed a cadre of fiercely loyal partisans who powerfully identified with Holden Caulfield. I didn't believe then, and certainly don't believe now, that Holden mirrored the anguish of my own particular soul. I was not a true believer, and I was not entranced by Holden. For me, the novel was nothing more than a better-than-average coming-of-age story -- although a dispiriting one because Holden Caulfield does not mature but instead remains stranded in perpetual, painful adolescence.

A novel without hope, The Catcher in the Rye has become an inspiration for the hopeless. In Los Angeles, in 1989, twenty-one-year-old Robert Bando shot and killed a young actress whom he had been pestering with trinkets and messages. In a nearby alley, police found a .357-caliber handgun, a bloody shirt, and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Two years later, John Hinckley shot and crippled James Brady and almost succeeded in assassinating Ronald Reagan. Hinckley had fantasized that killing the president would impress the actress Jodie Foster, whom he imagined that he was wooing. In his pocket he carried a well-read, tattered paperback of -- you guessed it --The Catcher in the Rye. In 1980, on Manhattan's West Side, Mark David Chapman, concealing his pistol under a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, shot John Lennon five times at point blank. He had inscribed his copy of the novel with the words "To Holden Caulfield from Holden Caulfield" -- Chapman had tried to legally change his name to that of Salinger's troubled narrator. From jail, the proud murderer issued an endorsement: "My wish is for all of you to someday read The Catcher in the Rye."  At his trial Chapman asserted that he had killed Lennon because the singer had become "phony," and at his sentencing he read to the judge the section of the book in which Holden tells his sister Phoebe that he imagined himself in a field of rye with "thousands of little kids" whom he must prevent from falling off "the edge of some crazy cliff." 

The Catcher in the Rye still sells well (15,000,000 copies in print by 1996) and has become a fixture in the high school and college classroom, where successive generations of adolescents can calibrate their degree of angst against Holden's. But increasingly, and paradoxically, attention has turned from the novel to Salinger himself, who has not published anything since 1965 and, secluded in his Cornish, New Hampshire retreat, has become the world's most notorious hermit since St. Simeon Stylites mounted his pillar in sixth-century Antioch. Although he is a hermit, Salinger is anything but a saint. In 1987, in a bizarre echo of Holden-obsessed stalkers, Salinger, then sixty-eight years old, flew to California and barged onto the set of the TV show Dynasty in search of one of the series's starlets, Catherine Oxenberg, with whom he had apparently fallen into long-distance electronic infatuation. He was "escorted" off the set. Did Catherine Oxenberg have a precursor?  She did, indeed she did. Several, in fact, including Joyce Maynard, described as "the Lolita of all Lolitas," who was eighteen and a freshman at Yale in 1972 when Salinger, at the age of fifty-three, initiated a romance by sending her a fan letter. These and other even less savory details about Caulfield-Salinger's life can be found in Paul Alexander's thin, amateurish biography Salinger (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999), which does not propose, although it might, that J. D. has learned as little about life as his most famous character.

Another Long Night

Last night, I had a specific sense that I hadn't been sleeping in clover. I worried for hours and I worried about everything. I started, I think, by brooding on the inevitability of a comet striking the earth and extinguishing life as we know it. From there I moved to the collapse of the ecosyste. The earth will soon (in geological terms) be hot, waterless, and lifeless. In the nearer future, monsoons, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes and other "acts of god" will occur with increasing frequency. My pillow was hot, and the bed sheet somehow managed to tangle itself around my legs.  I worried about the possibility of nuclear weapons or vials of botulism falling into the hands of jihadists. I worried about the declining population of our swifts and swallows, our frogs and toads, our bats and bees and about the certainty that the Asian longhorn beetle is about to do to the maples what the blight did to the magnificent chestnuts and the Dutch elm disease did to ulmus americanus. Not to mention the wooly adelgid that is intent on making hash of our hemlocks. I worried about the decline of the American economy, about the rebirth of bigotry and know-nothingism among the Republicans and about the pitiful fecklessness of the Democrats. I was working myself up to quite a state, sweating into my blankets. What about our radical-reactionary-interventionist supreme court? Oh my gosh, I forgot to worry about all those poor people in Haiti! At about four in the morning, I switched to more local worries: my apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, my increasing failure of memory, and my lifelong tendency toward procrastination, once resisted but now re-emerging with a vengeance. I reviewed the recent deaths and diseases among my age-cohort of friends:  -- K's polycynthemia vera, R's brain tumor, S's alcoholism, J's obstructed colon, B's shingles, C's lung cancer, my brother's sudden death of stroke or embolism or who knows what it was. I thought of the friends to whom I should have been more kind, more concerned. I worried about my children and grandchildren, all apparently thriving, but you never know. I fell in and out of sleep. I got up and paced.

