eyes that often seem capable seeing things not visible to men
Any sort of disturbance, whether man-made or elemental, is of immense interest to a goose, and geese watch the world through eyes that often seem capable of seeing things not visible to men. I have always envied a goose its look of deep, superior wisdom. I miss the cordiality of geese, the midnight cordiality. And they are the world’s best drinkers, forever at it. —
Postscript to “The Eye of Edna,” April 1962; Points of My Compass, p. 14
Part of the series of Haiku inspired by from In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers (2011, Cornell University Press) by Mary White. This book was compiled by Mr. White’s grand daughter and while I am grateful she pulled all these together in one book, I am not sure I don’t consider this cheating.
uncanny – was like nothing that had ever come to the world before
It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before. Flourishing industries rose and fell with it. As a vehicle, it was hard-working, commonplace, heroic; and it often seemed to transmit those qualities to the persons who rode in it.—
“Farewell, My Lovely,” ca. 1936; Essays of E. B. White, p. 162, and Farewell to Model T; From Sea to Shining Sea, pp. 16–17.
Part of the series of Haiku inspired by the book In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers (2011, Cornell University Press) by Mary White.
This book was compiled by Mr. White’s grand daughter and while I am grateful she pulled all these together in one book, I am not sure I don’t consider this cheating.
children screaming with delight link generations indestructible
Adapted from a paragraph in the EB White essay, Once More to the Lake.
Mr. White wrote: Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain.
My grand daughter was in town for a short visit and we were only able to squeeze in a quick trip to the beach.
The weather did not cooperate and instead of sunshine, sand and surf, we had gray skies and gray waves.
For May along the coast, the temperate was cool and the water was warmer than then air.
My grand daughter didn’t care and no matter how much we explained the time crunch and the uninviting weather, she was determined to see the water.
We walked out together along the walkways through the swamps.
She kept an eye out for alligators.
We got to the sand and got out of our shoes and barefooted, we walked down to the water.
With your toes in the Atlantic Ocean, I like to say, you have the entire country in back of you all the way to the Pacific.
My grand daughter didn’t mention the gray sky.
My grand daughter didn’t mention the gray waves.
My grand daughter didn’t mention that is was somewhat cool if not cold there on the beach.
She took my hand and walked into the water and wave after wave washed over our feet.
The occasion bigger wave would splash in and she would grab my arm and jump and I would lift her out of the way and set her back down.
And she would scream with delight.
Standing there, holding my hand, she looked out at the horizon.
vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about
According to what I read and watch, a BOMB CYCLONE is heading for the East Coast of the United States.
Sounds awful.
Whenever bad weather is predicted I think of two things.
The first is that I am glad to be out of it.
That simple sentence, for me, has two meanings.
Living in the Low Country of South Carolina and yet to experience a hurricane, the weather here for the most part is what you might call salubrious (a wonderful word and I put it to you that if you can work it into your conversation today you will feel better) or favorable to or promoting health or well-being.
The proximity to an ocean that won’t go below 50 degrees helps keep most of any weather away that might include the word, “freezing.”
For the most part its warm or at least warmer here than where I grew in West Michigan.
Somewhere in my mind is a passage in a book of all old rich man, sitting in the kitchen of his mansion saying something like, “182 rooms and all I want is the warmest one.”
The other meaning to “glad to be out of it” for me, is that for 20 years I was in the news business and in the news business there is no business like the bad weather business.
After I was on the job about 6 months, creating and managing a website for a local TV station, I got a call that I needed to come up with a way to a list any school closings online.
This list also needed to be able to be updated by the schools themselves.
And if I could somehow figure out how to send out an email with the list of school closings to anyone who wanted it, that would be even better.
“When?”, was my response.
“Tomorrow”, was the answer.
Understand that just a little more than 20 years ago, none of this information was online.
There was no online.
The most fun of my job and creating an online news environment was that I never would say that something couldn’t be done because nothing HAD been done and we did not know what couldn’t be done so we did everything.
And somehow the next morning we had school closings online.
