Yellow and Pink Think

 

Maybe little children make the best philosophers. William Steig may have thought so. “Children are genuine,” he said in an interview, and his much-awarded books for children deal with serious issues of life and death and everything in between: ambition, fulfillment, love, abandonment, family, restoration and magic. (Be careful what you wish for. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble) In 1984, at the age of 77, he published Yellow and Pink, one of his lesser known but, I think, most important books.

Yellow and Pink are two articulated wooden dolls who have just realized that they exist. In 28 pages, they pit their wooden brains against the great existential questions: Who are we? What are we? Where did we come from?

Pink studies the remarkable structure of Yellow and decides “Someone must have made us.” Yellow looks at the same evidence and insists they are too intricate for a creator. He’s never seen such a person, so he must not exist. “I say we’re an accident, somehow or other, we just happened.” Pink laughs. Being able to reach, turn, breathe, walk “just happened, by some kind of fluke? That’s preposterous!”

Yellow reaches for “time and chance” to explain the existence of sentient dolls. “With enough time—a thousand, a million, maybe two and a half million years—lots of unusual things could happen.” He envisions a walking guitar, an arrow-head tree, a snake with a goofy caterpillar face, a five-legged, four-armed creature with two heads. “Why not us?”

But Pink wants specifics. Yellow thinks hard about how legs might have come about. Ah! A chunk of wood fell from a tree and split on a rock. Arms, fingers and toes? After eons, a lightning strike forms them.  Eyes? Wrought by woodpeckers. Or hailstones.  But how do we see and hear through such holes? “Because that’s what eyes and ears are for, dummy. What else would you do with them?” says Yellow.

      Then, for a second doll, the process repeats, maybe over a million years, and produces the chubbier Pink. How he and Yellow got their colors is the next challenge. Each of them must have rolled through a puddle of spilled paint, yellow for Yellow and pink for Pink, with precise drops of black or white to make their buttons. Yellow changes the subject. “But why are we arguing on such a fine day?”

Most of Steig’s heroes (and villains) are animals in a fairy-tale world where children can marvel at Pearl the pig, Sylvester the donkey, Dr. DeSoto, a mouse, Amos and Boris, a mouse and whale, and even the ogre Shrek. Yellow and Pink stand out as not animals, but not exactly human either, though they deal with human dilemmas and related questions.

The punch line in the story is the appearance of “a man who needed a haircut.” He shambles and hums out of tune as he comes to claim the dolls. My guess is that this man is the fairy-tale version of Steig himself. Some old portraits online might be taken as evidence of his needing a haircut. I wonder whether he heard this from a wife, from time to time.

The book-man has a moustache, but a later photo shows that apparently by the time he grew a moustache, Steig had developed a shiny dome. Thin evidence, I grant. But he was a creator, and what he knew of the process of creation might well have inspired the questions of Yellow and Pink. He drew his characters boldly, just the way he wanted. But do they recognize him? Tucked under their maker’s arm, Yellow asks “Who is this guy?”

Pink doesn’t know.

If I had to guess which side of the creation- versus- accident debate Steig would come down on, besides his own creativity, I would draw on the dedication that precedes the story.
“To some recent arrivals: Jonas, Jonathan, Nathaniel, Max, Paige, Will, Serena.” Sounds like grandchildren to me. New little human beings coming into the world can make you think about the big questions. In a few years, they ask the perennial “Why?” And they insist on an answer too. Maybe little children are the best philosophers.

What Are You Wearing?

 

Homemade and hand-me-downs were the clothes of my youth, with the occasional new item from Sears. I never thought about it much until high school, where other girls (the cool ones, anyway) exulted in Villager dresses and Bobbie Brooks suits. Or was it the other way round? Didn’t matter. We couldn’t afford either one.

       I made my own wedding dress. When my husband started working for a company that staged big fund-raising banquets, I made a slinky blue nylon halter dress that held its own pretty well with the gowns for which the wealthy flew to Atlanta.

       Now a grandmother, having retired all the giant tee shirts and homemade maternity pants and having husbanded our income to a comfortable depth, I could probably afford any clothing that strikes my fancy. But the expensive designer outfits are striking something else.

