Sleepy Hollow

Last weekend we rented a car and drove upstate, where we happened upon the village of Sleepy Hollow and its churchyard cemetery. A sign out front promised a Halloween reading of the "Legend," and inside the cemetery, we found Washington Irving's tombstone, where I risked my clean criminal record leaping over a low, locked gate to snap a picture. Oh, and just so you know, I tried to persuade the headless horseman to pose, but he thinks he's unphotogenic.

On a way more serious note, I was really moved by the cemetery. Some of the 18th and 19th century graves are passionate and terrible (in the old King James sense of the word) in a way that stoic, contemporary stones just can't touch.

Retail Speak

Doctors and lawyers have their own professional jargons, and it seems to me that retail store employees do as well. When they want you to step forward to the register, they rarely just say “next!” Instead they suck in a lung-full of air and call out, “Will the subsequent guest please make their way directly forward to register six under the green sign on the far right, please!” The sheer number of syllables is supposed to sound polite and professional, but instead it just feels scary. You’re never sure if you’re the one being addressed. “Am I subsequent?” you wonder. And when you finally make it to the register, the cashier barks out cryptic questions and commands: “Who was helping you today?” “Don’t you know that if you buy five pairs of socks, you get the sixth free?” “Credit or debit?” “Press the green button!”

All of this is bad enough, but yesterday I was innocently buying catfood and had a brief exchange with my young, female Petco cashier that, I think, takes the prize for weirdness. I can’t make any sense of it, but maybe you can.

Cashier: Will the following guest please step down!
Jane [placing cans of catfood on the counter]: Hello.
Cashier [smiling]: Hi, how are you today?
Jane: Fine, thanks.
Cashier: Your total comes to $9.89. Do you have a Petco card?
Jane: Well, not yet...
Cashier: Okay, let me just give you this application form. You can fill it out and ret—
Jane: Well, I actually have that form at home. I just haven’t filled it out yet. I’ll bring it in next time.
Cashier: [smiling and shaking her head] I’m gonna strangle you! You better bring it next time!
Jane: [gathering bags hurriedly] Ha, ha! Right!

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Help! Is this something people actually say to each other? Am I too old and uncool to get it?

Someday My Prince (and other fables)

Laura Anne is an eleven-year-old girl from the seaside English town of Siddick who falls in love again and again. But the boys she goes for are almost incidental to this story. After all, they’re just dumb boys, and most several inches shorter than her. It’s not them she cares about. (Well, okay, a little.) But mostly she’s in love with being in love. That’s the premise for Someday My Prince will Come, a short indie documentary directed by Marc Isaacs and narrated in rhyming couplets by Laura Anne, whom the film follows over for a two-year period. I saw it recently at IFC and loved how funny and sad it is, how it draws you in without being the least bit cutesy or knowing. I hope it’s released on DVD so you can see for yourself what a lovely job the director has done.

Seeing it got me thinking about how much I appreciate stories about children-- and why I do. Two of my favorite movies fit this profile: Truffaut’s Small Change and Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. I don’t think it’s purely because I’m a sentimental sap. I hate most media portrayals of kids, their use as parrots or props on television, or dolled up on film like fat robots programmed to giggle. Thank God she hasn’t made her way to the screen, but I refer you to the “work” of Anne Geddes, or to those packs of Hollywood cutie pies with just the right hair and lisp. I’m not even really wild about real children (except when they’re related to me—then I’m fanatic).

But from an artistic point of view, stories about children—good stories—provide us with the pleasure of dramatic irony. (Remember back to English class? That’s when we know how the story will end up, but the characters don’t.) For the child, the world at hand is monumental; it’s all she knows. But we’ve been through all that and survived. We know the ending, and it’s our confidence that in all probability she'll also make it through childhood (with its many slings and arrows) that lets us watch with pity and even a kind of protective love. It’s that gap—between her short view and our long one— that gives these stories their enjoyment. We want to save her, not just from hurt, but also from the hopeful melancholy of her innocence, and carry her swiftly to our safe, adult vantage point, though, of course, what we’ve got is no safer. No one, least of all some junior-high prince, flew down and airlifted us out of childhood. So the fictional child has to live through it, too: loved (if she’s lucky) but essentially alone. That’s what the good storyteller does—tells the world as it happens, without trying to fix it. And this is where Peter Pan’s creator J.M. Barrie got it wrong. He wanted to spare his characters from having to grow up, not knowing that for most of us, adulthood is precisely the vantage point we need to make sense of the most wonderful parts of childhood.

Next time I want to talk about a few authors who handle the themes of children and childhood well. So be thinking of books (and movies)! I’m most interested here in how childhood is communicated to adult audiences, though I'd love to hear about any children’s book or movie you love.

Crackers!



One of my students recently returned from her brother's wedding in Kyoto and brought me a box of Japanese sembei (a.k.a rice crackers). These particular sembei are called "The Seven Gods of Good Fortune," a name that works out to be a tad ungainly in English, but who cares! Each of the teeny, half-dollar size crackers is encased in its own special package, which gives them an unexpected distinction (kind of like carrying each of your pennies in its own separate coin purse). It also drastically slows down the feeding process for those of us used to opening boxes of loose crackers and scooping them to our mouths steamboat paddle-style.

And, surprise! This being a Japanese snackfood, the packaging also allow for an explosion of cute characters. Each package depicts one of the seven happy gods--both front view and rear view (if you flip over the cracker).

Corresponding to the little characters are seven flavors: butter, cheese, shrimp, seaweed, shiso, curry, and hot pepper. I had fun tasting and guessing. Some, like the butter and curry, were obvious from the first whiff. A few others, like the shiso and shrimp, were less recognizable to my Western palate, dulled by years of imbibing Lousiana Hot Sauce.

If ever the NYPD needs a butter-sniffing cat, Bunn will be their man. As I type this, he is nosing around at the open cracker box in search of the fragrant butter cracker, but also trying to see if he can squeeze the entire box over his head. That's his idea of heaven: a box of food blinding his vision while he stumbles around bumping into things. Sounds about right.


Hard at work with another investigation