How I Spent My Summer

My word, I have been absent for a long while! I probably haven’t a single member of the Shaggerati left, and I guess I deserve it. In my defense, I have begun no less than three entries, and got interrupted before I could finish. And much has happened in la vie Shag since last we spoke, as jeankfl who kind of has an inside track, knows.

First and most gloriously, I am retired. I feel like my life was interrupted for a fifty-year long commercial and I am now returning to our regularly scheduled program. My reverse mortgage went through. I have my Medicare all filled out and took a blind stab at the supplemental insurance, since I can’t for the life of me grasp what the real sum of money to lay aside for medical purposes may be. I am somewhat more sanguine on that front, however, since I have selected as my primary provider, a clinic whose clientele is largely quite poor down in the city. Let me tell you, for medical purposes you always want to go where the poor go. This may be counterintuitive, but believe me the counselors at such venues know every trick in the book for getting the cheapest possible deal for every kind of need. They know the available help for those whose income has dropped precipitously. It looks like my health expenses may be less even than my best-case scenario imagined before I went there.

The weekend around the time of my last post my sister Lucy came to visit and stay at my house for two weeks (three weekends). Lucy and I were very close as children, but she has gone right and I left, and our visits tend to resemble armed truces where firing may break out at any moment. This was a spectacularly successful visit (aided, no doubt, by the fact that I was only home on the weekends). Our battles used to be started by me most of the time, then that got old and I shut up at which point they began to be started by her. This time we circled each other warily, but had a nice time, staying off topics political, religious and historical. Lucy has in her psychological make-up something that baffles me, but which I am beginning to see is present in a lot of women, which is that no wound ever heals, even slightly. She seems to suffer today 60-odd years later exactly the same degrees of shame, pain and so on when recalling a hurt that occurred when she was pre-school. A case in point: she once had - around age three – a pink knit dress that was her good dress and which was worn on such occasions as might arouse relatives to an orgy of picture-taking. Indeed, one perusing the archives might be excused for thinking it was the only dress she ever wore. Among the many pictures of her in said garb, there exists one where she innocently grasped the skirt by its hem and held it in such a way that white panties (or a diaper) were exposed. Naturally we boys mocked her until our throats bled, but eventually Lucy was able to destroy every known copy, and the matter rested there.

Years later, graduated from college, married and mother of two boys, Lucy was moving with her husband to Orange County, CA and all the aunts gathered to give her a farewell party. Aunt Suzanne presented a book of pictures from Mary’s life progress up to that date, which she, kindest of women, had gone to great trouble to find and assemble. And as Lucy smiled and thanked her, she opened the book and there was the three-year-old in the pink dress, showing her panties. Although she managed to remain pleasant, she was stricken just as if she were again three and the object of her brothers’ derision. She was also furious. Everything is like that for her. Every one of the many, many times our dad embarrassed her by his behavior (though this was never aimed at her), is as raw and new and shameful as the day it happened. She forgets nothing; she forgives nothing. It is way more than holding a grudge; she genuinely hurts anew again and again. I simply don’t understand it, but I know it is real. Where my problem comes with Lucy is that I never fully understand the range of things that she finds hurtful or weird or embarrassing. So I, who think nearly everything is funny when people behave foolishly, which is all the time, inadvertently offend her again and again by commenting on things. Her view of ‘normal’ – a concept that is the chief and only deity ensconced on her Olympus, pretty much consists of what she would do in any situation. If she ever had imagination, she has reigned it in and clamped it down and let it die from lack of exercise. She has had a singularly fortunate life – a husband with few vices, none of them humiliating, who has made millions many times over, kids who are healthy, smart, attractive and who have had exactly one brush with the law among them involving a thrown egg when the oldest was in high school. All of this is great; where she veers off the track in my humble opinion, is in thinking that anyone in any other circumstances, is there out of wilfullness, character defect, and quite possibly a malicious desire to annoy her. Anyone who has read more than two of my entries can see why we are as oil and water.

The weekend after Lucy left, my brother Jack stayed with me along with his chére amie, the platinum-haired Eglise. Alone among his brothers, Jack likes girlie-girls, trophies, girls who demand constant attention and generally behave like the fiancée who, in films, ends up getting dumped for Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts, whom the audience has liked all along. Eglise is great for an hour, a very social, chatty sort, but after twenty-four hours during which the chat has not ebbed even slightly, one begins to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome. There is much else to be said about Eglise, and if I am feeling mean-spirited as I so often do, I shall devote a whole entry to her one day. Suffice it to say that no house in which resides the lovely Eglise will contain anyone able to get away long enough to post any blog entries.

The weekend following the departure of Jack and Eggie, saw the sudden and unexpected arrival of my brother Liam and his wife Phoebe, who just felt like taking a week off from the tourboat job in darkest Utah and flying home. I like both of them enormously, as does everyone who meets them (or him, at least; my brother Luke is not so fond of Phoebe, who is prone to call a spade by its proper name and to brook no nonsense). They stayed at Jonesy’s, who lives on the shores of one of the minor Finger Lakes south of here. So that weekend I was down at Jonesy’s house. Jonesy and his wife are rather amazing people. They live like high school kids. Anybody can come and stay at their house anytime, whether they themselves are home or not. They are always ready to party. Yet both Jonesy and his spouse run businesses – he a local convenience store cum deli which is not part of any chain and which has been successful for years, she a gift shop which provides an increasing share of the family wealth. Jonesy also runs from his convenience store a catering business which tends to provide plain food for a hundred or so at a time for summer picnics, organization festivals and the like. So these are not irresponsible potheads by any measure; they are the most responsible of potheads. They live the life that one dreams of when one is young – their own boss, moderately well off, their real year-round home where everyone else has a vacation rental, and parties anytime anybody they remotely know comes through town.

The week after Liam’s visit, the class of ‘59 at my high school had a three-day series of events for their 50th reunion, to which they invited the classes of ’58 and ’60, the latter of which included me. So I had three fantastic days of seeing folks I really like, including one whose jaw dropped when he saw me and who cried out, “David Shaughnessy?? I heard you were killed in Saudi Arabia!” I assured him that despite the best efforts of the Saudis, such had not been the case. He looked at me several times as if he were still not convinced. Actually it was a four-day event, since I took off work (quaint phrase which I may well never use again, at least in relation to myself) the Monday following and was invited to break my trip back to Smallville by stopping at the home of one of the girls I liked a lot to have a lunch with THE POPULAR KIDS! After fifty years, I am IN! It simply doesn’t get any better than this.

