full fathom five

Dog Park Morning

Today my husband and I and our dog Cody took our morning walk at a coastal park that's been appropriated by dog owners as a dog park in the off-season.  In the summer, it's closed to dogs.

But each winter morning at 8:30, dog owners come walking down the long road to the outermost spit of land surrounded by Casco Bay.  Many of them carry traveling mugs of coffee, and dogs fan out in front of them, leashless, chasing and sniffing each other, grinning with their tongues hanging out.  They all seem to know that the real playing will start further up the road at the water's edge.

When we got up there, twenty or so owners stood by the water watching the dogs play.  Some held balls, sticks, and frisbies, knowing the dogs were too enamoured of each other to be interested in retrieving.  Two dogs rolled around on the ground wrestling, and others ran in circles around them.  Our Cody, unused to the routine, sniffed all the dogs, and did his bow that showed he wanted to play, but after a few circles of chase, he'd run back to us, leaning against our legs to get patted.  Meanwhile, we talked to the owners, asking about their dogs.  They'd tell their dogs' names, then their breeds or mix, their ages and where they came from.  We were pleased to hear that, like our Cody, most were mixes from animal shelters. 

The regulars were curious about Cody, and told us how beautiful he is.  They urged us to bring him back.  Walking back to the car, Win and I decided to try to come back every Saturday, with a thermos of coffee.

At the parking area, we noticed several cars with dog blankets on backseats, held up by  loops that went over the headrests.  Win said he'd take our backseat blanket to his sailloft tomorrow and attach similar loops.  So we learned something, in addition to the great walk.   On the way home, I told him that if anything happens to either one of us, the other should go to the dogpark regularly, that it's an exuberant way to socialize.       

Christmas Contradiction

I'm reading Anna Karenina now for my bookgroup. I'm engaged by completely different parts of it than I was when I first read it in my twenties. Then, I was caught up by the adulterous lovers Anna and Vronsky. Now, I'm fascinated by the country gentleman Levin, who vascillates between his duties as a landowner and social life as a nobleman, and his empathy with the peasants, whom he sometimes labors with in the fields of his estate. In this pull between two opposites, Levin epitomizes the political forces that will transform Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union forty years later. Tolstoy was ahead of his time in politics, religion, agriculture, and literature, and all of his prophetic genius is on display in this novel. In fact, the adulterous love affair that I fixated on in my twenties, seems a minor part of the book now. What I'm most amazed by, is how Tolstoy presages the change from the one-dimensional caricatures of fairy tales and myths of his day - the beautiful princess, wicked witch, charming prince, etc. - to the rounded characters of modern literature. He does this by creating characters shot through with contradiction. 

This made me more forgiving of our Christmas contradiction. I wanted to try a non-gift Christmas this year, shifting the emphasis from opening presents to being together with family and friends. So I told guests to bring a favorite reading or game, along with a dinner dish. And that if they insisted on bringing a gift, to make it a consumable, like wine or something else to eat or drink (that wouldn't add to the clutter we've got to cull through in the New Year). It went really well, with plenty to do in lieu of opening presents. During appetizers, I read an exerpt from David Sedaris's "Santaland Diaries," something I'd heard on NPR about his stint as a Christmas elf in Macy's "Santaland." Then a guest read an excerpt from Bill Bryson's memoir "The Thunderbolt Kid," about growing up in the fifties trying to put together the balsawood model airplanes boys often got for Christmas, getting tangled up in strands of glue and getting high on the fumes. And then my husband read the third stanza of Tennyson's Ulysses, the only sober reading, but very beautiful, about Ulysses asking his men to take one last sea voyage with him late in life.

Then we had a great dinner of braised lamb with root vegetables, which we walked off by taking the three dogs who were with us for an hour's walk down our dirt road and into a snowy meadow. We climbed a hill, then watched the lowering late-afternoon light over the woods below. The sky was intense blue with gold clouds so flat and still that they looked like rectangles of thick gilt paint. Then we retraced our boot prints back home to play a new word-game "Catch-phrase" - sort of like charades without the body-language, just words. We had coffee and cardamom pudding with blueberries, which our daughter made from the new Moosewood Cookbook.

