stoutfellow

I'm reading Phineas Finn, the second of the Palliser novels.

There is a major character named Robert Kennedy.

Given that Finn and several of his friends and allies are Irish, this is not a huge coincidence, but it's still slightly disorienting to someone who actually remembers June 6, 1968.

Twenty-five years ago today, I was waiting my turn in a barber shop in Tucson. At the other end of the shop was a small TV, fastened high on the wall so that everyone could see. It was too far away and tuned too low for me to hear, but I could see it well enough. This is what I saw.

A bright blue subtropical sky. A thick column of white smoke rising into the sky, with a blindingly bright spot of light atop it. Rising, rising... and suddenly splitting into a Y-shape.

It would be some time before I found out just what had happened, but my immediate thought was "Oh, my God...."

Where were you, and what do you remember?

I don't know what prompted the memory, but yesterday I found myself thinking of Luke. Luke was one of the family dogs in my childhood - well, my early to mid teens, I guess. His ancestry, we never learned; he was long-legged, a galoot of a dog, very strong, not too bright, patient yet firm with obstreperous younger dogs. He also played a role in binding together what was to be our extended family; one of my brothers-in-law-to-be used to roughhouse with him, and called him a raucous animal, while another won over my previously-dubious father by his quick, selfless, and successful action the day Luke was hit by a car.

But the story I want to tell is years earlier than that, when Luke was still a rotund puppy. (The incident I'm about to recount may not have happened; I remember it vividly, but no one else in the family seems to. It may be a fabulation, but after thirty-plus years, who can say?) In his puppyhood, Luke was a digger, and there was one spot in the front yard he especially favored. He would dig his hole; one of us - my mother, I would guess, most often - would fill it in; he would return, and the cycle would repeat. Finally, my mother tired of the game, and went out and bought a spray-can of dog repellant. She refilled the hole, then sprayed the entire area liberally with the contents of the can. We then retired to watch. Soon enough, Luke came ambling over. He caught a whiff of the repellant and shied back; then, determinedly, squeezed his eyes shut, cranked his head around to avoid the stench... advanced, and resumed digging.

I swear I remember this.

The old "first line, first post each month":

January: "At this point I have to recap a little bit of philosophical history."

February: "Tuesday, at about noon, the temperature here was around 60F."

March: "Does anybody else remember the short-lived TV series 'Frank's Place'?"

April: "The development of quaternions was only one of several more-or-less independent events in the rise of abstract algebra."

May: "I just got word on Ben's biopsy."

June: "I was going to write a 'things I didn't know' post, briefly discussing three or four things I've learned or noticed lately."

July: "This is somewhat embarrassing."

August: "Just a quick note to say that I'm in San Diego on the second leg of my vacation."

September: "It's been a long time since I last read anything by Avram Davidson."

October: "In the spring of 1994, I went down to the Humane Society to get a companion for Murphy."

November: "In a comment to jrittenhouse, I mentioned that I was considering revising the Keyword system in my library database."

December: "Happy birthday, commodorified!"

Brett, at English, Jack, has tagged me with the Eight Facts meme.

These are the rules:
  1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
  2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
  4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
  5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

( Eight Facts )

I don't go in for tagging, so I'll skip #4, but if you're reading this and want to play, feel free.

Back when I was in eleventh grade, I took a course titled "Advanced American Literature". I'm not sure why it was called "Advanced"; as far as I recall, it was the only course in USAn literature offered at old Crawford High. In retrospect, I don't think I got a great deal out of that course. I seem to remember that the instructor talked a great deal about symbolism, but I came away with the impression that symbolism was some kind of sekrit code that the author artificially superimposed on the story. It wasn't until a few years later, in college, that I got a glimmering of what literary symbolism really is.

In any event, I'm trying to recall what-all we read in that class. I know that we read The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. As it happens, I've just reread both of those, and, thinking back, I have to say that I doubt any seventeen-year-old - or, at any rate, I - could really comprehend either story. The Scarlet Letter is meatier, I think; though it is a moral tale, I don't judge it to be a moralizing one - Hawthorne presents the temptations that Hester and Rev. Dimmesdale faced toward the end fairly and realistically. The climax might be a little pat, but not excessively so.

The Great Gatsby... There's something about Fitzgerald that puts me off. The society he describes is brittle and shallow, and I have a hard time empathizing. Nonetheless, I do see (what I think I missed the first time, so many years ago) how pathetic a character Jay Gatsby actually is - how much of his appearance was façade, and how much of his life was built on an illusion.

I wish I could remember what other books we read in AdvAmLit. (DG, if you're reading this, you were in that class; do you remember anything else?)

In - was it 1972? somewhen around there - my Scout troop went to summer camp at Camp Hual-Cu-Cuish, in northern San Diego County. (This was unusual; usually we spent summer camp at Camp Mataguay, in the southern part of the county.) It was an enjoyable and productive camp for me; I earned three merit badges that week, in Basketweaving, Swimming, and Astronomy. (The Basketweaving was a gimme; the camp store sold these little kits, and I think almost my whole troop got that badge.)

At the first meeting for the Astronomy badge, I noticed a Question of the Day on the blackboard: "Define the Universe. Give two examples." Being ornery, I decided to take them up on it. I cobbled together some sort of description broad enough to cover the Ptolemaic and Copernican models, and used those as my examples. The next day, I handed it in to the instructor. He glanced over it, scowled, called me a smartass, and gave me (as the prize) a free bottle of Coke. The QotD the next day was... more serious, and very hard.

