9th September, 2017

One of my father's many inventions:
The high-altitude bed, for when one wants one's dreams to be closer to heaven.

On being charmed.

I have been feeling achingly low of late. Now and then it is right and proper to feel so; now and then it is the right and proper response to the world. Aches have the capacity to put us in the right relation with the world. Aches also remind us that we are not automata, and it is important to be reminded of this every so often, particularly when there are so many voices declaiming the contrary.

Upon returning from work this evening, the aching got up again like an abscess in a shark's tooth. It is very tempting to simply sob and sob and degenerate and feel very poetically and nobly sorry for oneself when one has sharks' teeth with abscesses upon them.  The degree of pain always seems to justify the melodrama: to the right personality, a mislaid pencil could justify throwing oneself off the Ponte Vecchio. Alas, I have somewhat misused an adjective: "O Dio, vorrei morir!" I fear I may be the right sort of personality.

In a bold attempt to disprove I was the right sort of personality, and to unleague myself from Tosti and Puccini, I pulled my head out of the stage-prop basket of my hands, dabbed the tears sensibly away on the pleats of my skirt (for what are the voluminous swathes of fabric on women's skirts for if not to serve as handkerchiefs?), took Aristotle off his neglected column, and set to rereading, for what must be by now the fourteenth or fifteenth time, the beginning of the Metaphysics. I'm so voluminously ignorant. My ignorance rivals my skirts. This is a sorry state of affairs, and it seems wasteful to spend my hours a-weeping when I could be making at least a little dent in my denseness. I missed out on a classical education. I known't a lick of Latin, and not even the chastest cheek-peck of Greek. I haven't a hope of catching up with Western Civilization's bullet-train of thought, but I may perhaps at least walk a little faster than I do. It's worth a try.

So there I was, raw-eyed but determined, rereading the first paragraph of the Metaphysics for what must be by now the fortieth or fiftieth time, when who should come bounding up the stairs, looking very pleased with himself indeed, but my father, calling out as he ascended praises for my goodness as a daughter as I'd brought him home a bagful of tails. Then he turned to demonstrate the swish of a twelve-foot long, rather distinguished, plastic eco-packaging tail comprised of materials I'd saved for recycling. He walked around the attic room, like a gentlemanly tyrannosaurus, dragging the plastic behind him, and as he walked the cat followed, at once confused and intrigued by this new modification to her owner's anatomy. Then he let me know dinner was ready and headed back downstairs as bouncily as he'd ascended, the cat pouncing eagerly in pursuit.

How can one stay melancholy in the face of silliness like that? My father used to be a psychiatrist, but his methods of cheering me remain those of a father. When I was low as a child he used to place bags of onions on his head to make me giggle. I couldn't help it. No matter how miserable I was, something about the sight of onions in their string-sack on his head just couldn't be borne straight faced. Now, as an adult when I am blue he sticks into his ears and nose, a la Blackadder feigning get-out-of-the-push lunacy, the compostable packing-peanuts I rescue from work (I rescue them in order that he might dissolve them in buckets in the yard, for my father is the most avid recycler that ever there was). Or he does what he calls his "Trump Jump" (this is a sort of ungainly cheer-leading routine involving a fit of hoe-down-esque leaping, while requesting, at every bounce, a letter of Trump's name). And even now, as an adult, I cannot help but laugh. The laughing may not last long; the melancholies may be more severe these days and the mitigations more fleeting, but still, for at least a few seconds, for a snapshot of reprieve, I giggle as I did when I was hip-high.

So. There is pain, but there is also Aristotle and my father and a cat pouncing on a twelve-foot plastic tail. I need to remember this. It is still a charmed life.