Toward dawn, I straightened the bedclothes, took a leak, ate some yogurt, and tried again. I woke up in a cold sweat, having dreamed that I was painfully plucking hairs out of my lips. Not hairs, exactly. More like boar's bristles. And that every handful of bristles was infested with spiders and other verminous insects.  Eew, hairy lips. How disgusting.

I did not worry about dying.

Death: no more nightmares, no more insomnia, forever.

A Visit to the Post Office

Package to mail, so off I go to the post office. When I arrived, eight people are on line ahead of me. I took my place. There were only two clerks on duty and let me tell you they were not breaking any speed records. They were moving as though through mucilage. If I had to guess, I'd say that they were working at just above the speed in which all molecular motion ceases. Their pace seemed carefully calibrated, as if in answer to the implicit question, "what's the least possible amount of energy I can expend and still retain my job?"  There was some grumbling on the line: "Only two clerks on duty!" It took me twenty-five minutes but I completed my transaction. When I left, there were ten people behind me, letters or packages in hand, shuffling and stamping their collective frustrated feet.

How much time wasted?  Well, here were nineteen productive citizens taking twenty minutes or half an hour to do five minutes worth of work. You do the calculation. If there had been another clerk, and if the clerks were to move at normal human speed, I would have been in and out in a flash. Multiply the TWF (time waste factor) by all the post office stations in urban America. What an astonishing, third-world loss of productivity.

The post office has been essentially privatized. It's not allowed to run a deficit, so it cuts back on services and continues to raise the cost of mailing an envelope. And makes people wait. 

But it retains from its former incarnation the lifetime-employment uncivil-service mentality. It combines the worst of free enterprise with the worst of public ownership. It's a truly remarkable solution to the implicit question, can we design a completely dysfunctional bureaucracy?

About a decade ago, some idealistic postmaster-general announced a campaign to serve every customer within ten minutes of arrival. To that end, a large clock was set in a prominent spot in the every office in the land (in ours, just where the line commences).  A big PR fuss was made. About a year later, all the clocks were quietly removed.  I wonder, where did they go. Does the USPS maintain an old clock warehouse somewhere in central Nebraska? Or were they discarded? Or taken home by the local postmasters. In any case, the campaign was a total disaster. The system did not move. 

The USPS didn't even do a good job of removing the clocks. When I stand in line, I stare at a wire sticking out of the wall where a clock used to hang.  I stare at it for ten minutes, for twenty minutes, for half an hour....

One Heck of a Big Miller

The miller in The Miller of Angibault is, according to George Sand, really, really huge. "The big miller descended, stretching, from his corn-loft, cracking the joints of his long arms and legs. He was well-proportioned, robust, easy in his movements, and strikingly featured. This specimen of the countryside was remarkable for a region whose inhabitants are generally on the short side."  How tall was this "tall miller?"

Nineteenth-century novelists rarely give us hard data, but George Sand provides the exact measurement for this "specimen." "Grand-Louis" is exactly five feet eight inches tall! 

Le Meunier d'Angibault was written in 1844. It's in Thackeray's Pendennis (1850), I think,  that one of the female characters is described as a "maypole" of five feet four inches.

I wonder how tall Shakespeare imagined Helena -- the famous "painted maypole" of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Probably just as tall as the boy who played the part, but how much would that be in inches? 

Height is believed to have increased a centimeter a decade in western Europe from 1850 to 1950.  Is it possible that the great heroes of antiquity -- Hector, Samson etc. -- were all under five feet tall?  My grandfather was just a hair above five feet tall. 

The average height of American males was 5' 8" in 1960 and is 5' 9 1/2" today.  How tall would a Louis have to be today to be called Grand-Louis? 

The "Motor" vs. the Horse

Edith Wharton loved the "motor" but never lost her nostalgia for the horse drawn vehicles of her youth.

A passage in A Backward Glance (1932) conveys the novelty and thrill of her virgin voyage.   