Well yes, it does. Because the remaining weeks that I have been away from ye Blogge, I have been rushing around doing pre-retirement things; including attending a dinner where I was given three books (one on use of the English language, a gift that was intended to reward me for constantly reminding my boss in meetings that events are “between Mary and ME”, not “Mary and I”) and gift certificates to the tune of several hundred dollars – mostly from American Express, but also some for iTunes (they know me well) and a restaurant. And my nephew Josh and I went to the American Idols Tour when it came near us, and I got see Adam from the fourth row, as well as being totally blown away – to my surprise – by the winner, Kris Allen. And Allison, of course. Perhaps a topic for another time.

And now I have to run. We have had three days of sunshine and temps in the high seventies and the seven-day forecast says we have seven more of the same in store. I need to get to my lounge with that thriller I am reading. If there were a deity, one might imagine he was saying, “What took you so long?”

June: Not Bad So Far

Two weeks ago, I had my counseling session, which is required by federal law before I can actually apply for my reverse mortgage. The one thing that is very clear – I had already grasped it, but this made it even clearer, is that this is something of an irrevocable decision. No one should get a reversible mortgage to solve a temporary difficulty, nor should anyone get one who has any possible heirs that he or she might wish to endow with his or her property. I can get out of it once it is in place, but it will be costly. If I get out within two or three years by getting a new first mortgage or otherwise paying the debt, I will have paid an effective 10+% rate for the two or three years, since many of the costs are front loaded. Once these two or three years have passed, the amount owed will have grown to the point where I would be hard-pressed to afford a new mortgage to pay it off, and I will be far worse off than before, although at that point, with the presumed growth in value of the home, it will have come down to an effective rate of outgo v value well below 4%. Are you bored yet?

The following Monday, I took off from work, because an appraiser came to value my property at the worst possible point in the economy, but here’s the thing: I can wait – and work every day of that wait – until times are better, or I can retire very soon. Retirement is not one of those things to which you can tack on days at the end to compensate for a late start. That weekend I arrived home to find my estate resting silent in its beauty, awash with bright flowers surrounded by its eighty-foot trees, a perfect oasis from which one would never really have any reason to stray. I think mosquitoes, deer and work are put on Earth to keep us from lying in a puddle of ecstasy under the nearest tree for the entire month of June. What a gorgeous time in this gorgeous place. The sensible person does little but stare about himself in a peaceful daze and haze during June; the rest, I guess, get married.

One statement that the mortgage man made to me when we spoke has been gnawing at me; he cheerfully informed me that all the projections that the insurer is making assume that actuarially I have 18 years left to live. This led me to thinking that even if I don’t turn up my heels on schedule, I will be well into my eighties, an age where one is too old to do much more than spoon mushed-up food or shoot up a Holocaust museum, neither of which activities is on my bucket list, I assure you. This led me to cast back 18 years and think what I was doing then, and I realized I was in Saudi enjoying the First Gulf War. Didn’t that just happen? All of a sudden life looks very short, and if there were no work, pretty sweet.

I was planning to write Warren and Marlena this weekend to say that joining them in Bali was too costly and not to count me in. But now I am thinking, “So little time!” Moreover I was driving thru the town south of here where my brother Liam’s best friend and his wife (well actually they are both his best friends) run a small grocery-cum-deli, saw them outside grilling a passel of chickens (which were, mercifully, deceased) and stopped to say hello. I mentioned the Bali thing, and they thought they too might be interested. The deal is that Warren and Marlena are renting a luxury villa in January in Bali. Since they stayed there earlier this year; they know the owners and can get it without the agency fee that they paid the first time, which is substantial. This villa, which has a full staff, including a guard, will cost them about $150 a day – far cheaper than a hotel, but it is very large and can accommodate a lot of folks, so although the price is fixed, the more folks that stay, the cheaper the cost for each will be. So, I am re-thinking the “no way”. I had been worrying that money would not last if I lived too long, now I am worrying that it won’t all be spent. Second in horror only to the thought that I will still be working when I die is the thought that I will leave money behind unspent.

Very likely I won’t be able to do this in the end, but I’ll think about it a while longer. My high school class is celebrating its 50th reunion with a Caribbean cruise in March (doesn’t retirement sound fun?) and there is that to pay for. And Bali is half a world away – there’s the airfare to get there and back. Still, Bali, you know. It is one of those places you only hear about, and I have always liked actually going to places that seem like myths. I am not sure how have I missed Timbuktu for so long.

My sister Lucy just left an hour or so ago; she has been staying here for the last two weeks, a period made easier for both of us I am sure, by my absence from here while I worked in Smallville both weeks. Lucy and I, though we were very close as kids, now circle each other warily when we are together. Altogether though it was a successful visit, and ended well. She was here when the appraiser was coming and went into a flurry of activity to ensure that his first impression was a good one. I love when women visit; the house is always so orderly and clean when they leave. Her efforts must have worked; my house was valued at the high end of my hoped for range; $200,000. This is high for the area; not because it is a lower income area – far from it – but because Western NY is chronically depressed. I think the entire state outside New York City and maybe Long Island isn’t so much low income as it is no income. With the kind of money I make, a mere droplet in such places as California, I can live like a king here. Lucy loved being here alone in the quiet; her husband retired rich but mildly disabled and is always home. I think they have a good marriage, but she says she loved being wholly alone in my house. Her husband is always home, and she says that although he is not interfering and intrusive, she feels kind of guilty not being busy during the daytime. She finished four books while here – mostly in the daytime – guilty pleasures!

My brother Jack and his somewhat irritating girlfriend will arrive this week from AZ. I do live the high life. This is another visit that could go either way.

Anyway, Lucy took all us locals sibs – George, Luke and his girlfriend Carol, and me to dinner at a restaurant, which was once a beer joint, but has now been considerably upgraded. We ate outside on a deck, which is a hundred yards or less from the substantial waterfall in Hagerty by which the first gristmill in that village was once powered. I actually used to live in an apartment above that restaurant when it was a joint with a very loud jukebox. How it has changed! A large blue heron swooped up and down the creek for our viewing pleasure. It was a very nice time, not least because Lucy footed the bill. Poor George, who has not had a scintilla of good luck in his life time (he has been abducted at gun point; he hit and killed a drunk pedestrian who suddenly step in front of his car, etc. ), had one of those slightly odd experiences that seem to come his way. George is a recovering alcoholic, as they say, and ordered iced tea, while the others (except me) had beer or wine. The drinks arrived – Luke and Carol having Coronas, Lucy some merlot and a diet Pepsi for me. The waitress plopped down a glass of brown liquid in front of George; he took a swallow, and said, “That’s not tea!” So he had his first sip of brown beer in 13 years. Stuff like that always seems to happen to George. He is the quietest guy, and very deliberate in his actions – not at all a ‘what the hell’ kind of guy like Luke and me and yet if any stray bit of weirdness comes along, it immediately takes dead aim at George. A small thing; but really, how many people order tea and get Guinness? It is not like the waitress mis-heard; she had clarified after his order whether he wanted he tea sweetened.

