Hearsay

Something occurred to me while I was out mowing the lawn yesterday:

Although hearsay evidence is inadmissible in every court of law—including Judge Judy’s—it nevertheless provides the bedrock for all religions.

The true believer not only swallows hearsay whole but pins his hope for Life Everlasting on it (not to mention his equally fervent hope for a postmortem cashing-in of Brownie points). He’s got everything riding on hearsay when it comes to his so-called immortal soul, yet would scream bloody murder if burned by hearsay for a forty-dollar judgment in small claims court.

Here’s what Thomas Paine had to say about the powerful, pervasive, and often pernicious form of hearsay called “divine revelation”:

[A]dmitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person alone. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.

To which I append a resounding “Amen!” as well as my belief that there are not nearly enough Doubting Thomases in this world.

Strictly as a postscript, here’s another prime example of human paradoxy from Steven Wright, master of the deadpan one-liner: Have you ever noticed how many people standing in line to buy lottery tickets ... are smoking?

It took me a while to grasp the Orwellian Doublethink at work in that scenario—people believing, on the one hand, that they have a good chance to be among the small percentage of lottery players who are going to win, and just as sure, on the other hand, that they will not be among the small percentage of cigarette smokers who are going to get lung cancer. Man, you just gotta love dodo sapiens.

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Nature's nasty ways

I think Nature is a mean Mother. A leering, spiteful perpetrator of nastiness aforethought. How else to explain the three cases-in-point below?

Case 1. Sweet Little Helpless and Hapless Baby Bunnies

We had a female rabbit living under our deck. A pretty cottontail who, for easier entry and exit, courteously gnawed the merest amount of material from just one diamond-shaped opening in the deck's latticed skirting. I'd see her from time to time—in broad daylight, no less—sitting or lying in our backyard. Sometimes the wind would swirl her thick fur as if to punch the last bit of breath from me with her beauty.

Then came the day my son was scattering clumps of poorly mulched grass after mowing the lawn, and accidentally raked away the clump emplaced by momma rabbit to conceal her nest—a shallow circular depression smack dab in the middle of the yard. Daniel looked down and saw a half dozen squirming baby bunnies, bald and blind. Susan and I hurried out to behold their inexcusable preciousness before he reconstructed the covering as best he could.

It started raining a few hours later, rained all night, and was still raining when I checked the nest the next day, fearing the babies might be flooded. They seemed okay, but I called animal control anyway and was told no worries, mate: Rabbits commonly situate nests in open areas; the mothers never come around during the day; if the babies get too wet she'll move them.

Well! All well and good. Nature knows best. The three of us felt enormously relieved—until about noon the following day, when I looked out the kitchen window and saw a huge, brown, frigging cat hunched over the nest and blatantly polishing off a fresh-meat meal.

Now, I ask you. Wasn't it a nasty bit of business on Mother Nature's part to make mother bunnies plant baby bunnies out in the open—and leave them unattended from sunup to sundown with nothing more than a thatch of grass for protection? Especially when sturdy wooden decks featuring predator-resistant skirting stand thirty feet away? I mean, that's just mean.

Case 2. Our Dog's Bottomless Pit

I am one-hundred percent certain I could kill our dog by ripping open a 25 pound bag of Kibbles 'n Bits, spilling it all over the floor, and saying "Bon appetit." Our dog seems innately unable to register, much less obey, a message of fullness emanating from her tummy zone. She would eat until her insides explode, I'm convinced, and with no discernible diminution of speed or urgency right up to detonation. What is the deal with that? How come our dog's eating-light glows eternally green? And listen, this is more than theoretical: She got hold of a large loaf of discarded cornbread one time and ate until she collapsed. Wiring her brain like that strikes me as kinda mean. Even gorging lions have the sense to push away from the table and leave a little carcass for the hyenas.


Case 3. Romantic Love Between Human Males and Females

Permit me to tell it like it is: Men equate romantic love with yee-haw love; women equate it with cuddle love. And each expects the other not only to supply the brand of romantic love desired—both regularly and profusely—but to really, really want to. Could anything be rigged more effectively for failure?

I rest my case.

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Screw you, Proust

Now see, this is exactly what I was talking about in my recent post entitled My personal approach to literature:

Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was two steps away, now wore that expression in which the desire to make the person who is talking be quiet and the desire to maintain a look of innocence in the eyes of the person who is hearing neutralize each other in an intense nullity of gaze, in which the motionless sign of intelligence and complicity is concealed beneath an innocent smile, and which in the end, being common to all those who find themselves making a social blunder, reveals it instantly, if not to those making it, at least to the one who is its victim.

