Leesburg Essay 16: The I Must Be Middle-Aged Issue

I know now why “they” say that as people get older, they feel younger inside their own heads than their chronological age. This was brought home to me recently as I was reading a news article describing the background of a Greek government official. The article noted that this particular guy had been in college in the ’80s. My automatic thought was something like: ”…that long ago—wow.” And then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute! I went to college in the ‘80s!” How delusional can one be?

Leesburg has been making halting steps beyond the typical fast-food, chain, and Italian options of a small-town restaurant environment. One of latest entries is “Cajun Experience,” which specializes in New Orleans cuisine. George and I went to lunch there one day (now that both kids are in school all day, we can sometimes go out to lunch like normal people do). It was almost as good as the food we had in New Orleans, although George felt the bread on the shrimp “po boy” sandwiches should have been much fresher. Beignets come out hot and drowned in powdered sugar. They had authentic beer, coffee, and music to complete the ambience. We would definitely go again. To New Orleans, for sure, or maybe just down the street. Nora has mentioned New Orleans a number of times since we were there and says she wants to go back, but she hasn’t yet been able to tell me why it made such a big impression on her. It was the same way with Bar Harbor, Maine, but in that case I think it had something to do with the souvenir shop at which she got the flip flops that changed color in the sun. Baxter ate them soon after, and she really has never gotten over it.

Early this summer I managed to catch a number of the World Cup matches, and I have to say that my favorite thing about the whole competition was the psychic German octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of a number of the games. George doesn’t care about the World Cup, to be sure, but he is a true believer in the genius of octopuses. As I’ve noted in the past, he loves it when animals get the better of people. The editor’s note in a recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated contained such a laugh-out-loud kind of story, in which Christopher Kimball wrote about man vs. deer in a scenario that should send chills through the heart of any hunter.

Buck Bites Back

by Christopher Kimball (from the July/August 2010 issue of Cook’s Illustrated—with apologies to the author for the excerpt!)

Over the years, a few of you have written in to say that my hunting stories are out of place in a cooking magazine. I won’t rehash my vigorous defense of this activity, but instead I offer the following narrative, told by one of our Vermont neighbors, Ryan Brown, in which the hunter becomes the hunted. I will let you judge its veracity.

“I had this idea that I was going to rope a deer, put it in a stall, feed it up on corn for a couple of weeks, then shoot and eat it. The first step in this adventure was getting a deer. I figured that, since they congregate at my cattle feeder and do not seem to have much fear of me when we are there—a bold one will sometimes come right up and sniff at the feed while I am in the back of the truck—it should not be difficult to rope one, get up to it and toss a bag over its head (to calm it down), then hogtie it and transport it home.

“I filled the cattle feeder, then hid down at the end with my rope. The cattle, having seen the roping thing before, stayed well back; they were not having any of it. After about 20 minutes, three deer showed up. I picked out a likely-looking young buck, stepped out from the end of the feeder, and threw my rope. He just stood and stared.

“I wrapped the rope around my waist and twisted the end so I would have a good hold. The deer just stood transfixed, although it appeared to be mildly concerned about the whole rope situation. I took a step toward it; it took a step away. I put a little tension on the rope and then received an education.

“The first thing I learned is that, although a deer may just stand there looking at you funny while you rope it, it is spurred to action when you start pulling.

“That deer exploded.

“The second thing I learned is that pound for pound, a deer is a lot stronger than a cow or a colt. A cow or a colt in that weight range I could fight down with a rope, and some dignity. A deer? Not a chance. It ran and bucked and twisted and pulled. There was no controlling it and certainly no getting closer. As it jerked me off my feet and started dragging me across the ground, it occurred to me that having a deer on a rope was not nearly as good an idea as I had originally imagined. The only upside is that they do not have as much stamina as many other animals.

“A brief 10 minutes later, it was tired and not nearly as quick to jerk me off my feet and drag me when I managed to get up. It took me a few minutes to realize this, since I was blinded by the blood flowing out of the large gash in my head. (I had cleverly arrested the deer’s momentum by bracing my head against various large rocks as it dragged me across the ground.) At that point, I had lost my taste for corn-fed venison. I just wanted to get my rope back and go home.

“I figured if I just let the buck go with the rope hanging around its neck, it would likely die a slow and painful death. I recognized there was a tiny chance that I shared some minuscule amount of responsibility for the situation, so it was up to me to find a solution. I managed to get it positioned between my truck and the feeder—a little trap I had set beforehand, much like a squeeze chute. I started moving up so I could get my rope back.

