Schlemiel, Schlemazel...

In Yiddish, a "schlemiel" is defined as someone who spills the plate of tomato sauce. He's a likeable bungler. I've certainly had my innings as the schlemiel in life. But a "schlemazel" is defined as the person upon whom the tomato sauce gets spilled. And I've more often been in that position. In fact, I might have reason to claim the prize for being the Grand Schlemazel. I was the victim of a cosmic dumping.

It happened at the Tower of London. Our tour group seemed to arrive there on the busiest day of the year. A line of people snaked around and outside the Tower gates, waiting to get in to see the Crown Jewels. It was a misty day and I had started to feel quite misty and drippy myself, a prelude to what would develop into some full-blown viral attack.

I'm not sure if a lecture about the Tower ravens is regularly included in the tour, or if we were specially treated in order to distract us from the long wait on that particular day. But in any event, a Beefeater who identified himself as the "Raven Master" came forward and gave us a lecture about the magnificent birds roaming the compound. I briefly forgot about the gathering storm within and without, listening to the fascinating lore.

The English have been very solicitous of the ravens because of the legend that said if the ravens should ever leave the Tower, the British Empire would fall. Now, since the Empire has already largely fallen, that legend has been amended into a somewhat contracted version. It's said that if the ravens should ever leave that landmark, the more limited area of the English Isle itself will fall. It might be drowned by the surrounding waters or have some other dire fate befall it.

Actually, there are several species that protect the English from such calamity. I had earlier heard about the care the English lavish on the "Barbary apes" on Gibraltar. It's said that if those animals (actually macaque monkeys) were ever to leave the rocky coasts of Gibraltar, the English Empire/Isle would collapse. A humorous movie starring Terry-Thomas (Operation Snatch) featured the problems faced by a hapless cadre of very under-Secretary British officials sent to that outpost to insure the monkeys' health, happiness, and longevity.

But this was the first I was hearing about the ravens' role in protecting England's dominion. The Raven Master told us how the ravens had their wings slightly clipped so they couldn't fly too high. Occasionally though one or the other of them would manage to make it out of the Tower yards. One had recently been retrieved again from its hangout by the door of a local pub. All the ravens are named and their individual preferences are catered to as far as diet and diversion goes. The Raven Master is charged, not only with feeding the birds, but with ensuring that they get adequate mental stimulation. So this Beefeater also has to serve as a sort of shipboard social director, organizing games and challenges for the birds.

He is also strictly accountable for insuring that none of the ravens meet with any premature demise. With the care given them, several were managing to last happily into their forties. When one does die, it is given a proper funeral. Its service to the Empire is acknowledged and it often has its name carved on a tombstone set up in the raven cemetery, a special plot kept sacrosanct off to one side of the Tower complex.

This lecture turned out to be one of the highlights of my trip to London. It revealed so much about the English people's quirky devotion to history and tradition - and to animals. I was fascinated by the sight of the ravens themselves. I'd never been in the presence of a live raven before. My main contact with any representative of their species had been the ink drawings that accompany most reprints of Edgar Allen's Poe's poem. I was surprised by their size and strut. I thought how they are indeed suitable birds to be dubbed guardians of the Realm.

For a moment I soared in my imagination with their majesty. But I was soon enough brought back down to earth. The Raven Master had finished his talk and the line started moving. Our group was within eye-shot of the Tower entrance. Just as I was craning toward the warmth and protection from the elements that the door offered - whap! I was hit in the head by something. I reached up and put my hand in a huge glob of green goop on my forehead. There was a lot more dripping down my face, covering my hair, oozing down the back of my neck.

Had a raven gotten airborne and relieved itself directly over my head? No, even as big as those birds are, one alone couldn't produce this much offal. Maybe a phalanx of ravens?  That seemed unlikely. A whole flock of pigeons who relieved themselves in perfect synchrony like the Rockettes? The quantity of the stuff was inexplicable.

I groped for a handkerchief, a Kleenex. I had nothing. Besides, it was even hard to grope, my hands were kept so pressed to my sides by the surrounding crowd of sightseers. I asked my traveling companion next in line if she could reach anything I could use to wipe myself off. She turned, and saw the green slime snailing its way down me on all sides. She shook her head and edged away as much as she could from my shocking dilemma.

Just at that moment, another Beefeater peremptorily called, "Forward! Move Forward. Your turn. Keep the line moving!" I considered dropping out of line to find a washroom somewhere. But then I'd miss the Crown Jewels, a highlight of our tour. So, looking like a victim being engulfed by "The Blob" in the Steve McQueen movie, there was nothing I could do but move along. I proceeded apace with the others in line as we were ushered downstairs into the "Jewel House" where the crown jewels were kept during those years.

I soon found myself in a room with very dim lighting. I could hardly pick my way along the ramp that circled the large glass dome shining at the center of this vaulted stone space. Under the dome was the full collection of crown jewels available for viewing. I passed by rubies, emeralds, necklaces, tiaras - all gleaming seductively from the dark velour settings on which they rested. The conspiratorial twinkle in the eyes of these stones invited a person to mischief - and murder.

Finally we came to the crown of the Crown Jewels - the headpiece that contained the famed Koh-i-noor diamond, the diamond with the most dangerous, dazzling history. It had been passed or stolen among maharajas and sheiks before being claimed by the English Royal Family. There I stood before it, in stark contrast. The diamond, a shimmering purity, looked out at me. And I - bird dung dripping down into my eyes, rolling into my ears, sliding down onto my shoulders - looked back at it. From the sublime to the ridiculous. From the Star of Royalty to the Ultimate Schlemazel.

The Blessings of the Big Box: In Praise of Wal-Mart

In a previous essay, I lamented how few businesses welcome their customers in the way that restaurateurs do. I regretted the impersonality of most business transactions, as opposed to the familial greeting that so many restaurant owners pride themselves on giving their patrons. My question was - why can't my accountant rush forward with an avuncular embrace when I come into his office, and assure me that "When you're here, you're family!" Why should such a motto be limited to the likes of the Olive Garden?

But there's another side to that issue. I could argue just as cogently, perhaps even more cogently, in favor of the sheer facelessness of the big box approach to business. There is advantage in having a big anonymous entity selling mass produced commodities to a stream of anonymous buyers. I might even argue that the ability to transact business in this way, without any personal contact, is at the foundation of many kinder, gentler, more democratic societies. It might be at the core of why modern America is an unlikely place to give rise to any extensive programs of genocide, terrorism, or dictatorship. It's possible that America would be an unlikely breeding ground for such widespread atrocity, not because Americans are intrinsically better people, but because they can shop at Wal-Mart.

Let me explain. Some years ago, I took a fire extinguisher I'd had sitting around the house into a little business I'd seen near me for years, advertising itself as the place to get fire extinguishers re-charged. I was warmly greeted by an elderly man who came out from the back of the shop, addressing me in a thick German accent. He chatted with me, taking an interest in my need to have an old fire extinguisher, almost an antique, chemically restored to full force. At first this seemed as if it was going to be a pleasant, convivial transaction, a nice change of pace from the usual brusque processing I got in most business establishments. The elderly gentleman took the extinguisher into his back room, and in a short time, brought it back out again with its dial now nicely registering "Full Charge." All was going well. How delightful, how refreshing to be waited on with such old-fashioned, individual attention. I drifted into a Norman Rockwell romanticization of Ma-and-Pa shops.

But - as I was turning to leave, the old gentleman checked me by remarking how blonde and fair-skinned I was. He asked if I was married and if I was German. This in and of itself unnerved me a little. Was he making a pass at me? That would be awkward. A little distantly, I replied that no, I wasn't married, and that yes, I had some German ancestry. However, I soon saw that the reason for his questions was more disturbing than any dating intentions. He chirped, "I knew it. I knew it. I could tell - you're from good German stock, just like the mädchen on the posters." He proceeded to caution me about my future choice of a marriage partner. He wagged his finger at me and said, "Now you be sure to marry a man like in the posters, blonde and blue-eyed and strong, and 100% German! You want to keep the bloodline pure. Don't put mud in the blood by getting mixed up with any of those dark ones! Don't forget! Keep the bloodline pure!" he wagged an admonitory finger at me again.

