VfthSW: The Brown Paper Bag

Thirty years ago, I lived on the highest street in the village, the house lots behind me and downhill were vacant.  Cross from them on a lonely street lived my best friend and his neighbor.  Whenever Paul’s neighbor let out the dogs, they would poop in the middle of his front lawn.  Paul had spoken to the neighbor to no avail.  

 One Saturday morning, maybe mid-morning, I finally got out of my bed.  Everyone else in our village of 100 had headed “into town” for groceries and shopping.  Either of the closest bigger towns were an hour away and everyone usually made a day of it.    My first chore; scooping dog poop in my back yard.  So, shovel and brown paper bag in hand I went out to doo my dooty.  (Ha ha!)   Not a big job.  When I finished, I looked down on Paul’s front yard.  Even at that distance I could see where the grass had been killed by the neighbor’s dogs. 

I said to myself, “What the hay! I already have a bag of dog poop.” 

So I marched down the hill and shoveled up the poop in Paul’s front yard.    

I swear by God Almighty what happen next was not premediated.  I had the brown paper bag half full of dog poop.  What was I going to do with it?  I walked over and placed it in the middle of the neighbor’s front lawn. 

I don’t know what I was doing when the neighbor came home from shopping.  The Judge was visiting and she saw it all real clear through the window at the kitchen sink.  The neighbor parked on the street.  The dogs jumped out of the truck with him and ran off to Paul’s yard, while he carried in arms full of groceries in brown paper bags.  Apparently the dogs distracted him further when he walked to the truck for the second load.  Returning to the house with his arms full of bags again, he noticed the brown paper bag I’d left and apparently assumed a bag had slipped out of his arms on the first trip.  So after depositing the second load of brown paper bags in the house, he returned to the middle of his front lawn for the one he thought had slipped out of his arms.  The Judge couldn’t tell, but she was pretty sure he didn’t suspect anything when he opened the bag to see if its contents were broken.  Apparently the aroma of dog poop and the visual hit him at the same time.  He slammed the lip of the bag shut.  The Judge had tossed down her dish towel and stepped back into the shadows of the kitchen.  So when the neighbor looked about, he saw no one watching and Paul’s truck still clearly absent.  Embarrassed he hurried around to the side of his house and buried the brown paper bag in his garbage can.

VftSW: He is Going to Leave his Wife for Me.

Kathy said, "He is going to leave his wife for me."


My grandmother had heard this so often from Kathy, that she just nodded, smiled sweetly and changed the subject.  Kathy didn't appreciate it when my grandmother pointed out that she'd been hearing this for years, that Kathy never spent Christmas with him, Thanksgiving, vacation, Valentine's day and only occasionally did he celebrate Kathy's birthday with her.  I think what really aggravated my grandmother about the whole thing was the number of times that she and Kathy had plans that abruptly got cancelled because he was suddenly available. 


In retrospect, maybe that was the kind of relationship Kathy wanted.  Clearly she wasn't good at making commitments to her friends, maybe she didn't want to have to commit to a man. 


I once referred to Kathy as my grandmother's best friend.


"She's not my best friend. "


"You two spend all sorts of time together.  You probably hit the town twice a week together.  How is she not your best friend.?" 


My grandmother sighed, as though a little disappointed that she had to explain the concept of a "best friend" to her college age grandson.


"So say I have an emergency in the middle of the night and I call Kathy to come over.  It will take her two hours to show up.  Cause first she'll shower, pick out an outfit, fix her hair and put on her make-up." 


I nodded, seeing how that was possible.


"Now if I call Marjorie, (Another friend she spoke of fondly and often, but not someone she hit the bars with.) Marjorie will show up in five minutes; wearing her robe and slippers, hair in curlers and shotgun in hand."


So,  who is your best friend?

VftSW: Free Beer

Thirty years ago someone in the front of the hotshot bus yells out, "Does that say Free Beer?"

He was referring to one of those big signs on the big hotels as you enter town.  We were coming back at the end of the day from working on a Forest Service trail over-looking Santa Diego Pueblo.  Sure enough is said, "Free Beer, Thursday 5-7".  It was Thursday and we got off at five.





We thought about car-pooling, because there would be no place to park, right?   The parking lot at the hotel had plenty of cars but not so many we could not find places to park.  There were a lot of people in the hotel-bar, but the typical number for a week-day afternoon where people were stopping for a cold one after work.  We crowded into an empty booth.  What there wasn't plenty of, was waitresses.  So being the take charge kind of guy I am.  I stomped down the steps in my dusty boots and dirty work clothes and ordered, "A vodka Collins with a double twist and seven free beers."


Barkeep said, "Coming right up."


There were three people sitting in the bar and they said in this order, "They have free beer here?", "Yeah." and "It's Schlitz." 