       The last high-end mall fashion magazine that crept into our mailbox was filled with models who looked like heroin addicts draped in rags. The latest came with a New York newspaper. New York City! World fashion capital! Well—the models look a bit less desiccated, though we suspect a couple of the women might be men.

Facial expressions range from misery to a sort of hostile desperation. Didn’t models used to smile? Like they were happy to wear the lovely clothes? But the desolate faces go with the clothes. “You’d have to pay me to wear that stuff,” was my first thought. On further consideration, “You couldn’t pay me to wear that stuff.” Aside from the realization that many models appear to have forgotten their undershirts, the outfits scream, “I started with tacky and carried it to a new dimension.”

This is from Chanel. Chanel! They've gone from Coco to Coocoo.

I can duplicate these "shoes." I need only sweep up after the dog and scoot through with glue on the soles. Swiffer chic.  

When Mrs. Harris went to Paris, she wound up with a gorgeous, flattering gown. That was close to the year I was born. I'd like to buy something gorgeous, but I guess it's not happening in my lifetime. They may have to bury me in something homemade. I do have some extra fabric somewhere.                                                                                                                       

Baal, Right on Target

 

At last, the children who have all had to go naked since they stopped the alphabet-jumble-wheel on “DAWAALAINM” (Do Anything With Anybody As Long As It’s Not Marriage.) have a haberdasher in Taregret stores. Who can forget the kindergartener who tied her shoes properly for the first time, looked up, pumped her fist and cried, “I’ve got it, Parental Unit. I’m Queer! So I can’t wear these ordinary sneakers any more. Or any of the clothes in my closet.” Or the little person whose finger stopped on the third item on the children’s menu and announced, “Hey! I’m Gay! So my board shorts will simply not do. I’ve got to have a swimsuit that looks like a girl’s and has special construction to mash my wee-wee down.”

        Across the country, progressive, virtuous mothers shed a little tear and said, “Oh, my brave darling, I’m so proud of you. I must post this milestone on social media.” A hitch arose when the children shed all their sexuality-limiting clothing and were forced to go around naked. Enemies of self-expression refused to allow the unclothed children on their platforms, thus snuffing out the Actual Lives of these little heroes.

        “Oh, Baal. Oh, Moloch, anybody but that Creator guy, help us!” cried the mothers. The prayer trickled downward. The gods stroked their horns and thought.

        “Ooo, ooo, I’ve got it,” piped up Baphomet. “You know I’ve got a deal with this English guy who uses my image on tee shirts and pretends not to believe in Satan, but quotes him anyway? Because that way he can tell anyone who objects that they’re stupid morons for thinking he’s a Satanist? Hahahahaha.” All the assembly leaned on each other and guffawed until they gave a final squeak and wiped their eyes with their tails.  

        “That’s it,” bellowed Baal. “You get with him, and we’ll get Taregret interested. We already have an ‘in’ there, you know.”

        Thus was the prayer answered. At last there were complete wardrobes with a wealth of accessories for the DAWAALAINM. Naked no more, they could wait happily for the day when they could proudly show their surgical scars on social media. No longer would they be oppressed by the perfectly healthy conventional sex organs they were oppressively born with. Progress!

 

Festivus Comes Early in the Plague Year

 

Since I’m turning stinking 70 in the Plague Year 2020, and there’s no telling where I might be during the approaching Festivus, I shall start early with the Airing of the Grievances.

I was a Brain in high school. Not in the “in” crowd, not a cheerleader, never on Homecoming Court, never up on the latest fashions and not good at styling my hair. But could I ever ruin a “curve,” especially in English class. When we got test papers back, someone would ask the teacher, “Will you grade this on a curve?” She would answer, “Sorry, there’s no curve. Someone got 100.” And Harold Eastwood would roll his eyes and say, “I wonder who.” (This is not the grievance. I liked Harold, and his teasing was always good-natured.)

The grievance attaches to the NMSQT. Not an identity, it’s the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Standardized tests never scared me, and I filled in those little rectangles with confidence. I did all right.