The reverse mortgage man says I should have the money in a week or slightly longer; I have next Friday and the entire following week off from work; life is sweet.

OMG, I just clicked on some odd spot in this effloration and the whole thing disappeared. Shades of the old MSN Spaces days! But not to fear, I have recovered my mewlings intact.

Hope y’all have as good a next couple of weeks as I plan to have. I know all about the best laid plans; which makes me think these weeks would be best if I got laid. But that is another topic entirely…

Reverse is Forward (Maybe)

Last weekend, when I left Reedville for five more irksome days in Smallville, there was a single pink peony half-opened by the corner of my house. Yesterday I returned to find hundreds of blooms. I have them everywhere – they line the back of my driveway, appear on all four sides of my house in one place or another. Some are the hugest I have ever seen. This place is a little Eden and, to make certain that I see more of it in the near future, I am meeting this morning with a rep from the reverse mortgage people to go over some papers. It would be dishonest to say that I don’t have a host of second thoughts in the wee hours about both getting a reverse mortgage and about retiring. I am unused to not having money left over at the end of each pay period. I buy whatever I want, and a lot of stuff I don’t. A whole new idea must rear its ugly head in the near future – discipline.

That is a virtue that heretofore I have only encountered in dictionaries or novels involving mysterious deaths at service academies. I subscribe to the untested thesis that I mostly spend to alleviate the vast tide of boredom that is my current situation. This touching faith in my inner contentment waiting to break out and warm itself in the sun of my retirement flies in the face of all past experience and requires a determined effort to ignore the evidence of the past 66 years. What is true though is that I really can’t go on as I have been doing. One lesson I seem to have to learn anew each time it is needed is that just as bad money is said to drive out the good, so to do time-killing activities drive out the energy to do what really matters, unsatisfactory relationships preclude the opportunity for real intimacy and so on. The people I want to spend time with and the things I want to do cannot be squeezed into whatever time is left over here and there after the aimless and unsatisfying activities in which I engage these days.

People with whom it is worth spending time are busy and popular. You cannot expect them to make time for someone who is merely a new acquaintance when that someone is unhappy with his lot and trails all kinds of baggage, none of it of an interesting or intriguing nature. Things that are worth doing demand time and commitment. I find, for instance, that I cannot write when I have other things scheduled. This is why, with rare exceptions, I blog only on days off. However good or bad my efforts may be, they require sitting down with an open-ended amount of time and going where my thoughts take me. I admire people who squeeze in their hobbies in moments snatched here and there. So many terrific writers and other doers of worthwhile tasks can do this, but I cannot. I must immerse myself, and I cannot do this when an arbitrary endpoint is looming. It is like waking just before the alarm goes off and trying to go back to sleep with that damn bell all set to ring. In addition, doing things I dislike (like my job) exhaust me far beyond what the effort involved would lead one to suspect. I just cannot summon either will or energy after work. I am lucky if I bother to eat.

Another more insidious thought also holds me back from getting involved in something I care about while I am still among the employed. If I were to do that which I loved, how could I ever go back to work again? I think on some level I keep myself from getting too involved, from loving anything or anyone too much, for fear I just could not draw back when it was time for work or other pointless activities. When you are with a thing, or a person that you love, the time flies. I often think of the character in Catch 22 who strove to make his life as boring as possible with the aim of making it seem to last longer. I have wondered if I may be unconsciously doing that. The college years, the surfing years, the years with Tumwell, the years in Saudi went so fast. Like Prufrock’s women they have come and gone, and perhaps like Prufrock, my courage has failed. The last 14 years, since all of those people and activities have been absent, has been an eternity. I wonder if, on some level, I feel that a life of real commitment will feel like a running jump into the grave.

What I must do is find out. Will I replace work with something real, or with just more pointless obligations that seem like work? I don’t really know; I am amazingly good at formulating vast plans that never quite get implemented. Based on past experience, I will have a fallow period lasting a month or two and then I’ll go somewhere or do something. I need some time to actually believe that freedom is real; that the shackles of servitude have finally been struck from my wrists and ankles and I am free. They say that people who have been confined for a long period of time tend to continue to live circumscribed lives for sometime after; even forever in some cases. I have heard often that men released from prison will stop and wait at closed doors afterward, because they are so used to doors being locked, requiring someone else to open them. I expect I shall be like that for a bit. I have let a life lived in default go on so long that I am too unsure of how to seize freedom right off the bat.

Later that day.

My man has come and gone, leaving behind a sheaf of papers that could account for half the trees felled this year in the Pacific Northwest. This reverse mortgage program is a federal thing, or at least a federally regulated thing, and now that I have been thru an hour and a half of preliminary paper rustling, nothing can be done until I have had legally mandated counseling. Apparently this is mainly for an independent party to ensure that I am not senile, a charge that I have not been entirely free of risk having leveled at me since I was about five. Once this has been completed I must get an appraiser to evaluate my house – hopefully he wil be impressed with my new super-insulated beveled glass front door that cost me, after installation, $4,600 all told. And the deck my brother Luke built, and the new roof and the tankless water heater et al. Certainly the man here today (who has nothing to say in the evaluation/appraisal process,) was blown away by the beauty of my surroundings. That is a good sign at least.