But there was one big contradiction, in the form of a small giftwrapped package we gave our daughter and new son-in-law. He unwrapped it, revealing a new low-energy flourescent lightbulb box. "Ah," he said, "we were just saying that 2008 would be our year for saving energy. This is exactly what we wanted." Then he opened the box, and his eyes widened as he pulled out two sets of car keys. Our daughter bolted across the room to gape at them. Then we were all out of our seats and striding out to the garage. We opened the garage door to a new Honda civic hybrid, a cleaner version than my month-old one beside it. Our daughter jumped straight up and down like she was on a pogo stick. Our son-in-law told us they'd just been saying that morning that if they could somehow keep her crummy old Jetta, whose driver-side door no longer opens so our daughter has to climb over the gear-shift to get out the passenger door, running through 2008, they'd be able to get her into something else the following year (she commutes a long way to work). After we all examined the car and sucked in the beautiful new-car smell, our daughter turned to me. "It's the best present in the world, but the only thing is, how can we believe you from now on?" I said, "Oh, it's a consumable. It depreciated 20% just when we drove it off the lot yesterday."

Wedding Lesson

Preparing for our daughter's wedding was a crucible of appearance versus substance.  I was so glad when the day itself came and the happiness and love radiating from the bride and groom dwarfed my concern for the dowdy look of my long sleeves, straight, ankle-length skirt, and flat shoes beside the spaghetti-straps, short flouncy hemlines, and high heels of women-from-away.  And nature helped put things in perspective, with silky 70-degree air, mica-sheet sea as the wind held her breath for the ceremony, and a vee of geese flying south overhead to heighten the feeling of blessed pause before winter.    

    And that's what now stands out in my mind: the day's perfect stillness, showcasing and cementing love and gratitude.  The way people dressed, the color of the tablecloths, what food was served, the flowers, have all receded in my mind.  The gratitude remains. 

   But I do remember the enigma of that day: a new member entering the family as an adult.  Our son-in-law poses the same dichotomy between appearances and substance that the wedding day did, although only inside my own heart.  The first time I saw him, about a year ago, was shortly after I'd gotten word that the book I'd written uncovering the fate of my lost father had been accepted for publication.  So my father was on my mind, and as J., our son-in-law-to-be, got out of his car, I noticed that his hair was the same copper color I'd been told my father's was.  They also shared the same first name, the same alabaster skin that sunburns too fast on a boat, the same height, and the same hobby (golf). 

    And on the wedding day, two other resemblances emerged.  I discovered that J. is a good dancer, when we shared a dance at the reception.  Wives of the veterans who served with my father still raved about my father’s dancing when I interviewed them a few years ago, some sixty years after my father was lost.  And later on in the reception, when the wine was flowing and things were getting rowdy, J.'s friends and cousins hoisted him up sideways like a battering ram for a picture.  In my father's Naval Academy scrapbook, there's a snapshot of his fellow midshipmen holding him up like that while he mugs for the camera. 

    The following morning, at the brunch where we Mainers said goodbye to J.'s family and their North Carolina friends, I was telling J. and his mother about all these coincidences.  "I'm trying to downplay them," I said, "because they take away from J.’s uniqueness.”  And one of the very unique things J.’s done that we'll always be grateful for, is his moving up here to our daughter's home, which involved his sacrificing his specialized job as an insurance litigation attorney, plus his leaving his community of lifetime friends and his supportive family.  His move involved a great professional risk, because he had to take the Maine portion of the Bar exam, and now he has to find a new job. 

     When I saw J.’s friends holding him up sideways, I felt the seductive pull of magical thinking.  But despite the reminder of my dad, and the occasion - when sentiment (and wine) can make simple coincidences seem like fate or divine destiny - I turned away. We’d all like to think – especially at big marker events like this – that there’s  a benign god at work, looking down on the proceedings and uniting our families with bonds stronger than ourselves.  This adds weight and significance to the bride and groom's hopes and dreams.  More people have remarked on how the sun broke through clouds and geese flew overhead just when the ceremony began.  Even the atheists among us are tempted to see this as a mark of heavenly approval.  And in my own case, my urge to link J. with my father is an inchoate wish for a shortcut to a special or deeper connection with a new person.  It’s similar to sentimentality, when an overly emotional response stands in for a more natural reaction that we unconsciously fear might not be good enough.    

            But reality is good enough.  Having a son-in-law is uncharted territory, so exotic, it needs no embellishment by the imagination.  J’s out there like a separate planet, a mystery too big to fit into any box in my mind that’s about my father. He’s his own person, waiting to become a friend.

wedding

The day before yesterday was our daughter's wedding.  It was a beautiful, joyous occasion, and I was proud to read one of the thank-you's this morning from a guest, who said that what stood out to her about the celebration was how grateful my husband and I were to our guests for coming and making it a successful party.  I'm glad that in an event that's built around appearances, something else came through: our daughter's radiant happiness, the impish humor of our son-in-law, a shared sense of gratitude among everyone watching the couple exchange vows in a field overlooking Casco Bay, the late-afternoon sun angling its rays through thin clouds and the sea hissing over rocks below.