"There were no motors in 1903; but as a toy for the rich they were beginning to appear. My old friend George Meyer was the owner of a magnificent specimen. I had never been in a motor before, and could hardly believe that we were to do the run from Rome to Caprarola and back (fifty miles each way) in an afternoon. The car was probably the most luxurious, and certainly one of the fastest, then procurable; but that meant only a sort of high-perched phaeton without hood or screen, or any protection from the wind. I had the high seat like a coachman's box. Off we tore across the Campagna, over humps and bumps, through ditches and across gutters, windswept, dust-enveloped, I clinging to my sailor hat. I spent the next days in bed, fighting an acute laryngitis. In spite of this I swore then and there that as soon as I could make money enough, I would buy a motor, and having a delicate throat, scoured the country in the hottest weather swaddled in a stifling hood with a mica window, till some benefactor of the race invented the wind-screen and made motoring an unmixed joy."

The early twentieth-century "motor" was hectic, prone to breakdowns, and erratic. In contrast, the vehicles of Newport, Rhode Island of Wharton's aristocratic youth were dignified and stately, as much for display as for utility. "Young ladies, married or single, expected to be taken for an afternoon drive by the master of the house. The vehicles of the fashionable young men were either dog-carts (drawn by a pair driven tandem) or a high four-wheeled conveyance called a T-cart, which was drawn by one big stepper, while the older men drove handsome phaetons with a showy pair, and an impressive groom with folded arms in the rumble. Carriages, horses, harness and grooms were all of the latest and most irreproachable cut, and Bellevue Avenue was a pretty scene when the double line of glittering vehicles and showy horse-flesh paraded between green lawns and scarlet geranium borders."

"Dog-cart?" "Phaeton?"  T-cart?"  What do these words signify?  And moreover, what the heck was a daumont, "preceded by outriders, which swayed gracefully on its big C-springs to the rhythm of four high-stepping and highly-groomed horses, a postilion on one of the leaders, and two tremendous footmen perched high at the back."

For more philosophizing on these nineteenth-century horse drawn conveyances, click here.

Salad Daze

What would prompt a guy to dream that his carrots were growing upside-down? Their abundant orange roots pointing straight into the air?  What point is my dreamatorium trying to make?  In this particular nightmare, I'm absolutely perplexed about photosynthesis. If they're upside-down, how do they..?

There's more. In the dream, my lettuce is growing right-side-up, but it's encrusted with some sort of white stuff that forms a collar around the base of the plant. 

Courageously, I taste it. It's -- by gosh -- feta cheese. Salty, but still quite good.

What the heck? 

The Shop on the Corner

From our window, looking left across the street, we can see a squat old cinder-block building that sits diagonally on its corner lot.  I remember when it housed a gas station, then a taqueria, and afterward, for at least a decade, an import rug store that was always 'going out of business,' until, contrary to all expectations, it went out of business. The building lay vacant for a year or so, but now it's found a new purpose. It's a medical marijuana "dispensary." (Marijuana, when used for the relief of pain or nausea, is legal in Colorado). 

When we're curious, and willing to make the effort, we watch the arrival of the chronically afflicted patients. The are uniformly youthful and they come by car, on foot, on bicycle, on skates or skateboard or scooter. The only vehicle in which they don't arrive is the wheelchair. 

In fact, neither "our" dispensary nor any other dispensary bothers to pretend that their product (aka stash) is anything but recreational. GreenLeaf Farmacy, for example, advertises Kief Hash! at $25/gram. Boulder Wellness Center offers "High Quality Medical Marijuana: Tinctures, Vaporizers, Ointments, Teas, and More." TopShelf Alternatives competes at $10/Gram and with "your choice of 34 home grown strains. Edibles include Mile High Ice Cream." DrReefer specializes in "clones." Boulder MM Dispensary is "an upscale establishment with high quality medicine."  Colorado Patients First, "where compassion for patients and quality of medicine comes first," offers "Sour Kush, Big Blue, Opium, AK-47, Maui Mist, Jack White, and Pot of Gold." For each painful disease, apparently, its own uniquely targeted variety of ganja. To judge by the exuberance of the clientele, the "medicines" must be alleviating tons of pain.

How did it happen?  Some years ago, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution legalizing the medical use of marijuana. The argument was compelling (and I voted for it).  Marijuana mitigates chronic pain and also minimizes the nausea that accompanies chemotherapy. Until this year, the state's Department of Public Health had limited individual physicians to five such suffering patients. But then a judge ruled that the constitutional amendment did not impose such limits, and, in the words of John Milton, "all hell broke loose."

