Whatever it costs, I'll pay it

A few weeks ago, I was driving home from work and I had a flashback, a moment of deja vu. Although it was early June, I couldn't get my mind away from a late July day in 2008, when my children were little and the company where I had worked for a long time was about to shut down, after an extended post-acquisition period of attrition. I was among the last remaining employees. I was apprehensive but optimistic about the future. My children were old enough to get in and out of the car on their own but young enough to sit on the floor and play with Legos. There wasn't much left for me to do at work except wait for the whole thing to shut down. It was a pretty carefree time. And the crape myrtle was in full bloom.

*****

I drove home from work on Monday, thinking about lots of things, but mostly about why crape myrtle is spelled so oddly. It’s crape myrtle season again, and I have mixed feelings about this. And unorthodox spellings bother me, too, so I looked it up to find out what the hell. It was comforting to learn that others dislike the “crape” spelling and that apparently “crepe” is accepted usage now. Now, however, we have two different spellings of the same word, and this bothers me too.

But let’s get off the subject of spelling for a moment, even though it’s one of my favorite subjects. Crepe myrtle (I’m going with what I believe to be the better of the two spellings) trees are beautiful, big and colorful with a lovely shape; and crepe myrtle season is the very pinnacle of summer. So what’s not to love? Why the mixed feelings? It’s because once you reach the pinnacle, there’s nowhere to go but down. Crepe myrtles are the beginning of the end of summer.

This is a crepe myrtle tree in my front yard.
I have no idea why this picture is so dark.
It might be a Google Pixel planned obsolescence thing.
Or I might have a dirty lens. Either possibility seems likely. 

*****

There’s always a turning point, every summer. There’s a day in late July or maybe very early August, when the haze lifts and the air cools and it’s just as hot in the sun as it ever is in summer, but the breeze has an edge that reminds you that fall is coming. This happened on Wednesday--Wednesday was the turning point. Summer will return for a bit--it always does--but after the turning point, it always feels like borrowed time. 

Eleven summers since that long-ago crepe myrtle season that feels like last week, and they go faster every year. There are no dog days, no lazy days of summer. It always feels like summer is on loan and the balloon payment is due soon. And it is, because every minute of life is borrowed. The interest rate on summer is just higher.

The broccoli shouldn't mess with me, is all

I came home today literally sick from anxiety. It's a long story. Sometimes someone kicks you when you're down. Sometimes, they kick you hard, with both feet, which are wearing steel-toed boots. And then they step on you, just to make sure you felt it.

And I felt it. So came home and I vacuumed like I had a grudge against the carpet, and then I chopped some vegetables like I was Inigo Montoya and the broccoli had killed my father and then I finished some work, the kind of work that you never really finish, and I was still sick. Shaking, sick to my stomach with a blinding headache and a lump in my throat, I put on a suit and went swimming in the almost too-warm pool. I was exhausted after 20 laps and I wanted to do 30, but I had to stop at 24.

I felt calmer afterward. Cooler, and tired enough that the anxiety seemed a little bit far away from me, as if I was observing it but not actually feeling it. But I remembered it.

*****

I had to work super-early this morning, and I thought I wouldn’t sleep but I did. I left the house before dawn and the sun came up very suddenly. One minute it was dark and the next moment I was shading my eyes against the sun. That wasn’t meant to be a metaphor, but I suppose it could have been because today was a better day. It’s not all OK now, but it’s better.

I take a picture of the Capitol every time I walk past it. I didn’t quite walk past it this morning (we drove instead of taking Metro), but I saw it down the street from HHS, and I took a picture of the creamy white dome shining against the pink-gold morning sky. A lot of stupid shit goes on in there, but it’s pretty and I suppose that’s all that counts in a picture.

