celebrate the mundane

Laying on the couch next to someone special on a sunny Sunday afternoon, window open, listening to the birds chirp and the fountain flow. No talking, none was necessary. Pure bliss….

my whole life seems to have been thus. But only by celebrating the every day does it become special.

Men’s clothing is pretty boring, by and large. We don’t have anything like the variety of women’s wear, from styles, to fabrics, to colors. The one mundane exception is the necktie.

I did a little research and discovered that this bit of attire has quite a history. The earliest known version has been found in the mausoleum of Shih Huang Ti, China’s first emperor, who was buried in 210 B.C. But it’s a mystery why his guards wore carefully wrapped silk cloths around their necks. Historians say other records indicate the Chinese did not wear ties.

In 113 A.D., Roman military genius Trajan erected a marble column featuring 2,500 realistic figures. They sport no fewer than three different styles of neckwear: shorter versions of the modern necktie; cloth wound around the neck and tucked into armor; and knotted kerchiefs much like cowboy bandannas.

It’s known that Roman orators often wore cloths to keep their throats warm, but soldiers did not typically do so. Ancient writers have suggested that only effeminate men covered their necks. Was this military neckwear some form of badge, perhaps?

No doubt the modern necktie owes its popularity to France’s “Sun King,” Louis XIV, circa 1660. Highly skilled Croatian mercenaries in his army wore silk kerchiefs around their necks. King Louis liked the style and adopted it as his own. The French word for tie, cravat, may be a corruption of “Croat” or rabat, which is French for a hanging collar.

As courtiers began copying the Croatians, ordinary soldiers began adorning their necks with lace and officers would sport muslin or silk cravats, often trimmed with embroidery. Soon commoners began wearing cotton versions, sometimes made of pleated black taffeta. The style spread to England and then the Americas in the 18th century.

The first time I wore a tie, it was a clip-on I wore to church in the 1960s. Later, my father taught me how to tie the four-in-hand knot that he always used. Although it’s worn widely in the United States, it’s not seen much elsewhere. I only learned the half and full Windsor knots when I began working Japan in 1975, and I’ve stayed with the symmetrical full Windsor ever since.

For a long time, I would wear anything but solid colors or striped ties, finding them much too traditional. I wore novelty ties (cartoons, abstracts, paisley, etc.) made of cotton or polyesther when I was teaching English in the late 1970s. When I became a copywriter in 1980, I started wearing silk floral patterns. I had one, in particular, that I loved and wore only on special occasions; it was sky blue, handpainted silk with cherry blossoms from a masterpiece by Van Gogh. I had bought it in Amsterdam and it cost me $120.

At one time, I must have owned several dozen ties. Choosing which one to wear for a day was an expression of my mood or the statement I wanted to make. I used to call the necktie my “leash on life.”

By the time I got into management in 1985, I had learned to appreciate conservative stripes and designer patterns, Kenzo, Ermenegildo Zegna, et alia. But to this day, the only solid-color ties I have ever worn were white for weddings or black for funerals. And I stopped wearing artificial fabrics, cotton or wool. Since 1990, all of my ties have been silk.

When I moved to Las Vegas in 2000, I gave away most of my collection. I now own only ten ties, the oldest being a Father’s Day gift from more than a dozen years ago. I have one “lucky” tie, one political tie, and one holiday season tie. The rest are pretty simple, color-coordinated to match my shirts and slacks.

Whenever I substitute teach at middle schools, I always wear a tie, even on casual Fridays. It’s a statement that says: “I’m here to work. This is my business attire.” The students seem to respect that. I’ve even received some nice compliments on my ties from them.

If anyone had asked me forty years ago whether I would ever enjoy wearing a necktie, I would have laughed and pretended it was like putting a noose around my neck. Today, I admit, the necktie is the one piece of men’s clothing I feel is worthy of celebration. Bless those Croatian mercenaries. Viva la cravat!

Reason to celebrate: it’s SUNDAY and there is no where to go and entirely too much boring stuff to do.

My sweetie arrived home with a whole big tray of fresh, chilled, ready to eat shrimp, the great horseradish and cocktail sauce, the most wonderful hand-stuffed blue cheese olives, AND a beautiful fruit platter with what turned out to be the best cream cheese dip for the flavorful bites, AND THEN told me to stop whatever it was that I was doing because it was time to relax and enjoy a break last night.

I sent him to the store for packing tape.

I love this man.

[I’m tellin’ ya, the miniature suprise rest party was really good.]

God bless the collapse of banality whenever it has a chance to let light, fun, and happy suprises break through.

Although cast iron cookware is old-fashioned, (for centuries, people have cooked in it), and humble (not gleaming like stainless steel or polished copper), I love to cook with it. My two favorite pans are the 10” skillet and the 10” dutch oven. I would be lost without them!