Around one my old high school friend and fellow altar boy from the years just after the discovery of fire, dropped by. He is visiting from Chicago where he has lived and taught school since 1971. He was saying that he thought that ours was the luckiest generation in history. Our parents fought the big war and worked their butts off to give us enormous opportunity, which we of course have screwed up so incredibly that our heirs will never know it’s like to live as we did. I’d pretty much agree with that – in fact it was I who added that last bit to the conversation. Happily we boomers (or more accurately in our case war babies) have done our damnedest with two presidents who never got beyond adolescence and have passed the torch, along with ruins of our educational system, the shell of a manufacturing dynamo that is a faint memory and a lot of faux religious blather, onward to a genuine adult to try to reassemble. Good luck to him. We will of course, demand that even billionaires get their full entitlement of social security so that no penny which can possibly be spent on us will be overlooked. I imagine our little grandchildren looking up at us and asking, “Grandpa, what’s money?” If I know the boomers, they will say, “Oh, it is just some Chinese custom,” without any thought of explaining why it is their custom and not ours. And certainly not the faintest idea that this, or anything else, is our fault. Ya gotta love us.

The man today estimated that the cash should be in my hand by July 1. I can’t even really imagine anything that could feel as good as that moment, except the moment sometime after that (but not MUCH time after) when I say to my boss, “Can I talk to you for a minute...?”

Old Time Entertainment

I don’t know if it is just my perception, but Spring seems this year to have arrived with a lushness that is unusual even in this lush and blessed Eden. Every blooming plant I have seems to have three times the number of flowers it managed to produce last year – indeed, a lilac I was considering removing because it was so sadly skanky and miserly with its blooms last year has astonished me with lavish lavender clusters this year. My wisteria, planted only two years ago has thrown out its first-ever bud and my climbing hydrangea, a plant that is notoriously slow to establish itself, has at least three flower heads about to bloom. And so it goes; every plant on the estate has either tripled its display or has suddenly bloomed for the first time. Peony plants, which are everywhere in my demesne, are practically invisible beneath the loads of buds they are bearing – even some I moved after they had already appeared this Spring have departed from custom and thrown out buds.

Some months ago my sister Lucy sent me some photographs that she had been given by our cousin Annie who has probably never thrown away any memento she ever collected, including a paper cup in which an aunt once gave her a drink (I am not joking here). A couple of these pictures are from an event my sibs and I staged so very long ago, and one picture in particular shows us so happy, so lively, so united that it smote my heart just a bit. I have wanted to post it here for a while, but something more than my complete lack of know-how has held me back – although I must confess, the lack of know-how and even greater lack of will to learn anything new involving computers may do the trick, however I resolved the other issue.

Speaking of the lack of will in the matter of computers, I must say my team leader called me aside yesterday and informed me that my boss’ application to get me a third week each year of vacation from the rigors of work at Smallville Solutions has seem to be stalled and that he therefore has directed her to tell me that I am to take my third week on the DL, so to speak, and that I was to tell her when I was taking this extra vacation time, and she was to record it for the department’s eyes only, up to the full extra 40 hours, while the department blatantly lies to HR and claim I am at my post. I will entertain no remarks here on the possibility that there will be no noticeable difference in the amount of work produced. I do need to note that my desperation to retire and my hatred of all things job- or computer-related has nothing to do with this particular place of employment, where I have a great boss (as just demonstrated), and perfectly satisfactory colleagues. The distance of my work from my home is debilitating after driving it for more than two years through rain, snow, sleet, sun and traffic citations. But it is the lack of discretion over the disposal of my own time and life that is becoming unbearable. Living in two places as I do, I am unable to get a social life going, or to pursue real interests (if I have any) in either place. I could, of course, but I am far too inert and too easily discouraged or distracted. It is time for me to have a real life, instead of this mess through which I have sleep-walked for lo! these many years. Yeah, I know – cliché, there. I called a reverse mortgage lender this week, and I arrived in Reedville to find a fat envelope awaiting me with the info I had requested from him. I am afraid to open it thus far, because I have gone so far in my mental retirement (no clever cracks here!) that I can’t bear to be disappointed by what I find.

But I digress. What I was about to talk about was a time long ago when I was about ten or eleven, when there appeared in various locations around Reedville posters announcing the coming of something called the “Darktown Jamboree” to our local town hall. I had no clue what this was all about, but any break at all in the dailiness was a matter of great interest in sleepy, never-changing, rural Reedville. Indeed, if a cow farted, my siblings and I would be diverted for half a day or more. Our Town Hall had been built in the 1930’s and included, besides the garage for the local fire trucks, of which there were two, and the local library and town offices, a basketball court along one side of which was a fine stage with heavy purple curtains (in my memory they are velvet, but I am sure that was not actually the case) and overhead stage lighting and the works. This building, which was built by an agency as one of those projects that made up Roosevelt’s attempts to provide employment during the ‘30s, was a real center for town life: we voted there, held suppers there, crowned the annual Harvest Queen there, spoke to Santa and received gifts from him during the annual cartoon show and party for the local children put on by the Fire Department there – I even attended first grade in its basement. And once in a great while, chairs were set up on the basketball court and some show or play was performed there upon the excellent stage. These were memorable events; this Darktown Jamboree was to be another such show.

I had no clue what the name portended, nor would it have made any difference one way or another if I had. But this was nothing more nor less than a classic minstrel show with local citizens in blackface performing Stephen Foster songs along with other music commonly associated with what we invariably called “colored people” in those days. Of course the central feature of minstrel shows is the group of men sitting in a row telling corny jokes with various broadly drawn reactions by the group to the punch lines. I recall very little about the show itself, except that we were convulsed with laughter throughout, and a new interest was born in the hearts of the Shaughnessy clan.

I realize now that minstrel shows were disrespectful and demeaning to the black people they purported to portray, and I would not consider attending one now any more than anyone in our town would consider performing in one. As a child, and I think this is common to many children, I could know several conflicting ‘facts’ at once. I could know that this show was depicting black people as somewhat buffoonish without ever once seeing any relationship whatever between these portrayals and the only black kid that I knew, Clinton Parks, of whom I have written. It would not surprise me at all to find that Clinton could – or did – attend this event and may have found it as removed from his experience or as unreferential to him as did I. Or perhaps that would not be the case, perhaps he would have found it hurtful. I have known personally a number of black people who were highly entertained by Amos and Andy, (as well as others who were decidedly not) and the show Amos and Andy really was no more than an extension of the minstrel show idea.