What year was this? What place was this! I was so shocked by this throwback to the Nazi propaganda of the 30's and 40's, I left the shop in stunned silence. The store proprietor probably took my silence as a sign that I was in accord with him and as a tacit promise that I would comply with the need to keep the bloodlines pure.

As I mulled over this bizarre encounter in the days that followed, it occurred to me that some such version of that conversation probably in fact DID take place time and again in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Oh, the exchanges were likely rarely so pointed and explicit. But the enlistment to prejudice was there, and probably grew with each new visit to local shops.

I envisioned an endless number of such casual, everyday affirmations taking place in bakeries, in butcher shops all over the small, relatively homogeneous towns of Germany. The shopkeeper would make some grumbling remark against Jews as he was wrapping his customer's purchase. Then the customer would have two choices. The customer could express, what was for her, legitimate agreement with the shopkeeper's bigoted views. In that case, their cause would be strengthened by their realization of support. Now both shopkeeper and customer knew they weren't alone. Each had the comfort of an ally in his or her prejudice.

On the other hand, the customer might not agree with the shopkeeper. However, the customer would be unlikely to find it worthwhile to say so. She would, probably correctly, calculate that any disagreement wouldn't change the shopkeeper's mind. It would only antagonize and alienate him. Let's say he's the local butcher. Then that would be the end of the extra little weight of sausage that he'd usually slip into her order, even though her ration card didn't allow for it. She'd never again get the advantages of being a preferred customer whom he liked.

So in this case when the shopkeeper vented some slur against Jews or any other minority group, the customer would just nod passively. Then an alliance would be assumed - an alliance that the customer couldn't later go back on or cancel by suddenly bursting out with an objection. Such opposition, coming belatedly out of the blue, would only make the customer seem erratic, crazy. Her opposition would carry no weight. So faced with what seems like tacit acceptance of his opinions in this case, the shopkeeper would feel encouraged to confide his negative feelings more and more on subsequent visits. His hatred would gain momentum with the retelling, and the customer would be locked into a stance that simulated support of this escalating froth of poison.

Oddly enough, the building of a tacit consensus doesn't usually work the other way around, in the direction of positive feelings and tolerance. That might be because, in the same way that newspapers are only likely to report bad news, shopkeepers and others would only be likely to voice negative opinions. There never seems to be enough interest in or weight to benign reports. It's primarily the bad, the shocking, the negative, that gets retailed. That's how a blanketing of prejudice often gets spread.

Of course, that kind of dynamic didn't only pertain to Germany during the Nazi regime. So many other Holocausts of hatred have occurred that probably had their roots in the same kind of neighborly dependencies and inter-dependencies. The campaign of extermination of all "intellectuals" carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia might in part have gained strength by the echoing of hatred taking place between people thrown into daily proximity to and dependency on each other. Similarly, the hatred behind the Rwanda genocide of 1994, in which it was principally Hutu extremists killing Tutsis, could have initially been forged through tribal connectivity. And so the Bosnian/Serbian atrocities, and on and on across geography and time. Seeds of hatred get propagated into kudzu growths that take over the landscape because people are rooted together, their lives entangled with each other through networks of buying and selling and necessary provisioning.

I can't help but think that if the people who participated in committing these cited instances of genocide, and the thousands of others that have occurred throughout history, had had early access to a Wal-Mart way of shopping - there would have been a lot less killing. The big box stores help a person to disengage from his neighbors, to think his own thoughts, to be his own person. They allow a person to free himself from the constraints of family feud and tribal tradition. And as much as local cohesiveness and cooperation is often extolled, the ability to step outside that boundary is often a good thing.

I had a parallel awakening on this score in a somewhat different context. I have always been an admirer of the writings of Ivan Illich. I discovered him through his most famous book, Deschooling Society. I'm very much in tune with the insights he presented there. He argues that mandatory schooling, and indeed all our insistence on the importance of schooling, is based on a false premise. Such an insistence assumes that children must be taught in order to learn. It completely discounts a child's willingness and ability to learn on her own, in the course of performing worthwhile activities in her household and her community. It insists that "education" become a product delivered in an impersonal, institutional setting - namely, the school.

Illich advocated a return to family and community empowerment. He gave suggestions for creating environments in which a child can learn, rather than having to be strapped down, so to speak, and taught - environments in which a child can spontaneously pick up basic knowledge in the course of helping her father build a shelter, or set up a well, or, in industrialized countries, repair a car. He didn't want children to have to be abstracted from their communities and isolated in age-segregated ghettoes where they are exposed to the same kind of carrot-and-stick incentives given to a donkey. Get away from the gold stars and the scoldings and let a child's natural curiosity lead the way in natural, multi-generational communities rich in opportunities for learning through interpersonal exchanges.

I was all for that, and essentially still am. But then as Illich elaborated on his philosophy, he more and more put the concept of community empowerment first. As he went on to write about health care and the provision of resources such as fuel and water, he emphasized ways in which these goods could be provided by grassroots action. Having been so in tune with him on the subject of schooling, I automatically went along with him through all these other explorations. His ideas about community empowerment sounded so right, so irrefutable. Who could be against tapping into the wisdom of elders, of extended family, of community leaders, in order to accomplish goals? Rather than opting to have services provided by vast impersonal institutions that homogenize needs in order to profitably deliver standardized products - let the living, breathing people around one all participate in custom-creating the goods of life.

But then I attended a seminar on community organization and was jolted into re-thinking some of that philosophy. There was a woman there who had wandered into the seminar as a sort of last-minute way to fill some spare time. She came without any of the imbedded vocabulary or assumed ideology the rest of us had after having steeped ourselves in Illich, Foucault, and similar philosophers. After we had bandied ideas largely borrowed from these writers about how neighborhoods could police themselves, foster learning, and promote health and healing by tapping into native wisdom rather than by relying on commercial institutional deliverances - this woman spoke up with a contrary view.

She protested that she wouldn't want to rely on her grandmother for any of these ministrations. Her grandmother's answer to every earthly ill had been "castor oil."  If people with medical problems ranging from a broken arm to cancer had limited themselves to her grandmother's neighborly advice, they would have been in a bad way, without any hope of a cure. What's more, this woman wouldn't have wanted to entrust her grandmother with any of the other functions the rest of us had been so sanguinely about to unload on the elderly lady. If the grandmother had been encouraged to police the neighborhood for example, it would have been a riot of racial profiling, since the woman, like many members of her generation, held very negative views of minorities. This elder, truth to tell, had been a bigoted, ignorant woman, and our seminar participant felt that it was a better world that delegated tasks to impersonal institutions rather than to the likes of her grandmother.

It hit me then! How unthinking and hypocritical so many of my mouthings about the superiority of self-help community activism had been. I certainly didn't practice such preaching in my own life. In reality, I was just as reluctant to trust to the advice of family and neighbors as that seminar maverick had been.

Almost all the neighborhood block meetings and community rallies I'd ever attended had quickly turned into hyperventilations of  "Not In My Neighborhood!" Existing residents voiced unappeasable concerns about immigrants coming into the area, running down property values, taking jobs away from "good Americans." They had exaggerated worries about their toddlers being sexually molested by perverts jumping out of the bushes. They would therefore petition any Alderman who'd come to speak that evening to jack up required registration for and surveillance of anyone in the area with a police record. They predictably clamored for more and more street lighting, for tree and shrubbery removal, for enforcement of grass-cutting laws. They demanded prompter graffiti removal and stricter policing measures. Every neighborhood meeting was pretty much a re-play of the last meeting on all these points.

