Filed under: Uncategorized
If I could re-popularize one English word, I think it would be whence. It’s efficient and rather pretty.
What about you? What word would you bring back?
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John Adams, in a letter to his son:
Public business must be done by someone. If wise men decline it, others will do it.
Almost any worthwhile and necessary endeavor can be substituted for “public business” and this statement is equally true and compelling.
Filed under: Overthought
What’s the right response to a statement about how quiet one is? If the “quiet” one says something in agreement, that kind of makes the first statement less true. Should I just nod? I’ve never been able to figure out if comments like, “Well aren’t you the quiet one?” or “You’re so quiet!” are compliments or rebukes. Maybe they’re neither, but just observations. But still, I have about as much of a response as if someone noticed aloud that I have detached ear lobes. I’m not sure I think that I’m quiet, anyway, but if I am, maybe it’s partly because I get tongue-tied trying to think up a gracious and sensible reply to these comments.
Ideas?
#6 walked in this morning (my 25th birthday), and said, “Hi! How does it feel to be that much closer to death?” After a minute of similar chatter, we ended up talking about life before birth. He was surprisingly oppositional about the idea that I was alive in our mom. Finally, he confessed his reason: “I don’t want the time before to count, because then I would be eleven, and that’s almost as old as most people are when they start smoking pot- blazing.”
From a traditional Christian perspective, adult life has two main paths: chaste celibacy, or a tightly-bound triad of marriage, sex, and child-bearing. (Fun fact: Matrimony comes from the root word for “mother.”) Once it was possible for people to to pick and choose among the three, it was nearly inevitable that we would feel entitled to select just marriage, or sex, or kids, or two at a time. After a few generations on The Pill (which marks a cultural milestone as the first medication widely used to suppress health rather than disease, but that’s another story), our mindset has shifted so completely that we feel like we deserve to have sex without children or marriage. But who would have guessed that some would also feel entitled to have children without sex or marriage? Motherhood to over a dozen fatherless children wasn’t the parenthood that Planned Parenthood wanted people to be planning. Yet their insistence that women have total rights to decide when/if they have children- regardless of their naturally-child-creating behavior- might have something to do with incidences like this.
(For the record, I’m not saying that it’s always wrong to use medical technology to limit family size or space babies, although “birth influence” is probably a better mindset for the ethical options out there. I’m just pointing out that without Margaret Sanger and her contemporary counterparts, we probably wouldn’t have phenomena like the Octomom. Evangelicals who want to think through their choices in this area might want to start here.)
Several family members just don’t like loud sudden noises. I was the kid who hated balloons at birthday parties. (Actually, I still do, despite a long attempt at “getting over it” by making balloon animals. I got decent at making balloon animals, but never got better at calming my nerves.) #6 follows in the family mold. While we were watching fireworks on Saturday, he turned to a friend and said, “I wish someone would invent silent fireworks!” (Maybe that’s why our late grandmother watched fireworks on TV instead). At first, this sounded unpatriotic, but hey- what’s more American than a little Yankee ingenuity applied to a problem?
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I never thought I liked cities, and certainly not L.A. Smoggy, crime-ridden, ugly, image-obsessed, cheap- that’s what I thought my nearest city was. My childhood ambition was to farm apples in the country somewhere. For years after my childhood ended, I fantasized about moving somewhere remote. I’d camped, and read Country magazine, which led me to believe that I’d love the open spaces, clean air, room to garden, etc. I still think I might like that.
Suburbs, on the whole, aren’t my cup of tea, although I’m lucky enough to live in one that avoids some of the ungainly sprawl of many ‘burbs and even manages to be quite walkable. It’s clean, safe, pleasant, if a little bland. I visit suburbs to visit people I love in suburbs, but I would never visit a suburb on purpose, the way I’d go to a country town or a city.
Visiting cities was actually how I figured out that I like cities. It started with San Francisco. I loved taking day-trips there and soaking up the funky culture and natural beauty. Then the East Coast charmed me with D.C. and Philadelphia. (Of course, I only visited parts of Philly and the District. Like most suburb-raised WASPs, when I say that I like cities, I mean the gentrified villages within cities.) I lived in dense, diverse Berkeley for a few weeks, and was enchanted enough to buy a Rybczynski book on “City Life.” I loved the compactness of city living- everything I needed was a short walk away. I enjoyed the cultures interweaving, and the opportunities to experience lots of art, museums, cuisine, music, and the like. More than anything, I discovered that cities are full of people, and people are interesting and have a glory that excels pretty buildings or neat streets. Cities, I finally decided, had their advantages.
LA was my neighbor city, but it was probably one of my least favorites. If my sister hadn’t gone to UCLA, I would have continued to believe that the best LA had to offer was Watts Towers (don’t go) or some cultural attractions in nearby Pasadena. But I would visit my sister in Westwood and walk through the lovely grounds of UCLA, admire the older buildings (quite a novelty in Southern California), walk past more restaurants and libraries that I could ever explore, and people-watch. Santa Monica, which had always been the epitome of uppity California in my mind, turned out to be charming (and yes, uppity). A friend finally took me to the Getty, and from there I explored the Getty Villa. I grew to appreciate Mochi and other ethnic food I have close at hand. I realized that the Hollywood Bowl was special, and finally admitted that we pretty much have some of the best weather in the world.
I still despise the traffic. Nearly all the buildings are appalling. Sprawl and smog are big problems here. I’m not ready to sing “I Love LA,” but I’m enjoying what’s here while I am. Here are some of the things I love about LA and its environs:
Having come to love LA late, there’s still a lot left for me to explore. This summer’s agenda:
Today, #6 saw a DVD and read the title: “Life with Father,” and without missing a beat, added in his movie trailer voice, “the charming prequel to ‘Life Without Father.’”
