Love shack!

This current residence is my first "real" apartment in the sense that the building isn't school owned and it isn't filled with students. In fact, Nate and I are the only students in the building. The difference is usually quite notable: the place is quiet during the work day, the muted sounds of TVs replaces explosively loud AIM pings, and smoke—whether it be from cigarettes, marijuana, or burned popcorn— is entirely absent. The floors don't need to be an indestructible linoleum, and we can save money by conserving energy since electricity isn't included. I like it very much.

Still, it's frequently obvious that the real world isn't all that different from the collegiate one. One of our neighbors is a professor, which definitely gives the building a not-so-far-away-from-campus feel. And I've mentioned our downstairs neighbor Norm, who is in many respects a frat-boy with a job. The fourth apartment (the other one on our floor) is no exception. Jay and Kelly are a young couple (dating, not married), who both seem to have a serious night life. They're often out as late as Nate and I are (although certainly having more fun), and conjugal activities happen within a few minutes of 1:30 am more often than not.

We know this because they don't really do anything quietly. They don't often make a ruckus like Norm, but they're not subtle. They're loud on the stairs, both vocally and in step, they're loud loud in the bedroom, both vocally and rhythmically. My bedroom is on the stairwell, so I get most of the former; Nate's bedroom borders theirs, so he gets most of the latter. Still, they don't seem to confine themselves to the bedroom, so I get a dose of the aural experience with some frequency (not unlike my time in Broadway). I've had some good chuckles with both Nate and Jean-François about some of the particulars, which may or may not find their way into another post down the line. At this point it will suffice to say that it's rather inescapable due to its volume.

This evening we were eating our supper in our main room, which is in the back half of the apartment building, and the moans started to issue through the wall. Nate looked at me incredulously. "In the kitchen?" he asked in a hushed voice. I decided that a gentle deterrent was in order. I raised my voice and rambled randomly: So I said to Withers, 'I say! the slope of the tangent of the circle is clearly less than the hypotenuse of the triangle!' And of course what could Withers do but admit that I had a point? 'Quite right you are!' he said to me. Really he was a right good chap about it and didn't let a little thing like that get him down for even a moment!

This seemed to prove sufficient, since the moaning came to an abrupt stop. Well, if I was pleased with myself then, the satisfaction was certainly not to last. At three this morning, our doorbell buzzed for a solid twenty seconds. Shortly after it stopped, a whole party of people came stomping up the stairs, carrying on loudly. They seemed to spend all of two minutes in Jay and Kelly's apartment before turning around and heading back out (this time the boisterous talk was accompanied by a harmonica). Nate and I both fell back to sleep promptly, but both of us are hoping it was a one-time event and unrelated to my dinner time theatrics since we generally like both of them when we have actual contact with them.

Claire Left And I Reminisce Electronically

Michael was kind enough to drive Claire and myself to the airport this morning so that we could say our good-byes and she could fly back to MSP. As we approached the terminal I told him we were looking for Delta check-in. His response was "Don't expect luggage to arrive." Sure enough, Delta managed to make Claire's day a difficult one. Upon arriving in Cincinnati, she discovered that her connecting flight had been canceled, and she was being moved to a Northwest Airlines flight four hours later. Only after she specifically requested a meal voucher did they give her one. And, upon arriving in MSP, she had to wait an additional 45 minutes for her luggage to catch up with her since Delta hung on to that themselves, even though they gave Claire over to NWA.

Fortunately, the frustrations of her trip home were atypical of the weekend as a whole. We generally kept things simple and at home. We cooked most of our own meals (Claire made pad thai and pancakes, I baked cookies and chocolate martinis, and we teamed up to make spinach lasagna). We watched a film on DVD instead of going to the movies (Y tu mamá también was the Road Film of the week). We got plenty of sleep and did a bit of homework when we got ourselves sufficiently motivated. Our one dinner out was a disappointment (due to outrageously slow service), but the potluck we hosted for my classmates was a success. All in all, it was a lovely weekend, and I expect the six remaining weeks until the end of Claire's semester will seem all the longer for it.