I sort of understood some of the concerns. I had read how eliminating gang graffiti turned out to be one of the surest ways of tamping down gang activity in a neighborhood. If you demonstrate that you won't tolerate the symbol, you show you won't tolerate the gang itself. Oh, but I did rather like that big, beautiful eagle that had been painted on my garage one night. It was a rendering worthy of Audubon. I understood, but I felt somewhat aggrieved when the neighborhood block club had the eagle sand-blasted away without my permission.

However practical that particular action was, I still saw it as reflective of the more general intolerance that characterized most of these community meetings. They were repetitions of petty complaints stemming from exaggerated worries. The most vocal people at them were usually the ones most intent on making the neighborhood more enforced, more sterile, more humorless. One could feel a pressure toward prejudice building at these meetings, not exactly to the degree that doubtless happened at meetings and rallies across Germany, but still dreary enough to reflect badly on the nature of humans in groups. People at these "let's work together" events didn't behave with the quirky individuality one would see among Wal-Mart shoppers.

It was the same with family gatherings. They usually were not the occasions for the kind of exchange of ancient wisdoms that Illich had projected. More typically, they were a gallimaufry of just the kind of prejudice and misinformation that the seminar woman had cited.

Holidays meant having to deal with that phalanx of big, beefy male cousins who thought delivering punishing tackles on the football field was what every proper young American male should be up and about doing. There was Aunt Ida's friend who disowned her daughter when she learned she was a lesbian. There was Uncle Joe who proudly told how he'd refused to let a black nurse touch him when he went into the hospital for his gall bladder operation.

A person couldn't generally retaliate against such opinions then and there. As with the German butcher, countering Uncle Joe wouldn't have changed him. It would only have pointlessly spoiled the Thanksgiving meal. The best I could do was to try to change the subject, to get Uncle Joe talking about something he did know something about, such as wood joinery, for the short time I had to be engaged with him. But if I had been forced to engage more globally with him, in a close-knit tribal or community setting - I'd have been faced with a much more difficult situation. My only choice might have been to get out, to estrange myself from family - or else to stay and take the bad with the good, the prejudice with the wood joinery. With either choice, going or staying, my actions could have provided a toehold for old hatreds to reach greater heights.

I'd seen and felt all this. So in reality, I didn't practice the Illichian philosophy of community self-help that I'd been preaching. In real life, I usually avoided community meetings and family gatherings as much as possible. I didn't want to get drawn into the lives of most other people more deeply than an exchange of chit-chat in passing.

Jane Jacobs, a noted urbanologist, came to the point from another direction. She observed how crime flourished in most concrete high-rise housing projects, in part because residents there were faced with an all or nothing situation. In their stacked apartment units, there was no place for neighbor to meet neighbor on a limited basis. There were no congenial, spacious common rooms where people could briefly chat with other building residents, and then disengage. For those law-abiding residents who really didn't want to get drawn into the often violent gang culture that pervaded some of these buildings, there were only two options. They could completely withdraw from their surroundings - either by moving away from the housing project altogether, leaving it to the gang-bangers - or by staying strictly to themselves, bolting their apartment doors securely against any infringements from the outside world. Their second choice, their only other choice, was to entertain the violence. This meant opening their doors, allowing others completely into the privacy of their living quarters, with all the good, the bad, and the ugly, that these others might bring with them as baggage.

Jacobs made astute suggestions about how buildings and neighborhoods should be architecturally and spatially designed to allow the limited engagement that makes it possible for more wholesome relationships to be sustained between neighbors. Her ideas were a form of "good fences make good neighbors." The location and the degree of opacity of such figurative fences can make all the difference.

In their way, the Wal-Marts of the world operate in the same way that Jacobs' proposed design features could have. Wal-Marts and the Internet enable limited engagement with others. You don't have to accommodate and appease a butcher's prejudices in order to get meat. You don't have to tacitly lend approval to a baker's bigotry when you buy your daily bread. The big impersonal retail outlets allow you to anonymously buy anything you want without being enlisted into others' projects. You can come and go from them a free and independent individual.

So as unfriendly as it sounds, I don't necessarily lament the passing of some of the Ma-and-Pa stores when a Wal-Mart hits town. I find myself rejoicing in the personal freedom that Wal-Marts afford. It's not only that I can buy anti-fungal creams there without embarrassment. It's also that I don't have to seem to accede to disliking gays or blacks or Moravians or anyone as part and parcel of my transactions there. I can be myself. I don't get enlisted into anyone else's warped worldview. I can return to the store again and again, without getting cut into conformity with whatever smoldering hatreds other townsfolk might harbor.

The better angels of all of us can emerge at Wal-Mart. Yes, in tight leopard leotards and ludicrous brassiere tops - we can shop there in all our diverse, uncensored unloveliness, and be the better for it. Let's celebrate Wal-Mart - a bastion of liberty, a pillar of human rights!

The Low-Down on the Higher-Ups

Even though I have a perfectly good coffee maker, I often go to the nearest Seven-11 to get my daily brew. I justify the extra expense by reminding myself how this daily outing gives me a chance to socialize and to see what's happening in the neighborhood. For a while, a few decades ago, my daily junket to the Seven-11 even provided me with a window onto the wider world. In particular, it became my pipeline into the intimate doings of England's Royal Family. While others were only left to guess about the dynamics of Prince Charles' deteriorating marriage to Princess Di and to the private conversations of other members of the Royal Family - I had the inside dope. There, all the way away in Chicago, I was able to keep my finger on the pulse of the people at Buckingham Palace.

For the better part of a year, I found a young man with a marked Irish accent often presiding at the counter of the Seven-11. After I had become enough of a regular to be on a first-name basis with him, I started to be the recipient of snatches of his personal history. He told me that he had been a member of the elite Coldstream Guards, the unit that had been especially assigned to surround the Royal Family with security. In the course of these duties, he had gotten to be especially close to the Queen Mother, the mother of the long-reigning Queen Elizabeth. Sean told me that the Royals had appreciated his services and still kept in touch with him, even after he had emigrated to the U.S. So he knew exactly what was going on in the Palace at all times.

When he felt he could further trust me, Sean started to give me daily updates on the activities of the Royal Family in camera. He would lean across the counter to tell me the latest, out of earshot of the mere riffraff who patronized the convenience store. I learned that, "The Queen Mum is rather put out with Princess Di. She's not at all happy with Di's incessant dieting. Really, it seems as if the girl has a case of anorexia, and that kind of calling attention to oneself with such problems doesn't sit well with the matriarch. The Queen Mum herself enjoys her kippers, and she believes that every proper young woman should have a good healthy appetite. She doesn't approve of keeping yourself bone thin the way Di is doing. Of course, she can't come out and say as much to Charles or Di. She has to be diplomatic - but between you and me, she's not happy with Di, not happy at all."

Then I heard that "Prince Philip is not the silent partner the press often makes him out to be. I tell you, he rules the roost on the home front. The Queen has to go along with his wishes. You know they put him in charge of some animal protection fund. But the truth is, he only cares about preserving animals so he can hunt them. He went traipsing out and shot a big 12-point stag on the Balmoral south forty today. It made Queen Elizabeth cringe. But what can she do? When it comes right down to it, the Queen is only a woman, and Philip is a man and still the head of the household."

I learned that whenever the Queen Mother had a cold or some other minor health problem, "you won't hear her complain. She believes it's the duty of a Royal to keep up a good front at all times, to be cheerful and always have the people's well-being as her primary concern. She wouldn't think of canceling her appearance at the Museum to see the Elgin Marbles this afternoon. She has to make some statement, some conciliatory statement to the Greeks, since they're complaining again about how Lord Elgin took those statues. She'll never let on when she has a twinge, or let up on her royal duties, no matter what. When she gets a touch of arthritis like she did today, she just has a bit of liniment rubbed on her shoulder, and she goes right on. A real trooper, she is. You wouldn't know she was over eighty, the schedule she keeps."

I heard about a dust-up that had occurred when the Palace cook made a rum cake to be served at a reception honoring Sheikh Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates. Since Muslims are strictly opposed to all alcoholic beverages, the gaff "almost caused an international incident, I can tell you. Cedric, the dessert chef who put that item on the menu, got quite a dressing down. He left the Queen's presence almost in tears."

