Q. Where the hell were you?
A. Boston.
Q. Why didn't you write while you were there?
A. A bit busy. Also, I thought the hotel was charging 10 cents a minute for internet access, which turned out not to be true, although I spent so little time in the room that I didn't pursue the question while I was there.
Q. Can't you do better than this?
A. Indeed I can.
I really oughtn't to snark on fundamentalist Christianity, but sometimes it just sashays along in a low-cut article and asks for it. When googling for something totally unrelated, I found "She Maketh Herself Coverings," a tract by and for the ladies. Mrs. Pastor Graf is concerned that even the most observant Baptist women are not dressing piously enough -- even the ones who have "put away [their] pants and all of our excuses for wearing them (i.e. it's cold, I'm going horseback riding, I just wear them around the house, etc.) After all, who wants to dress like an abomination in God's sight?"
Nevertheless, if a little bit of flesh can be discerned under your clothing -- no matter how shapeless a jumper it may be -- you're in abomination territory. She emphasizes that each time the Lord designed clothes for man, it was meant to be a robe -- that is, a complete covering of the body.
We see how in the Bible God designed clothes three times and all three times He designed coverings. . . .The Lord designed clothes . . .for the high priest's attire. They wore long robes with linen britches underneath the robe. A robe is not an "attention grabbing" article of clothing, is it? I mean, if you and your husband were going out of town on a romantic little getaway, what would his response be if you cuddled up next to him and whispered, "Honey, I want you to know that I'll be bringing my floor-length, long-sleeved, fuzzy, pink robe on this trip!" (Well, in the first place, he may have already fainted because you actually cuddled up to him... but that's another article!)
Of course! A good woman is naturally frigid, and a smart one uses sex to control her husband, so naturally he'd be pretty surprised at cuddling.
The article isn't a total howler, though. I was actually interested to learn of the biblical basis for modern standards of clothing. She says that
any part exposed above the knee is considered nakedness in the eyes of God. (Isaiah 47:2,3 "...make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, ...Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen." Webster's dictionary defines the thigh as being the portion of the leg between the hip and the knee. Another verse that defines nakedness as an exposed thigh is Exodus 28:42.)
I wondered how it was that conservative Christians decided on a standard of dress. Which raises the question: why am I taking the word of a fundamentalist for biblical interpretation? For that matter, why do we find ostentatious modesty laughable in Baptists, but not in Orthodox Jews? Interesting questions, and the answers are surely unflattering to me, but I digress. There is a pressing issue at hand:
** A Word to Brides-to-be **
I am utterly amazed and shocked when I attend Christian weddings because of some of the bride's gowns I have seen. Here we have this wonderful, sweet, little Christian girl, who has dressed modestly and properly as long as she's been in the church. What happens on her wedding day? To quote a familiar passage- "June is bustin' out all over!" Please keep your standards as high as ever on this wonderful day! There have been brides I've been embarrassed to look in the eye because of her immodest apparel.
Really? Imagine a grown woman blushing to look a young bride in the eye. Mrs. Graf sure spends a lot of time thinking about female flesh. So (as long as we're on this website) does Don W. Hillis, author of "The Mini-Skirt Speaks."
I want to make it clear that I am a Christian miniskirt. That is, I go to church every Sunday. What's more, I attend an evangelical Church. Of course, I am not the only Christian miniskirt in town. There are many others who go to my church.
Though we represent a variety of colors and patterns there is one thing we have in common. We all have a way of revealing attractive thighs, especially when the legs are crossed . . . Unless I am misreading the situation we seem to make our wearers a bit self-conscious. At least the girl who wears me is always tugging at my hem.
Miniskirts have a lot to say to Hillis on Sunday mornings, although that, of course, is not his fault, is it?
After making an Oreo cream pie for a dinner party at which the diners, combined, couldn't finish it off and wouldn't take it home, there was a quarter of this pie in the freezer, and naturally all I could think was DAMMIT PIE STOP TALKING TO ME. There was no one I could think of to take the pie away from me. It gave me an idea: the Dammit Cream Pie exchange.
