Metaphors and Similes and Such

   Sunday morning, 2 different current events interview  shows, 2 new expressions, new to me anyway.  The interviewer, leading up to a question,  says to the politician, "Well, after you've potted those plants, what is your strategy about.....?"   Less than a half hour later, another interviewer, addressing what he evidently regards as a minor  issue, says to the interviewee, "That's like the broccoli on the news plate." Must be they're focusing on the agricultural aspect, rather clumsily I would say.

Gone

  I read his obituary today.  I had been thinking of him just the other day when I was going through some old papers in an endless pursuit of  trying to organize.  I came across some  pictures of myself, back at a time when I didn't shy away from the camera.  I was remembering that one of my fellow teachers, back when the world was new, would comment that I looked like Ann Blyth.  I believed he meant it as a compliment, though the actress had been out of the spotlight for some time, and I wasn't sure how attractive she was considered.  Now I realize he made the comparison based on ethnic heritage. He was Irish, with a complexion so fair that a friend and fellow teacher used to say he looked pink, added to by the fact that he was immaculately groomed. 
    His obituary made no mention of the year or two that he taught at HVC, so I don't imagine he would have had any memory at all of anybody or anything  that was part of that experience. But my mind holds on to certain bits and pieces of the past in vivid detail.  I can picture the man as he was then, can see him clearly, hear his voice.  He taught English as did I.  We each had a class of ninth graders, and his room was just a few doors down from mine.  I should mention that he was very well educated and intellectual, proficient in several languages.  The ninth grade text included the poem, "The Highwayman"by Alfred Noyes, which I had been teaching for several years by then. 
    On a day when I had a prep period and he was teaching, I heard his voice instructing the class that the author of the poem was Alfred Noyes, but he pronounced it Alfred "Noi-yea."  I was appalled because I'd always pronounced the name "Noise."   I felt uneducated and provincial, wondering how I was going to undo the gaffe I'd made.  I could conceivably correct it for my current classes, but not for the years before.  My insecurity was relieved when I later found out I was correct.  Of course, I never told him, so all those students in his succeeding classes would hear an English author having his name pronounced with a French accent.  Oh, the horror!  Anyway, he left high school teaching and went on to the college level, so he presumably had no more interaction with "The Highwayman,"  "when the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas."

Love with strings.....

     "Gone, Gone, Gone" is a really touching love song that comes with a redeemable rider.    The singer (Phil Phillips) proclaims his undying love that will last long after his "Baby" is gone.  (Where she may have gone is undetermined.) But he says he'll be there to help at any time, offering even to shut down the city lights and carry her away from war.   He'll do anything for her and love her forever.  But listen carefully--there's a lesson to be learned valid for all times.  In the midst of his proclamation of eternal love is a verse:  "Give me reasons to believe That you would do the same for me.  And I would do it for you."  
    Nothing in life is free:  you don't get anything for nothing.  There's always a price, even if the buyer is willing to pay. 
    BTW    I think this may be the only song ever written with lyrics that include the word "poultice."

Lost in the World

  No wonder people succumb to senility, or Alzheimer's, or dementia, or whatever you want to call it.  For a person used to thinking and at least gaining a minimal understanding of how things function, living in a world where explanations exist is no longer possible, at least for some of us.  I'm not referring to trying to gain a rational explanation of human behavior, which is and always has been based on whim and fancy and ambition and such.  I'm talking about regulated practices and standards and cause and effect and precedents.  We joke that we need lawyers to untangle legalese, the language intended to obscure interpretation.  But it's not really comical when you think you should be able to grasp a concept but realize you lack some piece that prohibits comprehension. For example, medical billing:
    I know healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Hillary-care, and all that preceded present health delivery systems is a tangled and complicated web, fraught with codicils and exceptions and secondary insurance, co-pays, co-conspirators, etc.  But why can't a normal human being understand what would seem to be a simple step. A surgeon's fee appears on a statement as $9200.  Medicare allows $1450, and pays $1135, leaving a balance of $815 to be paid by the patient, who hopefully has secondary insurance to pay another portion.  That's a simple process to understand, except the part where the initial billing is $9200.  I assume the doctor has to set a high number so that he will be reimbursed a sufficient amount to justify his expertise.  But why does that figure need to be so high?  Those who are setting the percentages know the actuality of it; no one is thinking that there is any chance that Medicare is going to reimburse the full amount, so why play with such an inflated stack of figures?  This is just one of an array of scenarios that I don't understand, and can only believe that
I could comprehend if I really wanted to, but it's not worth the effort.  Isn't the breakdown  of cognitive thought a symptom of senility?  Or do just the elderly make that connection, and don't bother to connect synapses.
   

