A Little Update
Hey, Hilary from Ohio,
As you know, after you all deserted us for your richer much sexier lives as college students, we parents coalesced into a grieving support group to reminisce about our lost youth, and attempt to overcome our despair with shared food and strong spirits. Last Saturday’s tear-dabbing meeting was at Jen’s house, and here are a few photos.
Both your mom and dad cornered and then blanketed me with stories about you. They told me how much you like your new life, the problems created by overactive roommates, and your abandoning of your chant and clap classes for, of all things, science courses. What up wit dat? Your Little Richard imitation in the protest video demonstrated how perfectly suited you are for C&C Classes (formerly called Humming & Holding Hands). They also told me of your initial intent to double major in Environmental Science and Psychology, or was it Environmental Psychology and Daily Drama?
But you weren’t the only topics. We also talked religion, politics and about roadkill.
Here’s Adam:
“At Jen’s recent turn at our chronic, traveling party, held at her new house, we were discussing someone hitting a deer in the area (deer and driver both survived), and I owned up to braking hard for birds in the road and swerving to avoid frogs. I’m a vegetarian pacifist who at home takes bugs back outside (though I’ll cop to some admittedly harsh tendencies towards homo sapiens, anyway), and I once wrote a short poem about roadkill. These pathetic, squashed remains used to traumatize me, though one can be desensitized to most anything (just ask Dubya), and as I passed yet another mangled rodent one day, rather than wallow in piteous revulsion as was once my wont, I had an intellectual satori and phrased a ditty about why it happens, and how not caring portends the death of more than just hapless rodents, marsupials and ungulates.
Dead squirrel. Roadkill. Legs up.
Condemned by the chains of evolution.
Adaptive response, random flight,
defense against the near-ballistic
stoop of raptors.
But not against SUV’s.
Mindless iron momentum does not waver
for a rodent’s hesitant panic.
Nor return to countenance its demise.
Both can learn from this.
Must. ”
Might be the wrong time to say this, but we left Jen’s late and stuffed.
We’re all doing pretty well, here, in Acton. We’re excited that Matthew is coming home for the summer (though we rented his room out to a Chechen separatist taking classes at Lesley College, and will have to house him in the damp basement), and we’re hoping Diane’s back is strong enough to permit her to join me when we haul him and all his goods out of Philly May 8th. When are you coming home?
Besides work work, we’ve been tackling house projects. I’m installing new windows, painting the bedrooms, tiling the kitchen floor, tilling the garden, cleaning out the barn, and I’ve hired the same colorful crew who roofed Adam’s house (those guys’ gauges would’ve made Robby whimper) to do ours, and maybe a local company to pave our driveway. That’s the big ticket item we may not be able to afford, especially since we’re paying Goose and Matt to paint our house. I know, you can’t imagine Matt engaged in that kind of slave labor, but remember he and Goose and Robby did a terrific job on the Grojean’s garage roof three summers ago.
I also had the nettlesome hedges that border our driveway and the street trimmed. In the old days, when they were shorter, that was an easy homeowner job. But now that they provide cover for our peeling house cutting them back requires using a ladder like a Pogo Stick. Climb up, snip, climb down, move the ladder, climb up, snip, climb down, and so it goes. It’s about a day’s job and Goose did them last, two summers ago. I should have hired him again, but I couldn’t wait, and when I found a flyer in my mail box for this landscaping service that advertised everything from sprinkler systems to creating genetically altered rodent resistant broccoli strains, I decided to hire the Vietnamese owner. I figured a crew of guys sliding along zip wires with buzz saws finishing my hedges in the time it takes me to take a bath. That’s why I felt justified in haggling for a cheaper price.
But Tranh showed up two weeks late with a pair of hedge clippers, an electric trimmer that wouldn’t start, and a yellow step ladder. At mid-day, using my Craftsman trimmer, but mostly his hand held clippers, he was nowhere near done. Sympathetic me, I almost stopped my kitchen tiling to help him work. Instead I opted to give him lunch from Idylwidle. That got him through the afternoon, at which point with all his tools scattered on the ground, and all the trimmings piled on our driveway, he hightailed it home promising to return the next day.
Contrary to Diane’s convictions, he did come back, but not the next day. He arrived in the rain and borrowed a pair of my gloves to cleanup the driveway. Yesterday he came back again, this time with his wife and son, but only to retrieve his tools and assure me he’d return another time.
Yesterday, we dropped into Cambridge to see Mike Daisey’s “Invincible Summer†at the American Repertory Theater . Maybe you read about the high school students who walked out on his performance last Saturday. Though attendance was sparse, his performance was quite moving. The saddest thing to me is thinking of those kids who couldn’t tolerate a few four letter words. I wonder how they feel about the School of the Americas.