It's an excerpt from the Marcel Proust (rhymes with "roost") novel Swann's Way, the first of seven volumes composing In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. Remembrance of Things Past) and the reason I won't be reading the other six.

My copy comprises 444 pages of sentences about as numbing as the one above. The translation, from the original French, is widely hailed as masterful (so I can't blame the translator), much as the entire work is widely acclaimed as a masterpiece—even, in some literary circles, the finest novel of the twentieth century.

To which I say talk to the hand.

I've been using Swann's Way as a combination self-imposed penance and prescription-free sleep aid, and boy does it get the job done. The sheer monotony of page after page (some nights just page) of Proust's labyrinthine prose must surely be as effective at eradicating venial sin-debt as it is at rendering me senseless.

And it's not just the book's torturous syntax; it's the action—or more precisely, the inaction. Prime example: Proust took the better part of two full pages explaining how the narrator's family sat down for lunch an hour early on Saturdays—at 11:00 rather than at 12:00—such that Saturday visitors showing up at, say, a quarter past 11:00 would be not only surprised to find the family elbow deep in dining (on the basis that the family usually lunched at noon, remember) but constrained to cool their heels until the meal was done.

Hoo-hah! Almost two full pages devoted to inspecting microscopically that fascinating (I'm being facetious) detail. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry. What I am sure of is, Proust bores me out of my gourd. For which he roundly gets rejected. By me.

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My personal approach to literature

I read every author purely on one-on-one terms. Doesn't matter who. He or she either has something to say to me or doesn't.

I read every author as though I were a member of his or her contemporary audience; not as a student in a classroom accepting greatness as a given and swallowing spoon-fed thematic insights from the swooping-airplane of an instructor's hand.

I read every author with one simple condition in place: Entertain me, inform me, challenge me, inspire me, shake, rattle, or roll my soul. Be ye literary giant or novice novelist, do one or some or all of these things—or suffer utter rejection by me. Bitch.

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"Maybe the dingo ate your baby"

I've written before about the problems I have with Wheel of Fortune (see April 2 post entitled I have big problems). Well, now I have one more:

A few evenings ago, the ostensibly thoughtful Pat Sajak thoughtlessly said, "Maybe the dingo ate your baby," in response to something a contestant uttered. The audience found the remark typically so-darn-cute. But I didn't find it at all funny.

I found it, once again, insensitive, offensive, inexcusable.

See, there was a baby that got eaten by a dingo one terrifying night in August 1980—a baby who drew breath and was adored by her parents for just nine short weeks, and whose name was Azaria Chamberlain.

Azaria's disappearance from a camping site at Australia's Ayers Rock and the wrongful incarceration of her mother, Lindy, for her presumed murder were documented in the 1988 feature film A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep.

I'd seen that film and therefore immediately recognized the provenance of the "dingo" line so famously—and, judging from the overwhelming online evidence, admiringly—delivered by Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine Benes in a 1991 episode of Seinfeld called "The Stranded." It so startled and offended me that I wrote the following piece for my copywriting portfolio, illustrated with a grainy, slightly out of focus black-and-white photograph of a baby and a dingo-looking dog sitting in a kiddie car.

Not even from the mouths of babes!


"Maybe the dingo ate your baby," Elaine derisively rejoins in an exaggerated Aussie accent. And of course the live studio audience splits its sides at yet another outrageously hip Seinfeld riposte.


Only me, I'm gaping slack-jawed at the boob tube, dwelling on the outrageous part. As in outrageously offensive.


Because, I'd seen that movie too—the one the Seinfeld writers had obviously seen—where Meryl Streep plays a real-life Australian mother whose real-life little baby got dragged from a camping tent by a real-life dingo. Dragged into the night forever.


And sitting there, I could easily imagine, if only in some grossly thank God rudimentary way, the magnitude of that poor woman's horror—could infer its submerged mass from the visible part containing my unrelenting fears for my own children's safety.


How could anybody who knows that story (no urban myth) exploit that unspeakably tragic thing? How could anybody write that joke, approve that joke, deliver that joke (with pertinent regional inflection, no less), and above all find it uproarious?


Yeah, I'm something of a roiling cauldron of repressed irreverence, professionally speaking and personally speaking as well. Yet all hail the tempering spark of common human decency. May it eternally glow.

I blame everyone associated with that Seinfeld episode for investing a regrettable reference with pop-culture cachet.