    Such an occasion focuses our attention on the here and now, and we tend to be grateful for our good fortune for witnessing a celebration of love.  And the couple are grateful for the chance to stop time for a few moments, to say this is important.  These vows up here in front of witnesses, are important.

    But the trick is, for me, to feel grateful more often.  To realize how lucky I am on the ordinary days.  So this morning, I noted several things to be thankful for on our morning walk:  the crescent moon, with light coming up from the eastern horizon underneath it, where the sun was about to rise.  The unseen sun's rays lit up the part of the moon that was dark, making it faintly visible.  My husband pointed out the "plane of the ecliptic," the line of the planet's orbits going straight up from the moon to Venus, the brightest star-like object in the sky.  Above Venus, a red and white light moved above the orbit-line, and my husband said it was most likely a jet coming from Europe to Boston or New York.  I looked at how fast it was leaving Venus and the moon behind, and marvelled at the ingenuity of humans.  And felt grateful for it.

    And then when we came home, our front meadow was covered with birds about the size and color of mourning doves.  I looked them up in the bird book and discovered that they're common flickers, hunting in the grass for ants.  Again, fodder for gratitude.        

Summit Fever

Jon Krakaeur, in his book Into Thin Air, or an earlier one about the addictive sport of mountain-climbing, describes a force that takes over climbers when they near the summit.  The oxygen is thin, so reason is not dominant.  They just want to get up there, and will gloss over risks, often denying their earlier calculations of the remaining daylight needed to descend after summitting.  Sometimes, they get up there and they're so feverish that they'll just stand there gawking at the 360-degree vista while ice-blue shadows lengthen, sealing them in.

    I've found out this countdown week before our daughter's wedding on Sat., that I'm just as nutty.  It's wedding fever in my case, and beyond all reason (because we've shot our budget), I'm throwing money at last-minute problems.  Just today, I nailed down babysitters, promising the two high school girls who finally turned up after a long search, an enormous sum just to get them to say yes.   

    Even though the cynic in me is still there fingerwagging at the unreachable standards that wedding-purveyors levy on unwary buyers, I'm not listening this final week.  I'm seized with the need to make the day perfect.  And I thought I was home free when I looked up the 10-day weather forecast and triumphantly announced to husband and daughter, "full sun and 70 degrees called for Saturday!"  Both of them shrugged, telling me that 10-day forecasts are unreliable.  That the soonest you can begin paying attention is three days out, especially here in Maine. 

    So I'm trying to banish that expectation of perfect weather, but I can't say reason has been restored.  I can feel the air thinning, it's harder to stay at my desk, harder to go to work, harder to concentrate.  Thoughts of appearances, how things will look to others, are gaining ground, drowning out the reality that everything's all right, our emotional ties are secure.  It's going to be great to see everyone at the wedding, great to celebrate together.  These thoughts, the war between being seen and seeing, of thinking of oneself as object rather than subject, gathers momentum as solid ground recedes into the distance below.       

Life is good on Father's Day

Our daughter called her dad early this morning to wish him Happy Father's Day, because she had to be out on the water running a boat-race all day today.  So after the call, to make it a special day, I told him I'd take him to dinner with our best friends tonight, and till then, we'd do whatever he chose with our precious Sunday.  So we first picked a bouquet of deep blue Siberian iris from our garden, some daisies for contrast, and our blue "Presidential" clematis, and drove over to take it to his mother.  We took our dog Cody, whom she loves to see, and had a wonderful visit.

      As we were driving home on one of the main roads in our rural town, we saw a black turtle crawling across the road toward us in the opposite lane.  My husband pulled over to the shoulder, got out, and signalled cars coming down the opposite lane toward us to stop.  They did, and he trotted out and got the turtle, being careful to hold it near the back of its shell, and took it well off the road into the woods where there was a wet ditch.  He let the turtle go there.   

     Meanwhile, I was sitting in the car feeling proud of him for his care for the natural world.  But I was worried about the other drivers, knowing that people easily turn hostile behind the wheel, especially when they're held up for something so seemingly insignificant.  But the lady who was first in the waiting line told us an anecdote about when she saved a snapping turtle from the road.  My husband thanked her for stopping, and the people in each car after her waved and smiled at us as they moved slowly by.   