Then, at the end of the year, there was one of those ordeals they called an assembly. One of the school officials announced the thrilling news that a sophomore had taken the NMSQT and earned an honorable mention. Great news for our school, he intoned. Most sophomores wouldn’t even try the test, but here we had a brilliant, brave young man who not only took the test, but got Honorable Mention, something almost unheard of in the history of NMSQTesting, which is ever so challenging, and we can hardly believe we have such an achievement in our student body, and on and on. He ended with “Wealsohadawinner,DianaHeman.” I didn’t think anybody heard it. So, yeah, it was true, I was chopped liver.

At the end of the day, I was walking to my locker. A teacher stood on the little porch of her “portable” classroom. She was apparently the one person who heard that last sentence. She called out, “Congratulations.” I stared for a moment, thinking, “Yeah, sure,” but didn’t say anything. I regret that I was rude to her. I guess she has a grievance too.

Fugu Fugue, or Blowfish Blues

      No doubt in idle moments of Covid-19 quarantine, your thoughts have turned, as did mine, to this question: Are the blowfish that live in Florida waters the same as the fugu that are eaten with great ceremony in Japan? And now it can be told. Yes. Yes, they are. 

They’re all Tetraodontidae, which means they have four big ol’ teeth that can crunch through shells, and almost all have tetradotoxin, which, according to Cuteness.com (Really. Cuteness.com has lots of info about blowfish.) is more than a thousand times as poisonous as cyanide, and one fish-worth can kill 30 people. And my brothers and I used to eat the meat with some regularity. Well, maybe that’s not the best word. Frequency? Anyway, we ate it, and we lived.

            In Japan, chefs train for three years to be allowed to serve fugu. They learn to trim off the skin and scoop out the innards without puncturing anything. The poisonous bits get their own trash bowl. And people pay hundreds of dollars to eat slices of raw fish so thin they look smeared on the plate, or crispy fried chunks. A character in a novel I read said that eating fugu made the diner feel high, because he had skated so close to death and come through alive. That’s assuming he did come through alive.

          Here in Florida, you can hardly avoid catching blowfish in places like the Banana River on the east coast. The Air Force base where my father was stationed had a boathouse where officers could check out a modest fishing boat for free. Remember that phrase. When we kids were there for summer visits, he’d take us fishing. Fish were free food. We caught from angelfish to zebrafish. (At least that’s what we called them. They weren’t the cute little aquarium fish that turn up on a Web search.) And whiting. I think we had that right. They’re common and OK to eat. And, of course, abundant blowfish.

          As oldest sibling, my brother got the job of cleaning the fish at the kitchen sink. He snipped the tails into zigzag points or little scallops. And he got his fugu training. It didn’t take three years. It was, “Here’s the knife, here are the utility scissors, don’t punch a hole in the liver.” Three seconds maybe? The graduation speech: “Yes, it’s poison, but I think it will be all right.”

          The edible bit of the blowfish is two ovoid shapes on either side of the body, looking like chicken oysters. I had to look up the name, but chicken oysters are the yummy round bits in indentations on the back of the chicken, usually overlooked in carving. You can pop them out with your thumb, and do they ever taste good. The blowfish blobs are pale grayish and have a network of tiny veins on the surface. They taste like… frog legs, maybe. No matter how hard you try, frog legs do not taste like chicken.

          My husband’s family fished at every opportunity. They were probably within a mile of our boat on every outing. His father told them to throw the blowfish back. Then one day they were at the home of an alcoholic cousin who went about preparing for them, with his shaking hands, a nice mess of blowfish. My future father-in-law kept quiet, the boys ate the blowfish, and everybody lived.

          Fugu still kills a few hundred people in Japan each year, supposedly because of uncertified rogue chefs. I guess they charge less. But you wouldn’t eat their fugu any more than my adolescent brother’s or my husband’s alcoholic cousin’s. You wouldn’t, would you? It’s been 60 years since I ate Banana River blowfish, and I feel like running out to get my stomach pumped. The thrill of having avoided death is way overrated. Anyone for a burger?

The Florida February Farm and Fetch Workout

It’s February in Florida, and time to get in shape with the Farm and Fetch workout.

