Unnatural Marriage

My Mom used to work at an office. One of the salesmen there was an outspoken racist who said (bear in mind you're getting this thirdhand: my version of Mom's version of what this guy said) that "We keep the black people in their place in Nashville" and that we should handle the war on terrorism thing by bombing Mecca, as if that'd settle things down.

Mom was miserable there and didn't hang around long (for a variety of reasons, not just a loathsome coworker), but she befriended a nice woman at an office-related party. This woman was (per Mom)sophisticated, well-spoken, a professional writer who had numerous published books to her credit. I bet you can figure out the punchline: she was married to the racist guy.

I'm unlikely to ever meet this couple, but as my Mom told me more and more stories about them (each of which pretty much reenforced my initial impression: the Klansman and the college grad) I found that they inhabited my imagination to an unsettling degree. I think the key reason (aside from my guilty white liberal daydreams of retorting to bigots) is that they provide a sort of miscegenation nightmare for me; the sophisticate who marries an unrepentant bigot. This repels me the way race-mixing upsets Klansman. How could she mix her genes with a person of such inferior, degraded stock?

If someone could map the dynamics of their marriage it might provide a sort of Rosetta stone to the mysteries of human attraction.

Second Post of the Day: Can You Tell Me How To Get

This article about early Sesame Street starts off snarky, but touches on some interesting elements of the original Sesame Street production. Despite being a white suburban kid, I always felt at home in the pasteurized inner city environment of Sesame Street.

My favorite part:

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading.

This is exactly the point of all non-vocational learning, isn't it?

So cute

Today I saw a mom and dad leading a pair of identical twin girls, and don't you know those cute little girls were dressed exactly alike? They made me smile, but my smile melted into a frown, because everything I've ever heard from grown twins on the subject is that you should dress twins differently and encourage them to be their own persons. I have twin cousins who grew up with complementary but different wardrobes; their dresses might have the same pattern, but one girl's color scheme would be different from the other. That seems like a good way to balance it out. Today my cousins are as connected as any pair of sisters, but are very aware of themselves as distinct individuals.

Still, I totally understand the urge to turn twins into a perfect pair. It reminds me of the urge to have white carpet. When I was a carpet cleaner I discovered that every conventionally-minded newlywed bride wants white carpet in her first house. She soon discovers, though, that there is no such thing as white carpet. There is only mottled gray carpet with brown and black streaks. Any "white" carpet you see is simply a preliminary to the inevitable.

Pseudo-Good Deed

I was strolling along a walking path when I found a cel phone lying in the grass. The only other person around was a jogger. I called out to him and asked if it was his. He addressed me as "Ma'am, uh, sir," once, which made me wonder. I don't believe he actually thought I was a woman. Did he think I was trying to pick him up? Whatever.

It wasn't his phone, and so I called Sprint and made arrangements to drop the thing off at the local Sprint shop this morning. Everyone at Sprint, whether on the phone or at the shop, acted like I must be a wonderful standup guy to turn the thing in instead of keeping it.

The reality is that I don't use cel phones, don't know how they work, and have no idea what to do with the things (My brother makes a living helping people understand the gadgets, but I haven't asked him for help). I'm always panic-stricken when someone hands me a cel phone for any reason. All I know about them is that they're pestilential noisemakers that make the whole world sound like a Chuck E Cheese. I can't operate them, and they do too give you brain cancer no matter what those studies say. If I were less neurotic about the things I might have called all my long-distance friends on someone else's tab.

Birmingham, Alabama has the Mayor it deserves.

The winner of the new Platinum Douchebag for Excellence in Sucking is Birmingham's new mayor, Larry Langford, for proposing a sales tax increase to pay for the products of his synapse misfirings. Please help me hate him for pushing this regressive tax. Why does he like regressive, poor-people-punishing taxes so much? What is he, a Republican or something?

Pictures! We got pictures! Or, That Hair Reflection'll Get You Every Time

A couple years back a friend sent me some photos of myself in which it was very clear that I had a patchy bald spot. This was before I could see the patchy bald spot in the mirror. I responded to my friend with some cockamamie tale about how it wasn't actually a bald spot, just the way the light was reflecting off my hair. Was I desperate or what?

The other day I saw some photos of me in which I appeared to have an absurdly protruding pot belly. I'm not in denial about my need to lose weight and get in better condition (yeah, like I'm gonna whip it into shape around the holidays) but this picture really strained credulity. I'm not one of THOSE guys with low-slung pot bellies that don't match their frames and look like some kind of comical false pregnancy, am I? I looked closer and was relieved to see that it was just the open flap of my jacket, not an actual part of me, that was extending so far from my center.

Or was it? I remember how certain I was, or tried to be, that my baldness was just that old bugaboo hair reflection.

No Place at the Table

I'm thinking about the family I'll see at Thanksgiving, which gets me thinking about someone we won't be seeing at Thanksgiving: Uncle Lenny.

Uncle Lenny was a charming, brainy pilot and an early dabbler in home computers. He was married to Aunt Carol, who was my blood relative in this situation. They were a fact of family life when I was a child, Aunt Carol and Uncle Lenny.

Then one day it was announced that they were separated.

Much later they were back together, attending church and family social events hand in hand, smiling, talking about the counseling they were getting.

Then they were divorced.

A sad but typical story. But it's not like they just went their seperate ways. The message that came down after the divorce-and I wanna emphasise that this was from my Mom and other Aunts, not from Aunt Carol herself-was "Uncle Lenny is gone. He is Dead. His name has been blotted out of the Book of Life. You will never see him again." I was sad because I liked Uncle Lenny; he was charming and knew how to make a little boy feel important. But indeed I never saw him or heard from him again.

I'd kinda like to drop him a line, but I don't know his name. He's Uncle Lenny. And while my parents are generally open with me, I don't think they'd want to help me track the guy down.

Anyway, some years after all this I asked Mom why Aunt Carol and Uncle Lenny went through all that, and Mom's answer was "He had a girl in every port." Which explains everything and nothing. You can imagine how that would lead to divorce, but it doesn't in and of itself tell the whole story. Did he keep cheating after all his happy Scripture-verse-laced talk about staying together and counseling and the sacredness of the marriage vows?

And even if he were a repeat cheater, I could understand how my family would hold him in low regard, but there's more than low regard in this family for the man. There's a deep, dark, plentiful well of hard hate. Maybe there's more to the story than infidelity; or maybe when it gets personal such stock elements as "adultery" and "divorce" take on a fiery, frightening and epic force.

Anyway, my family is pretty pokey in most regards, and I prefer it that way.