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

I was going to be a poet when I grew up. I didn’t have a coherent plan for this–what I had was a bunch of sharp, motivating images, like a PowerPoint substitute for an actual plan:

• I would have my own garret, with long streaks of butterscotch light from the skylight.
• My garret would be in Paris, because Paris is where artists go to starve.
• I would live on French bread and black coffee, because I was poor. I didn’t like black coffee much in those days–and my idea of coffee back then was instant coffee–but I liked it better than red wine, which was the other drink option I knew for Parisian poets.

My childhood image of poverty and city life was based on the pictures by Ethel Franklin Betts in my copy of A Little Princess: Beautiful, misunderstood Sara Crewe leans out the skylight of her lonely garret,* feeding birds, with a backdrop of picturesque London rooftops. * What is a garret? A romantic, fictional attic.

Not until college did I figure out that starving in garrets has big drawbacks as a lifetime career.

Amazing how “bullet points” can bully you into enormous leaps of happy illogic.

I have mixed feelings about the Christian faith I grew up in–wow, that’s an understatement!

Does the Christian god (or any god) exist? I don’t know.

Yet, when a previously-Christian friend said she was losing her faith and asked me how I did without it–I felt the same guilt you might imagine if you had stolen a hundred-dollar bill from a good friend to meet some need of your own. (In my case, the need to be a smart-alec.)

OTOH, I despise the rantings of the religious right. I was a Christian for long enough to know that
literal-minded followers of Jesus Christ should be up in arms against tax-evading rich folks, not “gay marriage.”

Today, or maybe yesterday, was Good Friday. What a relief! Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Christians and non-Christians draw close together.

Christians imaginatively share the doubt and fear of the early apostles, who had seen their leader tortured and crucified. We ex-Christians have that same feeling of doubt 365 days a year.

On Sunday morning, our paths diverge again. Believers celebrate the risen Christ. Unbelievers like me hide jelly beans for our children, and then get on with the confusing business of trying to be a good person with nobody up in heaven who’s keeping score.

A year ago today, I blogged about Aesop’s lamb-and-wolf fable.

Notice that, if there is a God keeping score, the innocent trusting lamb would triumph in heaven over the wicked wolf. If there is no God, the wolf wins and the lamb is simply…lunch.

My position, of course, is intermediate. I caution my readers against a lamblike innocence–and I assume you share my revulsion against the wolf.

I just stumbled across my twelfth-grade English text. Amazing to see those old doodles of flowerpots–they saved my sanity during hours of sitting-still-listening.
What I wrote in the margins:

• “have you got something on your mind?” so close to real situation, but just cliché way of opening conversation.
• Describe a person’s character thru his actions. Show, don’t tell, what he’s like. Due Mon.
• Irony: by parallelling 2 contrasting ideas, you underline one of them.

Years later, I still don’t “get” irony. But in lectures these days, I draw much better flowerpots….

I was trying to remember the lyrics of “Found a Peanut.”

So I went online and found them–also the lyrics to such childhood classics as

• Peanut Sat on a Railroad Track,
• Do Your Ears Hang Low?
• Nobody Likes Me
• Three Bears in the Bed

Do not try this at home. You will waste hours and hours….

But, if you do–Mudcat Cafe collects not only kid
lyrics like “Dunderbeck” and “Sweet Violets” but a wide range of both
older and newer stuff–from “The Agincourt Carole” to “Friend of the
Fetus.”

December 11 is my birthday–hello, my fellow-fans of Joi Ito!

Giving you the full benefit of my (tomorrow) 57 years, let me give you more. Instead of telling you about life before television, seatbelts, and credit cards, let me take you back further–into the stories of three women from my childhood.

Aunt Jean, Aunt Harriet, and Aunt Martha weren’t really my aunts. They were single “career women” who formed a household. When the French-Canadian cook in that household suddenly found herself with an orphaned niece–a pretty ringleted baby, and I’m talking about an orphaning that happened back in 1918–these intrepid ladies adopted the little girl. (That was my mom, which is why they were my “aunts” too.)

Aunt Jean, Aunt Martha, and Aunt Harriet didn’t stay home to take care of their brand-new child. Heavens no! They were modern women of 1918! They earned money that supported a household that nurtured all of them, including the child. This worked out incredibly well for all of them.