As for Pat Sajak, maybe I'm being unfair in taking him to task for serving it up for the hundred-millionth time; it's been 18 years since "The Stranded" first aired, and as near as I can tell, I'm the only person in the world raising even a single eyebrow over "Maybe the dingo ate your baby."

I couldn't find anybody else offended by the line on Google, you see. But I did find an assload of dingo-ate-your-baby T-shirt offers.

Read the Wikipedia account of the tragedy.

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That's just twisted, sister

I saw a television commercial last night in which a young guy with a guitar was singing about how much he resented his wife and wished he'd never married her ... because of her bad credit score.

Furthermore, had he known her impropitious credit history up front, he sings, he would never have tied the knot.

But now he's stuck with this asshole loser of a wife and has to dwell within objectionable premises instead of the house he'd reasonably expected to occupy—four bedrooms, presumably, with granite counter tops, cherrywood cabinets, stainless-steel appliances, Mediterranean marble, and open floor plan—all on account of her crappy credit.

The whole point of this juvenile musical cautionary tale is to convince you and me to go to some Web site for the free credit reports capable of saving us from all the bitches and bastards in the world who would marry us without divulging unpaid cell-phone cancellation fees. Our disgruntled balladeer would be happily "batching it" today, he asserts, had he had access to such a service as this (as we now thank-God do).

Well, speaking as the father of five daughters, I wish he had had access to it. His wife's the one who got the shit end of the stick ("short end" being the sanitized form) from that superficial shit-heel.

This free-credit-report commercial troubles me, though, on a more fundamental level than troublesome credit scores:

Have we, as a society, or worse yet a species, reached the abominable point where we can sympathize with and be persuaded by the crybaby plaints of some shallow-wading simpleton who despises his brand new wife for something as fundamentally meaningless as her marginally blemished credit history?

As much as I hope not, I reckon we have. A commercial promoting reasoning as twisted as this, however comically cloaked, would seem to say so.

So score one for due diligence over tender understanding, abiding love, and a marriage of two hearts.

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Saved from squalor and sloth

Here's a quote from an Alice Munro story called Meneseteung. It sums up rather nicely the enchanted effect my wife has had on my existence in the world of things:

A man may keep his house decent, but he will never—if he is a proper man—do much to decorate it. Marriage forces him to live with more ornament as well as sentiment, and it protects him, also, from the extremities of his own nature—from a frigid parsimony or a luxuriant sloth, from squalor, and from excessive sleeping or reading, drinking, smoking, or freethinking.

To set the record straight, I do not smoke, nor do I excessively sleep (would that I could). I am not consciously parsimonious. I drink hardly at all, read voraciously, and am most definitely susceptible to protracted bouts of freethinking. I find much to like, too, in the concept of luxuriant sloth.

Left to my own devices, as Ms. Munro notes, I will keep a place decent, but won't do much to decorate it. The dishes will get washed, the bed made, the toilet scrubbed, the socks picked up from the floor. But the walls and various horizontal surfaces will remain, for the most part, unadorned.

So, yes, for the 34 years I've been married to Susan I have indeed lived amidst "more ornament as well as sentiment" than would otherwise have been the case. But Susan in no wise has forced these conditions upon me. She has just gone about doing what she does, which is to say casually and instinctively shaping our surroundings into an ever more lovely home.

Everywhere I look I see and relish her graceful hand, feeling privileged to dwell in a world of her creation.

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The last time we went bye-bye

My father was a pack rat and his house was a pack rat's house on a street called Regent in Detroit. For our final outing together—another unknown ending (see Feb. 8 post)—my seldom heard-from half brother Charlie and I gathered there to take lunch on the day of Christ's Passion with the parent we strangely shared.

I arrived just after noon. Charlie was wearing a white T-shirt over unbelted jeans. My father was typically attired: tuxedo-shirt; gold chain supporting cross and anchor pendants; dark slacks; black boots; navy blue boating cap with patent-leather brim just like the cap Frank Sinatra wore in Pal Joey. I have no idea what I had on.

The first thing I did on stepping inside was avoid being peed on by Fleur, Pop's yapping, wriggling, poodle-terrier mix. Dad scooped Fleur up and tossed her on the sofa (I would see her leap up and pee on it later) and made his way to a pile of second-hand overcoats he wanted me to try on for size with a view toward unloading the lot on me should they fit.

I humored him while eyeing an unbroken panorama of junk.