Mom and Mama Cass

   Some time back in the 70's, Mama Cass was a guest on one of the talk shows, Mike Douglas maybe, Dinah Shore, I'm not sure which.  Her mother was in the audience, and the host turned to her to ask what she thought of her daughter's liberal and controversial  lifestyle.  Her mother, probably in her 50's, answered that she was fine with it, and only wished that she herself was alive to enjoy it.  I remember thinking it was an odd choice of words, since there Mom was, looking very alive.  I suppose she felt that only the young are capable of really enjoying life.  I understand now more than then.

Mr. Bojangles

     Mr. Bojangles had a dog for 15 years until its death, and after 20 years he still grieved.  I had a dog, Lassie, for 11 years and after more than 50 years I still grieve.  She became my dog when I was 8 years old, and died when I was 19.  We believed it was from complications of a rabies vaccination, which was in its early stages of distribution at the time.  Lassie and our other dogs absolutely loved bring indoors in the evening, and they would stretch out and try to be invisible when night fell and it was time for them to go out to their doghouses.  My mother at that time did not want dogs in the house during the night. I don't know the reason; it was just the way things were.  Lassie had been sick for a week or so, not wanting to eat, though otherwise with no visible ailment.  So she was allowed to stay in the house overnight, and it was cold and wintry.  After I finished my college homework, I let her out before bedtime, and stood by the open door so she could come back in.  But on her way back from attending to her business, she stopped by the door where I was standing and looked at me, and then, so unusual for her, passed by to go into her doghouse.  I remember her making eye contact  with me before she continued on.  In the morning she would be dead.  I can still see her looking at me; she had brown eyes.

Mad Writing Skills

    I thought of a new career or at least temporary vocation for myself, but it was shot down.  I'd thought I could enter the job market as a translator, not for another language per se, but as a translator of cursive writing.  Since it's not going to be a focus of the Common Core curriculum, and is destined to be no longer taught, it seems there might be a need for interpreting cursive script in case some of the newly educated wonder what those historical documents actually said, or how to unlock the mystery in that cache of old love letters uncovered in somebody's attic.  But alas, my hopes for a new career were dashed when it was pointed out, correctly perhaps, that the secrets of cursive could be unlocked by computers, and more efficiently than I would be able to do.  Moreover, reading further I find that perhaps while teaching the laborious task of writing cursive may become obsolete,  schools may teach only how to read it. So I turn my thoughts of writing to another format:
      I was intrigued by an obituary notice I read in last week's paper. Obituaries used to be standard, formulaic documentation composed by the funeral directors in concert with newspaper editors. But increasingly, the prose of obituaries has taken off in widely disparate directions.  I was told once, by someone in a position to know, that contemporary obituaries have often been written by the deceased.  That would account for the listing of survivors including beloved  pets, even lizards, as appeared in a recent obituary.  But the death notice that caught my attention described the deceased as having died "while resting alone."  He loved lighthouses and daschunds, the obituary went on, and appeared as a stoic and ascetic loner with  a haunting air about him, "a walker between worlds, neither dead nor alive,"  suited to life as a lighthouse keeper or in residence at an Irish monastery.  Very compelling and fanciful impressions of a life, until the illusion-shattering line that, "His mother was not among those he held dear."  According to the notice, his mother has been dead for some years, so the motivation for  the jarring note will never be clear, at least to the uninvolved reader.   I'm not sure I could compete with the force of whoever wrote this particular obituary, but it makes me think maybe, for a start, I should construct my own.  We may have no control over what is said about us after we die, so this could be our last chance to set the record straight.