I am straying into territory where I have no authority at all, but it is my guess that for a group in power, such as whites in the U.S. in the 50s, there is very little that is admirable about shirking work, or laziness, or getting by on trickery. But to a group who are powerless, whose members can work their asses off, behave on jobs with complete integrity, and who can be the absolute model of the perfect worker and still make absolutely no forward progress in life or in society, the image of a man who ‘gets away with’ shirking his duties, or who puts one over on the boss or company, or on society, is a far more admirable or heroic image. So where the white man sees someone like – was his name ‘Kingfish’? – I never saw the show, and only listened to snatches of it on the radio; I was too young to comprehend it – but I am referring to the slick, feckless character that provided so much of the humor in Amos and Andy as kind of useless and typical of the ‘laziness’ of a group of people whose best efforts brought no reward, who had no reason whatever to work hard for the benefit of white society; someone who is in the powerless class whom Amos and Andy and Kingfish represented may see such a man as something quite different. Amos and Andy was just entertainment after all, and the writers probably never gave deeper matters a thought, but I am guessing that the character that was kind of the ‘straight’, socially acceptable character – was it Amos? – was kind of a stand-in for white society. No one would have considered putting on a show at that time based on blacks duping or frustrating actual whites. Indeed, there has been a string of fiction back to Robinson Crusoe, through Gunga Din and Uncle Tom’s Cabin right up into the ‘60s and beyond where the admirability of a nonwhite character was based directly on his selfless devotion to one or more whites. (Spellchecker doesn’t like ‘admirability’, but I do.)

As I said, Darktown Jamboree struck a chord in the Shaughnessy hearts. This was particularly true, I think, of Gary. Throughout his life Gary was hugely drawn to the oddballs, which one could argue the characters in a minstrel show were. He loved Jimmy Durante and used to do routines for the family, imitating him. He liked in real life people who were somewhat weird, but who were authentically so – who had no clue to their own eccentricities; although they may be aware that they were not popular. If someone was goofy-looking or had odd ways, Gary was drawn as the proverbial moth to a flame. He did not champion these people, or plead their case – he treated them somewhat roughly (I don't mean physically) as he treated everyone, but he liked them, and they tended to like him. He could laugh at their oddities – and did so – but he did not bully or mock them in front of others. He would directly address eccentricities, and was neither put off nor intimidated by them, as I would be. He could and did like a number of non-white people, without at all having any predisposition to like such a group as a whole. In this (as in so many other things) he was my opposite. Whereas anyone more or less had to earn Gary’s affection or interest, I was predisposed to like anyone whom I perceived as different from me. I am sure we were sides of a coin. Gary’s last great enthusiasm of this kind for a portrayal of an oddball before he died about 14 years ago, was the character Ed Grimley as portrayed by Martin Short. I knew the second I saw this character that he’d be right down Gary’s alley, and so he was. I wish so much I could have shared Mr. Bean, whom I first saw on TV in Saudi, with Gary. I tried; I brought a video tape home that I purchased in Riyadh, but unfortunately the video format was not playable on our machines.

I am having a hard time working out the timetable exactly, because I know that once we decided to put on our own Darktown Jamboree version, I was learning the format and history of minstrel shows in school along with the work of Stephen Foster, and eleven seems awfully young for that kind of study. Maybe I was older – it seems I would have had that kind of course in sixth, seventh or eighth grade. I look young in the picture, but I always looked young for my age. I was last carded for buying alcohol in my forties. I know that I was the one who came up with such facts as that the traditional names of the endmen were Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones; that there was a traditional sort of break in the jokes where the characters performed a ‘walk-around’ and even some of the traditional jokes, the only one of which I recall now being:

Mr. Tambo: Why is a trip around the world like a cat’s tail?
Interlocutor: I don’t know, Mr. Tambo; why is a trip around the world like a cat’s tail?
Mr. Tambo: ‘Cause it’s fur to de end of it!

We deliberately made our jokes as corny as possible. We tried to hew to tradition as much as we knew how, but made two innovations to encompass our circumstances; we added a female (called “Sapphire”, of course) to allow Lucy to join in, and we added a moment for Liam, who was very young, to perform. We did this latter by announcing “a word from our sponsor” at which point Liam walked out wearing a sign that said (Wait for it!) “Sponsor” and he said, “Hello” and walked off. A word – get it? Get it?

Gary was the driving force; anything in which he did not interest himself tended to peter out among us younger Shaughnessys; although I was the eldest, he was usually the leader. In a rougher age where I would probably have inherited the land, he would probably have assassinated me and taken over; happily for me, we managed to all follow Gary's lead without the need for such strenuous measures. We worked pretty hard at perfecting our show. We boys dressed up in Dad’s old cast-offs including the amazing number of old felt hats we found around the house, while Lucy padded herself out to look fat and wore an Aunt Jemima style bandanna and a red satin blouse. We rehearsed for days – probably weeks; we thought we were exquisitely funny. Finally we were able to perform at a big family picnic at my Grandfather’s home. It was there that the photograph that Annie acquired was taken, although I doubt that she was the one who took it. Most likely it was taken by Aunt Cassie, her mother and my Mom’s sister. Our ‘blackface’ was skimpy; we had remembered to bring our costumes, but realized once we got to Grandpa’s we had forgotten whatever we had been using for black, so we used the greasy black deposits that had formed over the years on the woodstove in Grandpa’s kitchen – a substance that we were to discover adhered to everything we touched and was nearly impossible to wash off.

Our minstrel show was one of those childhood events that we all remember fondly. The picture was taken at one of those family picnics where all my Mom’s sisters would gather with all the cousins and we would break up into age groups and head out for a day of mischief. Lucy and I usually wandered off with Annie who lived in the next county and whom we saw not more than two or three times in a year. Gary, being more of a ‘real boy’ than I, had no use for the girl cousins and would be off with Rob and Jack and whatever boy cousins showed up. All of us cousins (many of whom now can barely stand each other) loved those picnics at Grandpa’s and enjoyed each other tremendously. Grandpa had a big old house with the gloomiest-looking tall evergreens in the front yard and along the side (we always called them ‘pine trees’ as we did all evergreens, once we outgrew calling them all ‘Christmas trees’, but I think they were firs) – those gloomy kind where the sub-branches, which grow out of each side of the longer limbs that extend from the trunk, droop down and look like they are just waiting to drip rain on a picnic. There were rooms off of rooms inside the house – one attic-type room could only be reached by entering a big old bathroom and going through a creaky door at the far end – and all kinds of places to play could be found, most of which we were not supposed to be in, and which were rendered attractive by that fact alone. The house had a haunted, lonely feel; by the time of the show Grandpa lived there alone. Outside there was an alley paralleling the driveway formed by two rows of overgrown grapevines – mostly Concords with a single vine that bore white grapes that you could eat skin and all, and there was an excellent pear tree which bore a huge number of pears each year, two apple trees which bore mild yellow fruit and a big patch of bushes of some kind of sweet black berries which we called ‘long johns’. There were also two neighboring barns which we were straitly forbidden to visit and into which we usually managed to go surreptitiously at least once each summer.