More recently I was involved with the online video streaming of news.
As EB White wrote on the News and weather, “radio [News] people, Nature is an oddity tinged with malevolence and worthy of note only in her more violent moments. The radio [News] either lets Nature alone or gives her the full treatment.
The full news treatment for News Online involved me a lot.
Weekends, after hours, all hours, I was up and online and making sure that the weather got the full treatment.
Now, I am glad to be out of it.
The other thing I think about is an essay, again by EB White.
In fact, it is the essay where that the earlier quote about Nature being an oddity tinged with malevolence comes from.
It is an essay of Mr. White’s that appeared in The New Yorker magazine on September 25, 1954 and is included in the book, The Essays of E.B. White, that you can read online at archive.org.
The title of the essay is, “The Eye of Edna” and it tells the story of Mr. White following Hurricane Edna as it came up the Atlantic Coast.
In 1954, hour by hour radio coverage of a hurricane was something new for Mr. White and the world at large.
I cannot read this essay without comparing the news coverage of 1954 with the news coverage of 2022.
What I think when I make such a comparison is that there is nothing new to the news here.
Mr. White tells how a reporter on the scene of the storm was asked about road conditions.
The hurricane rains and ocean storm surges had been predicted to wipe out local roads.
“They were wet” reported the reporter, who, according to Mr. White, “seemed to be in a sulk.”
In the essay, Mr. White recounts his own efforts to prepare his home for the coming storm.
In the essay, there is this sentence, “The croquet set was brought in. (I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about.).
The oft-quoted-by-me writer Alain de Botton, used the phrase, I began word-painting.
Starting with the thought a hurricane and wind tossed trees and such.
Then add a croquet set.
Throw in windows, car windshields and maybe someone’s forehead.
Then thinking about how to paint scene this with words, I don’t think anyone could do better than “I was extremely skeptical about the chance of croquet balls coming in through the window, but it presented a vivid picture to the imagination and was worth thinking about.”
our history’s parts only way can be lost is we choose to lose them
I am not sure when I became aware of the actor Stanley Tucci.
Much like Ward Bond and Thomas Mitchell, Mr. Tucci seems to have been in everything and nothing at the same time.
He is always there.
I am not sure when it was but I do recall looking him up to find out who he was, and I think this was back in the days of if you wanted to look up a movie you grabbed a paper back (possibly the thickest regularly sold paper book in the store) copy of ‘Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide’, a copy of which was always laying around the TV in my house, and you looked up the movie and hoped you could figure out who was who from the short cast listing.
My Dad was a minor movie buff and he loved that book.
“4 stars for that?”, he would yell or “COME ON MIKE, it’s FOUR STARs with Clark Gable!”
He also loved to read the description of the 1962 remake of State Fair with Pat Boone, pause then yell, “BOMB.”
He would laugh and laugh.
It is amazing that back in the days of over the air three channel TV’s to remember how often movies were on TV.
TV shows cost money to make.
Movies were already made.
Television was flooded with movies.
The movies of the 40’s and 50’s.
The black and white era.
Every station had a block where an old movie could be run.
Bill Kennedy at the Movies from Detroit.
WGN’s Movie Night from Chicago.
My Dad also liked to listen to the CUBS on WGN radio from Chicago.
If there was a good movie on the night before, Lou Boudreau and Vince Lloyd would talk about it during the basbell game.
There wasn’t much else to watch and everybody watched the same thing.
Wait you say, if this is before cable TV, how did we watch WGN in Grand Rapids where we lived?
You caught me.
This didn’t happen in Grand Rapids.
We were one of those lucky family’s that had a summer place in Grand Haven, Michigan.
We lived right on the shore of Lake Michigan.
The first thing my Dad would do each spring was hook up a TV antenna high enough to pull in the stations from Chicago.
I watched the late movies from WGN all summer long.
If you watched old movies and you wanted more information the only source you had was that Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.
And at some point, I looked up Stanley Tucci.
I remember doing this as I can see the book in my hands and hear myself saying ‘Stanly Tuckee – touchi – ha whaaa??’.