“Did you know that deer bite? They do! I never in a million years would have considered this possibility, so I was surprised when the deer grabbed hold of my wrist with its teeth. Now, when a deer bites you, it is not like being bit by a horse: it bites and then lets go. A deer holds on and shakes its head—like a pit bull.

“Thinking back on it, I guess that the proper thing to do at that point would have been to freeze and draw back slowly. Instead, I screeched and shook my arm like it was on fire. My method was ineffective. While I kept it busy (allowing the buck to tear mercilessly at my right arm), I reached up with my left hand and pulled the rope loose. That was when I got my final lesson in deer behavior for the day.

“Rearing up on their back feet, deer will strike at your head and shoulders with their front feet, which are surprisingly sharp. I learned a long time ago that, when an animal—like a horse—strikes at you with its hooves, the best thing to do is try to make a loud noise and move aggressively toward the animal. This will usually cause it to back down so that you can escape.

“However, this was not a horse, so I surmised that this strategy would not work. In the course of a millisecond, I devised a different strategy.

“I screamed like a 5-year-old girl, turned, and ran.

“Now, the reason I had always been told not to try to turn and run from a horse is that there is a good chance that it will hit you in the back of the head. As I quickly learned, horses and deer do, indeed, have a lot in common. The second I turned to run, the buck struck me in the back of the head, knocking me down.

“But when a deer gets the upper hand, it does not immediately leave. I suspect it does not recognize that the danger has passed. Instead, it jumps up and down on your back while you lie there, begging for mercy, covering your head.

“I managed to crawl under the truck, and the deer finally went away.

“So now I know why people go deer hunting with a rifle with a scope. Deer may appear cute and docile, but when provoked, they are merciless killers.”

Speaking of nature getting the best of man, some men build “man caves” filled with—who knows? Maybe free weights, a flat panel TV, beer, and Maxim magazine. Places where they can escape from presumably shrill and annoying women and only sometimes male offspring. Well, instead of a man cave, I realized recently that George has built himself a nature sanctuary on our deck where he can contemplate birds, spiders, rodents and the stars through his telescope. After finishing his work rebuilding the deck, he installed a bunch of bird feeders—one regular, one “squirrel-proof,” one just for finches, and one for hummingbirds. This last proved surprising: just as George threatened to remove the hummingbird feeder because of seeming disinterest by hummingbirds, the birds moved in. They’re very amusing to watch as they suspend themselves in midair and stare at you. All the birds—hummingbirds and others—tend to nest in the big evergreens that line our back fence and then pop over for a snack. Baxter also enjoys the nature sanctuary, as he believes it’s his job to catch the squirrels that hang upside on the feeders. Sometimes George removes his collar so that Baxter can make a quieter attempt at catching them. Further afield, there have been quite a number of vultures around, and George believes he saw an owl in our backyard on a recent afternoon (although he still is unable to explain what the owl would be doing out during the day).

This summer was unbearably hot. We had so many days that were in the upper 90s or 100-plus that, looking back, we never seemed to get much relief. We had a few days of cooler temperatures during August, but as I write this paragraph on the first day of fall, the temperature has again shot up to the upper 90s. All this after our backbreaking winter (mostly so because this area is just not equipped to handle that much snow). To add to the fun, one day in August we had a real earthquake. It came very early in the morning, just after 5:00 a.m., and George—who was shaving at the time and was grateful he didn’t accidentally cut his throat—was convinced that it couldn’t be an earthquake. I was convinced that it was, however, because what else would make the house shake when it wasn’t storming? Maybe a power plant explosion or the crash of a big airplane, but my bet was on earthquake. Supposedly animals sense when such things are coming but Baxter was busy dreaming about squirrels and made not a squeak. I bet the squirrels themselves ran and hid, though.

Our peach tree clearly has some sort of disease, probably not helped by the extreme temperatures this summer. Even so, I believe the peaches that were on the tree earlier in the summer and nearing some stage of ripening were stolen. Not by wild animals getting the best of me as a gardener, mind you, but animals of the two-legged variety. One day we stepped outside and found that the tree had been picked clean. George thought that it had to be squirrels; I made the case for people. Of course there was no resolution here. Then a few weeks later I caught an article in the local paper that said that the Master Gardener Demonstration Gardens at Ida Lee Recreation Center in Leesburg had had all of their fruit trees picked clean by a peach burglar (who knew such people existed??). This was especially unfortunate as the gardeners were planning to donate the fruit to Interfaith Relief. A major piece of evidence as reported in the local paper echoed what we found in our own backyard: “…there were no hoof marks under the trees, no marks on the limbs, and no fruit lying on the ground as there would have been had the animals been pulling at the fruit and branches.” Kind of creepy, don’t you think?