Anyway, here we are together, happy, blacked up rather sparingly (thank goodness) a long, long time ago when all was possible and nothing bad had yet happened. There’s Lucy, then me, then Liam wearing his ‘sponsor’ sign (upside down, you may note), then Rob, Gary and Jack, the last of whom in every picture was always the cutest kid you ever saw.

So don’t say you don’t know what I look like.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day – and it looks as if it will be as beautiful a day as yesterday, which must go down in the annals as one of the fairest days since Time began. I was thinking that this is a perfect time of year to remember the young men – boys, almost – who have died for the Nation. The year is poised for Summer, everything is green with that freshness that fades in Summer’s heat, and all about birds are nesting, fields are being plowed and planted and everything speaks of possibility and promise; it is at exactly the point were these men were, just ready to begin their adult lives and their families, filled with the sense of perhaps. And it turned out that their harvest came early, although it was no less of a bounty to their fellow countrymen for that; each of them saved for the rest of us our way of life, which is at least as much as they could have done during lives spent in the farms, factories and offices of the land. But it is not what they hoped or planned, and thousands upon thousands of fatherless children and bereft parents and spouses too paid a heavy price. And we must remember, too, the thousands who did not die but who were condemned to lives with minds and bodies damaged. We see many tales of amazing vets who have risen above the loss of limbs to achieve great things, but so many were unable to do so, and these guys (and, increasingly, women) have pretty much given everything they had, too.

I said last week that my cousin Warren would visit me, fresh from his stint in Iraq, and so he did with his extremely cool wife whom I had not previously met. Marlena is German; although one of her parents was American, she was raised in Germany, but were you to meet her, you would never guess that she wasn’t raised just down the road. In fact she joined the American Air force where, I gather, she and Warren met although I didn’t think to ask for particulars. As usual when there are ears within the vicinity, I did at least 75% of the talking. We spent the day together, and both of them are so full of excitement at the life they are launched upon that they couldn’t help but bring a dim spark of hope into my life, too. First, Warren’s best friend is a writer who has already published two books. I had sent Warren copies of my early blogs on MySpace during his tour of duty; he told me he would lie in his bunk laughing out loud. I’ll have to go back and re-read them; I don’t recall what was funny about my tales of being in jail or in the nut house, but so it was,. Anyway, he said if I could get my writing together in some form, he’d talk to his friend who has an agent and well, you know. In addition, Warren and Marlena are both out of the service and said that people always talk about taking a year off to travel and they decided they could afford to actually do it, and that is what they are doing right now. As soon as they got sprung from the service, they launched this project with a tour of Asia, during which they both fell in love with Bali. Warren said it felt like home to him. So they are returning there in January and they’d like me to join them if I could.

So, wow! Probably something I can’t do, but still. Lots to think about, and only a job I dislike to stop me. Or, if I get my retirement going in time, there is the issue of money. Warren told me the family thinks I am totally loaded with the stuff, because they have this idea that I am some kind of computer guru (despite my many statements to the contrary) and even more that I made a fortune in Saudi, which a) I didn’t and b) I spent freely. The more you tell that branch of the family the truth the more they meet each other’s eyes and think they know better.

As to retirement, the new door I wanted to install before having my home evaluated for a reverse mortgage has been put in place and it looks spectacular. Where once I had a windowless black slab of wood, I now have a beautiful leaded glass extravaganza, with beveled edges on the glass insets and a series of circular prism-cut ‘jewels’ which let a flood of light into my foyer-type area. Every time I approach the area, I think I have left the door open. So Tuesday, I can start calling the places that give reverse mortgages and see what kind of a deal I can get. And if that goes through, I am on the threshold of my freedom at last.

I feel I owe my more devout reader(s) a survey of what’s going on with god’s work in the world. In Ireland, It has been revealed that the orphanages run there by Holy Mother Church have been, pretty much without exception, bastions of severe physical and sexual abuse for most of the twentieth century. Children were beaten for they knew not what constantly. The aim was to induce in them feelings of inferiority and submissiveness. A sense of their sinfulness. In Africa, I see that Sixty Minutes reports that the clergy there have found a money-maker in the general belief in witchcraft on that unfortunate continent. They declare that one child or another is a witch and for a fee, they agree to exorcise these children, which involves physical abuse, including biting pieces out of their bodies. The parents, devout Christians all, then turn the child out into the street as often as not, and the child, who often has not even been behaving badly, is left to become a street child. A significant portion of the street children in Kinshasa is innocent children whose parents are still alive, but who have been outcast because they are witches. And here in America another parent has taken her cancer-ridden child on the run so she can have him treated with Indian magic instead of a treatment with 90% success rate.

I personally am of the opinion that the mother in this last case should be allowed to treat the kid any way she wants. It is a win/win situation for society – if the kid is cured by a good dose of boiled grass, then we have found a marvelous new cure for cancer and we all benefit; if he dies, we are spared yet another religious wacko to blight society. Don’t get me wrong; I think religion is a great thing – but only if you are a member of the clergy. God help you if you are a child, though. But I figure that the clergy drains off many of the people who otherwise would become Bernie Madoff. People who pass their tithes to the various brands of theologists get what they paid for, just as does the man who gives a hundred bucks to a streetwalker. If he wants to believe her when she tells him he is really a great lover, well, what’s the harm?

A Visitor

Well, I am all agog, because my first-cousin-once-removed Warren will be coming to visit this morning. He, as some of you may recall, was in Iraq until lately defusing IEDs and other explosives. I mentioned on my Spaces blog, before that organization drove me forth into the storm by becoming completely unfathomable, that Warren was the subject on a profile in a recent Penthouse issue under the rubric, “Bad-Ass Americans” or something similar.

Anyway, I dandled this lad on my knee as a babe (he was a babe, I wasn’t) and there is, somewhere in the archives, a photo of me holding him awkwardly, flanked by a couple of his Cambodian relatives who look as if they are wondering how they happened to be there. I have seen him only rarely as he grew up, but each time I have been impressed by his excellent, though easy, manners, his general coolness, and the pleasure it has been to be in his company.