The last speaker didn't say it in disgust, but in was in a judgmental enough tone of voice that the other two nodded in understanding and agreement.


They weren't big glasses, but they were a cup (literally; small transparent plastic cup) of ice-cold,  free beer.  We went back to the bartender for round after round of free beer until was time to go home or time to go eat dinner.   The hotel never did it again as far as we could tell.


Here's my thought after all these years.  My boss drank a Vodka Collins with a double twist?  And he did it so often I still remember his drink after all these years?  Back then people drank Tom Collins!  And a double twist?  

TFBT; "Troy" by Walter Leaf

I recently purchased a copy of “Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography” by Walter Leaf.  (Ends up I did not get a real book, rather one of the Xeroxed copies where you see a person’s hand occasionally and badly bound in a hard cover.  The pages are already coming out of the binding.)  I find Leaf’s writing beautiful and his concepts way ahead of their time.  (Although I skipped the flat-out archeology bits.) He was writing about stuff in 1912, that I thought hadn’t been worked out until recently.  A few great quotes.  More to come. 

 

“The summit of Ida is a shapeless plateau, strewn with stones, and in itself most unlovely. But as the pasture of the plains below begins to die out in the heat of early summer, the fresh grass grows on the heights, and offers food to countless flocks and herds. And all round the fields of melting snow there springs up in May a glory of colour which those who have seen it are not likely to forget — crocus and hyacinth carpeting the slopes with brilliant orange and blue, mingled in thick beds worthy for the couch of gods.”

 

“It would seem to follow that there existed from the first some sort of a metrical narrative of the [Trojan] war... gradually transformed, by the natural growth of centuries, from a narrative into a poem, each generation taking up the tradition, and gradually moulding it by expansion and omission, to be handed on to the next for fresh development, till it reached its final form in the Iliad as we now have it.”

 

Leaf speaking of the Iliad, “the story which, of all that have ever been set down, has most affected the imagination of succeeding generations”

 

“Careful investigations by Virchow and others have failed to produce any sign of marine deposits in the plain, and it may be taken as certain that the coast-line did not in the Mycenaean age materially differ from that which now exists. Hissarlik [Troy] was as far from the sea then as it is now.”

 

“Skamandros, and Simoeis, where many cowhide-shields and helmets fell in the dust—as also a generation of demigods.”  (Iliad 12:22-23)

 

“One thing at least has passed for me beyond all doubt: that the poet who wrote those lines either knew the scene himself, or was following in careful detail a predecessor who had put into living words a tradition founded on real fighting in this very place.”

 

Referring to Achilles chasing Hector; “The triple course round the city is easy even now: it must have been still easier when the neck to the south-east of the fortress was materially lower than it is to-day. That it should be done in full accoutrement after a morning of hard fighting with river gods as well as men raises it to the level of a truly heroic performance.”

 

 

TFBT: The Epigoni

The Attican Study Group at the Kosmos Society is translating the text pertaining to Pausanias’ visit to Delphi during the second century AD.  This is the second of two articles on the statutes dedicated by the Argives; the first set of statutes being the Seven Against Thebes and this set the Epigoni.     My friend Helene asked me to write a little something up and here is the first draft.

 F

“οὗτοι μὲν δὴ Ὑπατοδώρου καὶ Ἀριστογείτονός εἰσινἔργα, καὶ ἐποίησαν σφᾶς, ὡς αὐτοὶ Ἀργεῖοι λέγουσιν, ἀπὸ τῆς νίκης ἥντινα ἐν Οἰνόῃ τῇ Ἀργείᾳ αὐτοί τε καὶἈθηναίων ἐπίκουροι Λακεδαιμονίους ἐνίκησαν. ἀπὸ δὲτοῦ αὐτοῦ ἐμοὶ δοκεῖν ἔργου καὶ τοὺς Ἐπιγόνους ὑπὸἙλλήνων καλουμένους ἀνέθεσαν οἱ Ἀργεῖοι: κεῖνταιγὰρ δὴ εἰκόνες καὶ τούτων, Σθένελος καὶ Ἀλκμαίων, κατὰ ἡλικίαν ἐμοὶ δοκεῖν πρὸ Ἀμφιλόχου τετιμημένος, ἐπὶ δὲ αὐτοῖς Πρόμαχος καὶ Θέρσανδρος καὶ Αἰγιαλεύςτε καὶ Διομήδης: ἐν μέσῳ δὲ Διομήδους καὶ τοῦΑἰγιαλέως ἐστὶν Εὐρύαλος.” 10.10.4

“These are works of Hypatodorus and Aristogeiton, who made them, as the Argives themselves say, from the spoils of the victory which they and their Athenian allies won over the Lacedaemonians at Oenoe in Argive territory. From spoils of the same action, it seems to me, the Argives set up statues of those whom the Greeks call the Epigoni. For there stand statues of these also, Sthenelus, Alcmaeon, who I think was honored before Amphilochus on account of his age, Promachus also, Thersander, Aegialeus and Diomedes. Between Diomedes and Aegialeus is Euryalus.”