We did have a big respite from the summer heat on our trip to Lake Placid. I believe that the ambient temperature dropped about 20 degrees from northern Virginia to upstate New York. Having never been to Lake Placid, I was stuck with this image from the horror movie Lake Placid—which George so helpfully brought up before we went—of this grisly hand coming up out of the dark water. No such hand was in sight during our trip, luckily. We took a boat trip around Lake Placid itself (our fabulous hotel was on Mirror Lake, right next door) and took a couple of longish hikes. For the first time, Nora hiked without complaining. The lake water was pretty chilly (75 degrees or so) so I ended up being the only one who went in all the way. I felt I could handle it because I survived Girl Scout camp at Saranac Lake (one of Lake Placid’s neighbors) and a number of summer trips to Washington Lake in New Hampshire. Neither place was notable for its balmy water temperature, even in August. The hotel had a great indoor pool in addition to its lakeside beach.

Because of scheduling conflicts, Alexander is not playing soccer this fall, so we told him he would need to get his exercise in other ways. In addition to the riding his “ripstick” (a hinged, two-wheeled skateboard-like thing that takes quite a bit of balance to maneuver) and playing various sorts of sports with his friends in the cul-de-sac, he and George have been on a couple of grueling bike rides—from Leesburg to Purcellville and back, which is just over 27 miles. Alexander likes these rides in part because they stop for lunch at a smoothie place in Purcellville and get smoothies and roast beef & wasabi sandwiches for lunch. And I had a heartwarming moment at an afternoon party recently when Alexander said, bravely given that our fanatical neighbors were circling around, “I hate the Redskins!” That’s my boy! Actually, I gave him permission to be a Redskins fan because he is from here, after all—I thought this was very big of me.

Media Update

We have begun using our new cell phones (yes, the cell phone I have trouble answering) for GPS service, rather than our Garmin GPS. Using the phones rather than the Garmin means one fewer device to drag with us in the car, but what’s definitely missing is Aussie Karen. Aussie Karen is the Australian actress who provides the navigation prompts on Garmin’s devices. When you get your GPS, you have a choice of voices, and George quickly settled on Aussie Karen. I believe he had a crush on her. The kids just liked it when she would say “take ramp ahead” and it sounded to them just like “take Grandpa head.”

Audiobooks

Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo. Bridge of Sighs concerns the family life of kids growing up in a mill town in upstate New York in the middle of the last century, particularly two kids destined to remain in the town and another one who eventually leaves and moves overseas. The book is told loosely through the memories of the main character, Louis Lynch. The end was—as is so often the case—unsatisfying, but the rest was very engaging and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in stories about small town America.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackery. This is a rather long novel written a long time ago about people in extremely different circumstances from those of the America of today, but, even though fiction, it shows once again that you can plop people down in different circumstances, different eras, and different countries and their thoughts and reactions will be much the same. I liked the novel, although I found most of the characters tiresome, to say the least.

Push (Precious), by Sapphire. This short, extremely graphic novel rings so true in parts that I had to look it up on Google to see if the author was writing her memoires, or, if not, if she had based the book on someone she knew. As it turns out, the author knew people who had had these kinds of experiences, but the book itself is fiction. The simple description is that the book traces the inner life of a severely overweight black teenager in Harlem who has suffered terrible abuse and neglect at the hands of her parents. She finds her way into an alternative school and finally, at age 16, begins to learn to read and write. This novel was made into a movie that received a lot of praise and the actress Mo’Nique won an Oscar for portraying the girl’s horrific mother.

Books with Pages to Turn

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I borrowed from my mother before the furor over the movie started up. This book is hilarious and tragic in equal parts. For those of you who have managed to avoid it thus far, it contains the writer’s memoires of travels to Italy (eat), India (pray), and Indonesia (love) following a devastating divorce. The book is structured along the lines of numbers that are considered particularly auspicious in yoga philosophy, which in itself warmed me toward it. I didn’t expect that I would find such profound things in a book with such a premise, but if I had had a pencil available at the time, I certainly would have done some underlining. For example, the author describes a psychologist friend of hers who was to begin counseling Cambodian refugees. The author catalogues some of the true horrors that those people would have experienced, and then notes that her friend felt herself to be possibly inadequate to be counseling them about what she assumed would be terribly traumatic experiences. What the friend found instead was that these refugees wanted to talk about seemingly mundane and everyday matters like the relationship they’d started with someone who was on the boat with them. Again, people in different circumstances react as humans do.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (“Book the First” through “Book the Thirteenth”), by Lemony Snicket. Nora and I have been working our way through this children’s series for most of the summer and now into the fall (George and Alexander are just ahead of us and have almost finished the series). I am a big fan of the Harry Potter series, in which Nora and I are up to book four of seven, but this series is in some ways more remarkable. The writing is very sophisticated yet completely accessible for children. The farcical situations remind me of the best Monty Python material. Adults are mostly shown up to be fools in a variety of clever and novel ways. The books are definitely worth reading, whether you purport to be an adult or a child.