This would be an agreement you had with friends and neighbors, preferably near neighbors so that you wouldn't have to take the food far. If you found yourself with abundant leftovers, food you didn't like, were allergic to, etc., you would go to the nearest member of the exchange and say, "Here's some Oreo cream pie we couldn't finish the other night!" Cheerily, but with a note of finality -- because the giver cannot be refused, you see. The givee can throw it out or pass it along to someone else she knows, but she can't say no, because that isn't how the game is played. The obligation makes it a favor to you, not her. She can't give it to another member of the exchange, either, because then you would have food making the rounds, and that would defeat the point -- it has become her problem. Soon enough she will show up at your door saying, "Here's some coffee cake," and you will take it off her hands, as you must.
You'd have to have some ground rules, of course -- no offloading gross food, like stale chips or salsa with broken-off bits of tortilla in it. Also there would be holiday amnesty, so that nobody would be obligated to rehouse Thanksgiving yams or Halloween candy unless they wanted it. It will probably serve as an exchange for desserts and rich, fatty foods, since people are happy to make room for decently healthy leftovers. But what better way to unite neighbors than to demand periodically that they enjoy cream pie?
I haven't been keeping up with the blog for a bit over a week now, or with my friends on the interweb, for which I am sorry. My personal laptop was overheating, and grew painfully slow after a few minutes of use. I was worried about damaging it, so I had to wait for a cooling pad to arrive in the UPS truck. I could keep up with work information, but didn't feel comfortable doing anything too personal on my parents' computer.
But! Here is the cooling pad, and here am I.
Since Memorial Day brought most things to a halt, I took a day trip to old P.A., that is, Phillips Academy Andover, my high school, dura mater to the alma mater of my actual college. I thought that this wouldn't be featured on the blog, that it would be an angstiferous trip of sorrow and chin-in-hand despair at fleeting youth and dashed hopes and whatnot, that I was taking it against my better judgment and I would be miserable afterwards. It was actually wonderful. I enjoyed myself as much as I ever did there, and on spring days like this -- assuming I was finished with exams -- that was a great deal.
The place was better kept than it ever was, which I wouldn't have thought possible -- it was always gorgeous. The one blight on the landscape that I remembered was Evans, the science building, a flat slate-and-cement monstrosity that smelled like dead animals and 1965. Since I barely ever read the alumni magazine, I was taken aback to find that Evans had vanished, replaced with a healthy green quad and a shiny new three-story science center. As much as I believe in preserving past architecture, I can't but support any demolition of a building in which I failed so many physics quizzes.
The nature sanctuary continues to be a wonder and delight, just as it was in my time, although a development has cut quite visibly close to the trail. Once you could stand there and pretend you were in the Forest Primaeval, even though you knew very well you had North Andover at your back, which is about as primaeval a place as a Taco Bell. For some reason, I liked to think to myself, "If I fall down and break my leg, no one will know to come looking for me until night falls, and even then who would know where to look . . . ?" But my old favorite bend in the trail still allows you to believe that you're that lost. There are paths near the sanctuary, especially close to Rabbit Pond, where it's much quicker and easier to repair for a moment of timelessness. I returned to sit on one slope of granite slabs that I loved when I was fourteen, and was quietly amazed to realize how little any of it had changed. It was always a marvel to sit there and think of how long the rocks had been there, just the same and just as enjoyed, before I was born; now at last it occurred to me that they will be just the same and just as enjoyed when I am dead. And I wasn't terrified by that. I was at peace.
(What I was not at peace with was the obvious pack of Newports stashed in the dead tree trunk right next to the rocks. Dude: do you not know better than to smoke at the rocks on Rabbit Pond? Much less hide your smokes there in broad daylight? Don't you know the place that's just a quarter-mile away -- ? Okay, never mind, you've probably been narced on by now anyway, but really, the path is clearly still there. Oh, and also don't smoke it's bad for you.)