While he has been serving in Iraq, we have corresponded sporadically – I copped out by sending him a few of my blog entries that I thought might amuse him. He told me I was the only one of his friends and fam that actually wrote at any length. He has had the misfortune to be born with a brain that can hold more than a five-word thought into the Twitter generation. Every time I think the modern communication has been reduced to the absolute minimum of content per connection, something comes along to prove me wrong. It appears that the ideal social situation now is to have about 10,000 friends without ever having been forced to spend a minute in the same room as any of them. How, I wonder, do teenage girls continue to get knocked up? If the pre-requisite for Messiah-hood is a virgin birth – or one that has all the appearances of fatherlessness – then I think we are in for a string of prophets. At least on can hope their Bibles will be a string of text messages. “Blesd r th pur”, perhaps, Or ‘R fthr hu rt in HVn’.

Anyway, Warren will be accompanied by his German wife whom he has managed to acquire somewhere along the way. He is out of the army no, and he and she have just completed a month or two of touring in Asia, during which only love, I gather, got her through a week-long trek in Nepal which Warren found necessary for his spiritual advancement. I shall be gratified to meet this compliant lady. If I were a better person I would be readying my house for their advent in a couple of hours, but as you know I am a river to my people, and if blogging means I can sit on my ass more than vacuuming would allow, then I am yours for the early morning.

Having a life that has pretty close to zero in the way of stimulation, I continue to be transfixed by Adam Lambert of American Idol who, although I think he will lose in the last round of voting, (Danny Gokey’s followers will NEVER move to Adam but, if they vote at all, are pretty certain to move toward the other crooner in the competition.) will be, I am fairly certain, the Next Big Thing. He is exciting and divisive and madly talented. He has swagger and balls. There has not been an authentic rock star since the brief light of Kurt Cobain was extinguished before he really could take hold. Freddy is gone, and the greats of the 70’s are either long gone (Janis, Jim, Jimi, Lennon) or rapidly aging (Tina, Mick, etc.). There is a steady stream of momentary flashes, or of crooners like Timberlake, who though talented and very popular, are NOT rock stars with all the flash and pushing of the envelope that requires. This guy is exciting and I am thrilled each week by his performances. I will miss Idol this summer like no other season before. I may even go to see the concert of the alums if it comes near enough to me this year. And there will be one reason why: Adam. Well, two maybe, since I think Allison is astonishingly gifted also – and if I were to see a live duet between her and Adam I might expire in my seat. (Are duets ‘between’ people? I never thought about the preferred preposition before now). When I see my rock stars, I want to be grabbed by the throat, have my heart ripped out still beating, and used to beat me around the head. I want to shake afterward. “Pretty” is not what I go to concerts for. Lately I have run across songs that enthrall me, but this I the first time in a long time that a performer has enthralled me, no matter what song he is presenting.

It is looking like a grey day, which is disappointing since I should have liked Warren and his frau to see my demesne in its best light. Yesterday was glorious and they were at Rochester’s Lilac Festival, which is a very large deal in Rochester. If you live within 50 miles or so of that city, you’d better have lilacs in your yard. I am not sure, but I think the police will cite you for some sort of dereliction if you do not. Certainly you will be regarded as a possible traitor to your country. If old Walt were to ask anyone, “When did lilacs last in your dooryard bloom?” he’d get a pretty much unanimous cry from us folks, “They are blooming right as we speak, buddy!” I myself have five main bushes with other odd bits starting up here and there. That makes me a mere piker by some standards hereabouts. Rochester is lilacs, Kodak and white hot dogs. And Wegman’s. No jobs, though. And not much Kodak anymore, either.

Anyway, speaking of pop culture, my first intro to the Great Divide was in grammar school when the girls on the school bus decreed that if you were an Eddie Fisher fan, you had to sit on the left side of the bus and if you liked Perry Como, you must sit on the right. I could have inferred the great divide from that point, although I didn’t. Sweaters and short hair to the right, leather and curly black hair to the left. Although both of these singers, who were huge back then, may seem much of a muchness nowadays, (although there WAS that Eddie/Debbie/Liz thing), the swinging versus mellow dichotomy is a permanent feature of the pop landscape. I am sure that if one were to trace the future careers of those who chose the right side of the bus, they would find folks who were still with their first wife, who are surrounded by great grandchildren that like sports and the outdoors (although they wouldn’t hold with them there tree-huggers), who love Jesus, and who stayed with the same company until retirement. The folks on the left will have been through rehab, will be with their second or third wife, or getting a divorce because of an affair, will not be sure how many grandchildren they have, and will never retire because they didn’t settle down and start saving until they were 50 in the first place, and will still remember Woodstock with great fondness.

This divide really showed up when Elvis arrived, I mean the bad-boy Elvis, although actually the lad had impeccable manners, was deeply respectful of his elders, had only one wife and was deeply devoted to his mother. Elvis was about sex. The left side of the bus had arrived. Overnight the rightsiders rallied around Pat Boone, a safe, sweater-wearing, short-haired, button-down pleasant singer who sang about love, not sex. Pat Boone made Bernardine, a film about a group of roomies in college who yearned for a telephone operator with a beautiful voice, Elvis made Jailhouse Rock. When the later sixties rolled around, the British invasion yanked the whole bus so far to the left-side that Elvis and Ricky and Conway and even Jerry Lee all found themselves relegated so far to the rightside, that they were on a whole ‘nother bus labeled ‘Country”, where they continued successful careers without having to change a thing. When Elvis or Pat made appearances on schooldays back in the day, girls told their mothers that they would just DIE if they couldn’t go; the difference was that the Elvis girls just might. Elvis girls cut school and ran away to see him, Pat girls cried in their rooms for hours, then finished their homework but didn’t answer the second part of question four on purpose and that would show them.

But even within the new sound on the ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ side of things, the dichotomy opened up. First it looked like the Dave Clark Five were going to be the right side of things as opposed to the Beatles with that hair and those screaming fans, but then the Stones emerged as even more S, D and RnR than the Beatles, and the Beatles themselves began to have just a whiff of the sweater and love of country, and once McCartney went to Wings, he was firmly on the mellow side of things. The rightside of the bus had its James Taylor and John Denver and Simon and G and the like, but as pop broke into tribes that didn’t even listen to each other’s music, once the seventies were over things had pretty much shifted over to the spiritually short-haired more and more. The great thing in the sixties and seventies is that one listened to them all, but one had one’s preferences. But pop became a series of boy groups and girls on the verge of a weeping jag, and although the greater female singers were predominately black, the music of Whitney and Mariah and the like was firmly in the mellow mode, while what had been seen as the ‘black’ element that Elvis had tapped into with its implication of late nights and high-living waned more and more. The left side of the bus pretty much dropped music altogether in favor of spoken poetry with music background relegated firmly to second place in Rap. Rap really requires no music at all. As music split into the various threads each thread became so set in stone that it all just got pretty boring – at least in the air-play world of things.