There's no zoning (as with liquor outlets), no sin tax (because marijuana is a prescription drug), and no decorum.

"The latest data from the Medical Marijuana Registry maintained by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment shows that as of Dec. 15, 2009,  a total of 820 licensed physicians had authorized medical marijuana for 15,800 patients. Of those 820 physicians, just 15 accounted for 73 percent of total patients, and just five have authorized 49 percent of all recommendations." There are now more than eighty marijuana dispensaries in our town. (There are just ten traditional pharmacies.) It makes one wonder about the size of the underground economy. 

It's the Wild West -- unregulated, unbridled capitalism!  It's a growth industry! 

It's also massively hypocritical.  

Why don't we just legalize marijuana, and then regulate and tax it the way we do liquor and tobacco? Of course, neither liquor nor tobacco pays its way -- the social cost of both drugs well exceed their revenues -- but that's a topic for another day. 

There are bills in the legislature to regulate the marijuana industry and everyone knows that within a year there will be tight new restrictions. But until then, we will much enjoy the scene at the corner store. 

[Update March 15, 2023.  Pearl Maneli writes:  MMJ, as it's often called, is now legal in Colorado, but the store visible from our window no longer sells it; the building has been transformed into an upscale i.e. expensive pizzeria.]

Haute Cuisine, c. 1945

A friend of long standing (a Shakespeare scholar) has posted a recipe for a dish that she calls grieven but which was known as gribbinis in our part of the world. It was a staple of my childhood, perhaps even my favorite food. Gribbinis also linked me to my grandma. Inasmuch as she didn't speak the only language I knew, it was natural and appropriate for us to bond over food. 

"Accumulate a cup or two of chicken fat. Render the fat in a pan with about an equal amount of chopped onion. Slowly heat the fat and onions over a low flame, being careful not to let the mixture ignite. The onion will turn golden, then brown, and some of the fat will become crisp."

My friend suggests serving the resulting mixture over mashed potatoes, but for grandma and me the preferred vehicle was a hefty portion of about 3/4 grated black radish and 1/4 onion--along with some black bread to sop up the grease. I thought it was a delicacy for a king, not knowing, then, that it was a dish for an impoverished  peasant in a Ukrainian shtetl.    

Black radish? Not a vegetable familiar to you? Black on the outside, white on the inside, turnip-size. Very, very, very, pungent. Not widely used here in North America, nowadays, but apparently still common in eastern Europe, where mouths are more acclimated than ours to allyl isothiocyanates. 

Whenever I'm among folks who make a fetish of  food preparation, I fantasize about taking them home and plunking down a trough-size trencher of black radish, onions, and gribbinis. 

Would that be hostility? Possibly, just the merest tad. Or perhaps just a need to remind myself where I came from when, perchance, I find myself among tender and exquisite palates.

A Melancholy Errand

Before Grandma died, she specified cremation and asked that her ashes be divided between the graves of her husband Dan and her daughter Phyllis. Now the time has come to fulfill the first half of the assignment. We'll fly to NYC later this month. We'll make a pilgrimage to the Baron Hirsch cemetery on Staten Island, scatter a portion of the ashes, leave behind a ceremonial stone or two, and think thoughts as positive as the occasion will allow. 

However, in the light of the Detroit plane incident, I'm concerned about carrying a box of white powder on board. Am I paranoid? is it completely nuts to imagine that some vigilant but misguided TSA employee will take a gander at the ashes and think "anthrax" or "explosives." Take me into that little room where they peruse your "body cavities." And then on to Gitmo.

Apparently, I'm not the only person with this worry.

"Passengers are allowed to carry a crematory container as part of their carry-on luggage, but the container must pass through the X-ray machine. If the container is made of a material that generates an opaque image and prevents the security screener from clearly being able to see what is inside, then the container cannot be allowed through the security checkpoint." Is our container sufficiently transparent? How would one know?

Instead of carrying the ashes aboard, why don't we just check them through?

"Some airlines do not allow cremated remains as checked baggage so please check with your air carrier before attempting to transport a crematory container in checked baggage." Why would United Airlines care whether I put ashes in my bags?  It's obvious -- they lose the luggage and then we sue them for zillions.  How about if I promise not to sue?

I'm going to guess that it's not a good idea to sew the "cremains" -- hideous neologism -- into my underwear. 

