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Sunday, July 8, 2018

The Old and the New

I know little about Henry David Thoreau beyond the most basic biographical information (not ever having read Walden, though I admire it immensely in my ignorance). Despite my admiration, I take offense at these words of his that I recently came across: "What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."

 

Now wait just a cotton-pickin' minute, Mr. Thoreau. I am overly sensitive to the "o" word; I'll admit that freely. And I will also point out that things have changed since your day. There was once a time when the forward momentum was a gentle stroll instead of today's NASCAR race. There was a need, perhaps, to remind the "old" to stand back and allow new ideas to flourish.

 

But today's society, in its unholy haste to be first with the new, has thrown the baby (old knowledge) out with the bathwater. If it isn't new, we say, it isn't worth having/knowing/learning. Our children are so focused on obtaining the latest app and the latest version of whatever is being hyped that they don't have time to reflect on what might have been. This is literally true. They don't have time. All of their time is spoken for. Ding: answer this text. Ding: answer this text. Ding: answer this text.

 

So what are they missing that they might be able to learn from Thoreau's "old people"? Just right off the top of my head I can give you a short list: how to listen. How to notice. How to sit still for more than 30 seconds. How to breathe. How to see the murder of crows making its morning flight from eastern roost to feeding grounds in the west. (We made our own flight this morning from bedroom wing to kitchen wing to find our own feeding grounds.)

 

I'll stop my list there without going into the particulars of various crafts (how to knit, how to darn, how to cook, how to build a canoe, how to build a fire, make a chair, pluck a goose). To find out about skills that are on the edge of dying, the young have only to consult the old who, some might say, are also on that edge.

 

Let's try for a balance between the old and the new. In today's word we need to tie the old to the new like an anchor, to slow it to a more human rate of progress.

 

 
Copyright © 2018 Ann Tudor
Food blog: http://fastandfearlesscooking.blogspot.ca
 
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Sunday, July 1, 2018

Barking Dog; a fable

Barking Dog came by his name honestly. Some called him Fido, but anyone within hearing range of his property called him Barking Dog.

 

He said—he told anyone who asked—that he was a good guard dog. He said no intruders would ever get into his family's house becaue he scared them off. Critics pointed out that he didn't distinguish between friends and foes. He just barked at anything that moved. But he knew who he was: a guard dog.

 

Early on in his career as self-appointed watchdog, his barking would alert the family members, who rushed to the door to see what frightening event might be taking place. When they reached the door they saw that the mailman had just visited, or little Johnny was standing on the porch to see if his friend Larry could come out to play.

 

One day they gave a party and Barking Dog greeted each guest with non-stop barking. That was the turning point. The family had to admit that Barking Dog had no discernment and could not be counted on as a watchdog. They began to ignore his incessant warnings, vainly yelling "shut up!" whenever he began to bark.

 

So the night the burglars came, when Barking Dog did his level best to warn the family, no one even bothered to get out of bed to investigate. The burglars cleaned the house out, taking all the valuables they could carry—while Barking Dog barked his head off.

 

Moral: All watchdogs should be told the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

 

 
Copyright © 2018 Ann Tudor
Food blog: http://fastandfearlesscooking.blogspot.ca
 
 
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Sunday, June 24, 2018

Other Dimensions

A friend recently mentioned other dimensions and how she sometimes imagines looking at her current self from some other dimension. (I may have misinterpreted what she was saying.)

 

I immediately tried to imagine, say, seventeen dimensions that connect with us here right now. It looked like a cross between a cubist painting and a 3-D tic-tac-toe game, all of this enclosed in intricate scaffolding.

 

Later in the week I brought this idea up with friends and got further information: first, the fourth dimension is Time (I'd known that once) and second, although physics posits four dimensions, in math (one friend is a mathematician) you can posit as many dimensions as you like and then prove them mathematically.

 

In the meantime, I had gone back to the typed version of my father's letters, not having re-read them since I first transcribed them several years ago from Myron's handwritten copies. The ones I was interested in were the 1934 letters.

 

In September of 1934, Myron's mother, Jessie, was recovering from an operation (her leg was amputated because of metastatic breast cancer). I don't know if it was medical advice or just a whim, but the family decided it would be good for Jessie to spend a month in New Mexico with my mother's parents to recuperate. Why they thought a three-day car trip in an old Ford would be healing is beyond me. So here's who drove to Tularosa, New Mexico: Myron, his mother (Jessie), his wife (Eileen), his father (Robert F.), and his first child (Robert Vincent), who was three months old. I can't imagine how awful the trip must have been.

 

In Tularosa they were welcomed by Eileen's parents, John Vincent Rahilly and his wife Anna (Anastasia), who had moved to New Mexico some 15 years earlier for J.V.'s health.

 

Myron's letters begin after he and his father had returned to Indiana, leaving the women and the child for a month's visit. On the way home, he writes, the car died and his father opted to buy a new Ford rather than repair the old one. (He had no interest in the equally available Chevrolet.) To handle the payment, Grandad called his bank back home and had them wire the money to the Ford dealer's bank.

 

The reason I was looking back at these letters was to find the word Myron used to refer to his son; it had struck me when I transcribed them but then I'd forgotten it. Now, it's bad enough that the poor baby was never even called by his real name until he was in medical school. His Irish mother re-christened him immediately after birth as "Dinty" for reasons undisclosed to any of us. But at this early stage of Dinty's life, either Eileen hadn't yet mentioned the "Dinty" nickname to Myron or she had mentioned it and he hadn't taken to it. For in these 1934 letters during Dinty's early months, Myron refers to the baby as "the stooge", as in "Give my love to Mother [i.e., Jessie] and to the stooge."

 

As I re-read these letters, it was as if I was living in Delphi, Indiana, with my father in the empty apartment above the Delphi Citizen office (the apartment where I was born two years later). I was rapt. The places and names were from my childhood (Clifford's grocery, Morrow Shoe Repair) and I could see Myron walking around the square during his daily rounds. He worked very hard while his little family was out West. The endless job-printing orders—the meat and potatoes of a small newspaper business—had him working until nine or ten or beyond most nights.

 

But it wasn't until my recent discussion of Time as the fourth dimension that I realized: during that hour spent rereading Myron's 1934 letters, I was following a Time loop that deposited me fully in 1934 Delphi, two years before I was born.

 

There are multiple dimensions to our lives, whether or not we are aware of them.        

 

 
Copyright © 2018 Ann Tudor
Food blog: http://fastandfearlesscooking.blogspot.ca
 
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