Topic 216: Winged Circle

Carol:

Over My Head,  At My Back

“This project is mostly an intellectual exercise for a newly-retired writing teacher and her anxiously-unemployed librarian daughter, both of whom are in need of something to keep them occupied during a transitional time.” (About This Project)

Topic 216 is a “throw back,” returned to the basket when I pulled it months ago, thinking it required more research than I wanted to do. It still does, but I can’t throw it back again because I now can see the bottom of a basket that once was completely filled with strips of paper. Two-hundred and sixteen essays behind us, and most of the remaining topics are “throw-backs.”

Megan and I now have worked on this project for over twelve months, a little experiment to fill our time, present a mental challenge, and provide some structure to our day.  For me, much of the fun was in figuring out how to approach the “throw back” kinds of subject matter, the head-scratchers, and the yawners. I always told my students that their job was to find a way to take an assignment and “make it their own,” so I have had lots of opportunities to practice that principle. 

I usually have a direction in mind by the time I head out on the morning walk.  Not today.I sat down for coffee with wings and circles pushed to the back of my mind. Our neighbor’s patio is inviting, and the temperature perfect for slow sipping and chitchat. Suddenly, Marc pointed up at the sky to a bird in flight. He is always doing that, pointing out birds on bushes, in the trees or flying overhead. But, this time when I looked up, I didn’t need the birders in the group to identify the long legs and wings of a Great Blue Heron.

As I looked back down at the patio table, my eye caught our host’s coffee cup. On the side of the cup was an emblem, a winged circle. The logo was from the Arkansas Department of Aeronautics, whose emblem is the “Great Seal of the State of Arkansas: with white bird wings added.  Interesting coincidence.

Wings and circles eventually led   to literature. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is pretty well standard for any high school English textbook, and it introduces the notion of carpe diem—in tandem with sexual seduction—right at the point where adolescent hormones are kicking into action. Seize the day, a perfect bridge between the elegant language of the 17^th century and the imagined seductions of teen-age boys: “Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with rough strife…” ( Marvell).

The other half of “carpe diem” fails to penetrate most young minds. Why are we urged to 

“seize the day”?  Because aging and death are inevitable, because the world changes and

 missed opportunities cannot be retrieved.  

“But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.”

I really feel those wings of change at my back this morning.  After 12 months and 216 essays, Megan and I have come to another “transitional time.” I am no longer newly-retired, and she is no longer unemployed.  I have plenty of fun research and writing projects to keep me occupied. And, Megan has her own exciting work and writing projects. I am about to lose my favorite cartoonist and writing partner, co-conspirator in movie getaways and book-buying frenzies.

Thirty-six topics left in the basket. 

Sources:

Image of Great Blue Heron in flight. PeterWallack. Wikimedia.   

Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress.” Poets.org.

Megan:

 The Ciiiiirrrrcle of Life

I really wish we hadn’t kept throwing back the hard topics. After two weeks of vacation and illness, I could really do with one like “On the Dog.” Except I don’t think “On the Dog” was a real topic from the book– I think we just chose it as our first essay because it would be an easy way to start the project. 

As my mother mentioned earlier this week, it’s been just over a year since we began writing on The Daily Theme.  When we started,I had a concern, which I revisited several times over the year – that when we finished the project, an entire year would have passed and I would have nothing to show for it but this website. And in my mind, my father is telling me that’s not very “In the Moment” thinking and my cynical side is chiming in to suggest that Nowhere is exactly where a year of living “In the Moment” gets you.   

Of course, a lot has changed – or rather, a lot has happened. I’ve reconnected with my childhood friends. I’ve spent more time with family than I have in the past 10 years combined. I experienced professional disappointment for the first time ever – getting turned down for job after job.  I’ve changed my diet (although, just as I wrote that, I took a bite of a very non vegan chocolate chip muffin), and taken classes.

I got a puppy, and regretted it, and then stopped regretting it. And if I were writing “On the Dog” today, it would have been a very different essay. Mom just shouted down to me that Bella dragged her purse into the loft, opened it up and ate her toothbrush all in the time it took to write the essay. But if that’s all the damage she caused, then we are having a good morning.

When we decided to try writing every day on the same topic, I estimated it would take just about a year to get through the 250 topics. I hadn’t factored in vacations and illness and days when we just weren’t in the mood. And job interviews.

 I couldn’t have known that one year to the day of starting this project, I would be offered a job (I thought it would happen sooner).  And now, I’m not sure what that’s going to mean for this website. I know I’m not going to be able to write every day. I want to be able to finish the 250 topics, but it feels more “Circle of Life” to just end it now.  Except that a circle never ends.

 

Topic 215: The Pleasures of Loafing

Carol:

The King of Loafers

I don’t read the Sunday comics much anymore, but I had my favorites when I was young. Many of the comic strips in our newspapers, no matter what city or state we lived in,  were syndicated by King features, a company owned by the Hearst corporation that not only distributed cartoon strips but editorial cartoons, puzzles and games.  Beginning around 1914 the King syndicate produces most of my favorites, including: “The Better Half,”  “Beetle Bailey, “ “Dennis the Menace,” “Family Circus,”and  “Popeye” (source: :King Features Syndicate”)
 

In grade school my favorite cartoon was Chick Young’s creation  Blondie, featuring the Bumstead family. Dagwood Bumstead is the king of loafers, his domain the couch, hammock and refrigerator. He has a job at J.C. Dithers and Company, and we do see him rushing off to work, rushing home from work. However, his default  mode is loafing. He has perfected the nap, stretched out on the sofa with an open newspaper covering his head. When he isn’t napping, he is enjoying the king of sandwiches, that gigantic meat, cheese and whatever pile of jaw-breaking proportions now known as the Dagwood sandwich.  Even with Blondie’s loving nagging and the distraction of two teen-agers in the house, Dagwood Bumstead always finds a way to indulge in his greatest pleasure, loafing.
 

