How times change! When I was little, NH houses all had an outdoor thermometer, much like the one in this Flickr photo by Églantine.
Neither the many hotels where we’ve stayed this month, nor the charming apartment in North Oxford that we are housesitting now has any such thing as an outdoor thermometer that you can check from inside before dressing to go outside. But that’s ok, because if I want to know the current outdoor temperature in Oxford, it’s on my Google homepage.
Our outdoor thermometer was a source of great joy when winter started ending. The very first morning that the mercury (remember mercury?) climbed above 32, my mother would let us four kids run outside in our woolly bathrobes and long flannel pjs! We had to wear boots but we did not have to wear our coats as we celebrated the family’s springtime ritual, jumping up and down on all the soon to be melted snow.
Talk about adventure! And Kon-Tiki was an adventure my father talked about, with enormous enthusiasm.
And, from all the books my father urged me to read in my pre-teen years, Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl wrote two of the ones I loved best.
So visiting Oslo’s Kon-Tiki Museum with Frank was both sweet and sad. It was sweet when I thought how my father would have loved to be there with us. It was sad when I added this to oh-so-many adventures I’d love to have shared with him, in all the years since he died.
Here’s what I still share with him–sailing the paths of the universe with every one of your friends, every one of the people who have shaped your life. Some of them, when you are lucky, will be by your side. All of them, always, will shape your future adventures.
Not even Kon-Tiki’s sun god could be more powerful.
As Akma says, love the standing ovation at the end. But who could have resisted? Snip:
Chew slowly
But hurry
The bus is here
Be careful
Come back here
Did you wash behind your ears?
Play outside, don’t play rough, will you just play fair?
Be polite, make a friend, don’t forget to share
Work it out, wait your turn, never take a dare
Get along! Don’t make me come down there
Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, pride–the old Seven Deadly Sins name things that make us stupid.
And maybe our best protection against their power is knowing their names, so that our simple brains can guess it’s time to fight back when we see one of them kicking down our mental doors.
Why is there no one-word name for the deadly sin that sucked all brain cells from the brains-big-as-Buicks of Robert McNamara and Arthur M. Schlesinger?
“You like me, you really like me!” may be an inaccurate quote of Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar speech, but it’s a dead-on reflection of Sin #8, a craving at least as deadly as anger or avarice, much stronger than pride. The craving (O, junior high school!) for Popular Kids to pull us into their clubhouse–and backing that up, the fear that if we displease them we’re pushed out forever.
Schlesinger knows he is too easily beguiled and seems never to have allowed moral or ideological differences to interfere with his social pleasures…
Over decades of friendship with Henry Kissinger, he only slowly fathoms the diplomat’s “overpowering ego” and Machiavellian ways. “I like Henry very much and respect him,” he writes in 1969, “though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one sort of thing to me and another sort of thing to, say, Bill Buckley.”… By the time of Watergate, Schlesinger deems Kissinger “one of the most disgusting figures” in the Nixon White House.
Yet when Gerald Ford takes over and Henry asks Arthur to lunch at the State Department, our diarist overcomes his distaste…. Kissinger .. tells Schlesinger that Nixon was sometimes evil and lazy (with the work habits of Hitler) and a liar and obsessed with destroying the reputations of the Kennedys, and that he had Howard Hunt forging documents proving that John Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Diem. “He was unquestionably a weird president, but he was not a weak president,” Kissinger says. “But everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.” Schlesinger doesn’t press on the “slightly homosexual”; he deems Henry “a highly intelligent and charming man.”
Is there one word strong enough for the stupidifying power of Sin #8?
“Conformity” is far too bloodless. It doesn’t capture the craving, the intoxication, the horrible fear of ending up shut outside if you don’t “go along.” Sin #8 needs a new name and maybe “Junior High School Sin” is ugly enough to deserve it.
It may no coincidence that so many whistleblowers have been outsiders whose keeping quiet could never have won them acceptance into the exciting secrets of the Big Boys’ Clubhouse.
Right up against the edge of this plowed field, one small daisy plant celebrates its so-improbable survival with a few flowers.
I’m guessing that late September may be too late for these flowers to set seeds–but what do I know? I’m not a botanist and, for that matter, I am not a little Swedish daisy.