    My pride spread from my husband to our town.  Most of us who choose to live this far out in the sticks, do it because we love nature.  It's great to share moments like this where it's expressed. 

Birthday gift: My father's voice

When my mother died in 1998, one of the photos amongst her papers was of my father standing at a microphone onstage at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, about to receive two cocker-spaniel puppies that the host was handing to him.  My dad had a surprised smile on his face, and Navy men sitting in a row at the back of the stage were all laughing.  On the curtain behind and above them was a huge sign identifying the event: "Bromo-Seltzer presents Vox Pop," and below that, "CBS-Coast to Coast."  The photo had a caption showing the date: May 24, 1943.   

     My father was commissioning a new submarine, the USS Cisco, at the time.  Four months later, he'd disappear with all hands in the enemy-infested waters of the Sulu Sea off the Philippines, and the cocker puppies, Skip and Jack - named for one of my father's former subs: the Skipjack - would grow up with our family through several moves down the east coast. 

     About eight years ago, when I started trying to learn about my father, I wrote to CBS Archives to see if they had a recording of the radio broadcast.  They never wrote back, so I figured there wasn't such a thing.  And then about five years ago, I happened to read a detective novel about WWII.  After finishing the book, I read on the book jacket that John Dunning, the author, was an avid collector of oldtime radio broadcasts.  Since he knew a lot about WWII, I thought there was a chance he might collect WWII-vintage broadcasts, so I kept the book bedside to remind me to look up his website and query him about the broadcast. 

     It wasn't till this past November that I finally got around to writing him.  And again, no answer, so I thought no more about it.  And then, just last week, I got an e-mail from the author's wife saying her husband was very sick, but had asked her to send me contact info. for someone who kept a list of oldtime radio collectors and what broadcasts they owned.  I e-mailed him. 

     And boom!  The next day I got an e-mail from a collector saying he had that very broadcast, and would copy it for me onto a cassette tape and send it to me.  We talked on the phone, and he warned me not to expect anything, that the sound quality was very bad.   

    The tape arrived last week, on my 63rd birthday.  I sat down at the kitchen table, wondering if I'd be able to hear my father's voice for the first time, and if so, what he'd sound like.  My brother?  My sister?  My aunt, his only sibling, now long dead? 

     But fifteen minutes into the old, scratchy tape, when he finally was introduced by the show's host, he didn't sound like anything I'd expected.  His voice was deeper than my brother's, and his hesitant, almost reluctant delivery was totally unlike the humorous raconteur I'd come to know through my research.  Here, he was anything but lively, fun.  He sounded bone-weary, almost shell-shocked, hardly the smiling man at the mike in the photograph. 

     I finished the tape and went to meet my husband and daughter for my birthday dinner, and by the time I told them about the tape, I'd pieced together an explanation.  My father was in a slowly tightening vice at the time, sandwiched between a Navy bureaucracy who wanted to break records with his new boat for the fastest sub ever built, and his cautious charge as skipper to bring his men home safe - which had him retesting and pulling the boat back to drydock again and again for further repairs against a mysteriously recurring oil leak.  He was also worn out, having just come off two years of continuous duty in the Pacific without a break, with six war patrols as skipper. 

      Add to this the media's need to sanitize the war to the public (the Clint Eastwood movie Flags of Our Fathers shows this most powerfully) and you can hear the conflict in the voices: the host's full of false cheer as he steers his submariner interviewees to subjects he thinks are heroic, glorious. "What's it like to be depth-charged by the Japs?" he asks, with a heartiness befitting something like, "Hey Kids!  Tell us about that merry-go-round you rode the other day!"  My dad seems stunned, buying time with a long "Welllll...." and then with an "um," seems to decide something and sidesteps the unspeakable, with, "The worst thing is feeling all eyes on you."  He explains how the crew, particularly new sailors, look to the skipper to judge whether they can show the fear they feel.  "No matter how you feel, you gotta keep your eyebrows as high or low as the next guy's."

     By the time I ran the tape again, straining for my father's words through the background hiss, he was indeed the dad my research had revealed, the methodical, careful guy who's thinking his way through every sentence.  "What do you like best about submarines?" said the jaunty host.  "Wellllll...." my dad paused again, and I'm sure he's sick to death of submarines, wants nothing more than to stay home and watch his kids and new pups grow up.  "The men all know their jobs," he said.  "They don't have to ask an officer what to do.  That's why I like submarines." 