First Rush

Claire and I celebrated our one-year anniversary this evening with a trip to the new Guthrie, which had its grand opening last weekend. The first official production, The Great Gatsby doesn't open until 21 July, and previews don't even begin until the fifteenth, but a touring production by the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, is breaking in the McGuire Proscenium Stage this week. The rather complicated run of DruidSynge involves the presentation of some combination of plays, varying nightly, by writer John Millington Synge. Claire and I saw one-act The Shadow of the Glen followed by the more famous The Playboy of the Western World. Claire and I both struggled to follow Shadow on account of the actors' thick brogue but enjoyed Playboy, which offered more meat to the plot, more time for adjustment to the accents, and more cushion for those lines that were lost upon us.

If the show itself lacked accessibility, the overall experience in the new Guthrie made up for it with a vengeance. The new building was both gorgeous and functional [I'd like to address the architecture in a separate post], and the enthusiasm among the other attendees was noticeable. Claire and I, being on a tight budget arrived without tickets and instead took our chances with the rush line, which sells all tickets at $15 a piece starting 30 minutes before the start of the show. I made certain we arrived early, and we claimed the first spot in line, making us the first Friday night rushers for the new theater. The manœuvre paid off: we snagged sixth-row center-section seats (valued at $55 a piece). After the show Claire and I enjoyed magnificent deserts at the Level 5 Café and enjoyed each others company at the end of the endless bridge, overlooking the Mississippi river.

I'm looking forward to returning to the new Guthrie. And, of course, I'm looking forward to spending another year with Claire.

Guns and love disastrous (five illuminations)

(I)
I'm sitting on Chair 1, guarding a moderately busy beach during an uneventful three o'clock safety brake when the boy approaches me. He's four years old.
Are you a lifeguard? he asks.
I am, I answer.
Do you have to be able to swim?
I have to be able to swim a whole mile!
Do you like being a lifeguard?
I do. Does he want to be a lifeguard when he's older?
He answers without the faintest hint of a smile. No. FBI agent. He reveals a squirt gun which has been tucked into the back of his swim trunks. Holding it in the air he turns and runs.

(II)
The water is cool and clear early in the day, but with the strong June sunshine and a frenzy of activity it becomes warm and cloudy by midafternoon. As the sun sinks, it becomes a calm place, even a private place if only up to a foot below the surface. But those deeper areas are enough, and occasionally we lifeguards must remind lusty young couples that the beach is a family-friendly facility—that is to say it is a place meant for the raising of existing children, not the making of new ones. What percentage of copulating couples do we catch? Who knows. We occasionally learn of some incidents only from patrons more observant or simply closer to the action than we are. Sometimes such reports come from children, but, thankfully, their own innocence protects them when we fail. We were displeased, if not exactly alarmed, this evening when a child told us of a couple in the water "kissing and fighting."

(III)
The boys were in the shallow end, pointing their fingers at each other in the manner that has allowed children to engage in bloodless gunbattles for generations. Perhaps these fellows of ten and twelve weren't armed with the plastic facsimiles that have supplanted the fingers and the imagination for this most recent generations, but the older of the two had certainly acquired a modern, gory idea of gunbattles. While "Bang! You're dead!" sufficed for Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, who were no doubt raised on nearly bloodless war movies like "Kelly's Heroes," which dispatches dozens (hundreds?) of Nazis without a single bullet wound. This boy spoke in a manner more fitting of young Marvin's demise in Pulp Fiction. His younger duelist was quieter, so I heard only one side of the imaginary showdown:
"I shot you!"
"I killed you!"
At this point the boy's mother cried, "John!"
"I shot your head off!"
"John!"
"I blew your face off!"
"John! Don't talk like that!"