Write again,
Michael
When I was in Jr. High School in about 1972, we had a 2 day class trip to NYC and one of the activities during the trip was a show at Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes and the Woody Allen movie “Play it Again Sam”. The head teacher decided we needed to leave during the scene in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are trying to have an (extramarital-for-Keaton) affair, they’re in bed but unable to carry it out. Actually, we were made to leave when it seemed as though they would have sex, most of the class had already left (or certainly were no longer able to focus) when the audience finds out Allen and Keaton do not consumate the affair.
For some reason, I’ve always remembered this.
Comment by jennifer — April 29, 2007 @ 7:41 am
First, Mike, massively excellent letter — Hil, you must feel honored. Second, Jen requested that poem, which I hope is as humiliating as she’d hoped. A bit more cynical now, if that’s possible, I might change the last word to (or add) “Won’t”.
But the video goes from being a sidebar of the main post to primal. First I’d heard of it. Well, the whole thing causes a gaggle of emotion, and know I don’t know what I don’t know about where that took place, why that performance there, and why the walkout. I loathe rudeness in general (I think grace could save the world), and I suspect malice aforethought — what group ever acted on impulse or took unexpected direction with such instant unanimity? — but I also suspect we all would defend protesters who would do something analogous were GW speaking on campus, or Cheney doing a one-man about how much fun it was to plan the Iraq war. There’s no corollary in content, I grant, but like these doofuses, our heroes would know what they were in for and mean to make a point, which IS their right, though it trashes others’ right to watch said peformance. ‘Course they’d be arrested for even approaching either criminal, and methinks the creep with the water should suffer some restitution. But free speech is complicated. The soapboxers in London’s Hyde Park open themselves up to both committed and dilettante hecklers as much as to receptive even if not completely like minds. But that’s a different set of groundrules. I can’t see that anything this guy did merited this, and I would also argue a theatre ticket and the venue for witness is something of a pact.
Not defending, just being a Gemini …
Thanks for a tumultuous Sunday morning, Mike …
Comment by el Kib — April 29, 2007 @ 8:42 am
This link to Mike’s account of his discussion with the water pourer is illuminating, as are many of the comments under the video. It appears to be the work of the chaperone, rather than the indignation of the students. I may be wrong.
The monocular focus of the video – I’ve got to say this – distorts the importance of fucking Paris Hilton. Pay for your tickets, walk in, sit down, read the playbill, feel a camaraderie with the audience, and then watch his performance. That one scene, as any one part of his act, is nothing more than another picket in the fence that is his carefully crafted story. But for that one bit, there is no sex. And the violence which follows are graphic memories he forces us to relieve as the twin towers fall.
I keep thinking that growing up in Ohio in the fifties I was exposed to far than those few words. And isn’t there a bigger picture somewhere?
To directly address your point, Adam. Maybe I could understand a publicly organized protest of “Hair” way back when. Part of the push and pull of those days, those events, but to single out this struggling artist?
Comment by michael — April 29, 2007 @ 9:29 am
By and large I agree. I do find the actions of the “protesters” at once both childish and reprehensible, the performance piece unremarkable in its potential to offend, and I hope for ironic backlash in a fourfold increase in the man’s audiences (whether to idle curiosity or conscious support I care little). But I’m a second-guesser “gray” kinda guy — as one of the more opinionated and judgmental people I know, I consider it mandatory to challenge whatever instinctual responses I have. Gemini.
Comment by adam — April 29, 2007 @ 10:15 am
Much publicity, but still a small afternoon audience. And Matthew will tell you I’m a waffle with more than two sides.
Comment by michael — April 29, 2007 @ 10:59 am
That piece by Mike Daisy (linked in comment 3) is quite amazing.
I agree with you wafflers about everything.
Comment by jennifer — April 29, 2007 @ 4:43 pm
Aw, I feel so happy and loved to have gotten a letter on the blog! And what a happy and fabulous letter it was!
I hadn’t heard about the protest of Mike Dailey, but I just watched the YouTube video and took a look at the letter he wrote — woooow. I’m so fucking glad I can deal with more mature topics than the Christian Public High School Youth Group!
Anyways, I think next year will be very different from this year because I’ll be missing some very important C&C/H&H classes, but I’ll still have at least one (Latinas/os in Comparative Context) and an art class that I’m going to MAKE into a happy, cutey class (silkscreening. I better get into that class…) so we’ll see. I’ll still be holding hands with all my frisbee boys and girls, who I’m currently with in the Science Library. Maybe I should go do some work?
Much love! Take care of yourselves, everyone! Love, Hilary
Comment by LaChica — April 29, 2007 @ 8:18 pm
Great letter Mike, but if I’m exhausted hearing about all that yard work and house naintainaince, what possible thoughts might pass through the head of a (very polite) college student like LaChica?
I’d rather carry a backpack through the tamarisks of the canyons of Utah (which I just did) than do all that yard work. Time to retire and pay someone to do it, Mike! (More later about that canyon country.)
Comment by rakkity — April 29, 2007 @ 9:53 pm
La Chica treats her elders with patience and respect.
Comment by michael — April 29, 2007 @ 10:29 pm