OK, here's the plan.  We take a symbolic portion the ashes, secure it in a transparent ziploc baggie, and insert a visible all-caps large-font note: "These are Grandma's ashes. They are not dangerous. Feel free to examine or to sample."

Incidentally, I can offer no confirmation to the rumor that the Department of Transportation plans to ban all underwear. Or that it will insist that underwear be worn on the outside. These are vicious canards. 

Well-aged Outrage

Another day, another solicitation  from Cornell, the university that I attended back there in the Bronze Age 1950s. I've got to admire their tenacity -- they've been holding out the tin cup for fifty years and I've never dropped in a nickel. Not even a copper. 

Why so negligent? Well, there are a number of reasons. The first, and probably most important, is that I took my education so seriously that I became a teacher, and as a result,  I never accumulated the kind of dough that would make the least impression on a multi-billion dollar endowment. A second reason: I sent my daughter to Cornell during the 1980s (at what now seems like the bargain rate of only $20,000 - $25,000 a year), and the total four-year cost of her stay was a sufficient contribution to the ole alma mater. And finally, other causes felt more pressing (last year, for example, Obama, and this year, helping to keep our state legislature blue). But these reasons are mere rationalization and excuse, for, truth to tell, I bear a grudge against Cornell. Let me unclasp a secret book and tell you about it. 

In my first year at Cornell, I shared a room in an all-freshman dormitory. It was not gracious living, but I hadn't expected it to be. Cinder-block walls, composition floors, cheap extruded-aluminum furniture. Worst of all, the doors were fragile, hollow-core, and were always busting. I busted one -- I slid a piece of furniture and sliced a hole into the 1/8" plywood sheathing of Room 2117. (Whose brilliant idea was it to put fragile doors in the way of a thousand adolescent males?) Anyway, some guys came to fix the hole, which they did by gluing a 2" by 6" piece of plywood ONTO THE SURFACE OF THE DOOR. Talk about craftsmanship! 

But here's the rub. I was billed $10 for the so-called repair. $10.00?  Not so much, you say?  Well, I was then employed at $1.25 an hour, so the perfunctory repair, which couldn't have taken five minutes to complete, represented the before-tax wages of a full day's labor. (Further context: the rent for my half of the room was $315 for the 32-week school year, or less than $10 a week.)  Plus the bill was sent directly to my father, who was scrimping to send me whatever bucks he could afford and didn't need to know that I had wasted $10 laying waste to the elegant decor. 

I was outraged. I'm still outraged.

Hey, Cornell. Make it up to me. Do the right thing. When you've contrived an apology and a recompense, well, then, maybe we can start to talk about possible donations. 

Another Visit to the Coffee Shop

Reading at one of our local Starbucks, I was, as is often the case, lost in my book. But I looked up when a late 20s-early 30s blonde and bearded man sat down at a table across the way. I noticed that he was holding his cup of coffee in an odd way. And then I realized that where his right hand should have been there were a pair of stainless steel hooks. Sad, I thought. And yet he seemed cheerful and optimistic. I wondered if I would be in such good spirits if I had lost a hand in an accident. I went back to reading, but looked up again when he fumbled with the sleeves of his jacket. And then I saw that he had no left hand either. Instead, a  pair of hooks, left and right, where hands and fingers should be. What terrible accident could have caused a young man to lose both hands, I wondered. Perhaps I was more sensitive than usual, but I was moved almost to tears as I watched him manipulate his coffee and his napkin and his muffin with his mechanical prosthetics. Soon his young and attractive girlfriend joined him. She came on aluminum crutches. "Must have broken her foot," I thought. Then I saw that there was no foot and that she had only one leg.

I'm slow, but I figured it out at last.

Soldiers. Home from Iraq. Bombs -- IEDs --  took off his hands and her leg. They met at a rehabilitation hospital. Fell in love. They're trying to start life over again.

I'm not ashamed that I turned away and started to cry.

 And then grief converted to anger. 

That damned useless war! That idiot ignoramus Bush! That villain Cheney!. Those two megalomaniacs, and their co-conspirators,  who started this war -- they're sitting pretty right now, aren't they? But these young folks right next to me -- they're not sitting so comfortably. They've paid the price.

Belatedly, I wish them all the joy that life can offer. As for crazy George and strutting Dick, there's no penalty that they can pay, there's no retribution sufficient -- but if their pernicious bodies would rot half a centimeter a day, why, that would be a start.