And so it went, the intimate day-by-day drama of Buckingham Palace unfolded before me for the better part of a year. But then the reports started to taper off. Sean looked more and more down in the dumps. He seemed to have lost his old eagerness to relate the Royal Family's conversations. Sean would often just silently ring up my coffee purchase, without offering even a tidbit of the latest palace contretemps.

Then Sean began to look as if he was declining physically as well as emotionally. It seemed as if he might be losing a dangerous amount of weight. On cold winter mornings, he would be standing there behind the cash register, shivering, more and more just a rattling of bones under his smock. I was tempted to remind him that the Queen Mum wouldn't be pleased with such weight lose - that she would surely advise him to keep up a healthy appetite, to treat himself to some hearty servings of fish and chips. But Sean seemed too removed and mechanical these days to take kindly to such personal remarks.

Then it got worse. One morning I was shocked to see that Sean had a terrible black eye. He didn't try to disguise his sorry state with sunglasses. But he kept his head tucked down in his smock as he rang up my coffee without a word of news from his home front. He looked like a duck tucking its head into its feathers against a wounding world. Just as that black-and-blue started to fade, Sean appeared with a lot of bruising along one arm. He was all-around becoming a mere shadow of his former chipper self.

One day when an older woman was checking me out at the counter, I realized I hadn't seen Sean at all in over a week. On a subsequent visit, I caught the manager's eye and asked him what had happened to Sean. The manager rolled his eyes in exasperation and said he'd had to "let Sean go." He said that Sean had essentially been homeless, living on the streets, getting into fights as he started acting crazier and crazier. In spite of it all, Sean had been performing acceptably as a clerk, and the manager had wanted to give him a chance. But really, it got to be too much. When Sean had started to come in late, looking all beat up, talking so crazy - he really had to be let go.

I never saw Sean again. As the Royal Family went through all the dramatic changes that rocked it during the eighties and nineties - the divorce, death, scandal, marriage, birth - I never knew any more than was reported in the newspapers. I missed my pipeline into the Family's private chambers. I especially wondered what the Queen Mum had really thought about it all, there at the end.

Queen Marlene of Chicago

While I was recently visiting in Canada, I went to a local staging of a play called Queen Millie of Galt. The action is supposedly based on "a true story." Much of it is a flashback to 1919 when the future King, then Edward Prince of Wales, was touring Canada. One day when he is playing hooky from the tedious round of hand-shaking and opening ceremonies on his schedule - he happens upon a young woman tending her garden in the town of Galt in southern Ontario.

Seemingly not recognizing the man who has wandered into her garden, the young woman vents her feisty opinion about the Royal heir, saying she was not interested in rushing into town with all her neighbors to line up to see the Prince. She says she believes the Prince is dull and ineffectual and not worthy of her time or attention.

This frank opinion snag's the Prince's attention because it is so different from the fawning praise he is used to receiving. He eventually reveals his identity to Millicent Milroy and asks her to be his escort for the remainder of his tour in the area. As she gets to know the Prince, Milli's attitude towards him softens. The young couple fall in love, but are denied the right to marry by the Prince's father, King George V. So the two unofficially pledge their troth, just quietly between themselves in Milli's garden, before the Prince is forced to leave and resume his royal duties.

As is famously known, this is the Edward who, over a decade later, abdicated the throne in order to marry commoner and divorcee Wallis Simpson. The play has Milli aging gracefully, but alone, in Galt - never speaking of her association with the Prince. Until her death. Then the town learns that she specified her tombstone have the added legend of:

Wife of King Edward VIII

How much of this is in fact true? It's hard to say. People who grew up in Galt (eventually consolidated with other nearby towns into the municipality of "Cambridge, Ontario") say that they aren't aware of any local tombstone bearing such an inscription. However some of the elders in the town had it passed down to them that the Prince did indeed disappear off the radar a few times during his 1919 visit. Who can say what happened when he took his own version of "A Roman Holiday."

As it was, the play sent me off into several different unscheduled avenues of thought on my own. First I considered how much talent there is in little community theaters and how likely it is that a lot of it will forever remain undiscovered by the larger world. But perhaps that's not a bad thing.

Then I was jogged into remembering some dating advice I heard someone giving years ago, during the days when it was still openly assumed that every female's primary goal was to snag a husband. This dating consultant advised a woman to be critical of some aspect of the man on their first date. This was contrary to a lot of the advice then circulating that limited women to unvarying sweetness, attentiveness, and passivity. No, said this advisor to the lovelorn - a girl should break out into some contrariness in the course of the evening. It's not that any global attacks against a date were recommended. I don't think the consultant would have approved of Milli's all-encompassing condemnation of Edward's personality and accomplishments. These are things a man can hardly correct in any reasonable length of time. Rather, it was suggested that, in order to be an effective husband-hunter, a woman should criticize some detail of her date's presentation of himself that he can readily change. "You have atrocious taste in ties! What is that thing you're wearing? Did you raid a clown's wardrobe trunk?"

This sort of limited assault will make an indelible impression on the man and at the same time it will provoke him into a second date with the woman in order to give him a chance to prove to her that he is capable of making a better showing. He'll be piqued into correcting whatever the woman faulted. So even if the woman isn't very pretty or appealing and might ordinarily not have expected to be asked out on a second date - such a targeted attack should do the trick. But again, it was advised that any criticism should generally only throw down a manageable challenge and not strike at the core of a man's ego.

It seemed to me that such a manipulation probably would work more often than not, at least in prolonging a man's interest in a woman. I never tried the technique myself, feeling sort of superior to playing such games. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so scrupulously averse to gaming. Some historians report that that's indeed the kind of approach Wallis Simpson made when she had her turn at Edward, the most eligible bachelor in the realm. Although she wasn't particularly young or pretty when the two met, it's said that Wallis did speak to the Prince in a perfectly frank, natural way. She might have been a sort of Elaine humorously needling a Jerry Seinfeld. Edward was so struck by this contrast with the usual simpering approval he got - that he eventually abdicated in order to marry this woman he loved.

Mostly though, this play reminded me of an almost forgotten optimism I'd once had about myself becoming wife of the King of England. I thought it possible that a future King had come calling on me.

My brief vision of entering into the Royal Family dates back to the days when Prince Charles was the most eligible bachelor in England - before Princess Di or Camilla. I had been editor of a small journal on economics. In one issue, I'd contributed an essay on urban planning in which I inveighed against the destruction of so much old architecture and of so many ethnic neighborhoods - all to accommodate the most blighting modern urban development projects. Shortly after this issue of my journal "hit the stands," I learned that Prince Charles was championing exactly the same views I had expressed, right down to many of the same details regarding how wide sidewalks should be and how much lawn there should be in neighborhoods in order to encourage urban liveliness. So just on a whim, I sent a copy of this journal issue to Prince Charles.

I really didn't expect to hear any more about it, since the Royal Family is surely deluged with thousands of pieces of mail every day. But lo and behold - a few weeks later, I got an embossed letter from the Palace. It was not from Prince Charles himself, but from a "Lady in Waiting." She wrote that Prince Charles had very much enjoyed and appreciated my comments about the unfortunate trend toward destroying our architectural heritage. She thanked me for sending the journal.

It sounded like more than a mere form letter! Could the Prince have actually read my article? Better still - was there some remote chance that he had recognized we were soul-mates? Well, that last was hardly possible. Still…

Some months passed and it was announced that Prince Charles was coming to the U.S. on tour. He was including Chicago in his itinerary. Interesting, but by that time, I had pretty much drifted back down to earth. So when Charles and his retinue hit Chicago and they announced on the morning news that he was going to spend the day just touring around the City at random, with no set schedule - I didn't think too much of it. I sat in my usual Sunday state of dishabille, bobby pins in my hair, wrapped in an old bathrobe, slumped in front of the TV.