Television

Rubicon. George claims that this new AMC series, about a group of quirky analysts at secret government agency masquerading as a national-security think tank, more accurately portrays what real CIA analysts do than most movies or TV shows about the intelligence community. We stayed tuned in after the first couple of meandering episodes in the hopes that the plot would eventually go somewhere; in the beginning it wandered around in a Lost sort of way. Unfortunately, the characters, although quirky, are not as engaging as those in Lost, and it’s set in a office building somewhere around NYC rather than in Hawaii (well okay, Lost wasn’t really set in Hawaii), so there the similarities end. As the season finishes, however, they seem to have sharpened their plot focus and begun to move things along.

We continue to enjoy Mad Men, although as we’ve settled into it, the plot takes on much more importance as the quirky 1960’s details become less shocking. As we’ve learned a lot more about the characters we’ve graduated to discussing their problems and motivations rather than simply speculating about whether people really drank that much at work and could still function. An interesting editorial from the Washington Post argues that Mad Men is an extremely accurate portrayal of the times.

And in the category of catching up, George and I are up to Season 5 of The Office on DVD, a show which is appalling and heartwarming at the same time. First of all, I love Steve Carell, who plays the clueless boss of a Scranton, Pennsylvania paper company. The love story between characters Jim and Pam is painfully real and played perfectly off the absurd things going on in the rest of the story. Many of these situations would be familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in a modern office environment, such as staff birthday parties, sexual harassment training, distribution of parking spaces, and on and on. My favorite character is Dwight Schrute, a salesman who is clearly a lunatic and completely rational at the same time. The worrying thing is how many of Dwight’s personality traits remind me of George. Hmmmm…

Movies

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I found the first part of this movie—in which an old man is born in a half-baby/half-old-man state, from which he proceeds to get younger—extremely disturbing. I hate babies that are made to look like old men or vice versa. The freakish baby “grows up” to be Brad Pitt and then Cate Blanchett eventually shows up, so that makes it better for a while. It reminded me somehow of Forrest Gump, as this character floats through life observing all sorts of historical nonsense. I guess I liked it despite all of my criticisms, but I’ll never get the picture of Brad-Pitt-as-old-man/baby out of my head.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The real star of this Woody Allen film that purports to star, among others, Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson (George sat near her on a flight once last year and I believe has been a bit enamored of her ever since) is Spain itself. The movie is a very engaging romantic comedy, and I’d happily watch it again, but what it really does is serve as one big travel advertisement. I immediately wanted to hop on a plane to fly over for an extended stay in some small Spanish towns.

Frost/Nixon. George and I both really enjoyed this one, which supposedly tells the backstory to the famous David Frost/Richard Nixon interviews that aired a few years after Nixon left office in disgrace. We both would like to see the original interviews, as the movie portrays the two in the end as basically battling one another for supremacy. The way the questions and answers play out (i.e., who’s on top) changes as they work their way through the hours of tape. The actors are very good, and I liked the ‘70s atmospherics.

In Addition

New York magazine. For those of you unfortunates who did not spend your formative years in a suburb of New York City, New York magazine was during my childhood the chronicler of the cool and the shocking in city life. It taught me about city politics, arts, trends, the importance of a good restaurant review, and to my endless amusement, personal ads, of which the back pages were filled. The most important thing I learned, though, was that the Kennedy family represented the apex of American life. This was the era when John Jr. was thought simply fabulous and Jackie O. had escaped the family by marrying Aristotle Onassis and wearing really big sunglasses. They were worshipped as gods. The more I read about them, the more inexplicable I found this. I guess maybe had I been born in 1956 rather than 1966 I may have thought differently, but this was the ‘70s and ‘80s and it seemed to me that the bloom was off the rose, despite the relentless fawning of the media. One of my grandmothers used to get Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, both of which were definitely worth perusing, but neither was nearly as fascinating as New York.