(Note: does anyone know of technology to clean background noise off old tapes?)                                    

Borat

This past Sunday, W. and I had some rare family time with our only child, daughter Sherry who's spending her first winter since college away from her home in Portland, Me.  She's up from North Carolina for a few days on business and to get her dog Lila, who's been staying with us.   

    So day before yesterday was a precious treat, which we started out walking Popham Beach at dawn with the dogs tearing up the wind-ridged sand in front of us.  Everything we saw, even to the tangled-metal and rope of old lobster-traps washed up on shore, made us grateful to be alive, together again, and walking the coast of Maine.   

     Two hours later, we meandered down Route 1 to a little diner in Brunswick, for three-cheese chili omelets and great coffee.  And that's where I - wanting to extend our togetherness and the spontaneity of the day - made the blunder of persuading W. and S. to take in a matinee later in the day.  Seeing movies on the big screen has always been a rare event in our family, so I thought it would add to our treat to see a movie that several reviewers agreed would make us laugh for two hours straight.   

     So late in the afternoon, we came in three separate cars to the blockbuster movie Borat,  S. arriving slightly late because she'd been pulled over by the police for a broken headlight.  The theatre was completely empty, which - on hindsight - showed me that the movie's pretty much run through its primary audience by now.         

     I should have had another clue by the awful previews we had to sit through.  They were either tasteless horror, like the new spinoff of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or disgusting grossness, like a team of people trying to move a beached Orca whale corpse, when pushing on the carcass break through the hide and are up to their elbows in revolting opalescent goo.   

     I muttered something to S. and W. about paying good money to sit through schlock, and S. whispered, "Mom, the previews are geared to the kind of audience they think the movie will draw."   

    Oh god! I thought, finally suspecting what we were in for.  One more preview, this one of Ben Stiller as a guard in a museum whose stuffed animals and action-figures from history come to life at night, and I knew: Borat's main audience were adolescents!   

    And it was true.  Yes, Sasha Barron Cohen is a great comedian, especially as a verbal mimic, and W. and I'd laughed till my stomach hurt at him as Ali G. in his DVD.  But he specializes in breaking taboos, and - let's face it - most remaining taboos are the dregs: bathroom humor, grossly obese or misshapen bodies, public nudity, human and animal bodily fluids, excretion, masturbation, painful cosmetic procedures like bikini-waxing, etc.  And the only audience still fascinated with breaking taboos are adolescents.   

     The rest of us demand more selectivity.  A grossly obese man may have never before been shown on the big screen wrestling in the nude and suffocating his opponent with pendulous, R-rated body-parts, but just because it's shocking doesn't mean it's interesting.  Ditto for excrement-covered walls, drunken frat-boys making racist remarks, and masturbation.  They're all taboo, but inherently dull, making the story drag.

      Again, I think Cohen is about the funniest and most brilliant man on earth when interviewing unsuspecting people, especially those who are puffed up or deluded by self-importance.  So he's great in short stints.  But over the longer period of a narrative arc, his material isn't selective enough to sustain interest, at least for a mature audience.  One of the problems with the movie is that his primary conceit of interviewing people who believe that he's a professional interviewer and thus serious, which is made clear to the audience in his DVD's and TV shows, was not explicit in Borat.  So several interviews with people who weren't public figures, I thought were staged with actors.  For instance, Borat meets with a professional humorist, who tries to teach him how to tell a joke in America.  I, for one, didn't even know there was such a thing as a professional humorist, so I thought it was a made-up situation.  There was no surrounding  context, no shots of signage on the guy's door, in his office, no certificates on the wall or title on his desk - unlike Congressman Bob Barr, another interviewee, with nameplate on his desk, the Capitol showing out the window of his office, etc.   

     Ditto for the professional etiquette-teacher, the dinner-table group, the rodeo, and many other scenes.  And if I - who have been prepared for Cohen's technique by his video of Ali G. - didn't know this, there must be many more moviegoers who didn't get the full punch of these encounters either.  That's too bad, because most of these interviewees were so blinded by their professional lenses or knowledge or stance to the world, they were literally unbelievable and I thought they must be actors; no one can be this naive!  And thus, one of the most interesting messages of Cohen's comedy: that our own point-of-view shapes our perceptions and judgments - could have been largely lost in this movie - at least at the time. 