Suddenly - "there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door." Unlike in Poe's poem though, this rapping became sharper, more insistent. It took on the clarion ring of a royal summons. No one I knew was even remotely likely to be calling at this early hour. Could it be? Was it possible?

I threw myself off the couch, almost falling under the coffee table in my lurching haste. I limped as fast as I could into the bedroom, ripping the bobby pins out of my hair en route, tearing off my bathrobe, hurling dresses to the floor in my attempt to find something presentable to wear. Naturally, the more I frenzied, the more I delayed myself. Buttons flew off, straps broke, my hair fell askew. Grab something else! Get another blouse! Where IS that pleated skirt!?

But the rapping had stopped. Was I too late? Still hoping I might catch him - um, whoever it was - I kept up my efforts to throw myself together. Then, just as I was trying to shimmy into the only laundered chemise I'd been able to grab hold of - I heard a sharp rapping at my BACK door. No one ever came around back! That meant having to negotiate past the gate and its sticky catch. Whoever it was must be really intent on seeing me now - TODAY! It sounded like someone who might only have the one day to spend in Chicago - someone who would be leaving tomorrow - for good! It was him! It was him!

I wrestled into the rest of my shift dress, and still wildly disheveled, I rushed to the back door. I tried to reassure myself - appearances didn't matter between soulmates. I got to the door, and flung it open - just in time to see what looked like a black limousine rolling away from my gate, down the alley. I ran down my garden path, out the gate, and looked beseechingly after the retreating car. But it was too far gone. He'd given up trying to contact the woman with whom he was so in synch on matters of urban renewal. I'd missed him. I'd missed my chance.

I slumped into my living room and threw myself back onto the couch in deeper dishevelment than ever. Well, perhaps just as well. If I were to have become Princess and then Queen, I certainly couldn't sit around the house in my usual sloppy attire. I'd have to be up and about and presentable every waking hour. I'd have to be all-the-time formally dressed, something that's pure torture for me.

Still, there might have been something worthwhile about making the effort. I'd have a platform from which to effect all sorts of change in the world, including promoting those wiser urban design measures that had drawn Prince Charles and me together in the first place. And really, I didn't think there would have been any problem with Prince Charles becoming engaged to me. Ultimately, the only reason the Royal Family had vetoed Wallis Simpson as a wife for that earlier Prince was not that she was American and a commoner. The reason she'd been deemed unsuitable was that she had been twice divorced. So I was in the clear. I congratulated myself on having had the foresight never to have been divorced. Well, I'd never been married. So I really was the eligible maiden of storybook fame. What's more, it occurred to me that I might not really be that much of a commoner either.

During their tour of Europe some years before, my cousins had found our family had a registered coat of arms in Switzerland. My relatives hadn't been allowed to take the original embossed crest papers away, but they'd made copies. I rummaged through the box of family photographs and found one of the copies.

The design of the thing was hardly prepossessing. Our family was represented by a large, uncomely fish leaping out from between two columns of fleur-de-lis. To make the emblem even more absurdist, the fish was wearing a top hat. Well, my Swiss great-grandmother's name had been "Fischer." So perhaps the design was an apt reference to our familial profession. Fishing didn't seem a very regal trade though. Besides, it had been a long time since Switzerland had had a monarchy, so I doubted that the coat of arms could have been bestowed on us for services to the Crown. It was likely more of a vanity coat of arms. Still, a crest is a crest. I definitely would have had it all over Wallis Simpson.

But my bobby pins and peanut butter stained bathrobe had been my undoing. Who knows what might have happened if I had just gotten to the door sooner. I fell into a slough of regret.

A few weeks later on a weekday, a man came through my office door (my office was adjacent to my residential quarters) - very eager to rent space in my building. He said that he operated a chain of day care centers and the City required that all such facilities be in places with full length plate glass windows fronting them (presumably so that nothing untoward could be done to the toddlers outside of the public's line of vision). Since I was one of the few places he'd come across in Chicago that maintained the requisite expanse of windows on my façade, he said he REALLY, REALLY wanted to make a deal. But as we discussed the issue further, I found that renting to this man would mean my having to make a lot of changes to my building, both office and residential sections, in order to conform to the extensive code regulating commercial day care centers. The child-proofing, the insurance, and on and on. It wouldn't be worth it. So I declined his offer.

As he reluctantly started out the door, he turned back to make one final appeal. He said, "You know, I tried to contact you a couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday. I even went around the block and knocked on your back door. This place would have been ideal for one of my centers."

When I stared back unresponsively at him, he concluded that there was no way he could change my mind. So he shrugged and left, closing the door behind him. As I looked out the front window after him, I guessed that he must be very successful with the day care centers he already had operating. He drove off in a long black Cadillac.

I put the copy of my coat of arms back in its box, stored away for keeps. I guess I wasn't destined to claim the title of "Queen Marlene of Chicago."

.

Always the Fall Guy

Several years ago, they tore down the old factory that had been built next to my house when I was a child. There's now an empty lot where a tool and die business used to operate day and night, seven days a week. That has left the whole south wall of my house exposed. I sort of miss the insulation that that extra layer of brick and that buffer of building used to provide for me. My heating and cooling bills have certainly gone up since the dramatic demolition of the factory. But on the other hand, it has been rather nice to have a view, and a neighboring lot where wild hollyhocks and a whole garden of wild flowers might take hold once again - before some other developer comes in and takes over the land with new construction.

That might not be too soon though. That lot has remained vacate now for several years. However, a little while ago, a new element was added to the scene. I was approached by an illuminated sign company interested in renting my south wall for advertising. Since I'm on a busy street with lots of traffic, and since there's now a clear line of sight from the street to the broad expanse of my south wall - they thought my location was ideal for advertisers. Was I interested in having an illuminated billboard put up there. The representative from the signage company was cajoling. I could earn $250 a month in space rental and I wouldn't have to do a thing. The company would put up the billboard, light it, and maintain it. They'd do all the work, of course being very careful not to damage my wall or my roof in the process of installation. All I'd have to do is sit back and collect the money.

Well, there was just one tiny little thing I'd have to do. I'd have to pay for the electricity used by the floodlight they'd install over the sign. But the man rushed to assure me that they now used LED lights which consumed very little electricity. The lighting shouldn't add more than a dollar or two to my monthly electric bills. So, how about it?

I knew that if I were to be consistent with all my previous preachings, I should turn the man away. I had always been so stoutly against "consumerism" in all its forms. I'd inveighed against getting and spending, and against advertising so that people could be prodded to get and spend more and more at an ever accelerating pace. So really, the decision should have been a no-brainer.

But wait a minute. I considered. A billboard really wouldn't be disruptive in my context. I had no residential neighbors who might be bothered by the sight or the lighting. My street was already largely industrial, so an ad wouldn't be a commercial intrusion into what should be an uninterrupted natural setting. Then the extra money would certainly come in handy.

But more than that, I thought how billboard ads nowadays are often works of art. I thought of the lavish, seductive posters that feature women in dreamlike, liquid, poses - renderings reminiscent of Salvador Dali. Whatever product was being sold was incidental at best. Any association of the image with a certain brand of perfume or jewelry or clothing was very subtly subliminal. The arresting artistry of the image itself was the main event.

More specifically, I remembered how I'd been captivated by a lot of the signage I'd seen on my recent whirlwind (if this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium) tour of western Europe. I'd spent a lot of the one short day we had in Amsterdam just standing at the main traffic interchange downtown, starring at the immense LED ads there. Many of them were close-ups of handsome Hollywood stars. There were huge portraits of the likes of Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp that looked as if they might have been photographs taken by master artists such as Stieglitz or Steichen. A person could stand there and feel absorbed into the very souls of these personalities. It was unimportant, and almost undetectable, what the signs were there to sell.

I pictured perhaps such a soul-searching portrait on the side of my building - a photographic insight into Brad Pitt or Matthew McConaughey. What an improvement that would be over my present bare wall of brick that needed tuckpointing. So the twin prospects of the money and the McConaughey convinced me. I told the salesman to go ahead - to have his crew install the billboard. I signed an elaborate contract which reassured me further by giving me the right to refuse any signs that I deemed to have inappropriate subject matter.

