From various websites:
Abraham Lincoln: "It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expressed! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!"
I was delighted yesterday to discover comic-strip kin I had forgotten about. As I've said, my favorite comic strip currently is the award-winning Zits with its minimalist drawing--such economical changes of facial expression with so little--and its brilliantly surreal imagination, as when Connie Duncan, the mother, is nag-nag-nagging the 15-year-old Jeremy about household chores, she is turned into this yappy little dog; when Jeremy has his head figuratively taken off, the strip makes it literal, his head on the ground or being carried. Yesterday had only three cels/frames: the first, Mom Connie holding Jeremy's oversized shoes: "Jeremy, how many times do I have to tell you not to leave your shoes in the middle of the living room??" Second cel: sitting up on the floor, Jeremy: "That's sort of up to you, isn't it?" Third frame: his dad, Walt, sitting on the other cushion reading a newspaper, terrified Jeremy sticking his head up from the couch, holding the cushion like a lid as if he were in a foxhole: "Never answer one of Mom's rhetorical questions with an existential answer." Obviously, as I remembered from past strips, Connie had used her [verbal] flamethrower--and that's how it's drawn, like an angry dragon's burst, though unnecessary to show this particular day.
For that matter, the hot temper is considered a family trait. I can attest to that from holidays crammed into our grandparents' house. Two days' pressure-cooking of "Play Nice: It's Easter-Thanksgiving-Christmas"; then Mom's younger sister and brother let each other have it like cat and dog, hissing, clawing, barking, biting, like many other siblings in many other families. Grandpa cussed and stomped outside, Grandma cried, and Mom became peacemaker, the temporary wreckage to be mended and patched over and over again with TLC because we were always a very close family in those days before geographically sprawling out the American way, all of us still big-time huggers. I immediately began campaigning to go home (off the farm, yes!) back to the peace and quiet of an only child that I have reverted to today in reclusion after too many courtroom years of scalded babies and raped old ladies.
William Wordsworth: "The world is too much with us: late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!/......../For this, for everything we are out of tune . . . ."
For that matter, in a milder degree, so that I play fair and not just pick on relatives, my younger sister and I have our heated differences. She's a very efficient businesswoman whom her partners give all the dirty work in taking care of affairs, so she's also a Control Queen (and I assure you the whole family was and is topheavy with strong women from Grandma and her sisters forward: all would've managed the Oregon Trail with no problems); but I am never a willing "Your Highness" subject for anyone, 16 years older, and clearly on the other, north side of the Grand Canyon generation gap, having my grandmother's and mother's values--and song tastes--and likes and dislikes. (Grandma and I loved cemeteries together, not scary places such as fatuous horror films show but historical with family trees and contemplative. Mom didn't.)
For that matter, the only person to stand nose-to-nose and scream back at Mom was my older sister, growing up. I was shocked when I walked into one of those fights because nobody dared talk back to Mom, as our cousins have told me. They might not pay any attention to their mother, but if Aunt V. said it--well . . . . But then I've often complained that my sisters got away with all kinds of behavior I didn't. When is that news? And happy irony: my older sister, a tomboy Daddy's Girl as I was a Mama's Boy, turned into her own nice version of Mom. I'll simply say we all share handsomely in the family heritage. Don't poke the bear. The bear bites.
The trait does give me pause. Mom didn't get it all repressed. My sisters when young had a cleaning job for my old piano teacher, one of the town institutions, the forever pianist/organist and choir director for our little church, who made me take my shoes off and wash my hands before a lesson in her immaculate home (plastic over the piano bench). I don't remember what she did, but my young sisters came home crying. At that time I was an excessively protective brother--now that they're 50 and over, I figure they can take care of themselves--and I still remember an instantaneous red fury, like that sudden, mysteriously startling hot flush nurses warn you about in certain medical procedures. (I'd say PM, but male menopause doesn't duplicate females'.) If Mom hadn't blocked me, I would've stormed down and slapped that lady silly. The physical totality of that anger shocked me, later helping me understand at least vaguely some aspects of criminality. So I've continued to work at restraint my whole life, out-of-control anger pointedly not one of my options.