The next matter has only a glancing relationship to media, but it’s really an Internet-based research update, so I thought I’d include it here. It turns out that the history textbooks distributed to fourth graders in Virginia (i.e., Alexander and his ilk) contain certain misstatements about the Civil War—including the “fact” that thousands of black soldiers fought for the South—that were put in there by the author after she “verified” the facts on Google, which pointed her to a link to a website maintained by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and other revisionist groups. The Sons of Confederate Veterans maintains that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War—the struggle was one primarily over preserving states’ rights and individual freedom and liberty. In any case, because of her misstatement, all the textbooks had to be collected for correction. This scandal has exposed the soft underbelly of textbook production in Virginia, as the author in question is not even a historian, and the “review committee” is pretty weak. Couldn’t they have found some starving history grad student somewhere in Virginia to act as a fact checker?

Once again this summer, a flock of Donaldsons were gathered around the TV for a tennis match, this time in Knoxville watching the “end” of the Wimbledon match that wouldn’t end. These poor guys played on and on and on and we kept watching and watching and watching as they’d go from deuce to advantage and back to deuce. And then the guy who ultimately won the match lost in the next round. A discussion of it here takes the point of view that the match was boring, which I have to agree was probably true.

Last year I followed pro football with the help of the ESPN Podcast called “Football Today,” hosted by former pro scout Jeremy Green, the son of former NFL coach Dennis Green. By the time the 2010 Superbowl rolled around, however, I was sick of his antics, which had seemed to escalate over the course of the season and so I just deleted the Podcast from my list on iTunes. What I discovered over the summer, weirdly with no official comment from ESPN itself, was that Jeremy Green was arrested in July both for possession of illegal drugs and—something that is truly disturbing considering that he has (I believe) four children and had just recently remarried—for possession of child pornography. And to think that I’d listened to hours of this guy talking about football over the course of the year. YUCK. In the end, ESPN has found a replacement in Ross Tucker, a former player, who is beginning to grow on me, and thus I’ve tentatively taken up listening again. I can only imagine what the atmosphere is at ESPN that the network continues to breed these weird scandals with its personnel. It’s almost as though the analysts must mirror the scandals that so often engulf the sports stars they cover.

Domesticated Animal Update

Animals like schedules and routines, as those among you who are pet owners have no doubt observed. Just after school started I read an article somewhere that noted that many pets get depressed when school starts again, in part because when the kids are home from school many pets get more attention. Baxter was absolutely the opposite. He was depressed all summer, even stopped eating his meals. Some of it could have been the heat, but all I know was that when school started Baxter started eating again. There’s a Staples commercial I love, one where a Dad is dancing through the aisles at Staples, presumably buying school supplies, kids standing nearby looking disgruntled while the song “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” plays in the background (view it for yourself). All I know is that no one was happier than Baxter to see Alexander downstairs at 7:30 in the morning the day after Labor Day ready to feed him. He pranced off to the corner to see the bus arrive and sniff all the kids and his dog friends. He is not necessarily thrilled, however, that I have begun brushing his teeth upon the recommendation of the vet.

When we saw Cheryl, Hon and Annaliese in Knoxville this summer, Cheryl had with her a brochure concerning horse breeding. More specifically, this was a brochure that contained glossy pictures and information regarding horses that were being offered up for stud services. The thing that I found absolutely fascinating about this, given that I know nothing about equine industries, is that in order to breed your horse, the STUD NEED NOT EVEN BE PRESENT. I believe you pay a chunk of cash and you receive in the mail (hopefully packed in ice) a syringe containing the necessary material. But what if you can’t…er…administer it properly? There goes thousands of dollars. I imagine someone has thought of this and there are probably people who are experienced in equine in-vitro fertilization, but can you imagine how stupid you’d feel???

While we were all together in Knoxville this summer, Cheryl’s cat Max died. She had had him for such a long time; I have pictures of him from way back when Cheryl lived in an apartment in North Bergen, New Jersey. I know animals get old, and I guess he must have been about 15 or so and had a variety of health problems, but it seems weird to me that poor Max is gone. In tribute, I enclose my pictures of him here:

Politics Update

In the category of how silly can things get when a president bends over backwards to please everyone except his own countrymen, check out this column by Charles Krauthammer regarding moral equivalence.

George and I both read excerpts from the Washington Post’s big series on the intelligence system in the U.S. This was set up to be, I imagine, the kind of series that brings a newspaper a Pulitzer prize. I read the first installment and was bored to death. It was more like a list of offices and organizations than any kind of analysis, ironically, and contained no information on the overall usefulness to policymakers of the kind of intelligence that is produced by this unwieldy system. For example, does the President’s Daily Brief meet his needs? Has the production of it become so bogged down in new levels of bureaucracy that it has ceased to function as intended? Has some other mechanism by necessity taken its place? In any case, George and I both liked this piece by Richard Posner that reviews the Post’s work.

And finally, as I’ve been expecting, someone has finally advocated killing people to save the climate. The extremists have finally tipped over the edge and become caricatures of themselves!