CurlyShavings

Many things in life have a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference. (This statement, of course, may or may not be true.)

What is true is that my employer is in the financial industry and I have been watching the "implosion" of WaMu and Wachovia (as well as our cross-town rival) with some interest. Now much of my financial news comes from the Wall Street Journal and as I read, digested and followed the events of the past weeks, a phrase from the HHGTTG kept coming to mind. Of course I wasted many, many hours in middle, high school and college listening to the series on NPR (and my bootleg recordings) and reading and re-reading the books, but apparently that wasn't enough because it wasn't until I went to the book (thanks, Karen R!) and found chapter 15 that I remembered the complete scene.

Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of. . . .

. . . And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion hungry worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they labored into the night over smug little treatises on the value of a planned political economy.

It was "the pen scratchings" that I was hearing as I read the paper pages of my newsprint, the RSS feeds of the blogs and talked around the water cooler with my colleagues. Some of it scholarly. Some smug. Some little. Some espousing less regulation and some espousing more.

A lot of pen scratchings, though.

And now I think I am ready for a period of "long sullen silence". You see, while Douglas Adams was ultimately a funny nihilist, I have work to do, a family to lead, a boat to sail and cabinets to finish.

Update (20081104): Several readers have asked me if I really believe in "a planned political economy". I do not. I believe that free markets, when transparent enough, are the most effective ways to handle an economy. I do, however, wish for a sullen silence (or any kind of silence) these days.

I was a fairly young married guy in 1997 when we moved into our first house on Wandle Avenue in Bedford and decided to paint the place the way we liked.

(Old married guys will notice the funny word "we" in the preceding sentence.)

We brought home a couple gallons of Behr's Arapaho White the same day our pastor came over to check things out. I had a sample on the wall and was moaning about how peachy-pink it was. And moaning. And complaining.

(Old married guys will see where this is going.)

The pastor pulls me off to the side and educates me. "Listen," he said, "she's going to be here all day long and you'll be lucky if you see these walls illuminated a couple of times a week. Paint the walls whatever she wants."

So I did. (He later educated me further on the some of the finer points of servant leadership.)

Fast-forward eleven years. This past week our house was finished being painted what Behr calls Madras Blue, number 560D-4. I think the only thing I like about it is its close approximation to a Buckeye Trail blue blaze. (Well, that and the fact that the house is completely painted and I didn't do anything harder than write a couple checks.)

Turns out we had shutters up there. Five years, living in this house and I didn't know we had shutters. Can't leave them black, we've got to find a complementary color.

Leaning on my fourteen years of marriage experience, I not only painted them Phantom Hue (110F-5), but I also got a quart each of Purplestone (110F-6) and Deep Garnet (110F-7) in case Phantom Hue turns out to be too light.

I may draw the line at the front door, though. I do occasionally see the front door and I just can't imagine Deep Garnet on my front door.

Then again, I have been married for over fourteen years. (Does that qualify me as an "old married guy" yet? Ask me after the door gets painted.)

I bumped into Wesley Washington (wrote about him earlier here) again the other day out in front of what is becoming Cadillac Ranch. Sounds like he's going to have a concert soon out in Tremont. Here are the details:

with open eyes

10-16-2008 21:00 at The Southside 2207 W. 11 St, Cleveland, Ohio 44113 Cost: Free

Yesterday afternoon the six of us (and nine assorted other relatives) were at the Manassas National Battlefield Park, near my parents' retirement home. I had the two year-old, the youngest of my four, on my back when an older lady approached me and commented that I must have drawn the short straw, implying that I got the chore no one else wanted, carrying the baby.

I quickly replied that I was loving this. "Well, I think it's beautiful," she responded and turned away.

I wish I hadn't been so intent on remembering whose army was behind which hill at what time or I would have engaged her a little bit more.

"Thank you! This is my fourth child and compared to my third at this age, she's a feather.

"Feel those fingers clasped so tightly around my neck? See that downy head nestled on my shoulder? Hear those chirps about this and about that?

"I only hope I can remember these things into my seventies and eighties and beyond. You see, I've only been doing this for nearly twelve years now, and I rather feel like time is running out.

"She's likely our last (I won't say our last) and outside of time with nieces and nephews, waiting for grandchildren seems almost unbearable."

Twelve years. Is that short or long?

Time's running out.

English is a funny language. Not sure if it is funnier than some or most, but it is certainly funny. (I only speak one other, so I reserve the right to be wrong.)

Years ago I wrote a thank-you note to a number of friends who had graced me with a present of their presence at a dinner my college roommate (Hi, Alex!) had hosted. I thanked them "for their presents of presence" and even though all were (and presumably still are) very literate, I was soundly chastised for using the wrong word ("presents" vs presence" or vice versa) or writing a poorly-constructed sentence.

I was reminded of that event today when calling a doctor for an appointment. Their voice response unit kindly informed me that they were all busy at the moment and then thanked "their patients for their patience".

Astute readers will recognize these pairs (presents/presence and patients/patience) as homophones because they sound the same regardless of their spelling. And they are also heterographs because they sound the same and are spelled differently.

What I didn't know is that they are also (and this appears to be debatable), polysemes because they have related meanings.

If you'd like to explore this even more, be sure to check out the differences between terms on Wikipedia's Homonym page.

Some day I'd like to know why words weren't this much fun in high school or college.

Tony Woodlief writes today that he doesn't know why his back hurts except that sometimes in his dreams he runs "really fast to stay a half-step ahead of the monsters".

I don't know if his monsters take any particular form but it seems that today there are plenty of candidates. (I had thought to list some but concluded that nameless monsters are more universal, i.e., the monsters in my dreams might not inhabit yours.)

I also found it particularly interesting to hear another adult confess to having monsters. A few years back my wife and I developed a strategy to deal with our son's monsters (I think we lightly spritzed water under the bed) and I wonder now if we were doing him a disservice. To him they were real, even as the ones that menace adults are real. Teaching him to trust in a sovereign God for something as silly as imagined monsters under the bed might not have been such a bad idea—we lead him to prayer for many other things.

A sovereign God. Probably sounds old-fashioned to some readers. And certainly God's sovereignty doesn't preclude those monsters from doing bad things to His people (but here we digress into free will, etc.).

The comfort comes in knowing that we are His people and even when bad things happen, we cannot be snatched from His hand. The monsters, even when they catch us, are not eternally consequential.

A leaf made it to the sixth floor of my office building today, no doubt brought in on the heel of someone's shoe. It lay there on the carpet most of the afternoon, a bright-red maple reminder of Autumn's arrival.

I marvel, not only at its humble beauty but also at its fortitude. Blown to a wet sidewalk from who-knows-where, attached to a sole for a walk to and then inside the building, a six-floor ride up the elevator and another walk down a long, carpeted hallway, to be deposited there for us to see.

The wall color is "Feather Gold Dust" or some such rot and we hang large posters and big framed art to break its monotony. Why, then, does this three-inch wonder command such attention, disrupt our focus and draw us back to view it again?

It isn't just the boldness of its color or the uniqueness of its hue. Nor is it the cut-out shape that only a maple can deliver.

No, it is because it is something "outside" that has made it in.

Something that surprises us by not belonging here. Something otherworldly that defies by its presence.

Up against an acre of industrial hallway and walls, this little red maple leaf draws us to itself. "Come closer;" it seems to say, "see me; remember that today is not like yesterday, that inside it is still, and that outside, things remain in motion."