These are the sons of the Seven Against Thebes discussed previously.  They succeeded in conquering Thebes whereas their fathers did not.  Sthenelus was the son of the hubristic Capaneus, Alcmaeon and his brother Amphilochus were sons of Amphiaraus;   when they discovered their mother had knowingly forced their father to participate in the doomed expedition of the Seven Against Thebes, the advice from the Oracle was for them to kill her.  (Same advice Apollo gave Orestes a generation later with the same pleasant consequences.) Diomedes, son of Tydeus. And so on.  Most of these went on to battle beneath the walls of Troy in the Iliad.

If we are wondering why the Argives and Athenians erected these statues of the Epigoni in honor of the victory over Sparta, the answer might be found in the Iliad.

There is a tradition in many cultures that in the good old days, men were braver and stronger, and women were smarter and more beautiful.   For example, in 469 BC a skeleton of large man was found by Cimon and brought to Athens. It was believed to be that of Theseus. ¹   Homer probably explained this folk-belief best;

“Aeneas seized a great stone, so huge that two men, as men now are, would be unable to lift it, but Aeneas wielded it quite easily. “ Iliad 20.286

In answer to a similar charge of weakness and smallness in the current generation by Agamemnon against Sthenelus and his buddy Diomedes, Sthenelus replied,  

“We boast to be much better than our fathers.  We even captured the foundations of seven-gated Thebes,   having mustered a smaller army against a stronger fortress and having heeded the signs of the gods and the help of Zeus. But they perished, by their own wantonness.   So do not bestow on our fathers an honor [tīmē] that is like ours.” Iliad 4.405-10

So by erecting statues of the Epigoni in honor of the victory at Oeone, the Argives are pointing out that they too are better than their mythological forefathers, and accomplished something they never had, they defeated the Spartans.  

¹ A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology William Smith, Ed.

TFBT: The Seven Against Thebes

Over at the Kosmos Society one of the study groups was translating  Pausanias 10.10.3.  I did a little research on it.

 Near the horse are also other votive offerings of the Argives, likenesses of the captains of those who with Polyneices made war on Thebes: Adrastus, the son of Talaus, Tydeus, son of Oeneus, the descendants of Proteus, namely, Capaneus, son of Hipponous, and Eteoclus, son of Iphis, Polyneices, and Hippomedon, son of the sister of Adrastus. Near is represented the chariot of Amphiaraus, and in it stands Baton, a relative of Amphiaraus who served as his charioteer. The last of them is Alitherses.

Talaus had a son Adrastus.  Adrastus got some strange prophecy from Delphi telling him to wed his daughters to a lion and a boar.  Admetus had to deal with something similar  ( Apollodorus Bibl. 1.19.3,  Fabulae 50)  Adrastus found two guests fighting on the doorstep; one carrying a Theban shield ( think bottom half of the Sphinx) and the other a Calydonian shield (as in the Boar Hunt)  So he wed his daughters to them

• Argria to Polyneices banished co-king of Thebes and
• Deiphyle to Tydeus, father of Diomedes

Talaus had a daughter Eriphyle wed to Amphiaraus the seer.   With the help of Iphis’ advice, family politics and poisoned jewelry Amphiaraus  was forced to participate in the doomed expedition against Thebes.  His charioteer Baton and their chariot are mentioned by Pausanias because of what happens later.  (See below.)

Talaus had a daughter Metice, mother of  Hippomedon.  He has various parentages.

Iphis had;

• a daughter Evadne married to Capaneus and
• a son Eteoclus (Polyneices brother is named Eteocles, just to confuse us.)

Various lists can be found naming the Seven Against Thebes; none of them include the unknown Alithereses. 

For those that don’t recall; after Oedipus cursed his sons Polyneices and Eteocles, civil war broke out.  Polyneices raised an Argive army to insure his right to the throne.  After much epic battling and the death of several of the heroes  (See Thebaid) the brothers decided to settle it man-to-man.  They ended up slaying one another simultaneously in front of the gathered armies.  The Argives fled.  Adrastus was the only Argive captain to survive because he was on the divine horse Arion.  Amphiaraus,  Baton and their chariot were swallowed up whole by the earth.  The site became an underground oracle and both men received heroic honors.

 Part II is The Epigoni

 

VftSW: Don’t Bring Your Girlfriend Home

Long ago I worked with this guy Blake and his brother, fighting forest fires. They were young and still living at home.  I stopped by the house once for a beer and noticed the lack of a woman’s touch, definitely a bachelor household.  I made some comment about that to Blake.

“Oh, mom ran off ages ago.” He said matter-of-factly.  “Dad raised us pretty much by himself.”