U.S. Capitol and U.S. Botanic Garden, from the
Hubert H.  Humphrey Building, 6:30 AM, July 16, 2019. My Google Pixel 2 takes OK pictures,
but it didn't really capture the creamy shine of the dome glowing in the early sunlight

*****

That was Monday and Tuesday talking. It’s Friday now. Things are looking up a little bit, but I can still see the abyss from here if I turn around and look behind me. So I won’t turn around or look behind me. Problem solved.

I’m working from home today and just finished some research, so I’m taking a break to write, and then I’ll stop writing to write some more, only it’ll be the writing that I get paid to do. Later on, I’ll read a few pages of a book that I’m almost finished. It’s tragic and terrible and bleak, but I’m rationing those pages because I’m not ready for it to end. Maybe right now I should think about reading something that isn’t tragic, terrible, and bleak. Maybe I should get out of the house. I’ll do that later.

*****

I finished the book and I miss it already. And now it’s Saturday, the hottest day of the summer so far--almost too hot for me. Almost. Summer swim season is almost over and the pool is almost too warm and I’ll be on vacation in almost a week.

It was a bad week, and I took the Lord’s name in vain more times than I care to think about, so before I go to the pool, I think I need to go to Confession. I need forgiveness and I need to forgive. That last part is harder. Confession starts at 4 and it’s 3:22 so it’s almost time to go. Until next week.

Dead Language

I looked back at some old posts, and realized that I seem to write a lot about handbags. I don't know what that's about. I mean, what is there to say, really?

So let's talk about books instead, because you don't get enough of that around here. I just finished Motherfocloir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language, by Darach O'Seaghdha. I got this a long time ago, and forgot about it, but after my trip to Ireland, I was curious about the Irish language movement and remembered that I had this.

Apparently, there are fewer than 100,000 fluent, everyday Irish speakers in the whole of Ireland, north or south, with maybe a few hundred thousand more people around the world who speak or understand the language to varying degrees. It's a compulsory subject for most Irish schoolchildren and has been for some years, so maybe those numbers will grow. Even for the majority who don't speak Irish at all, it's still a fact of daily life in Ireland. Signs in most Irish towns are printed in two languages--Irish and English; and lots of official announcements--on trains, for example--are spoken in both languages, too. So if Irish ends up dying out, it won't be because Ireland didn't try to save it.

*****
Motherfocloir is hard to describe. The word focloir, by the way, means "dictionary" in Irish; and the title is meant to be a clever, attention-grabbing play on another long word beginning with "mother."  Anyway, it's kind of a book about the language, with lots of vocabulary lists and definitions, broken up with commentary and observations about how the language has evolved and how language influences thought and culture. So I suppose it's something of a dictionary, but it's much more of an extended commentary about what language represents to a culture and how it influences the thoughts and ideas of each individual who speaks or writes in that language.

The Irish language is a political issue in Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, taxpayers question the wisdom of spending so much money and effort (signage, compulsory education) on a language that only a handful of people speak. In Northern Ireland, Irish is one of many bones of contention between Unionists (those who want Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom) and Nationalists (those who favor reunification with the southern counties and independence from the U.K., which makes the word "unionist" a little confusing). The 1998 Good Friday Agreement provides for some official support for the Irish language, but the Nationalists want to see more mandated official use of the language, rather than just the "if enough people want to speak and read and write in Irish then I guess we won't try to stop them" approach outlined in the Good Friday Agreement. Of course, this isn't the biggest problem that Northern Ireland has right now, with a messy Brexit becoming more and more likely.

*****
A few weeks after my trip, this article showed up in my newsfeed, and so I read it. The writer explains that the name gaeltacht--the Irish word for the Irish-speaking places in western Ireland--translates roughly as "the Irishness." And that's really how I would describe Motherfocloir, too. It's about the Irish language, but it's more about how the Irish language shapes the Irishness, and about whether or not a distinctive Irish identity would even exist without the language.

