… you really should consider seeing UD‘s nephew Daniel Fleming in Northwestern University’s Die Fledermaus, starting tomorrow. He’s the lead. In this picture he’s kicking up his heels and making an ass of himself.
His parents are both veteran actors; he’s got acting and singing in his blood. I love his warm, self-deprecating personality; plus he laughs – with seeming sincerity – at UD‘s jokes around the seder table. I think he’s probably a comic genius, and you can catch him in his early years at UD‘s own NU (she was an undergrad English/journalism student there) on Friday February 28, and Sunday, March 1.
On a long soggy walk today through Garrett Park, the town I grew up in and moved back to twenty-five years ago, I come upon four police cars and a dump truck. The authorities are once again forcibly removing large abundant junk from the front yard of a man I’ve known since elementary school. Indeed, one of the cops routinely sent out for this abatement procedure is also an old school friend of both mine and the junk guy’s — the police dispatch him hoping a familiar face will make the operation less ugly. Less threatening to the junk guy.
Who, given the complexity of human beings, turns out to be a lot of things besides an angry (KEEP OUT signs are everywhere on the lawn) white male. For decades he’s been the town handyman, circulating in his rusted gray pickup and mowing lawns, repairing machinery, whatever. Although his appearance is a little unnerving – à la late-stage Howard Hughes – he is the soul of sweetness and does much of his work around Garrett Park for free (even though almost everyone here is wealthy). He did quite a bit of raking and mowing for us ten or so years ago and we’re still waiting for the bill.
Garrett Park is a very small town and I’ve known it intimately forever. My old friend Bennett’s mother still lives across the street from the handyman, who helps her out with everything all the time. The house on one side of the junked place burned down a few years ago, and a remarkably large number of townies donated money to get the family in it back on their feet. Rebuilt in a chic woody eco sort of way, it recently sold for about a million dollars, and UD figures the new owners would dearly like to see the end of the handyman.
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And how does ol’ UD, notorious for energetically picking up trash on her walks, feel about this town eyesore, kept by a belligerent old acquaintance?
I always say to Mr UD, “When you get old, everything about you gets worse.” He disagrees, in his pollyannish way; but you know what I mean. The pack rat the junk guy used to be is now, age 65, a mad hoarder, made madder by what he sees as neighborhood and police harassment. When you stand in front of his small house and really contemplate his junk (cars, car parts, mowers, trash cans, plant containers, tables, chairs, rakes, snow shovels, radios, tires, piles of jumper cables, loungers, a trampoline, fake flowers), you perceive the expressivity it represents. None of it is placed arbitrarily. This is an aesthetic gesture — something to do, I guess, with his life work — the gathering up and staging of his accumulation, over many years, of unwanted objects from all of us. We’d walk by its display in MOMA with a shrug.
Ja, ja, of course I want the police to take it away. It makes you laugh, but after the giggle subsides you’re basically appalled. No one should have to look at that.
Like a lot of aesthetic gestures, it has plenty of aggressivity against the world behind it. But it also expresses that thing all of us are desperate to express. I. Exist. Here. This is my private history, my personal truth, my hard-won, hard-salvaged ship.
UD (over breakfast): Caroline from across the street asked me the names of various plants in our new garden, and I had to explain that I mainly relied on the landscaper and didn’t know what was there on a … granular … level…. GRANULAR! I think this is the first time I found granular while conversing! It just came out. GRANULAR!!
MR UD: Very nice.
UD: It’s like orthogonal. (Snobby Brit accent:) That matter is orthogonal to the point in question…ORTHOGONAL… Wait. Wasn’t there some hilarious Supreme Court back and forth about orthogonal?
MR UD: ?????
UD(Checks cell phone.) Here it is! (Reads.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging – CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what? MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh. JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that. MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal. MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right. JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh. (Laughter.) JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem. (Laughter.) MR. FRIEDMAN: I should have — I probably should have said – JUSTICE SCALIA: I think we should use that in the opinion. (Laughter.) MR. FRIEDMAN: I thought — I thought I had seen it before. JUSTICE SCALIA: Or the dissent. (Laughter.)
I felt – as I so often do at that particular point – deep emotion, a heart-stopping sense of the beauty of the piece and the pathos of us all. Not sure why this transition gobsmacks me. I suspect it’s because the conversation the fugue establishes has an emotional break here. Here we’re not just dancing back and forth with one another, with ourself. Here we are letting the tears flow. Post-Bach, a walk with the dog through new parts of our forest, where we stumbled on a deer skull.