“Aunt Jean” (Elizabeth Jordan) was my godmother–newspaperwoman, editor, author, general entrepreneur. She covered the Lizzie Borden trial, published Mark Twain, and dragged Henry James into her multi-author novel (pretty dreadful!)

“Aunt Harriet” (Mt. Holyoke, then Columbia) was a student and later a colleague of Melvil Dewey. “Aunt Martha” was the baby of the group–born in 1865. She went to Smith, then to Cooper Union, and did art and “interiors” all over Manhattan. (They were turquoise blue and a peachy sunset orange, to judge by the many art objects she left behind.)

When I was little, Aunt Martha and Aunt Harriet were still a big part of my life. They read me stories, took me for walks, introduced me to all their friends. For many blocks around the house they lived in, I knew I could knock on anybody’s door to find a friendly face and somebody to give me cookies.

Aunt Martha and Aunt Harriet would have loved email. Every morning they “answered letters” for hours. I remember their shocked complaint when the price of a postage stamp rose from 3 cents up to 4 cents.

I could tell you more–someday maybe I will! My point here is not that I knew and loved people born in the nineteenth-century.

My point is that the people in your own life may someday be loving memories from long ago. And–in honor of Betsy’s birthday, December 11–think about that.

I’m wishing a happy my-birthday to you, and to all the people you love.

Two feet of snow fell on New England this weekend and everything looks so different. Even branches against the sky are just white-on-gray.

A snowfall like this redraws lines between people too. Neighbors who never see each other share coffee after digging their cars out of the same snowplow lump. Later on, if one “steals” the parking space dug by the other….

But right now, we all get a chance to rebuild connections in a world that looks full of strange possibilities.

After one NH blizzard, my mom’s neighbors gathered like a posse to dig a path from the road to her front door. So, instead of being in the house worrying, she was in there baking a *lot* of banana bread.

My dog Marianne has always loved snow. (I imagine the West Highlands have a lot of it.) In a blizzard like this, I tuck her under my arm like a fuzzy football until we find someplace where she can stand up. She races and woofs and makes doggy snow angels. She’s no longer fourteen years old–she’s back in her puppyhood. And I brought her one of her very favorite toys, one she’s been missing.

In her doggy mind, I’m the one who made all this snow. And I did it for her, just because it would make her happy.

How wonderful kitchens are, when we’re very small.

And sometimes, how terrible! I must have been three or four on that long-ago day when my mother got a big silver spoon caught in her cake-mixing beaters. We children had been watching her, hypnotized by the good kitchen smells and the hum of the mixer, patiently waiting for leftover batter to lick.

Suddenly–Whack! The spoon was pulled out of my mother’s hand and bent double by the beaters. The motor stopped droning and began to smoke. We looked at our mother. She looked at the beaters, tears came to her eyes, she was trying not to cry…. She didn’t like making mistakes–and she was still (from my point of view now) very, very young.

Of course, my sister and I began to cry at once, setting each other off to louder and louder wails. Then my mother started instead to laugh, so we both laughed too, and all three of us thought the whole thing was a wonderful joke.

This isn’t what I had planned to write about, but blogs can be like that….

Well, here’s my mom enjoying a happier moment, a few years before my earliest memory.

I love the once-official iconography for scenes of Mary on her deathbed. Her son stands before her in two different bodies. The grown-up son is there, and so is the baby.

After 1950, such icons (called “Dormitions”) stopped being good Catholic devotions and became heretical, because the Assumption of Mary became official Catholic dogma.  (Translation: she flew up to Heaven instead of dying.) But I digress.

My point is that we see the people we love through kaleidoscope eyes. (Good old Beatles.) That barefoot sleepy guy who just made coffee this morning is the young husband who stood up to armed guards in an Italian airport rather than let a door close between you. He’s the distinguished professor giving a learned talk in a suit you had to bug him for days to get him to buy. He is the funny funky grad student you fell in love with while watching Bobby Fischer. And he is the dirty rat who just ate the bagel I was going to eat.

And for our children, that seeing-double thing goes double. Put them into our dreams and the seeing-double goes triple. My two twenty-something daughters inhabit my dreams with at least ten years age lag. Mickey, the grad student, sometimes manages to be 14, but Mira, now almost a senior in college, hasn’t yet made it past 7. Yes, of course I respect them as adults–at least, when my eyes are open. The truth is, I kind of enjoy having the best of both worlds–grown-up daughters making their own decisions in the real world, little kids I can play with in my dreams.