I thought, nevertheless, that a place with so many young and vibrant people should have a bit more in the way of admonitory landscaping. If I ever have wads of money to leave the school, this is what I will do. I will make a bequest to the academy, and submit a design for a sculpture that must be installed if the money is to be received. There will be a simple, stylized bronze sculpture of a pretty girl and a happy young man carrying books, sporting equipment, etc., set just opposite a small crescent border of boxwood hedge, about one foot high. There will be a plaque inscribed in a small sans-serif font that only a close viewer can make out completely. It will read:
"turn around
turn around
there's a thing there that can be found"
-- John Linnell
And behind him in the little hedge, the viewer will find a human skull, carved in granite, half-sunk into the ground.
This isn't to be sullen or despairing.* I was actually quite cheered by the sight of the bright young things on campus. The boys were all so much like the ones I always adored; the girls were spitting images of long-forgotten friends. The fashions haven't changed much at all up at the campus -- still a mix of pink and black and army surplus for the freak-types, and school shirts with running shorts for the jocks and preps. We used to call those kids "white hats," because all the jock boys and plenty of the girls had a white school cap, the brim curled and worn with constant wear. They were usually sweat-soaked and dirty enough to be grey, especially the ones the boys had. I noticed, to my satisfaction, that now the white hat appears to be in remission. Many of the boys had quite sizeable hair, luminous blond afros or mullet-length black tresses. They're gathering roses while they may on that account, as well they should. Why it should be the case that grown men usually have such lank and unappealing hair when they grow theirs out, I cannot say, but I suppose it's a study for another time.
Almost every kid I saw was studying, or at least bent over books in the spring sunshine which is of course exactly studying and perfectly effective. I did not intrude myself into the buildings, mainly because I did not wish to be a creepy trespassing type of alum, but also because I knew exams were on, and exam time is almost as fierce as it is during college. Even the Starbucks (a new development) to which I repaired was alive with laptops and notebooks. One dewy blonde thing came in, trailing her clique, and said, "Who studies?" All her friends laughed, and talked about how they never studied or maybe sometimes for chemistry, as they casually sat down at the table I had my hand on. And so I strangled her. No, wait, I didn't. I went to the park instead, and waited for the train, and when I boarded it I was as happy and exhausted a young lady as ever did.
-----
* And on second thought, it isn't a good idea anyway. Teenagers have no trouble remembering that humans die, as a general matter, and it seems terribly romantic and deliciously restful to a lot of them. What they can't imagine is pushing thirty. It's much harder to design effective sculpture in which a haunting human archetype indicates its cellulite saddlebags, persistent neck hair, or outstanding student loan balance.
But if one of them had, it would sound like this.
Do you feel that? That lightness in the region of your legs? That is the absence of your pants. They have been rocked off.
During the first fourteen years or so of my life, I was instinctively afraid of public transportation, especially subways. This was to be expected, as I was from Mississippi, where "public transportation" means a nice new four-lane highway. At best, subways looked intensely confusing, and meant for no one who hadn't been raised knowing how to get across Manhattan. At worst, they were graffiti-choked rust-colored lines of death, where, as movies and books of the late '70s and '80s assured me, I could look forward to being harassed at best, robbed in all probability, and possibly raped and murdered. This view was of course based on the subways of New York, which at the time were not undeserving of their reputation. Occasionally, however, you came across a more flattering portrayal even then.
There is not actually a secret abandoned pneumatic subway tunnel, complete with a car full of luxurious decayed fittings, under New York City. It was probably destroyed around 1912. Why we here in twenty-first-century America do not use pneumatic tubes for subways or indeed nearly everything is at first a mystery, although, as a professor once told us at law school, the answer to any question beginning "Why don't we . . ." is generally "Money." Most likely no one could be moved to invest in a citywide underground infrastructure for small deliveries when the post office and various courier services did well enough. Today pneumatic tubes are mainly featured in bank drive-through lanes and old office buildings.