I was disappointed to learn that an ad wouldn't go into place right away. First the space had to be announced for rent. So the billboard was erected, but its floodlight only illuminated an encouragement writ large to "Rent this Space. Call Marla at XXXXXX." I wondered how many men might call Marla, not to have an ad posted, but to "have a good time."

A couple of months passed - and no takers. The signage company man dropped by though to inform me that a business not far from my building had expressed an interest in the space. It was the "Brew and Grow" company, one of a chain of stores that specialize in selling kits for making beer or wine at home. But they sell a lot more than that. They sell grow lights of all kinds, along with seeds and bulbs and already-growing plants that a person can nurture indoors using the other equipment that's on the store's shelves.

Well, that wouldn't be so bad. Maybe I wouldn't get the intense romance of someone like Brad Pitt looking out at me. But I'd have the miracle of a sort of modern-day hanging garden up there. I often pass the Brew and Grow company and their windows cast a real enchantment onto the street. They have a glass facade, so the fruit trees and cacti and tomatoes and peppers they have growing inside year-round are visible. With the grow lights bathing the plants in blue-green wavelengths, all the leaves seem to glow from some inner luminescence. The effect is especially striking in the winter, when snow drifts are packed high against the building outside, while the lush greenery persists and thrives just on the other side of the glass, in effulgent contrast. It looks like a greenhouse full of exotic plants landed from outer space, a hypnotic and dangerous beauty.

So yes, I thought I wouldn't at all mind having some picture of that on my south wall. But that magic didn't materialize either. A few more months passed and my wall still went unclaimed. The signage company salesman was surprised that the space hadn't been snapped up by some advertiser, considering its prime location. I almost considered following Judy Holliday's example in the movie It Should Happen to You. I thought about renting the space myself and plastering just my name up there - representative of nothing - a bare name with no accomplishment, talent, or meaning behind it.

But it didn't come to that. Finally - finally. While I was briefly on vacation, the friend staying at my house called to say the space had been taken at last. Since the signage company hadn't been able to reach me, they'd gone ahead and hung the sign, assuming I'd have no problem with it. My space had been rented by -  a firm of lawyers specializing in lawsuits. So instead of the alluring artistry I'd anticipated, I had a crude cartoon drawing of a person falling into an open manhole. The text reads something like:

Had an Accident?

Call Gabinsky and Brothers, Attorneys at Law

We'll Get a Settlement for You -

FAST!

XXX-XXX-XXXX

So I was accommodating the questionable activities of what might in effect be ambulance chasers. I had gotten neither McConaughey nor mangoes. Instead I have the unlovely image of someone falling into a sewer. The story of my life.

What's more, it seems to me that my electric bills have more than doubled from the pre-floodlight days. Maybe LED lights aren't so cheap to run after all. I'll have to look into that.

Timbre! Elvis vs. The Beatles

In an earlier one of these Blog essays, I complained that popular music has become more about the spectacle than the soul. The actual music and the individual singing it are usually drowned out by the pyrotechnics mounted in connection with any live performance. It's now a rarity to see a person simply stand and deliver a song, unadorned by gaudy skimpiness, wild background writhing, and deafening-dazzling special effects. But in all this cacophony, the thing I miss most is the individual human voice. What I miss most are telling lyrics, clearly sung in a voice with a moving, expressive timbre.

There are rather technical, mathematical definitions of the word "timbre." The difference between the timbre of a clarinet and a flute, between one singer and another, has to do with ratios of overtones, waveforms, and frequencies. But the reason one timbre can be so emotionally affecting, while another one leaves us flat - remains largely a mystery. We can only say we know it when we feel it.

There aren't many modern singers whose voices have a moving timbre, who convey some unique combination of joy and pathos. There aren't many modern singers with mature, distinctive voices that are immediately recognizable and that therefore in and of themselves provide grounds for imitators. Perhaps Jimmy Fallon could imitate Justin Bieber's hairstyle and dance moves. But Bieber offers no distinctive vocal timbre that can be imitated, and that can evoke surprise and recapitulation of some strong emotion. Any imitation of Bieber can only be an imitation of exteriors in order to produce a derisive laugh.

It's the same with almost the entire roster of American Idols. When that show first came on the air, I thought it would be a true search for another Elvis, for someone with a searingly distinctive style and voice. But that hasn't happened. It has found people who can sing competently - even beautifully. Its finalists could all give gladdening performances as choir soloists or lounge singers or in some re-imagined version of "The Lawrence Welk Show." But there has been almost none among them whose voice has a memorable individuality. With all due respect to Kelly Clarkson's ability to render a song faithfully and with appropriate feeling, there is very little that's distinctive about her voice. It has no compelling singularity that makes it recognizable and uniquely evocative. There's nothing there to give imitators a toehold now, and there certainly won't be an industry of Kelly Clarkson imitators fifty years from now.

It's not some characteristic smooth and easy mellowness that I'm looking for in a voice and whose absence I'm regretting in the modern world, although when I really pause and listen, I can appreciate that quality in the "old standards" of Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Dean Martin… But I want more than that in a voice. I want "gravitas," that word that's applied to mature actors who can freight the most incidental dialogue with import and a sense of inevitable succession. I want a foreshadowing of triumph and defeat. I want that quality that makes a voice both imitatable and inimitable.

A lot of the people whose voices thrill me with such qualities have fallen roughly into the category of "country-western" singers whose heyday was in the 70's and 80's, although their renderings transcend any set time and classification. They're beyond country-western, rock, or blues.

Willie Nelson is an example of a singer who has one of the most touching timbres for me. His voice is so much an onomatopoeia of the dry desert winds that sweep through his songs. When he sings in "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" -

You could die from the cold

In the arms of a nightmare

Knowin' well that that your best days are gone -

his voice and that lonely fate form an uncanny confluence. His voice is that lonely fate. In the same way, he embodies the long wistfulness of love when he sings in "Will You Remember?" -

I have sat 'neath the trees

While the cool summer breeze

Blew away the sands of time…

And when you've heard, all the songs of love,

Will you remember mine?

Similarly, something of the melancholy that suffuses our short time on this earth is a strain in other of my favorite voices. There's Tom Waits' whiskey-wasted search "for the heart of Saturday night" and his "breakin' all the rules in the cold, cold ground." Hoyt Axton conveys the richer bourbon worldliness of drifting down "every road I see," to find what's waitin' round the bend. There's Rod Stewart's hoarse hopefulness when he wonders, "Will I see you tonight, on a downtown train?" There's Leonard Cohen, whose voice has truly become "golden" only in the last decade or two, as he extols Joan of Arc's "solitude and pride." Even Johnny Cash, whose voice is so much the macho of solid oak, can have the admixture of that other, more complex craving as becomes apparent, again in a lesser known song he sang - "I've been sittin' here thinkin' about old times, some old times - dead and gone."

I see that most of the voices that affect me are men's voices. I don't know if that's because I'm a woman and therefore automatically more drawn to the male principle, or if men do cast a wider range of rebellion and individuality in their tones. But there are women whose voices, although they can't be thrillingly basso profundo - are still profunda. There's Edith Piaf who so fiercely regrets nothing. There's the incomparable crying catch in Patsy Cline's voice. Then no one conveys a pining romantic nostalgia better than Bernadette Peters singing an Irving Berlin song, wondering "When I'm alone, with only dreams of you, that won't come true - What'll I do?"

All these people have recognizable, distinctive voices that pave a pathway to the heart of things. Their singing is supremely affecting in a way that no rapper's cannonade can ever be. I can't help but think that most people who claim to enjoy the latter's performances do so for the same reason they claim to enjoy the spatterings of a lot of modern art. They say they like it, not because they find the work intrinsically expressive and interesting, but because they want to fit in with a certain crowd. They want to project a certain persona, and their choice of music must conform to their assumed character and to the part they're playing.