(IV)
I'm riding along Weaver Lake Road, on my way to Claire's house (she's back from the jungle), and I'm gaining fast on young couple walking side-by-side down the center of the path. I shout my customary bicycle on your left, and the girl (who I see is no more than sixteen) casts look over her shoulder. She starts to move to the right, and realizing that her male companion has not heard she begins to pull him towards her. Feeling her tug, he turns to her for a kiss, but she pulls him past her, and he takes a stumbling step onto the grass, evidently perplexed until I fly past.

(V)
A hundred yards farther down the road I come to a stop at a red light. I cast a glance around the intersection and see a large black SUV with windows proclaiming in fingerpaint JUST MARRIED. Inside the groom is at the wheel talking animatedly. The bride is gazing out the passenger side window with a look of resignedness. The light turns green, the bride blows me a kiss, and we ride on.

Venitian hilarity

Claire and I ended our time together with a trip to the cinema to see Casanova. My previous prejudices against Heath Ledger were assuaged by his appearance in Brokeback Mountain, which I can respect even without having seen it, and I'm quite glad they were, for Casanova was one of the funniest movies I have ever seen and certainly the funniest I've seen since The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. The film had the makings of a Shakespearean comedy: a tangled web of romance, an entertaining villain, sight gags, clever quips, and the right timing. Claire and I even got one laugh from the end credits. I also enjoyed the on-sight cinematography in Venice. Last weekend we watched Top Hat, a favorite film of mine, and we couldn't help but notice that the Hollywood mock-up of Venice looked more like the freshly painted sets of Munchkinland than the City of Canals. Casanova delivered the real thing and was better for it.

The Whole "Twenty-One" Thing (Part II)

I managed to get carded at Cub Foods yesterday when I stopped to pick up AriZona iced green tea and Mike's Hard Lime for our New Years Eve Party. The cashier, a middle-aged woman, looked saddened when she saw my license, and she told me that she didn't want to believe that someone with my birth-date was already old enough to drink, but the computer had indeed approved me.

The party was a great deal of fun. Claire and I joined my parents and a four couples from church in playing Hand & Foot, a canasta-type card game. The party ended quite soon after midnight, which granted Claire and me some quality together time before she leaves tomorrow and allowed everyone else to get to bed.

Which kind of rubber?

I'm doing my homework for Building Systems, and in the process of searching for CSI three-part specs for a Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer waterproof membrane, I came across product information for All Virgin Hot Applied Sealant, which includes in its ingredients "organic reinforcing fillers." Maybe I just need a break, but it seems funny to me.

Talk About Love

I've seen signs in the shelter at my bus stop for a series of lecture-type events hosted by a couple of SU sororities. I support the Greek organizations attempts to pursue education outside the classroom, but I haven't been entirely convinced of the merit of their events based upon the titles. The most current one was "Do Black Men Love?" Before that came "Are Men Dogs Or Do Women Make Them?" I'm not entirely sure what they were asking with that one, especially since I think it's pretty obvious that women make men (along with more women). I guess that using the language of formal logic we could truthfully say that "men are dogs or women make them," but I'm not sure where that gets us.

Honestly I think the sorority girls would do better to follow PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, which recently dealt with African-American families. The program also had a rather interesting poll about American family values. The most recent issue of The Week references the poll noting that "71% of Americans believe 'God's plan for marriage is one man, one woman for life,' but only 22% see divorce as a sin." So much for the sanctity of marriage.

Beginning

This evening marked the official end to my being "single," something that I've been since 23 January 2004. Who has set me free from this label? I suspect any regular reader could guess that it's Claire.

Hope

Claire is single today.