So I am hoping that we get another overriding left-side of the bus phenomenon, because just cannot spend another morning listening to Golden Oldies, and I really am thinking that Adam Lambert might be it. No matter who wins Idol this year, the buzz on Adam is phenomenal, he is being down-loaded way more than all the others. On the website “Television Without Pity”, last time I looked, the discussion thread on him is about four times as long as his nearest competitor – I have never seen anything like it. A lot of people can’t stand him, but they talk about him. Elvis’ records were publicly smashed, the Beatles were excoriated from pulpit and statehouse, and I just get a tiny whiff of the same sort of thing here. I hope so.

But maybe I am just getting old and finding small dim hopes under every stone – who knows?

Onward to the Shallow End

I can think of few inventions that have brought more benefit and peace of mind to mankind than the automatic dishwasher. My own model of this beneficent device is whirring and gloshing away as we speak. Without it I would be awash in dirty dishes, plates with odd blue-green growths, cups with the accumulated rings of a thousand servings of coffee, glasses with more rings than a sequoia tree to tell the archivist exactly how many servings of milky substances I have consumed since they were purchased. Because I hate doing dishes and I pretty much don’t do anything I don’t want to do anymore.

It is a lovely, albeit chilly, morning and I am contemplating my plans for the future. First I am going to install a very expensive new front door – not counting installation it has cost me just under $4000: a lovely beveled glass affair with a sidelight, rated highly enough in insulative qualities to garner a 30% tax write-off this year. Then I am applying for a reverse mortgage on my home (which will be raised in value, one hopes, by more than the $4K investment, since there is no one to leave it to anyway. All my relatives fall into two categories; either they have homes that suit them very well or they could not afford to pay of the rest of the mortgage and hold onto it. And then – do you hear it coming? – the sweet, sweet relief of retirement.

This business of living in two places with a 2-3 hour drive between is getting very old. For one thing, it reduces my time to do things around the house to one day a week. This is the same day in which I have to do any buying for the week, write my blog, conduct my social life and so forth. Oh – and rest, doing nothing. Guess which of these enterprises wins most often? I have observed that when I have that rare two-day weekend on Reedville, i.e., a three-day weekend overall, I get things done. Unfortunately, about half those three-day affairs contains a holiday on which I traditionally attend a dinner at a relative’s home – Christmas at Caitlin and Brad’s, Memorial Day at Joan’s and so on. So the extra day is lost so far as accomplishing tasks is concerned.

I have done the math, admittedly with a view to making it come out the way I want it to, and I think without my mortgage, even considering the taxes here and insurance and so forth, I can swing it. Anyway, I have lived my life acting on impulse and it has stood me in good stead. The man that I know who plans most carefully for his future is my friend Yan, and those of you who read my last entry know how that turned out. The life I am living is simply not worth the added money it brings in. I do a lot of spending which I recognize afterward is simply to atone for the deep malaise into which continuing to work has plunged me. There has been no real social life, nothing meaningful on the horizon for all the 14 years since my return from Saudi. I just cannot get up any enthusiasm for travel that must be rushed through in two weeks or less. Vacations leave me with less devotion to my job, not more.

One always hears of these freakish men who retire and find themselves at loose ends. I do not personally know any such men. Without exception, those many friends I have who have achieved retirement have found their lives more full of zest, energy and things to do. I have not been able to converse with any who have died still working, but my guess is that the number one answer to, “What do you think of that?” would be “chagrin”. And that presupposes that cussing in the afterlife is frowned upon. Or pointless.

Well, how boring was that? Let’s see – did you see the news article about the couple that wandered out of a pub and began banging on the Windsor Castle lawn in broad daylight, surrounded by tourists? That was fun reading. Although in residence at the time, the Queen was not involved so far as I can tell. Pity.

I have had occasion in the past to acknowledge how extremely shallow I am, and as further evidence of this, I now admit I am an avid watcher of American Idol. I have had my favorites through the seasons – there always seemed to be at least one contestant to whose performance I looked forward each week – not necessarily because they were the most talented, but because they usually delivered something a little unexpected or unusual. The five top finalists this year are easily the most talented of any season; any one of them would have been extremely strong contenders – and likely winners – in former seasons. But this year there is a contestant so supremely gifted both with voice and showmanship, that I can’t wait each week for Tuesday and my two-minute Adam Lambert fix. This guy has everything I would expect the word ‘Idol’ to imply. I find him thrilling – and when I listen to his singing without watching him (I have downloaded four of his performances, compared with two for all other singers in all other seasons put together) – I am as astounded by his gifts as when I watch him. He may well not win – he was one of the two lowest vote-getters this week - but I have never seen anyone before who I was so sure will be a major star.

Each year there is a division of sorts between voters on the show – many years it is pop v country, but the country contestant left early this year. The division this year is between crooners – boy-band types – and rock performers. There is a bit of church versus Satan in the ranks, too, and of course Satan’s followers have dates on weeknights and a life that is not on hold until Eternity rolls around, so some of them are too busy to vote. I don’t think there is a Mormon this year in the finals or a candidate who plays up his origins in a small state, or an ethnic favorite who is getting votes for that reason (I do not refer to black v white, which doesn’t seem to happen on this show, but more like when there is a Filipino or some smaller minority candidate), so the block-voting such contestants sometimes receive irrespective of their performances is not occurring. The preference for a crooner or a rocker, or an R and B or country singer is an entirely legitimate preference and seems to play heavily in the voting. In addition, physical attractiveness weighs heavily, as it does in all other aspects of life – although I am not sure that is not more the case among the judges than among the voters. Simon Cowell is incapable of seeing beyond looks, particularly in females (those of you who know to whom I refer when I say ‘bikini girl’ will recall how completely incapable of impartiality toward beautiful women he is), and Paula Abdul is also strongly biased by appearance, particularly (and unsurprisingly) in the men.

Mainly, I want Adam to last at least until the final two, just so my Tuesdays will be exciting for a while longer. I doubt that his success or failure as a performer from this point on will be much affected by how he fares on Idol. So I will still be able to buy his music and, believe me, I will.

And now, out into the sunshine – I hope you will be doing the same.