If I look Mr. Tucci up in the Wikipedia and read through his list of movies or his ‘Filmography’ nothing really pops out at me until you get to The Big Night in 1996.
If you haven’t seen, it is worth the effort to pirate to watch and enjoy and hear about the dish called timpano.
Since the Big Night, Mr. Tucci, for me, entered into that ‘Ward Bond, Thomas Mitchell’ phase I mentioned and now he seems to be in everything and everywhere.
And Mr. Tucci has published a book.
Actually he has a couple of books to his credit but a new one has just come out.
When I worked in a bookstore nothing, well, almost nothing, made me more angry that anytime a celebrity would bank on their name and publish anything but a bio.
Bill and HILARY Clinton have now published novels.
Sports figures who I would figure could not construct a basic English sentence to save their lives have published novels.
OH COME ON.
Quite a few celebrities can get around this by publishing cookbooks but again, oh come on.
Is that something the world needs?
After 20 years of working for a book seller, library and publisher let me tell you about cookbooks.
Any cookbook with ONE, that’s right, ONE good recipe in it is a good cookbook.
99% of the cookbooks in the world are BAD cookbooks.
Now Mr. Tucci has published Taste, My Life Through Food.
This way its a bio and a cookbook.
And it is a delight.
Mr. Tucci can turn a sentence or at least he can with his editors help.
But the book has a secret ingredient.
Readers all know that part of the mystery of reading is how did the author intend to have this read.
What sounds, what phrasing, what and where are the pauses.
For the most part, each reader makes up their own mind.
For example, take Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I have never been able to listen to any audio version of the Lord of the Rings because of the way Gollum is re-created.
One, the voice is nothing like what I imagined and I won’t waste my time.
Or, two, the voice is spot on and that is just tooooooooo creepy to be listened to..
And you never know when that Gollum will show up.
Plow your way through the book, “The Long Season: The Classic Inside Account of a Baseball Year” which is known for being one of the first, inside the locker room – tell it like it is – baseball books written back in 1959 and all of sudden the author-player tells how he went through a phase driving everyone nuts in the St. Louis Cardinals locker room by talking like Gollum.
“Has he got handses?”
“Can he hits baseballses?”
I pass over those film adaptations of Lord of the Rings except to say I really wish the filmmaker had taken the time to read the books as I am not sure what the movies were based on.
Another example is Charlotte’s Web.
If you like this book please try, just for a gift for yourself (let me know if you need it emailed to you) to find the audio version.
The audio version read by EB White.
There is a lot of magic and poetry in the sound of White’s voice and to hear his phrasing and pronunciation is the purest form of this book you can imagine.
Keep in mind that when the manuscript for Charlotte’s Web arrived at the publisher it needed NO editing of any kind.
So back to Mr. Tucci.
It must be because of his recent show on CNN that this works.
I watched that show with my wife and when I read his book, I can hear Mr. Tucci.
I can catch his phrashing and such.
Mr. Tucci also has one of those voices that is both distinct and yet doesn’t stand out except to say it is uncommonly common.
My reading of Taste: My Life Through Food is like listening to the audio version because I hear it in my head as I read.
Goofy I know but there it is.
I doubt I will try many of the recipes in the book at this time.
But I will read them.
I also will read about Mr. Tucci’s adventures growing up in America.
We are about the same age and I also can remember WANTING if not getting and eating a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich.
Also at this time I am spending a lot time thinking about food and families and culture and culture expressed through food and familys.
The Gullah Culture wants to presever its culture though food,
The SouthernFoodwaysAlliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Mr. Tucci sums this up in an E PLURIBUS UNUM on food when he writes:
Losing a beloved family heirloom is a very real personal loss;
they’re things that cannot ever be replaced or re-created.
But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes.
Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time.
Yet unlike a lost physical heirloom, recipes are a part of our history that can be re-created over and over again.
The only way they can be lost is if we choose to lose them.”
I want to eat it all.
My Mom’s Thanksgiving Stuffing Recipe … how it reads…This is what the recipe says ….
