Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

“…it is not enough, before commencing to rebuild the house in which we live, that it be pulled down ..
it is likewise necessary that we be furnished with some other house in which we may live commodiously during the operations…”
René Descartes (1596– – 1650), Discourse on Method)

Descartes boldly set out to question all his beliefs– but didn’t question the need for some “code of Morals,” even though he expected that ultimately he would replace them with new guidelines of his own.

His first principle was to conform to the laws and customs of people around him,

“…adhering firmly to the Faith in which, by the grace of God, I had been educated from my childhood, and regulating my conduct in every other matter according to the most moderate opinions, and the farthest removed from extremes, which should happen to be adopted in practice with general consent of the most judicious of those among whom I might be living…”

This moderate and rational praise for conformity deeply impressed me when I was a teenager learning French. Re-reading it now, I see that I mis-remembered something fairly important. I (mis)remembered that Descartes urged conformity to avoid fruitless arguments with our neighbors, leaving us more time and energy for nobler goals.

I’m glad I cleared that up, though I don’t expect to be tested on Descartes again very soon…

In the summer of 1969 or thereabouts, I drove to Alaska with my brother
Kevin. We lived on honey and peanut butter sandwiches for three months,
sleeping on a plywood-and-foam-rubber “bed” we’d rigged up in the back
of a Jeep station wagon. Nobody had heard about seatbelts way back
then–if we picked up more than a single hitchhiker, one of them would
have to ride flat on the bed.

At night, in the pine woods, the northern mosquitos were huge. We
carried yards and yards of mosquito netting to slam in the car doors
before falling asleep. One night, Kevin slept with his arm against the
netting–it swelled up to the size of a big hock of ham.

It was one our way north–in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory–that Kevin
met a girl from San Francisco. She was beautiful and sweet and kind of
crazy. Her name, she told us was Strawberry. Strawberry what? Just
Strawberry, she said. She gave him her address, and on our way back we
detoured all the way down to Haight Ashbury to find her. She’d moved on
elsewhere but we stayed a week with two childhood friends who were running a candle store…

Now, back to Alaska–up near Mount Denali, we fell in with a bunch of
glacierologists. None of us could sleep through the sunlit midsummer
nights–the world was just too exciting and too new. We talked for
hours, hiking through gravel-strewn landscapes past moonlit boulders,
eating gigantic pancake meals topped off with our peanut butter and
honey. (We started off with a full gallon can of each, and had some left even when we got home in August.)

Sailor Bill was one of our hitchhikers–quite a bit older than most, he
seemed ancient to us. (He was probably ten years younger than I am
now.)  Sailor Bill had spent many years as a hobo, and told us he
know how to ride the rails. When he saw how tempted we both were by his
stories, he told us about one boxcar misadventure.

He had been partying with a woman who wanted to go with him as he
hopped a train. He knew a crossing where freight trains slowed way down
and hobos could climb aboard. They’d ride in a boxcar for a couple of
days–she even brought a suitcase along for the ride. But after the
train slowed down and they both hopped on, he discovered something wrong
with the car. I don’t remember what the problem was–maybe I didn’t
understand it back then, but it was serious. They would both be killed
if they didn’t get off the train, fast, but now the train itself was
speeding up. And the woman couldn’t understand what he was trying to
tell her–she didn’t want to jump off, and the train was going faster
and even faster. “Thank god for the suitcase,” Sailor Bill said.
“Arguing was no good–but when I threw her suitcase off the train she
finally gave up and jumped off herself. Boy, was she mad at me–and I
just saved her life.”

He probably saved my life with that story of his. Thank you, Sailor Bill, wherever you are.

Long ago, in a galaxy far away–that is, in 1990 or so, when I was
doing an oral history of math for the Institute for Advanced Study–I
coaxed lots of the Institute’s math and physics types into a softball
team that I christened the Princeton Eulers.

Despite weekly practice and gallons of Gatorade, we had an unspeckled
record of gallant defeat–one year by a ragtag team of historians, the
next by a pick-up team from Princeton University. We did have the best
Tshirts and the best pizza party, which we financed by selling An Abelian Grape,
my $1.50  photocopied collection of math-and-physics jokes I’d
heard over lunch, literally cut-and-pasted from dot-matrix printouts.

Mathematical biologist Joel Cohen
was our most generous patron–he bought 10 copies! Then he suggested
that he and I should merge science-joke collections for a real book.
Two years later, Simon and Schuster’s Fireside (paperback) house
published Absolute Zero Gravity, by Betsy Devine and Joel E. Cohen.

Within months, our editor left Simon and Schuster, leaving our book an
orphan, soon out of print. Of course you can still get copies on the
web–but I urge would-be-readers to avoid sellers who want $25 or more.
It’s a little paperback book that originally sold for $8–and the jokes
that went into it have been widely told elsewhere since then. I still
get people emailing me “great science jokes” that are word-for-word the
version I wrote down for AZG.

I’m remembering some of my crazy kid thought processes this morning, thanks to a funny blog story by Lisa Williams about a dead rabbit.

I grew up in the era of long, slow, neighborhood-and-family
summers. My pals and I had a “clubhouse” on some scrub land,
and one day somebody arrived with a still-warm dead squirrel. We all
petted its soft fur, admiring its many tiny perfections. Tears in our
eyes, we held a solemn funeral. One of our group treasures–a handsome
cardboard cigar
box–was sacrificed for a coffin. Freeze frame on our sad and
thoughtful faces then.

Now cut to the same group, same clubhouse, a few evenings later,
digging up the same squirrel, with dialog like, “Yeah, good. It
stinks.” “Oh boy, it really, really stinks!” “This is going to be
perfect for Eddie’s father.”* We gleefully carried the now sodden and
smelly cigar box to Eddie’s house, put it on the front doorstep, rang
the bell, and raced home to the safety of our own houses.  We ran
fast because Eddie’s father was a big mean guy and we sure didn’t want
him to run after us and catch us.