It's more difficult for me to understand though why so many people seem to be sincerely enthusiastic about singers who have no distinct personality, no unique voice - singers who are unripe and dependent on electronic synthesizers for the homogenized sounds they produce. More generally, it's difficult for me even to understand people's enthusiasm for most groups. Again, that's because the ultimate for me in popular music is an individual expression. Just as I wouldn't care for a novel written by a committee, I'm not often able to care deeply for the combination sound of barbershop quartets, choirs, or groups of any kind.

That's why the popularity of the Beatles has always been something of a mystery to me. Their joint sound never struck me as having any rich resonance. Then as they fractioned off into solo careers, I didn't find that any of them had that kind of moving individuality of voice that I value. People have argued with me about this. One friend claims that Paul, for instance, does have a distinctive voice that's anywhere recognizable, and that its unique timbre does provide fodder for imitators. Well, I don't know about that. Somehow, I doubt it. I can't help but think that people who claim to find that Paul, or any of the Beatles, produce a touching sound that, beyond any intellectual content of their songs, speaks directly to our emotions - are imputing qualities that aren't really there. I often feel that Beatles fans have ulterior reasons for attributing striking vocal ability to their idols. Perhaps fans are associating the advent of the Beatles with their youth or with some generally happier, freer time in their lives. They surround the Beatles with the glow of those better days.

Sometimes though, I worry that the shift from appreciation of someone like Elvis to groups such as the Beatles was the result of a more profound shift in Western culture - a shift away from my personality type and the kind of individualism that I still feel is the best hope for a sound, interesting, and humane society. Perhaps sociologist David Riesman put his finger on this swing in temperament in his 1960's bestseller The Lonely Crowd. He traced what he thought he detected as a progression of dominant personality types in our culture over the last couple of hundred years. It started with people who were guided by, and often bound by, tradition. Then society transitioned into favoring individualists, both bad and good. There were the robber barons, but also the creative artists and thinkers who forged their own paths. These newer generations of people incorporated the singular experiences they had growing up in eccentric, often self-sufficient families. As adults, they maintained inner compasses that reflected the unique circumstances in which they had been forged and which caused them to forge ahead in divergent directions. Riesman called these generations "inner-directed."

But then Riesman believed that somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, another personality type emerged and became dominant. He wrote that these most recent generations are primarily shaped by peer expectation. They take their cues from the likes and dislikes of the amalgamated group around them. They follow the crowd and are more geared to "group-think" than to rugged individualism - although the words "crowd and group-think" have a more strongly pejorative connotation that Riesman probably intended. He was primarily making an observation that the latest generation was what he called "other-directed or outer-directed."

Of course any such cultural analysis is a vast over-simplification. There have obviously been people of all types in all eras. Still, I can't help but feel that some such cultural shift might have marked the shift from widespread appreciation of Elvis to widespread appreciation of the Beatles. Or, to de-escalate the enthusiasm and to widen the time-scales just a bit - it was a shift from people who liked the extravagant, energetic individuality of Al Jolson to people who, from an early age, cried out after the passive uniformities of the line of Barbies and the Spice Girls. It was a shift from the apotheosis of the non pareil to the apotheosis of the united front.

There is indeed a "generation gap" between the two fandoms, although it's not really along the lines usually cited. The difference between the Eisenhower era and the hippie era is usually said to be the difference between conformity and a "do your own thing" outlook. Actually, it's closer to being the reverse. In the decades before and including Eisenhower, movie stars, singers, heroes, were people who had some distinctive, vivid aspect - people whose wit, beauty, or brains, seemed largely unattainable, above and beyond. But in the decades that followed, it was the "Average Joe" who was sought after - someone like everyone, someone who blended in - in appearance - and in voice. It was someone who sang, not alone, but in unison.

But I do miss that solo voice, the outstanding performance of an individual who stands stark, free from background noise. I miss the ravishingly distinct timbre that comes out of the darkness and touches some emotional core of me, one-on-one.

Sometimes I think perhaps there can't be any new voices with such unique tones, that perhaps all the possibilities have been used up. I think that after Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Elvis, and those other often-imitated/never-duplicated voices, that all the available band wavelengths, all the most striking registers, have been taken. Unlike the children in Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone, everyone can't be "above average," and so maybe we are left with just the ultimately unmemorable averageness of most of the American Idol voices.

I hope not. I hope that other truly distinct and moving voices can emerge and not be drowned out by the necessity of presenting with accompanying pyrotechnics. I think many of us were flabbergasted during the recent Oscar Awards Show to hear that Lady Gaga has a truly affecting voice when she sang without all the usual distractions. Maybe other such talents will come to light and find a platform.

If not though, there are always the recordings of those older unique voices to turn to. When the present world is too much with me, I can always turn to something like that 1956 recording of Elvis Presley singing "Love Me Tender" - pure and simple. He sings almost a capella for some stretches of the song, then with only the occasional guitar strum as accompaniment. His unique voice comes through - before he became a caricature of himself - before the hype and the hysteria so often tended to drown him out in the way that current singers purposefully, panderingly drown out any individuality they might have.

And even though the national character might have shifted in the way Riesman described, I won't be alone in my preferences. There was a scene from the movie Pulp Fiction that brings home the persistence of people who prefer Elvis over the Beatles. Director Quentin Tarantino had the scene deleted from most modern copies of the film - because he thought it sounded too scripted and because it became a cliché among dating couples. Nevertheless, it makes a telling point. On their arranged date, Uma Thurman's character tells John Travolta's character that there are only two kinds of people in the world - those who like what's in Column A, and those who like what's in Column B. She proceeds to quiz Travolta about his A or B preferences. The most notable choice she challenges Travolta to name is between the Beatles and Elvis. It seems likely she knows his answer in advance.

When Travolta unequivocally responds "Elvis," he stands with all of us who respond less to the necessarily homogenized sound of a group and more to an individual with a touching timbre for all times.

Hung By an Apostrophe

Watching a re-run of the true crime TV show Forensic Files, I learned about a new field of the science called "forensic linguistics." It has a lot in common with many older branches of research such as the one of attribution which tries to determine who wrote a certain document, novel, or other text. Traditional attribution studies include researches into questions such as "Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?" These studies often rely on concordances, comparative lists of the frequency with which words are used in different texts, of known and unknown authorship.

But I gather that "forensic linguistics" has been an attempt to pull together a broader range of verbal studies, of both written and audio material. While it can never be an exact science, it aims at presenting unbiased arguments that can stand the rigors of examination in court. It does not concern itself with handwriting analysis, but rather with the content of different writings and assertions. One of the pioneers in formalizing this branch of forensics has been John Olsson, whose books I was inspired to get after hearing about this new field on the TV show.

The Forensic Files episode that snagged my attention involved the question of the source of some threatening notes that a woman received in the mail before being murdered. Had these in fact been written by her husband, trying to make the authorities believe some outside person with a grudge against the woman murdered her? The notes were turned over to a forensic linguist for analysis, along with some representative samples of the husband's correspondence.

The forensic analyst soon noted a quirk that characterized both the husband's routine writing, and the poison pen letters. Both sets of writing were notable for including contractions of all negative assertions, such as "I can't, I shouldn't, I won't," etc. However all positive statements were written out as "I am, I would, I will." There was never an "I'll or "they'll" in either text. This was so unusual a stylistic dichotomy that the analyst concluded that the poison pen notes had in fact been written by the victim's husband. This analysis was combined with other forensic evidence pointing to the husband, and he was eventually convicted of his wife's murder.

The book of such case studies of crime I got by John Olsson weren't generally quite as decisive or thrilling as the above analysis. Still, he made some interesting points. His comments about how to detect plagiarism were especially telling. He noted that plagiarists will generally not be so obvious as to copy passages word-for-word. They will resort to synonyms that are necessarily a bit strained and inapt. So where their source might say "he poured chilled wine into glasses," - the plagiarist will translate that into "he poured fizzing wine into crystal goblets." Or the plagiarist might simply change the order of a sequence of actions, turning a catchy progression into a lame and disordered chronology. So "He came, he saw, he conquered," might be rephrased as "He conquered after having come and seen."

