This is Bad Behavior. It’s dangerous, inconsiderate, and could have provoked a serious road-rage incident. Do NOT try this at home especially if your state has lax gun laws.
But I am laughing my ass off and applauding these guys; I wish I understood Chinese. Go Mazdas!
Music playing: My own “Hummer” of course!
(Thanks to NPR for the story.)
The morning was rainy, but the skies cleared in time for a perfect fall day, and the yard and beautiful old building of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture filled with pickers. Veterans of the scene who’ve been playing for decades, kids with adorable miniature fiddles, folks from out of town and folks we play with several times a week. A great concert, opening with Rafe Stefanini, a brilliant old-time fiddler and banjo player from Italy, and his wife and daughter, and continuing with local and national stars. So crowded that you couldn’t find seats; I went back out into the yard to play some more and people were saying they could hardly get through the auditorium to leave. I should have taken more photos but I was too busy playing.
I walked out of my apartment building today and saw a black car waiting, a corporate hired car with a number placard hanging on the rear window and the driver talking on the phone. It brought back a rush of memories, of leaving for a business trip on a beautiful day, trundling my rollaboard downstairs and giving instructions to the driver so he wouldn’t get stuck in traffic on the way to JFK. Of watching Brooklyn go by on the other side of the tinted window, thinking about the jams I wouldn’t be playing at that night, the people I’d had to put off seeing, the day in the park I could have had.
I looked at that car and felt so happy that it wasn’t for me, that I wasn’t leaving, that I wasn’t going to be a spectator to this picture-perfect day, in it but no longer of it, a harried traveler rather than a content resident. All-expense-paid trips to California sound wonderful until the umpteenth time you spend an entire day looking out a conference-room window (if you’re lucky enough to be in a room with windows) at the California sunshine, hoping the meeting will wrap up early enough that you can do something fun before the obligatory work dinner that will drag on for hours.
I’ve had fun on business trips. Sometimes I’d manage to slip a free day into the schedule, or arrange my time to leave an afternoon off, or duck out of dinner. One afternoon in the early years of the dot.com boom, a lunch presentation at a Silicon Valley company was canceled. Everyone remained in the conference room, opening their box lunches at the conference table and making mind-numbing business small talk. A quirky software genius (who later quit the company) looked up at me and said “Let’s go to Kepler’s.” So we blew out of the conference room and drove over to the famous bookstore on El Camino in Palo Alto, loaded up on books and ate wraps sitting outside in the sun.
(Side note: That was the day I bought my first Neal Stephenson novel. The genius came up to me on line at the register and put a copy of Snow Crash on top of my pile. “I’m so done with cyberpunk,” I said, and he said, “Trust me, just read it.” So I started it on the plane home and was rolling my eyes all through the high-tech chase scene that opens the novel, thinking, this is just what I’m so sick of. Then it turns out that the tech jockey is actually a pizza delivery guy trying to beat the 15-minute delivery guarantee, and I’ve loved Stephenson’s work ever since. Even shared a podium with him at an awards ceremony, but that’s a long story.)
But I am very glad to no longer be in that life. To enjoy the city where I live and start to see other places in a new light — such as Seattle, a place I’ve visited many times and never once enjoyed. Seattle is, for me, endless hours in the atmosphere of forced conformist brilliance at Microsoft. Of driving an ugly rental car around the ghastly suburbs — Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland — thinking, “So this is why Courtney Love is so angry all the time.”
I walked past that limo, bought some groceries for dinner, and picked up my dry cleaning — five dress shirts, three weeks of business dress. The fiddle player I usually play in the park with on Thursdays is busy, so I’m going to cook some dinner, learn some tunes, maybe go to the park. The limo was still there when I came back from the store, and I walked past it again, glad I didn’t have to drive off from behind dark windows, happy to be part of the beautiful day.
Madeleine L’Engle is dead. I think it was through the Scholastic Book Service (whose deliveries were one of the very few bright spots in the hellish years of third, fourth and fifth grades) that I first got a copy of A Wrinkle In Time. It was the blue mass-market paperback pictured at right, shorter (in height) than the standard paperback. I’ve long since lost that copy, and I now have the edition with the scary cover that regyt mentioned in her post.
Anyway, I adored that book (with its thoroughly unthreatening abstract cover) although parts of it were pretty scary. I had a crush on Meg but I liked Calvin anyway and I wanted to meet Mrs. Who. I read the sequels when I found out they existed. I read other young adult novels she’d written (The Young Unicorns), and then her adult fiction (A Severed Wasp, in particular, which I’ve reread several times).
About ten years ago I was at work one day, in the World Financial Center, and a co-worker looked up from the paper as we were all eating lunch and said, “Hey, Madeleine L’Engle is signing books over at the Trinity Church bookstore.” (One good thing about that job was that I was not the only person in the room who said “Really???”) So we walked over and met her, and I bought a copy of The Other Side Of the Sun, which she signed for me. We chatted with her for a while as the lunch hour ended and the store emptied out, and she was every bit as kind and engaging as I’d imagined from her books.
The inscription, more than just a signature, is lovely, but what charmed me the most was when she flipped to the first page of the book and corrected a typo (“sandpipers stalked” had become “sandpipers talked”). “This edition embarrasses me,” she said. “It’s full of typos. The kind that spell-checkers don’t catch.”
Her writing always spoke to me, was always an escape. She wrote realistically about children and teenagers. She wrote about worlds in which it was good to read lots of books and have an inquiring mind. Her books were full of gentle humor and a deep respect for learning and knowledge. She was identifiably Christian, but always gentle and compassionate and open-minded, never spinning off into pathology the way writers like C.S. Lewis often did. In my early teenage years, the Catholic Church reversed what had been a gradual course of liberalization and turned sharply rightward under John Paul II. The religious authorities in her books were a welcome relief from the mean-spirited intolerants who characterized organized religion in my life. Her books were deeply moral, but never judgmental, and encouraged thinking rather than condemning it. The first time I saw the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in person, it was her books I was thinking about.