Ronni’s bright-red time machine and my beige-y gold one whisked us last Friday into a lovely mid-century twilight zone of stage-settings from the 1940’s and 1950’s.
The remarkable thing about NH’s “Strawbery Banke” is that wandering there lets you side-slip from the many memory-objects on display there into your own private world of forgotten memories.
What a pleasure it was to wander there riffing on memories with Ronni Bennett, who has even more photos in her blog “As Time Goes By”.
I grew up in a (New England) world with no air conditioning. I’m not sure how grownups who spent days in offices managed on really hot days–but little kids with backyard sprinklers did just fine.
Keeping our house cool inside needed different tactics.
First, our windows were opened up wide every bedtime, on the theory outdoors would get cooler before we woke up.
Second, once sunrise arrived, grownups stayed alert for the absolute instant when air outside the house got hotter than the air inside. Bang, bang, bang, those windows got shut again!
This morning in Cambridge, MA, I’m sorry to say, that slam-windows moment came at 8:30 a.m. But at least so far I don’t need the whir of my room air-conditioner, thanks to old New England tactics from long ago.
By December 8, 1980, nothing had gone wrong in my life. My parents were middle middle class, although growing up I thought we were wealthy. None of my desires were frustrated (well, except for prom night, but that’s a different story)…
Another great Weinbergerism on John Lennon there: “What a great blogger he would have been, so eager to be imperfect in public.”
ThinkGeek’s Annoy-a-tron might sound funny or cute–but what do you think of this email they quote from a “satisfied customer” who planted one on a co-worker?
I have watched this simple device transform an (until-now) mild-mannered colleague into a spitting, cussing, paranoid lunatic.
He has ordered all of the staff he supervises (not a small number) to locate the source of the dread beeping before doing anything else (but since they are in on the prank, they haven’t been much help). So he waits, white-knuckles gripping the edge of his desk, anticipating the next beep…nearly bursting that vein on his temple as he shouted it: “That beep has been F***ING with me for HOURS now.”
He has called the facilities department to schedule a maintenance worker to investigate. He speculates that “they” might be doing air-quality testing in the building. This beep must be some device in the ducts detecting dangerous levels of asbestos in the air. Or worse. Radon? Aerosolized mercury? Legionella spores?
The beep means something. What does the beep mean? Is it a warning? It sounds urgent, doesn’t it? It’s telling us to do something. But what? … I imagine that soon he will begin to take things apart. He will methodically dismantle all of the electrical devices in his office, creating an unusually precise metaphor for what is happening in his psyche.
I am reminded what a thin and fragile thread keeps us attached to sanity. Today, this tiny little device helped me break a co-worker’s mind, and I thank you for the sinfully pleasurable schadenfreude.
Sinful pleasure in other people’s pain is increasingly marketed to young men. Marketers vie for some bad-boy demographic that gets a charge out of guys insulting their girlfriends or a bunch of guys teaming up for hours of sport humiliating some coworker.
OK, let me be really old here and give some advice. Marketers want to sell stuff, not to make your life better. Making your life better requires teaming up with other people, some of whom sometimes will really annoy you. When you hurt people who thought you were on their team, you risk turning friends into enemies or at least skeptics. You damage the team, which was your team.
I’m a fan of ThinkGeek, but this time I don’t like what they’re selling.
…because it means that I’ve had to lie on my back and look up into treetops–which I recommend to you!
Yesterday evening, the treetops were fuddled by wind, Morse-coding fast overlapped leaf-patterns against the sky. Tonight is much calmer–fewer branch motions and many more manic twee sparrows, flying in for a few friendly “tweets” before settling to bedtime.
Meanwhile, high up above treetops, airliners seek Logan Airport, leaving long sunset-tinted contrails behind. And way-up-high-sky-winds drift those contrails across the treetop-marked sky–just as those same winds push cumulus clouds around. Why did I never, before tonight, notice that contrails are just a funny-shape kind of cloud?
And when did I ever before stare up into sky-treetops? One quick assessing glance, maybe, when I was a kid, before starting my own climb up the tree’s branches. Now that I’m 60, I look and appreciate without demanding to conquer.
Tonight gives new meaning to that old New England saying, “Look up, not down.”
Or to quote all of it,
“Look out not in.
Look forward not back.
Look up not down.”
Good advice, and may you enjoy it without having to get any pinched nerve in your neck!