We got
home to find our mother on the phone with Eddie’s father–one of
the scariest moments of my life.  Going over a cliff in a Ford
convertible when I was in college was nothing compared to hearing my
mother say, “Oh, hello, Mr. Ozkelewski.”**  In the Ford, I just figured I
was about to die. That night of the squirrel, I’m not sure what I expected.

The conversation continued–we could hear only one side of it.
“Oh my, Mr. Ozkelewski–really? How awful.” [Our mother turned to scowl
at us four kids, now standing huddled together and looking terrified.] “Of
course, you must be very upset. I’m glad you called me.” [Our mother
was glad? She didn’t look glad–she was really glaring at us.] “But it
must have been some other children who did it. My kids have all
been home tonight, ever since dinner.”

Once she got off the phone, she gave us a huge scolding and I hope I
looked suitably sorry for what we’d done. But hearing my mother lie to
save my skin–and I don’t think I’d ever heard her lie before–was one
of the happiest moments of my childhood.

* Eddie’s father had threatened to chase us out of our clubhouse if we didn’t let four-year-old Eddie into
our gang. We were a tough bunch of seven- to ten-year-olds and we had
no wish to become Eddie’s baby-sitters.)
** Or whatever his last name was. At this point, I’m not even sure the kid’s name was Eddie.

Some of my best friends are Libertarians, so I understand the conservative critique of government social spending, also known as “handouts” and sometimes even “the public trough”.

I believe, however, that the point of such spending is not to create a subclass of entitled loafers. Even if you don’t have any sentimental urge to help people in need–most social programs benefit society as a whole, not just the folks who are getting the actual money. Some people need a temporary hand if they’re ever going to become productive citizens.

A classic example of such a program that worked was the GI Bill of Rights, which helped US veterans get back into the work force after World War II. I came across a 1945 speech by my grandfather to a bunch of bankers where he explained why this “tax and spend” program was good for taxpayers as well as for veterans:

I hope veterans returning from the Iraq War will have the same opportunities offered to them, and I hope that a Kerry presidency will bring new hope to their communities as well.

I blogged about my grandfather “the two-shirt Democrat” before, and put the full text of my his remarks on the GI Bill here.

This is the gourmet equipment from my mother’s kitchen–garlic salt and an old coffee can she kept full of bacon fat.

My mother’s recipe for hamburgers:

Go to Boy’s Market and chat with neighbors while waiting for Mr. Boy to grind up some beef.
Pay for groceries by saying “charge it, please” before heading home.
Put some bacon grease in the huge black skillet to melt.
Pass out bites of raw hamburger to any children or dogs hanging out in the kitchen. (Kids get a shake of garlic salt on their meat, but dogs don’t.)
Put some garlic salt into each patty and a whole bunch more on top.
Sear burgers top and bottom in pan–serve when meat inside is hot but still dark red.

I love all the extra choices I have now for cooking. (Cilantro! Szechuan bean curd! Miso soup!) But the real secrets of cooking I learned from my mother–who had 4 tricks to make anything taste better:

• Add a pinch of sugar.
• Add a teaspoon of salt.
• Mix in a tablespoon of butter or cream.
• Do all the above

Of course, all these things are now known to be very, very bad. And I’m a good girl, so I rarely do them. Some day, though, modern medicine will change its mind again, as it has so often before. Mmmmm, bacon fat as health food. I can hardly wait.

Congratulations to Amity! She successfully defended her thesis this morning (no, not with an Uzi.)

I will, however, be trying not to go around mentioning “my daughter,
the doctor.” I’m counting on the rest of you to keep me honest.

My little sister Ri and my little brother Kim. Can you tell from this picture that they are the sweet 2 in our family of 4? As the oldest, I was well-meaning but kind of bossy. My brother Mark and I were also the naughty ones.

Mark grew up to be brave and funny and kind. He was always ready to help, to play, to enjoy, to emote.

When our Great-Aunt Mae was in a nursing home, Mark was the one who cared enough to woo all the kitchen staff into sending her up the hot dogs she loved instead of the fish that she hated. As a result, Aunt Mae was happy, he was happy, and the people in the kitchen were very, very happy.

At our mom’s 80th birthday-party-cum-musical-comedy, I thought nothing of writing him into the hardest roles–including Elvis. (That photo shows him belting out an Elvis number.) I knew he would knock them out of the ball park. He did.

After a year of telling us he had “a cold”, he went to the hospital and died of melanoma, all through his chest, in two days. How we miss him.

Here come the buzzing, munching, mating cicadas, after 17 years underground.

I just checked out Cicada Mania—recent Feedster Feed of the Day–and started thinking–what was I up to, the other times those bugs showed up?

2005 – 17 = 1988

That spring, in a house on a Santa Barbara canyon, I was planning the next year’s sabbatical. How I worried that both children would have big school transitions (9th grade for Mickey, kindergarten for Mira) in faraway Cambridge, MA. Now, as you may have noticed, it’s where we all live.

1988 – 17 = 1971

That spring I was getting ready to graduate from college and planning a road trip to Alaska with my little brother Kevin. I wouldn’t have noticed if giant woolly mammoths had crawled out of the NH soil and taken wing.

1971 – 17 = 1953

I do remember cicadas during that summer. We had invited some family friends from Manhattan to spend a summer week in the relaxing countryside. After one night of New England bug serenades, the Rosenblatts packed up and headed back to NY.

1953 – 17 = 1936

Too early for me–see if you can find somebody else who remembers the cicada season of 1936.

Here they come!

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