I was reminded of this by the recent kerfuffle over the IAU's decision to redefine the word "planet", in such a way as to include the current crop, together with the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's moon Charon, and the Kuiper Belt Object temporarily known as "Xena". It occurred to me to wonder what the point was - why the concept "planet" was useful enough to fret about. Since pompe knows more about these things than I do, and since he had just posted about the controversy, I took the opportunity to ask him that question. His answer (scroll down to the comments) is, I think, cogent, and leads to a different and quite plausible definition.

Anyone have any other ideas on the subject?

Friday. The big event that day was a lunch with D and J, a couple of old classmates. We selected a restaurant near my father's place; J would pick me up, and D would meet us there.

The initial steps of the plan went off without a hitch; J, accompanied by his wife B (a vivacious Argentinean), arrived at my father's doorstep as planned, at about noon.

Unfortunately, the restaurant we'd chosen turned out not to open until 5:00.

When D arrived, a brief conference led us to another nearby restaurant, Millie's Café. (Millie's? Minnie's? Damn. Something like that.) The food there was delicious; I ordered chicken feta penne, which, along with the titular ingredients, also contained pine nuts, tomatoes, asiago cheese, and assorted other goodies. The food was also plentiful. I cleaned my plate (I always clean my plate, which probably has something to do with my inability to get my weight down under 185 lbs), but the others had to resort to doggie bags.

Thirty years is a long time, and memories mutate. An incident or two which remained vivid in my mind had apparently vanished completely from D's and J's (for which I think I'm thankful...), and the converse also held. (J credited me with teaching him the International Phonetic Alphabet in high school, but I have no memory of that. I know that I was thoroughly familiar with the IPA by then, having spent many hours poring over the diagrams in a book on articulatory phonetics and trying to imitate them, but... I said nothing, as his story redounded to my credit, but I felt a little guilty afterwards.) There was a small amount of reminiscence, but mostly we tried to catch each other up. Lots of travel stories; culture shock (B's, on coming to the US; D's, on returning from a year in Brazil); work stories (J promised to send me some references on sea shanties and other folk music)... It was remarkably comfortable. J is involved in music these days - helping with arrangements by day, performing, when possible, in the evening - which doesn't surprise me; D got a degree in physics and is apparently still involved in it, but I don't recall her actually saying what she did these days. Other classmates drifted in and out of the conversation; there were a scant handful we could place, but most of it was of the "where is...?" variety.

Say, whatever did happen to...?

There's a quiz floating around, where you identify which US states you've visited and get back a map of the US, with those states picked out in red. Now, I'm a born nitpicker1, and my training in mathematics and linguistics only made things worse.

What does "visited" mean?

I have lived in the following states (5): Arizona, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Washington.

I have gone to the following states, with the intention of doing something not transportation-related there, and spent at least one night (13+1): Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin. (DC also belongs here.)

Same criterion, without spending the night (3): Indiana, New Hampshire, Virginia.

I've set foot in the following states, spending the night, while in transit (2): Arkansas, Pennsylvania.

Same criterion, without spending the night (5): Georgia, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico.

I've ridden through the following states, without setting foot in them (2): Kansas, Ohio.

Then there's that prenatal time in South Carolina...

So how many states have I visited?

1. When I was a kid - maybe about six? - my sister O. decided to quiz me on my ability to read a clock. She asked (something like) "If the big hand was on the eight and the little hand was on the four, what time would it be?" I answered, "The clock would be broken. If the big hand was on the eight, the little hand would be between the four and the five." For some reason, O. found that answer unsatisfactory.

I've alluded to this story a time or two on the Bujold list, and once, I think, on LJ, but I thought I'd put it down in full for once.

I don't remember just when what I'm about to recount happened; I deduce, from internal evidence, that I was probably about five years old. I should also mention that I've told the story - to others and to myself - enough times that some fabulation has crept in, so the details should probably be taken with a grain of salt. The core of the story, I feel sure, is true, and the details, if wrong in places, are at least in keeping with its spirit.

I was a voracious reader from an early age, and my parents made sure I had plenty of reading matter. One of my early favorites was Edith Hamilton's Mythology; I read and reread the stories of the Greek and Roman gods (and the Norse ones as well) with great enjoyment.

At this time, my parents (and perforce their children) were regular churchgoers; we attended military churches, which preached a generic brand of Protestantism. This attendance, coupled with my reading preferences, soon led me to a conundrum. On the one hand, I was reading these stories about a large number of gods, with names like Jupiter and Hera. (I knew that most of them apparently had two names; I wasn't clear on why. The very concept of a foreign language was not yet in my mental inventory. I generally settled for whichever name I thought I could pronounce.) On the other, every Sunday I was told that there was one god, whose name was God, and there weren't any others. This confused me somewhat.

Thinking about it, I concluded, something must have happened. The possibility that the old gods had died seemed most likely to me. The Norse myths, after all, spoke plainly of the death of gods. Also, in another book (The Book of Knowledge, which was, I think, a sort of children's encyclopedia), I'd been reading an article about the origins of the names of the days of the week; it included such phrases as Mercurii dies, and - to my mind, as yet innocent of Latin - this somehow supported my tentative conclusion.

Nonetheless, I was still uncertain, so I decided to ask my mother about it. She was occupied with housework - perhaps ironing, perhaps washing dishes; I remember her standing with her back to me, with light from a window framing her. Thus, perhaps, she didn't notice the urgency with which I asked the question. She replied, simply, that they (the Greco-Roman gods) had never existed.

I was stunned. I swallowed dryly, said "Oh", and wandered away. They never existed. Death I was prepared for; not this.

There is a very old Peanuts cartoon. In it, Linus is talking to Charlie Brown about a quarrel with Lucy; he says something like the following. "She said she wished I'd never been born. Can you believe that? Never been born... Brrr! Why, the theological implications alone are staggering!"

Linus, buddy, I know just how you felt.