Point of View: Stiff Upper Quip
“Did you hear?” I said the other day to Mary, who was working at Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.
“Yes. Obama finally bit the bullet on immigration.”
“Well, there’s that, but they’ve found that 90 percent of social drinkers are not alcoholics! I had been hoping, though, to stand up at an A.A. meeting and say, ‘My name is Jack Graves and I still use floppy disks.’ ”
I suppose confessionals are good for one, though whenever I think of imbibing I remember what my late stepmother said when asked, after a 30-year absence from the Catholic Church, for a litany of her sins: “I’ve not done anything anyone else hasn’t done.”
And that was that. She wanted her epitaph to read “Lucette lived, loved, laughed, and left.” Which reminds me of Chris Walsh’s “Relay” column last week in which he quoted from Edith Piaf’s “Je ne Regrette Rien,” which my father and I used to sing with gusto, as well as “Milord.” My stepmother and father, mother and stepfather — not to mention my late mother-in-law — were like that, pretty much stoics all. Of course, they didn’t have to write weekly columns.
Ou sont les parents d’antan?
Nowadays, everybody’s wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Facebook is lousy with it, though I dutifully run through the postings before getting down to the more serious business of Scrabble, a game in which I’ve invented innumerable words they won’t allow, though it appears to me they allow equally arcane and innumerable ones of no more merit than mine. My 5-year-old granddaughter has just come up with one: aglet. I thought she meant eaglet, but no, she was right. Aglet is a word. It’s the metal point of a lace! I’ll keep her close the next time we play “Words With Friends” with Jeremy Samuelson.
But enough with the pouting. I should be stoic, laconic. Which reminds me that after describing an interviewee as such, I was taken to task for having intimated that he was lazy.
I didn’t mind it that he was a man of few words, it was just that I labored under the assumption (being rather green then and less aware than I am now that bigger photos can make up wonderfully for a lack of anything to say) that they were required if a newspaper were to exist. But, as the Facebook and tweeting age advances, photos may well inter print, as I think someone predicted recently.
If I didn’t have such a wonderful photographer, Craig Macnaughton, at my side, I might be worried by the handwringing on the wall.
But it’s Thanksgiving, and I oughtn’t to be fretting about the end of the world as I know it. I ought, rather, to be giving thanks for Kitty’s torte, an amalgam of concretized butter, sugar, and chocolate cake that, despite all my entreaties that it be removed from the house, remains, to be picked at, in the morning, at midday, and in the evening — an eroding whipped cream-topped cliff of soft and clumpy scrumptiousness that ultimately and inevitably slides down into the gullet, and out to the sea.
They say it’ll kill ya, but they don’t tell ya when!