Blink of an eye

My best friend Claire visited Madison for the weekend, arriving Friday for a late dinner and departing mid-afternoon today. I think the past 44 hours were surely among the most fleeting I've experienced. We had dinner with her good friend, future roommate, and traveling companion Melissa, Melissa's host for the weekend Brenna, and Brenna's friend Rachel. During the next day and a half, Claire and I succeeded in visiting Memorial Library to retrieve a volume of James Joyce Quarterly I needed, in applying an oatmeal facial mask (below), in visiting the Elvehjem art museum, in visiting Memorial Union, in taking a nighttime stroll around the capitol, and in mixing and consuming cosmopolitans. We failed to visit Jamba Juice (in part due to the surprisingly frigid weather) and the Community Pharmacy. We had two memorable meals; Sarah, Evan, and Mike's girlfriend Annika took us out to King of Falafel to both meet Claire and celebrate my admission to Syracuse School of Architecture (Mike was unfortunately away visiting family). It was a most enjoyable meal and get-together. We had our last lunch at Pelmini, a hole in the wall that serves Russian dumplings. They serve potato dumplings and beef dumplings; you can order them butter-style or spicy-style. That's it. (They do have a fridge with cans of soda and tubs of sour cream, both of which are included in an order.) The dining experience, like the rest of the weekend, was very highly enjoyable. Claire's visit most pleasantly bisected our two months apart between spring break and summer vacation.

Sexually Explicit

Like most of the e-mail using world, I get spam. For reasons unknown to me, my Gmail account tends to get spam only of a pornographic nature and my AOL account tends to all the other types (home mortgage, "bad credit?", perscription drugs, etc.) This bifurcation caused me to take interest in a recent report issued by the Pew Internet and American Life Project regarding a survey on spam:

Among other things, the survey found that people were getting less porn spam.... While 63% of email users now say they have received porn spam, down 8 percentage points from a year ago, 29% of those email users say they are now getting less porn spam, compared to 16% who said they are getting more.

I suspect that this drop primarily reflects two things: (1) spam filters are getting better on a whole and (2) many Americans are either unaware of their spam filters or they just don't check their spam folders. I'm doubtful that this poll reflects an actual drop in porn spam.

In truth, I haven't been been checking my spam folders that often either. As I move away from AOL, whose filters are less than impressive (I'd say they get it right about two-thrids of the time), to Gmail, whose handling of my unwanted email has been nothing short of amazing, I feel less pressed to keep a carefule watch on the spam. Nearly all of my unwanted messages are automatically sorted into the spam folder, and it is unusual for legitimate messages to end up there by accident. To make life even easier Gmail automatically labels messages with pornographic content with the all capital label "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT." This makes messages that are mistakenly sorted (either spam in the inbox or good mail in the spam folder) stand out like a sore thumb.

As a result, I almost never read even the subject lines of my spam, but today I read a few when I was retrieving a message I had marked as spam by mistake. Most were of the subject lines were typical ('webcam,' 'hot,' 'co-eds,' and other such buzzwords were a dime a dozen), but one subject line really just cracked me up:

Naughty Doctor Fucks Pretty Whore In Cute Anus

As if having a subject written like a New York Times headline wasn't humorous enough, I can't but help laugh at the choice of adjectives.

Rouge

I think I've spent a good ten minutes today with my face in various shades of crimson.

First, in James Joyce, we were examining the episode "Oxen of the Sun," and pulling apart some of the text that was written in a rather antiquated style. The chapter takes place at a maternity hospital, and is chockfull of offcolor references.

Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch.

Professor Begam mentioned that there is, of course, a pun in this last word. I (true to form) must have had an amused look on my face, for he turned to me and asked me what the joke was. Decidedly less amused, I tried quickly to think of how to answer the question. It's playing at a reference to her pubic hair, isn't it? What was the word Joyce used back in "Lotus-Eaters" during the bath?

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream This is my body.

He foresaw he pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

'Bush.' That's it, as the passage came to me.
"It referring to her bush," I answered, which I figured would be perhaps slightly amusing, but not overly so, since I've made a habit of using Joyce's wordchoice whenever possible ('waistcoateers' for 'prostitutes' and 'the BMV' for 'the Blessed Virgin Mary'). What I hadn't counted on was being just a little bit wrong. Apparently 'thatch' was the female genitalia, and not the surrounding hair. The professor corrected me, and everyone laughed. I blushed for a good long while.