Attire: Drag out that purple sweat-wicking workout shirt. You gotta wear it some time, you big faker. Leave the casual skirt on. It’s too much trouble to change into workout pants, because who knows which drawer they’re in anyway. Slip into Xtratuf rubber boots, which seem to be well-enough thought of in the rubber boot community to command a list price of $85, for crying out loud, but you would only buy on super-double-clearance-closeout on Sierra Trading Post. And work gloves, because your pansy hands wouldn’t last five minutes. Straw hat; it looks authentic.

Equipment: Three or more overgrown raised garden beds, which you really should have cleared out and planted in January, or at least covered so they wouldn’t have quite so many tenacious weeds. A solid garden rake, the new one you bought when that hardware store went out of business, because the one that’s older than you are snapped its handle in two right where it went into the tube-ish bit on the rake head and you’ll be darned if you’re going to scrape the rotten wood out around the rusted screws. A bucket. I think there’s one out there. A dog, for whom Fetch is the greatest good. A toy that used to be red canvas but is now a blob of slobber and dirt. (I told you you needed gloves.)

Moves: Smack the rake down into the dirt and pull. After five seconds, pick up disgusting toy where dog has dropped it at your feet and is now bouncing about like a drop of water on a hot griddle. Throw as far as you can without putting it over the fence where the unpleasant neighbors live. Rake for ten seconds while dog lopes back with toy.

Pull out astonishing mass of green sprouts and roots and drop into bucket. Throw toy. Rake. Pluck. Throw. Rake. Pluck. Throw. Repeat until right shoulder burns, and you know you’ll be hearing from it tonight. Survey beds and decide it’s not too bad. Tell dog, “One more throw, and then we go in,” which she understands and agrees to because, boy, is she tired.

Recovery: Get inside, get something to drink. Sit down at computer to write up a report, and do it right now before every muscle in your body seizes up entir

Fire and Lutefisk

Winning souls for Christ with fire and sword was the strangest concept I wrestled with during my Road Scholar trip to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. (Except for some of the unmarked, two-handled shower controls. Inscrutable.) A book they told us to read, The Northern Crusades, had me hollering down the corridors of time at the founder of the Cistercian order of monks, “Bernard, what were you thinking?”

     Bernard of Clairvaux. You picture him like this, right? Humble. Saintly. Give him points for writing about loving God because of Who He is, and for reforming the monastic movement, but he also wrote the book on how soldier monks can knock the (literal) demons out of pagans so as to prepare them to hear the Gospel. Wherever crusaders might go, he said, they should fight the unbelievers “until such a time as, by God’s help, they shall be either converted or deleted.” Um.

     Bernard wrote the rule book for the Knights Templar, of Holy Land crusade fame, and the Teutonic Knights adopted pretty much the same constitution. The Teutonics started out as a small group in Palestine. Then some German nobles decided they needed their own version of the Templars and started enriching the humble hospitalers with cash, castles and property. Just in time, they had a trained and disciplined army ready to subdue the pagans, and, oh, by the way, take over some new territory to the east. A bishop or two spoke up: “If they had come to strengthen the Christian faith… they should do so by preaching, not by arms.” Well, yeah, the Bible says a thing or two about that. But the Pope said go, you’re official crusaders, and your sins will be absolved.

     The conquests are a long story. Some of the “missionaries” went full Old Testament on temples of scary four-headed idols, tearing down the statues, chopping and burning what were by all accounts beautiful buildings. But they brought the Good News: join our church, or we chop your head off. On occasion, the pagans chopped and burned them right back.

     Now Latvia and Lithuania are mostly Roman Catholic, and there are churches all over. The tour guides who show them to you still say, “Christianity came to us with fire and sword.” And Estonians say, “We are the least religious people in the world.” I couldn’t decide whether that was a boast, a joke, a neutral fact, all of the above? The country is nominally Lutheran. I’d go for the coffee and lutefisk over the death threats too. Well, maybe not the lutefisk. But I vote for doing things the way God says in His Book. More potlucks. Less mess. And maybe a faith that’s more than nominal.