When I get to my deathbed (not yet, thank you very much), I hope that like the traditional Virgin Mary I get to be surrounded by a kaleidoscope of my memories.

Thanks always to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for talking about such interesting stuff.

…on July 3, 1973, I was a kid in my twenties about to get married for the second time, and boy was I nervous. Just about everything went wrong that day.

• Because we “eloped” with just 4 grad student pals as our witnesses, our families assumed a baby was coming. In fact, we were just too impatient with all the postponements due to “Aunt Agatha can’t come June 7, how about the next weekend–no, Uncle Ed can’t make the next weekend…” Well, a baby did come, about 15 months later.
• I baked us a chocolate wedding cake from a mix, but assumed I wouldn’t have to grease and flour my brand-new miracle cake pans lined with Teflon. Wrong! Our guests ate bowls of ice cream with huge hunks of scraped-from-the-pan cake on top.
• We got lost driving to Dutch Neck traffic court, so we missed the time of appointment with the judge. We and our pals had to sit through an hour of testimony about stop-sign violations and DUI before being called into the back room for our “ceremony.”

One thing went right–I married a wonderful man, who hasn’t once stopped surprising me in all the 30 years afterward.

Feel free to throw rice anytime.

What is the strangest thing you’ve bought on the Web? Hard to narrow it down to just one, isn’t it?

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, I needed sound effects for a joke-telling program. In fact, I needed clips of children laughing.

Picture some sage in a B-grade movie shaking his head, telling this uppity woman, “I’m sorry. Some wonderful things in life are not for sale. One of these [dramatic pause] is the sound of happy little children laughing.”

Well, BZZZZT! Wrong! You can listen to, download, and buy a whole lot of sounds of laughter in the sound-effects emporium of SoundDogs.

I love the SoundDogs website. Their individual sounds are pretty cheap, and you can browse the entire collection without buying anything. What can you hear there? Their sound-effects page starts you off with this clickable catalog?

Airport, Amphibians, Animals, Applause, Aviation, Bars,Restaurants, Basketball, Bells, Birds, Boats,Marine, Buildings, Buses, Cars,Specific, Cars,Various, Cartoons, Casino, Communications, Construction, Crowds, Crowds,Kids, Dogs, Doors, Farm Machines, Feet,Footsteps, Fight, Fires, Foley, Glass, Guns, Hockey,NHL, Horns, Horses, Hospitals, Household, Humans, Industry, Insects, Low Frequency,Boom Tracks, Machines, Magic, Metal, Military, Motorcycles, Nature, Office, Police,Fire, Rain,Thunder, Rocks, Science Fiction, Snow, Sports, Synth, Toys, Traffic, Trains, Trucks,Specific, Trucks,Various, Vehicles, Voices, Water, Whoosh, Winds, Wood

My find of the day was a gladiator striptease.

Go to “Foley” subcategory “Drops,Armour,Shields,Clothing.” A little mood music, please, here comes Russell Crowe. Let the sound effects begin!

Put Down Belt, Put Down Boot, Put Down Boot, Put Down Broken Armor, Put Down Broken Shield, Put Down Buckler Shield, Put Down Chainmail Armor, Put Down Chainmail Armor, Put Down Chainmail Armor, Put Down Cloak, Put Down Glove, Put Down Glove, Put Down Helmet, Put Down Helmet, Put Down Helmet, Put Down Large Shield, Put Down Leather Armor, Put Down Leather Armor, Put Down Leather Armor, Put Down Medium Shield, Put Down Plate Armor, Put Down Small Shield, Put Down Belt, Put Down Boot, Put Down Boot, Put Down Broken Armor, Put Down Broken Shield, Put Down Buckler Shield, Put Down Chainmail Armor, Put Down Chainmail Armor, Put Down Chainmail Armor, Put Down Cloak, Put Down Glove, Put Down Glove, Put Down Helmet, Put Down Helmet, Put Down Helmet, Put Down Large Shield, Put Down Leather Armor, Put Down Leather Armor, Put Down Leather Armor, Put Down Medium Shield, Put Down Plate Armor, Put Down Small Shield.

Bye now–and have fun at SoundDogs!