Then, in the Rise of American Post-Colonial Architecture, Narciso suddenly turned to me and commanded, "without blushing, define for me an 'erotic impulse.'"
By this time I was half tempted to look for the candid camera.
"Can I pass? I've already had a sufficiently similar experience today," I replied.
"Oh, do tell," said Narciso.
"You want my story?" I asked in fear.
"I'd rather have a definition for an 'erotic impulse." I paused and thought.
"Well, now I am blushing, but how about a sudden desire for a sexual experience?" I ventured hesitantly.
"Sexual experience?" Narciso asked.
"An experience," I emphasized.
"I don't like this word 'experience.'" he said. He suggest a desire for copulation would be better, and asked me if I was convinced.
"Not entirely," I answered.
"What don't you like?"
"I don't like 'copulation.' I think that many people desire some sort of other sexual act," I said as thoughts of my gay and lesbian friends and my pedophilic professors flitted through my head.
Narciso consented and went on to discuss a famous (but impotent) nineteenth century critic of architecture. I continued to blush for a good long while.

I can't remember a day like this since eighth grade health class. The day I recall took place during our sexual health unit. It was, of course, very uncool to laugh at anything of that type by the time we were in eighth grade. Come of think of it, I think it might have been uncool to laugh at anything. Anyhow, I sat right behind this fat kid named Brent. Brent was not cool, either by the eighth grade definition or my current definition. Brent would laugh at anything and everything in the sexual health class, even the most unfunny words imaginable like 'urethra.' Being as fat as he was, ol' Brent'd jiggle all over like a bowl full of jelly. And while I didn't see much to laugh about in 'vas deferens,' I did find much to laugh about in seeing waves of fat cruise up and down Brent's body every time Ms. Hegadus said 'vas deferens.' So I laughed, and no one knew the real cause for my mirth, and I blushed for a good long while.

True Love Is Forever

Here's an romantic story for Valentines Day:

Gay penguins won't go straight
Ananova

A German zoo's plans to tempt its gay penguins to go straight by importing more females has been declared a failure.

The female penguins were flown in especially from Sweden in an effort to encourage the Humboldt penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo to reproduce.

But the six homosexual penguins showed no interest in their new female companions and remained faithful to each other.

Zoo Director Heike Kueck said: "The relationships were apparently too strong."

A keeper confirmed that the male couples had adopted rocks which they were guarding like eggs in their caves.

The zoo has said that it will try again in Spring 2006, because the penguins are an endangered species and need to be encouraged to breed.

I guess I should amend my statement: True love is forever or until your species goes extinct.

Stereotypes In Love

There seem to be a lot of young men with bouquets of flowers wandering about the streets of Madison today. I saw one tall and lanky fellow carrying long-stem roses. I saw one black guy in a Fubu jacket and flashy gold chains carrying three bouquets with three separate cards. I even saw one bookish kid looking rather embarrassed carrying a bouquet down Gilman Street while rehearsing his lines.

If Madison is any indication, retailers of plant reproductive organs seem to have done rather good business this week.

Of A Broken Heart

An ad in the local edition of The Onion:

Cure Your Valentime's Day Blues
[picture of a heart with much decoration (including a torch, ribbons, and a zipper) and at least four crossed-out girl's names]
10% OFF ALL COVER-UPS
at EXOTICA TATTOO
3769 East Washingon

I bet there are probably a decent number of people around here who will be tempted by such an offer. Having been a lifeguard for a number of years and having seen a lot of tattoos that might have looked good a decade ago, I don't think I will ever be in the position to take an advantage of discounted "cover-ups."