Assorted glassware and gimcracks covered the dining room table. The living room furniture—a pastiche of rummage-sale oddments—looked like it had been set down willy-nilly by moving-men who had then left for lunch and not come back. The upholstered parts were threadbare and grimy. A pink chenille bedspread served for drapes. Opened and unopened mail, crumbling paperbacks, yellowing magazines, water-stained photos, and battalions of kitschy figurines obscured most surfaces like preposterously thick dust.

But, seriously: What should I have expected from a man who flushed his toilet by removing the tank-lid and dropping a jumbo bottle of shampoo onto the flapper? ("I’m gonna call a plumber one of these days," he assured me on demonstrating the technique.)

The plan, it turned out, was this: through the tunnel to Windsor, Ontario, then down Front Street to this great seafood restaurant he knew of in Amherstburg. Detroit River view and everything.

We snaked our way to the attached garage through gaps in the waist-deep clutter and climbed into Pop's winter ride—a four-door Chevy clunker he drove to keep road salt off his latest pre-owned Cadillac. Heading south toward the Windsor tunnel, we made a brief detour through the neighborhood off Gratiot where I'd lived with my grandparents before my mother remarried.

The two-family house on Townsend still stood, but amid a sorry host of debris-strewn vacant lots—including those once containing Tommy Trumonte's red-shingle home and the corner market with the striped roll-up awning where my grandmother bought me banana and root-beer Popsicles.

We bemoaned these changes and change in general all the way to the tunnel, Charlie interrupting from the back seat now and then with hysterically funny impersonations of deadpan actor Sterling Haydn droning Broadway show tunes. Thirteen years my junior, Charlie was one of the world's true geniuses without a cause.

"We must have looked like narcs driving down Townsend," Dad kept remarking throughout the afternoon. Yeah: his no-hubcaps jalopy and funky skipper's cap; my full beard and aviator sunglasses; Charlie's mutton chops and manic mane. A trio of grubby undercover cops cruising Murder City, U.S.A. (I found myself liking that idea, actually, for suggesting a personal reality substantially more exotic and exciting than writing sales brochures about Ford medium and heavy-duty trucks.)

On the Canadian side of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, my father said to the customs officer, "You've been here a long time, haven't you."

"Thirty-six years."

"I remember you," Dad said. "I used to work here in Windsor. I came over through the tunnel every day."

"Oh ... yeah!" the man said, recognizing him. "How are you?"

That was the thing I admired most about my father: his genuine interest in, and generous kindness toward, strangers. Unless you've seen the movie Harvey, starring James Stewart, you can't appreciate what a compliment it is when I say my father was as close as it gets to a real-life Elwood P. Dowd. ("Here, let me give you one of my cards.")

In the parking lot at the riverside restaurant, Dad, who'd promised to buy, turned abruptly to Charlie and me and said in a weirdly severe tone, "You can have anything you want except beer, because I am not going to pay a buck twenty-five for alcohol." I was taken aback. Me, a father of six, talked to as though I were ten! I bristled a little, but held my tongue and obediently ordered coffee with my fish and chips.
Our post-lunch conversation heading back to Detroit degenerated inexorably into yet another Charlie-bashing. I'd cringed at them before—pretty much every time the three of us had been together—and therefore only halfway listened while Dad held forth on Charlie's inability to stay off welfare ... all the things wrong with Charlie's marriage ... the various deficiencies of Charlie's children (Bryanna doesn't mind, Jason is a wimp) ... the lackadaisical approach to discipline displayed by Charlie's beleaguered wife.

So sorry, Charlie.

It was dark before we got back to the rat house on Regent. I'd had my fill of surrealism and was happy as hell to blast off for home with just two secondhand topcoats in the trunk.

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21 years ago

... Kelly hunted me down to tell on Erin.

It seems Erin had left her book-bag somewhere where Kelly could trip over it, and Kelly had gone ahead and tripped over it and fallen hard on the hardwood floor. An affront of this magnitude, Kelly felt, could be remedied only through swift and sure corporal punishment at the stinging hand of me.

So she stormed out to the kitchen and demanded a pound of Erin's flesh by parental proxy, expressing in no uncertain terms the length, width, height, and depth of her older sister's culpability.

Fortunately, generously dished commiseration was enough to carry the day, and, mollified, Kelly began scribbling a circular pattern in the condensation on the kitchen window—that irresistible magic slate. After a moment or two she settled into inscribing her name:

She formed the K, the E, and the two L's before running out of room at the frame; then, without hesitation, drew the Y in front of the K.

And this is what our children teach us if we're paying attention: All things are possible. All things make sense. Boundaries of thought and action do not exist. But, alas, the sublime solution of placing the Y before the K becomes ever more elusive the older we get.

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