The K. temper also makes me an impatient driver with very bad language. Mama was always appalled at my driving language, enough to gasp I was another person, the Mr. Hyde side, I guess, not Dr. Jekyll. She didn't know I admired her dad on that fine Czech accomplishment and wanted to model myself after him. She chided me whenever I lapsed into heated profanities: "A college English teacher can't find better words to express himself?! Really, G.D., you should be ashamed of yourself!" (Most children's mothers use first and middle names when upset; mine used both names all the time for all three of us.) By the way, Grandpa K. was more profane than obscene, as I have just said I am. Think of Bill Cosby's hilarious description of what he and his brother thought their names were from their dad's swearing at them. However, my last bailiff and our polluted language atmosphere have unfortunately infected me with the obscenity I love to hate, a word I once warned students was as brutal in sound as in meaning, the same word with its variants that makes a Colin Farrell interview an exemplary illustration of impoverished language shaming his native Ireland, the same word set that helps defile rap as the simplistic vulgarity it is. And, yes, I wrote "defile," not "define." Profanities, of course, deal with sacred names and matters, obscenities referring to bodily functions. A teacher, my mother almost always had clean language, though she was amused the way our next-door neighbor, Maxine P., turned "shit" into three drawled syllables, a mighty long diphthong, as I am amused by the same-word common French merde, roughly pronounced maired, translated in inocuous subtitles as "Egad," "Darn," "My heavens." And for those who like to be internationally obscene, the German is Scheiss, pronounced shice, which I heard some old farmers use Up Home (I've lived in Omaha for almost 30 years, the most anywhere, but one never loses his roots).
The title of this chapter refers to my mother's favorite bromide, verbal tranquilizer. She got it from Grandma. I didn't realize I could blame Lincoln for it until I looked it up today. Whenever I came home steamed from some stupider-than-usual college administrative shenenigans, was clacking my dentures like a disturbed bear over wanting to quit my job or assault a lawyer, from childhood till her death it was "This, too, shall pass away," which finally had as much effect as a placebo, i.e., none. In fact it annoyed the hell into me. My sisters laugh about Mom's "This, too," whereas I'm inclined to growl, hence my titular modification.
A final P.S.: I will go to my ashes an English teacher, training that really started in our grade schools where Uncle E.'s Grinchy Grimm Brothers stepmother, for one, would snap, "Kids are goats! Are you a goat?" Or "Bunches are grapes! Are you grapes?" or "People are hanged. Coats are hung." As a gradass--that's irreverence for "graduate assistant"--I had to learn well the part of teaching I detested because I took so much time at it, only to have students complain that I wrote more on their papers than they had, correcting papers according to strict handbook usage. While Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a bestseller as usage manuals have come back--signalling our illiteracy?--I used then and still consider the best to be the Harbrace College Handbook. Anyway, I'm the sort who insists on, e.g., "between" between two, "among" for three or more; not the choice many think sounds better, "between you and I," but the correct "between you and me"; "cannot help but" being a double negative no-no; distinguishing between my sisters as the older and younger; and--finally to my point here--capitalizing family pronouns when there is no possessive: Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Grandma; but not when the possessive occurs: my mom, her dad, his grandpa, their grandma. (Actually, it's a simple matter of proper and common nouns. Never mind.) In case it was puzzling you. Mom is partially responsible, happily, because she insisted on teaching diagramming from Hoenshel's Grammar, and, believe me, knowing parts of speech and sentence syntax/structure is essential to clawing through the court-reporting language thicket. I had to just wing it once over those thorny briar bushes when a witness kept getting tangled up but wouldn't quit: I think the sentence ended up a page and a half before the period, with lots of commas, semicolons, and dashes. Shut up, G. OK.
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