    Maybe I should just speak for myself here (being admittedly slow on the uptake).  But I felt disappointed and a bit chagrined coming out of the movie.  I apologized to W. and S. for it, and we agreed that although there were some very funny parts and that Cohen's extremely gifted, it's another reason for Netflicks.           

            

            

            

From Wimp to Greeter

   My husband and I are getting ready to sail off Downeast to Penobscot Bay for three weeks, and we have to-do lists a mile long.  One of the things we had to buy was a canine lifevest for our little Cody.  It's yellow with black edging, and has a black handle right over his spine, so we can lean off the boat or a dinghy and hoist him to safety.  That is, if we can lift sixty-plus pounds of wet dog, which makes me kick myself that I haven't been to the gym nearly all summer.  I don't know if dividing lilies with a spade and digging up rocks every day counts.   

   But the other evening after work, my husband went down to the boat to prepare it for the trip.  Cody went with him, and when they got to the dock, W. put Cody's new vest on him.  Usually on the dock and in the launch going out to the boat, Cody is glued to one of our legs, shy around strangers and new dogs.  But this time, he trotted up and down the dock in his new vest, wagging his tail at people and sniffing dogs.  He even hopped on a few boats, startling the owners.   

   I was reminded of the first dog obedience class we took him to, almost a year ago now, shortly after getting him from the animal shelter.  When he first laid eyes on the other dogs, he planted his feet in a back-up stance and bristled, barking so loud that the teacher ran up to us and started pulling chairs across his line of sight, fencing him off from the other dogs.  "See that?" she pointed to the raised hackles on his neck and back.  "He's making himself bigger."   

   Perhaps the vest felt like an extra coat of fur to Cody, a second skin of raised hackles that made him feel big enough to be secure for the first time.  When I told a friend about how the vest changed him, she said, "Oh yeah, like a suit of armor."   

 

   I wonder if armor transformed knights of old into greeters.  It's wonderful to think of analogies with people we know today, how metaphorical lifevests and armor of learning a new language, say, or getting a driver's license, or a job, or one's citizenship, can similarly transform the immigrants I work with.  As they take on the security of new skills, they become less guarded and prickly, more friendly and outgoing.  They're willing to take risks, speak up in class more, and this makes them in turn, more fluent.  Security fuels curiosity, learning.   

 

   I wonder how the theory will prove out with Cody.  "Notdotdot," who visits this blog from time to time, has told me about her beloved collie who - on her one and only sailing trip on a small boat - hiked out when the boat heeled.  That is, she naturally got up on the high side of the boat and leaned her weight out over the edge to compensate for a puff of wind tilting the boat.   

 

   That's the first I've ever heard of a dog as an instinctive sailor, but I don't doubt it at all, and it's got me hopeful.  I know to savor this hopeful, anticipatory few days before a trip as one of the true gifts of vacation.  I'll post a goodbye before we go, and on our trip I'll snap at least one picture of Cody in his vest to show you - hiking out if we're lucky.             

How to Diffuse Tension

We had our Marriage Encounter group here the other night.  A couple who now spends the winter in a warmer state told us about a black-tie dinner they went to recently at a country-club in this new state.  A local man came up to their table to talk to the other longtime residents our friends were sitting with, and the man said in a loud voice, "Well ----, what do you think of this here Martin Luther Coon day?"

Our friends were thunderstruck, and suddenly realized, "We didn't feel safe."  They wanted to leave, but were frozen in their seats.

 

Later, when our initial check-in was over and it was time for cross-talk, I said that I like to think I would have said something to the guy, like "Would you please take your racist talk elsewhere?" but that I probably would have just sat there too, paralyzed.  Then my dear husband, who's much quicker on his feet than I am, said "Or" - looking at his watch - "Gee, what time is it?  1864?  I thought we were in the 21st century."

I've seen W. do this - foil a jerk with humor - through the years, and I'm always in awe.  He's even done it at Town Meeting, in front of hundreds of people.  I wish I could learn the knack, but it appears to be a gift.

I think he got it from his dad.  There were countless times my father-in-law cut through tension, formality, or hippocracy by making people laugh.  One time when our daughter was an infant, we walked into W.'s parents' kitchen.  His father was there with a number of guests, one of whom was a pretentious lady.  "Ohhh, a baby!" she squealed when she saw Sherry, our daughter.

 

My father-in-law, who'd had it with uptight, inauthentic guests, rolled his eyes our direction and said, "Noooo. It's an actor impersonating a baby."