Blondie first appeared in other cartoons before 1933, and apparently there is a back story to the Bumstead family. Blondie’s dimpled looks and yellow curls are reminiscent of the flapper cartoon character Betty Boop, and before she married Dagwood, her last name was “Boopadoop.” Dagwood was disinherited by his  wealthy family when he married Blondie, so he was forced to give up a life of privileged leisure for the middle class rat race. Apparently, the story of the romance and foibles of the Bumsteadd family was built over several years as part of the comic strip serial’s ongoing storyline, but I’m sure later generations of readers like me didn’t really know this history.
 

You don’t hear the word “loafer” so much these days. The more current expression “slacker” just doesn’t fit.  McSweeney’s magazine takes a fun swipe at Dagwood’s loafing in the Joe Moe essay “Excerpts from Dagwood Bumstead’s Intervention.” In the essay Blondie, neighbor Herb Woodley, Mr Beasley the mail carrier, and other Blondie characters have finally had enough after putting up with Dagwood’s eccentricities after 70 plus years. So, they conduct an intervention. Blondie hones in on the napping:

The only thing I hate—HATE—more than the eating is the sleeping. I’ve been reading some things online and I think you have undiagnosed clinical depression.  Listen, just because you’re asleep, it doesn’t mean that life stops.  You can take your naps on the couch, you can sleep in a hammock, you can oversleep before rushing off to work. But I have news for you, Dagwood: the world is still here. And you have to face it just like everyone else (source: Moe “Excerpts”).

I am trying to imagine a post-intervention, 21st century incarnation of Dagwood. He still prefers a life of leisure, but his Dagwood sandwich has shrunk to the thickness of pannini, meat and cheese replaced with heart-healthy veggie alternatives. He continues to enjoy the paper version of the newspaper even though Blondie and the kids have switched to reading on their laptops. You just can’t get the same coverage with  a computer that an open newspaper gives when you’re stretching out for a good, loafer-worthy nap before work, before dinner, before bed. ZZZZZZZZZ

Sources:
 “King Features Syndicate.” Wikipedia.
Moe, Joe. “Excerpts from Dagwood Bumstead’s Intervention.” McSweeney’s.
              
Megan:

I've spent the past 24 hours in bed, and that's the plan for the rest of the day as well. I had a lot planned for how I was going to spend my last few free days, and working my way through a Kleenex box wasn't close to being on the list. But that's what I'm doing.

Topic 214: Acid Tests

Carol:

The Dead Zone

 

I call the stretch of the I- 10 between Blythe and Indio the Dead Zone. It  peaks at Chiriaco Summit, which at 1700 feet altitude isn’t much of a summit unless you consider that you are climbing from 800 feet at Blythe in the middle of a desert and jockeying for position with massive trucks that slow to a crawl. I reckon I have driven The Dead Zone over 100 times since we moved to Arizona in 1983.
 

We called it the Dead Zone not just because of the arid terrain. Our radio reception would usually die out somewhere after Quartzite. We had a stack of tapes to counter the monotony, but often we would just talk, letting the conversation meander all over the place.
 

The first few years, we made the trip with two toddlers strapped into car seats. Going west, we usually broke the journey with a stop for breakfast in Blythe. As the kids grew older and quit napping, they would ask questions that often couldn’t be answered with our pooled knowledge which was long on language and literature and short on science and technology. How many times I wished we had a dictionary or a portable encyclopedia so that we could find the answer right away.
 

By the time the kids outgrew their car seats, I often made the trip without Marc to visit my parents and brothers’ families in southern California. If we left Thousand Oaks by 5 a.m., I could avoid the worst of the traffic crawling into Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley and the kids would sleep until we hit Blythe for a food and fuel stop. The Dead Zone seemed to stretch during those years, no conversation for the driver and no music if I forgot to pack the travel tapes.
 

The kids grew up, the vehicles changed and the technology evolved.  Our current vehicle has an I-Pod port and a CD player, but the conversations continue. Last August  Megan and I read essays out loud from a 1925 writing textbook. By the time we hit Blythe, we had committed to writing our own essays and creating a website. The first Daily Theme essay was posted on September 1, 2010.
 

On September 5, 2011 we found ourselves again traveling the I-40 back to Arizona after a family wedding. The radio was turned off, and conversation picked up after Indio. Did we know that Chiriaco Summit has a General Patton museum? Should we gas up over the border in Ehrenberg, or should we continue to the Pilot stop at Quartzite? My mind wandered ahead to the daily theme due the next day.“Acid tests.”  Hmmm.
 

I cheated a little and threw out a question to Marc. “So, how would you define “acid test”? Is an acid test the same as a litmus test?  If only we had a dictionary or an encyclopedia.”  A voice from the back seat suddenly announced, “According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, an acid test is….” Megan’s cell phone, not much bigger than a playing card, had become our dictionary thanks to the Internet.
The conversation eventually led us to Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, Tom Wolfe and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Like I said, we are short on science and technology and long on language and literature.
 

Megan says the satellite reception on that dreary stretch of desert between Indio and Blythe was strong and clear. Guess, I’ll have to find another name for The Dead Zone.

Megan:

I came back from California with a little cold, which has now transformed into a serious sinus infection. For those of you who may not know, I start a new job next Monday, and I'm pretty sure that if I call in sick on the first day, I will fail the litmus test for new employees (litmus test being interchangeable with acid test, according to Merriam-Webster) and this is the best I can do. 

Back to bed.

One Day More...

We are back from our trip, but we need a day to recover. 

We'll return tomorrow.