Maybe a person who speaks Irish is more Irish than a person who speaks only English. But that's a troublesome idea, especially for an American. My mother-in-law is a U.S. citizen, but after 46 years in the United States, she still hasn't really mastered English. She gets by, and she tries--she has taken classes on and off for years, and she does crossword and word search puzzles to help her to recognize more English words. But even though she can carry on a conversation, she'll never be really fluent in English. I think she feels less American because of that. There's an American frame of reference shaped by idiom and wordplay and jokes that she doesn't get. And I'm sure that she thinks in Korean. But she's American. It says so, right on her passport.

*****
Toward the end of Motherfocloir, O'Seaghdha cites C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as a book that he enjoyed but disagreed with. I suppose lots of people, especially non-Christians, would disagree with The Screwtape Letters, but O'Seaghdha specifically complains about Lewis's "zero-sum take on Christianity and his bitter dismissal of romantic love," a criticism that made absolutely no sense to me. So now I'm re-reading Screwtape, and finding that although O'Seaghdha is dead wrong about Lewis's views on Christianity and romantic love, he's dead right when he writes that "Great writing is never just about one thing..." Motherfocloir, though not great (especially when you're comparing it with Screwtape or anything else that C.S. Lewis wrote) is very good. Mostly because it's not just about one thing.

Deadlines

The weather is uncertain just now. Very hot with a pretty clear blue sky but a stiff breeze and a threatening dull heaviness at the edges of the few clouds.

It's July 4th. My son's graduation party is today and I am hoping against hope that the threat of thunderstorms ("severe," of course) and flash flooding will not materialize, and that the party will remain outdoors and dry. But we are resourceful and adaptable; and we will party, rain or shine. Rain or shine.

*****

July 5th, and the party was a pretty near unqualified success. Not totally dry, but the rain was so much less, and so much less severe than it could or should have been, given the forecast. The thunder rumbled and threatened all afternoon, but by 5:30 or so, no one was paying any attention anymore. We had tents, and the tents kept everyone pretty dry during the intermittent sprinkles; and we had towels, and the towels dried the furniture when it got wet. It was so humid that chips from a freshly opened bag wilted, their crunch gone. I don’t even want to think about how dirty my floors were just 24 hours ago, and I came a little too close to running out of food. But everyone ate, and the house and yard are back in order now, and the party was a success. It’s sunny and bright today.

*****

It’s Saturday and I’m looking at my backlog of blog posts and half-finished Google Doc drafts, and realizing that I should finish and publish some of this stuff. I’ve read and written about a bunch of books and when you read my posts about them, you’ll know that the posts are not chronological and do not reflect the order in which I read the books. Right now, I’m reading Say Nothing; and when you’re reading that book it’s hard to do anything else. Every time I try to get out, it pulls me back in. I’ve been off from work since Wednesday, first getting ready for the party, and then having the party, and then cleaning up from the party. After a morning at a very hot swim meet, I wrote some swim team stuff, and then swam and read, and now I’m here doing this, “this” being writing about all of the other stuff. Sometimes I wonder why I do it--it’s just another thing to do, you know?

*****

And now it’s Sunday. After an earlier-than-usual Mass and a quick swim, I spent most of the afternoon fighting a PowerPoint presentation. I won, in case there was any question. PowerPoint is my bitch. I’m back to work tomorrow. The downtime is over, and now it’s three weeks of full-on round-the-clock work and summer swim team madness until our week at the beach and the bittersweet summer wind-down that is August. The days will get a tiny bit shorter, and the stores will be full of school supplies and football-watching snacks and clothes suitable for the crispness that fall people love to rhapsodize about on Instagram. But the pool will still be open, and the daylight will still last into the evening, and I’ll still be able to wear flip-flops all weekend long.

It’s 8 PM and I want to finish working but I have a deadline, and the deadline is tomorrow. But you know what? I actually set that deadline, which means that it’s pretty flexible. I'll get to all of the unfinished drafts eventually, and I'll finish the presentation pretty soon. For now, I think I’ll go read my book. Goodnight for now.