In another set of studies, Olsson reported on assignments he'd been given to determine whether the statements made by witnesses or suspects at a police station were spontaneous or whether they had in fact been coaxed out or suggested by the police themselves. It was frequently necessary to make this sort of determination in the days before police interviews were tape recorded.

In this connection, Olsson tells how he hung a lot of import on a witness' statement that "I saw the scar on his arm," when he'd been asked to describe the likely suspect in a murder case. There had been no previous recorded mention of a scar in the written police statement. If the witness' statement had been completely uncoached, Olsson believed he would have said "I saw a scar on his arm." The fact that he referred to "the" scar meant that some preceding reference to a scar had been made, but that such prior discussion had been omitted from the police detective's official written report. Such attention to minute detail ranks right up there with Sherlock Holmes' investigations.

All this opened up a fascinating new world of stylistic exploration for me. I would think any avid reader or writer would be drawn to the field of forensic linguistics for its insights into such nuance. But as I read along in the field, I realized I had once convicted of a mischief by some keen linguistic analysis informally exercised on me by a friend of mine.

It's a sad and wry story. Some years ago, I found a fragile white kitten on my property, not really injured, but obviously in need of a home. It made an affectionate, touching appeal to me to be adopted. But I just didn't feel I could take on the responsibilities of another pet at that time. I had an older dog that I thought wouldn't take kindly to the introduction of a rival into the household. Mostly though, I resisted the kitten's supplications out of sheer laziness. I was just too inert to consider tending a cat for the next twenty-plus years.

But what to do with it? It was springtime and all the no-kill shelters I called were awash in kittens. They all adamantly refused to accept yet one more likely unadoptable resident. I made pleas to every responsible person I could think of. But absolutely no one was in a position to adopt a cat.

Except - there was one person I knew who might make a home for this little stray. Glen's circumstances were far from ideal. He was an inveterate hoarder whose house was an unwholesome clutter. Any animal who came to live there would likely be subject to flea and mite infestation. But the man was tender-hearted and attentive to animals, in his way. And most important of all - he had an opening.

The last stray cat he had entertained had recently disappeared after several years of making Glen's house a regular way-station. Like many hoarders, Glen saw his seamy collection as being of inestimable value. He irrationally exaggerated the extent to which his hodgepodge of holdings would be coveted by the outside world. As it was with his cracked computer monitors, his stained and coverless books, and his broken and bladeless can opener - so it had been with the various scruffy alley cats he had given shelter to over the years. He was especially sure that this latest cat to disappear had been spirited away by some neighbor. He maintained that some neighbor must have been spying on him, a hankering after the cat growing and growing in the individual's breast - until he could no longer control his greed. Glen was sure the neighbor must have lured the cat permanently away with some ripe sardines or other irresistible treat. Glen had grown really attached to the cat and was desolate about the loss.

So Glen occurred to me as the little white kitten's best chance. But there was a problem. In addition to being paranoid about his belongings, Glen was also cussedly contrary. Whatever idea I presented to him - he would refute. Whatever course of action I advanced - he would strike down as unworkable and inadvisable in the extreme. When he'd forget that I had been the original source of some suggestion though, he would often advance it as his own. Viewed that way, he would of course champion it to the end as brilliant inspiration.

So I knew that if I were to present him with this cat with the suggestion that it would be a good replacement for the one he'd lost, he'd reject it out-of-hand. I had to work the cat into Glen's own worldview. So I concocted an elaborate storyline. I bought a carrying case for the cat, coaxed the hapless little creature into it, and set out early one morning. After long plotting, I had attached a note to the carrying case. The note read:

I'm sory I stoll your cat. It was so butiful, I wanted it. But now I'm sory. I got this other cat and desided to give it to you to make up for what I did. It's a reel nice kitty. I know you will luv it and it will luv you. 

Or something like that. I perhaps didn't go quite so heavy on the misspellings, but I tried to make the note sound as if it might have come from one of the semi-literate street people whom Glen always suspected of waiting a chance to steal from the rotting woodpile beside his garage. And so I left the caged kitten meowing piteously after me in Glen's back yard, and high-tailed it out of there.

A few days passed and I didn't hear from Glen. I was getting really worried about the kitten. Had Glen found the loaded carrying case I'd deposited by his rickety back staircase? Had he found it before the kitten could finish the food I left with it and starve? Had I presented the cat as enough of a part of Glen's own scheme of things to make it acceptable to him? There were so many forks in the road where this project could have taken a wrong turn. Then the poor kitten whose cries told me it knew it was being abandoned to an uncertain fate - would never find a home.

Finally - Glen called. I listened, more impatient than ever, as he gloated about the TV he'd found in the alley. He couldn't get any actual picture on it - yet. But he was sure that if he just went in there and adjusted the raster, he'd have a perfectly workably set. That was another project he'd get around to - sometime. Really, he didn't know why people threw out perfectly good sets like that. Meanwhile I was silently shrieking, "Yes, but what about the cat? What about the cat?" Of course I couldn't ask him anything out loud and tip my hand.

Eventually though, my long wait came to an end. Glen very casually mentioned that someone had left a cat in his yard. I was surprised and disappointed that he broached the subject almost as an aside. I thought he might take the appearance of the kitten as he took so many things that came his way - as signs that the universe was magically in tune with him and attentive to his secret wishes. At the very least, I thought he would triumph by the cat's appearance, taking it as confirmation of what he'd maintained all along - that his vanished alley cat had been stolen by an envious passerby. But no. He was perfectly nonchalant about the advent of the new cat into his back yard. Indeed, he sounded alarmingly indifferent. I got the sinking feeling that the adoption had not gone through. Surely he'd be excited if his found wealth had been augmented by a new pet.

However, as I'd been thinking these dismal thoughts, Glen had been elaborating. He described how the cat had been left in a nice new carrying case. He said that he could make use of that anyway. As for the cat itself, he said that he suspected some attempt to mislead him there, some additional twist to the conspiracies that his neighbors were engaging in against him.

"What?" I caught my breath.

'Yes," he said that a note had been tied to the carrying case - a note with a lot of misspellings. But he said that he was sure that the person who wrote the note was actually highly literate.

(Oh no! Where had I gone wrong?) I asked Glen what he meant.

He said that well, the words "sorry" and "decided" and so forth had been misspelled in the note, but that the ignorance was obviously faked. He could tell this for sure because elsewhere in the note, the writer had correctly used the contraction "it's" with the appropriate apostrophe. Glen said that only a literate person knows when to use that apostrophe, and when to omit it. He had taught college for a while, and the vast majority of even his senior students hadn't mastered the distinction between "its" (the possessive form) and "it's" a contraction of the verb phrase "it is.") So obviously, this whole business of the cat was part of another plot against him - or else - Glen proceeded with frightening shrewdness - the cat had been left by a friend who was having a little fun with him. That would be some friend who was a good writer, someone interested in writing as a career. Then with oily conclusion, Glen asked "Did you leave the note?"

I was aghast. I blustered a denial. My denial was probably as unconvincing as my misspellings had been. But Glen didn't press the point and I let ride my indignation over his suggestion that I had been the perpetrator. With great trepidation, I asked what had happened to the cat.

Glen said he had opened the carrying case out in his yard to play with the cat, but as soon as he'd sprung the door, the cat had bolted. It ran around to the front of his house, out of view. He thought he heard some tires screech and he assumed the cat had run out into traffic. Wanting to remain in denial, Glen went back into his house without looking what had happened to the cat. And that was that.

Another whisker of tragedy to us humans; a whole world to the kitten. After that I have never again been able to deny any stray cat's appeal to me to be adopted.

I've also learned how careful I will have to be if I ever murder my spouse. In any fake suicide note I attempt, I'll have to watch my apostrophes. With forensic linguists on my trail, I might not stand much of a chance.