Lutherans and Sexuality

Don't, unless you do

Garrison Keillor, Star Tribune

The ELCA had the good sense to issue its report on sexuality the week before a major snowstorm and so the church's new guidelines on blessing same-sex relationships and ordaining people in an SSR didn't arouse the storm and fury one might have expected. People were thinking about shoveling their sidewalks, a life-and-death issue for those of us in the coronary stage of life. And when you imagine toppling over into a snowbank with chest pains and your last thought before expiring is "Boy, she was right, I shouldn't have," then the whole issue of whether Pastor Sandvik should bless the union of Bruce and Kent -- it's just not that big a deal. Up in Stearns County, you've got Catholic priests blessing snowmobiles, for crying out loud, and on the Feast Day of St. Francis the Episcopalians are bringing cats and dogs and hamsters and newts and amoeba in to be blessed, so what's the harm in blessing two young guys, even if maybe they do fuss over their hair more than a person should?

The report was a lovely example of muddling through, which Lutherans are good at. They are people of great modesty and even greater compassion. And also bravery. The question of SSRs is one that firebrands on both sides are up in arms about and ready to burn villages and blow up bridges. The Task Force was given the assignment three years ago, long before the wave of gay marriages, and it proceeded to hold hundreds of elaborately patient and painfully respectful meetings and discuss the thing to (yawn) death and finally write a report that restated the question in terms you wouldn't understand and took 40 pages to avoid answering it and affirm a policy of Don't ask, don't tell, never mind.

In 1996, the church had said, "Marriage is a lifelong covenant of faithfulness between a man and a woman." It was willing to ordain gay people who were in a chaste, or unconsummated, relationship, a USSR, but not in a sexy one. After due study, the Task Force acknowledged the deep divisions over the whole SSR question, reaffirmed the 1996 position while accepting that people in good conscience might choose to challenge it and asking them to be careful if they do and not make a big show of it but saying that if they do do what they will, probably nobody would give them a hard time about it.

In other words: Nothing has changed essentially, we don't approve, though in a sense we do but probably not, but if you go ahead and do it, don't feel bad about it, we understand.

This is the beauty of bureaucracy. It absorbs and deflects violence and anger by causing confusion and annoyance and writing a lovely amorphous mishmash of sentences like extruded marshmallows and thus the peace is kept. Militants on either side are outraged, but they enjoy outrage, that is their art form. The rest of us are grateful to be spared the sound and the fury and to be able to attend church on Sunday morning without having to wear a badge. As important as sexuality may be, it surely isn't any more important than snow, and if you feel, in good conscience, that God didn't intend snow to be part of your life, then you may want to head for Arizona, which is OK, though we will miss you and I do beseech you to return my shovel before you go, it is hanging in your garage, not that I want to go ask you for it, I don't want to put you on the spot and make you feel bad, though it's hard to understand how you could forget about a thing like that but if you do and you go off to Phoenix, don't beat yourself up over it, we will get along somehow as best we can. This is the Lutheran way.

The School

by Donald Barthelme

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that ... that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems ... and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don't know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn't the best. We complained about it. So we've got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we've got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

It wouldn't have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes -- well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that ... you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren't too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably ... you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren't looking. Or maybe ... well, I don't like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander ... well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they're belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

We weren't even supposed to have a puppy.

We weren't even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede's truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then ... And that's what it did. It wasn't supposed to be in the classroom at all, there's some kind of regulation about it, but you can't tell them they can't have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar -- that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling, "Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!". Then they'd laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don't mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don't know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn't had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely, because I knew that was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.

And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid's name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn't have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the school, particularly. I've seen better and I've seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier that year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.

The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they're excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There's a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don't know what's true and what's not. It's been a strange year.

I forgot to mention Billy Brandt's father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don't know, I don't know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn't death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of --

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don't like it.

I said, that's sound.

They said, it's a bloody shame!

I said, it is.

They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.

I do like Helen, but I said that I would not.

We've heard so much about it, they said, but we've never seen it.

I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out the window.

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

I said that they shouldn't be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

Love! Baby!

Happy Valentine's Day to all you love birds out there. Happy V-Day to everyone.

End

Single again after almost nine months.