The worst streetcar accident in United States history was the Malbone Street wreck, in Brooklyn in 1918. An inexperienced young company man, pressed into service as a scab during the evening rush hour, took a curve at about 40 mph. That particular line had been designed for speeds of up to 6. In the subsequent derailment, ninety-three people were killed.
I was in some kind of train mishap today, although no one was more than put out. Hundreds of us were put out, in fact, at Charles/MGH, a small platform stop which was suddenly packed solid with grumbling milling bodies. At least that was in the open air, which was much nicer than sitting underground for twenty minutes while our train was hooked up to push along the train in front, after that train had some kind of engine failure. The only casualty was one woman who had regained her feet and was gratefully cooperating with her "rescuers" by the time they could lead her off to the convenient hospital. Thankfully, no one was mentally disturbed or otherwise prone to making it a war hell ride. I was sitting next to a lady who was doing her best with three children and an infant, and not far from a slip of a girl with a heavily muscled bull terrier. The dog was as good as gold, and delighted in the petting of strangers. His behavior, in fact, stood in marked contrast to that of the three children, especially the little boy, who made a constant "nnnnnn-whnnnn-hnnnnn" insectoid sort of noise to relieve his boredom, even before the car ever stopped. To be fair, the dog wore one of these, the use of which is frowned upon by most child-care experts.
is that ideas simply collide with you. Nothing particularly Metropolitan Diary-ish has to happen to you to make you think of things you never would otherwise. For example, I was riding along on the Green Line when I had an idea that must have occurred to anyone who has ever ridden a ground-to-surface subway train in the last fifty years and ever, for any fleeting moment, wanted to Write.
Think of it: you're standing alone, one night somewhere between October and November, huddling in your greatcoat and wondering if you've missed the 11:35 after all. It's the last on the schedule, and how else will you ever get home? Then at 11:45, just when you're about to give up hope, a train wheezes up the line, and halts. You mount, and pay, and take your seat, and the moment the last coin clinked in the till, you forget the conductor's face, just as you do every day. And the train screeches up and onward, and you are so tired, you lean against the window, and think of nothing but the steam heat thawing your flesh and the needles of heat in your face. The train passes underground, and around some black mine corner, it stops, as it always will. And you think nothing of it, until the conductor says, Doors are opening to the right; and in from the cement walls come the dead.
They come from all stations and all times. Some are ladies, shaking the dust and dogshit out of their great trains of jeweled crinoline. Others are shopgirls and teachers, soft in plain black or houndstooth gowns, who smile a little by accident and show their snaggled teeth. Some are townsmen with muttonchop whiskers and muttonfed bellies; some are boys in go-to-hell hats and short overalls. All of them take a seat comfortably, for their fare was paid long ago. A matronly woman seats herself besides you, and as the train pulls along, you feel her heavy skirts crowding your bare stocking-legs.
So far, this has not horrified you. The first footfall of the risen dead only cut you loose, made you lightheaded, as if you were under the ether at some subway dentist's. The dead are not ghostly-pale, and now you can feel they have some heft and weight. You look to this lady's face, which is coldly correctly forward just as yours had been, and this affords you an excellent view of the weeping red chancre at her neck.
Your gasping, gagging noises make no impression on the dead. To each stop the train proceeds as usual; some alight and others wait. No one boards at these stations; they are empty, shut for the night, because, you know, you did miss the 11:35. But at last there is your stop, and you stagger to your feet, and make your way to the door. Then you feel the conductor's arm across your chest. You paid the full fare, miss, says he, and I ha'n't change for such a fare as that. You got to ride to the End of the Line . . .
Oh come on really. Somebody wrote a story like that, surely, and probably eighteen somebodies. It sounds exactly like something I might have read in an anthology when I was growing up. Can anyone tell me what it was?
Which is no excuse for remaining dull, I know. I'll try to do better, but I'm staying busy.
Stay tuned! To follow: embarrassing treasure trove of items from junior high school!