That set me back a bit.  Blake’s dad and I had friends in common.  I had never heard this story.  Not knowing what to say, I said, “That must have been hard on your dad.”

“Ya, especially because she ran off with my grandad.” came the matter-of-fact reply.

Okay, I never heard that bit of gossip before either.  Again not knowing what to say, I said, “That must have been hard on your grandmother.”

“Nay, she’d already run off with my grandad’s father.” 

“Blake!” I said, “Let me see if I have this right.  Your great-grandad ran off with your grandad’s wife?”

“Uh-huh” he nodded

Then I said, “And your grandfather ran off with your dad’s wife?”

“Uh-huh.” he nodded.

Then I thought, “So your dad is going to steal your wife?”

And without me asking the question out-loud, Blake responded with a nod and an “Uh-huh.”

 

TFBT: Sema and Anagnorisis

I just finished reading "An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and An Epic" by Daniel Mendelsohn.  As I mentioned before I fine it well-written, insightful and thought-provoking.

Chapter Sema,

Of course the last chapter deals with the end of the Odyssey (and of the father).  The ritual that ends Odysseus’ career as Destroyer of Cities and start of his role as King of Ithaca as predicted by the seer Tiresias mimics the rites involved in the burial of Odysseus’ sailor.  In never occurred to me that the burial of Achilles is foreshadowed by the burial Patroclus and all mixed up the prophecy of Thetis. 

None of the characters above experienced the long lingering death of the elderly, which the father succumbed to and so feared. As we all do. 

Chapter Anagnorisis

The son and father seem to have so little in common.  (I wonder if the son knew the story that Laertes is NOT the father of Odysseus, but rather Sisyphus (Scholium to Sophocles’ Ajax 190).  Just saying, the son’s mother, father’s wife was a beautiful woman. )  The son seems so clueless about the father, as though the elder man had been gone twenty years.  But siblings and relatives alike knew all sorts of stories, had all sorts of insights that the son didn’t share. 

 This chapter, actually the next to last and I think the most pertinent, is primarily about the son interviewing relatives about the father. (Probably symbolic of the author gathering material for the book.)  While talking to Aunt Barbara and Uncle Nino this happens;

“Barbara looked at me and said, slowly, Oh, I know what you’re doing I know why you interview your uncle.  I know why you’re here.

I looked at her and said, what am I doing?  Why am  here?

Barbara smiled with slow self-satisfaction, like a student who is convince she has outwitted the teacher.  She said, you’re doing what Telemachus did.“ 

TFBT: The Telemachy

TFBT: The Apologies

TFBT: Chapter 3; Nostos

TFBT: Sema and Anagnorisis

TFBT: Quotes for February

Strictly speaking, then, gods are not anthropomorphic, humans are theomorphic.” William F. Hansen

A flock of owls is a parliament
A flock of crows is a murder
A flock of ravens is an unkindness.  (Tim Piazza)


11] In reply to this Phalinus said: “The King believes that he is victor because he has slain Cyrus. For who is there now who is contending against him for his realm? Further, he believes that you also are his because he has you in the middle of his country, enclosed by impassable rivers, and because he can bring against you a multitude of men so great that you could not slay them even if he were to put them in your hands.” Then Theopompus, an Athenian, said: [12] “Phalinus, at this moment, as you see for yourself, we have no other possession save arms and valour. Now if we keep our arms, we imagine that we can make use of our valour also, but if we give them up, that we shall likewise be deprived of our lives. Do not suppose, therefore, that we shall give up to you the only possessions that we have; rather, with these we shall do battle against you for your possessions as well.” Xen. Anabasis. 2.1.11-12



[20] In reply to this Clearchus said: “Well, that is what you say; but as our answer carry back this word, that in our view if we are to be friends of the King, we should be more valuable friends if we keep our arms than if we give them up to someone else, and if we are to wage war with him, we should wage war better if we keep our arms than if we give them up to someone else.”  Xen. Anabasis. 2.1.20

A suitor like Hippomenes in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women must compete—to paraphrase Haubold—not only for a wife but also for his life. (Yiannis Petropoulos  is Kleos in a Minor Key: The Homeric Education of a Little Prince, 

“The Arkeisiads survive at the expense of at least two age-sets. “ Yiannis Petropoulos. In other words two generations of Ithacans  died to insure the throne of Odysseus and Telemachus 

  

“If the T scholia on Iliad 9.482 are correct in deriving the etymology of τηλύγετος ‘special or favorite [sc. child]’ from the word τέλος ‘end’, the prince is literally, as the above scholia note, ὁ τῆς γονῆς τέλος ἔχων, μεθ’ ὃν ἕτερος οὐ γίγνεται ‘he who finishes or completes the generation, after whom no other is born’ “ Yiannis Petropoulos