The dutch oven is particularly good for slow-cooking in the fall and winter. I use it instead of an electric crockpot. Since we have a heater woodstove, I often put the dutch oven on bricks on top of the woodstove, so the heat which warms the house also cooks the food. The bricks raise the pan away from direct heat; temperature can be controlled this way. To boil a pan, I put it directly on the stove top; to simmer, I put it on an iron hibachi rack. If it was a wood cookstove, I wouldn’t need the bricks.

When the skillet is seasoned, food doesn’t stick: who needs teflon? I like the way food cooks in cast iron, and it reminds me of all the women of past generations who cooked in pans like these.

I’ve got digital cable TV now, and I pay a pretty penny for it. But I didn’t have it when I moved back to the United States in the summer of 2000. In fact, I didn’t even have a television for the first four months I lived here. I got my news through the Internet and the newspaper. I listened to sports and music on the radio. If I wanted entertainment, I went to a movie.

Then I got an inexpensive 14” TV and a VCR. I used the old rabbit ears to watch snowy pictures of the major broadcast stations. I rented videos tapes. I couldn’t rationalize paying the cable company or satellite providers for better quality or more variety. Broadcast television had been “free” for as long as I could remember. Commercial advertising ensured that there was no additional cost to me.

But in February 2009, nationwide Digital TV is coming, and it’s all going to change everything. Our old sets will no longer work without special tuners. Nearly 20 million American households are going to have to pay for new digital televisions, or converters, or cable/satellite, if they want to continue to watch the tube. Free access TV is going the way of free air at gas stations. An era is coming to a close.

So while it still exists, I want to celebrate all the decades we’ve been able to watch programming on NBC, ABC, and CBS (and later on, FOX), without paying for the priviledge. We took it for granted, didn’t we? I imagine generations of the future will marvel at such quaint technologies as analog broadcasting and terrestrial television, much the way we already look back with nostalgia at old B&W programs. But it sure was nice while it lasted.

What could be more mundane or less appreciated than weeds, the ones that you see by the roadside, or popping up among your cultivated flowers? Some folks with lawns even poison the weeds, to take control over nature.

From nature’s point of view, which I will assume while I write this entry, there are no weeds; only a wide diversity of plants adapted to a certain habitat. They spread their seeds and runners, waiting for an opening in the soil. A garden or plowed field, or a burnt-over area, is like an open scar in the earth’s covering. If it is not planted by humans, or colonized by weeds, the soil would soon erode by wind and rainfall. The plants’ roots anchor the soil, while the foliage gives shelter to colonies of insects and small animals. Mammals graze on their foliage. Weeds are an important link in the web of life.

Weeds are also the ancestors of all our food crops. Beginning with wild grasses, seed pods, berries, etc., humans have selected, over thousands of years, the plants we cultivate today. Medicinal and culinary herbs also originated in the wild, and can be found there today, if their original habitat still exists.

Even so-called ‘weed trees’ have a function in the forest, where they spring up quickly after a fire or clearcut. They hold the soil while the slower growing species become re-established. Poplar, for example, is often called a weed tree because its wood has little commercial value to humans, yet it can fix nitrogen in the soil for the other species. The bark of young poplar trees is eaten by beavers. Poplar is part of the cycle of forest renewal.

I think it’s fine to pull weeds out of the garden, or cultivate a field. I also think it’s equally good to honor the wild plants in nature, even when we don’t think we benefit from their existence. Indirectly, we do benefit. We are all part of the one great interconnected web.

I fell in love with the dictionary when I was about eight years old. Just imagine: Every word in the English language explained…and more! Synonyms, antonyms, parts of speech, pronunciation, spelling, etymology… wow! A treasure chest to delve into whenever I wanted.

Over the years, my love of dictionaries has continued undiminished. I still use Merriam-Webster’s as my primary reference book. I also own a Random House version with thumb indices that I won in a contest (actually, I won a gift card at a bookstore and I used it to get a new dictionary). I once convinced a publisher to buy me a huge Oxford English Dictionary when I was working on a project that involved editing the Australian version of our mother tongue. I still have it and find endless delight in the differences and commonalities that abound in our shared language.

How much work goes into creating a well-bound and thorough dictionary? It challenges the imagination. The proofreading of a single volume must require an army of sharp-eyed word warriors.

Nowdays, of course, the Internet offers up an electronic version of my old stalwart. But how much more satisfying it is to thumb through one of the thick books and stumble across a word prevously unknown, or one long forgotten and now rediscovered.

Here’s a fun game I’ve often played: Look up the definition of a word and follow it through the dictionary by looking up the words used to define it. Wonderful connections pop up, such as the linkage of “inspire” to deity, influence, star, and breath. A delightful journey through the world of words – The Dictionary!

Over the past week, I have been slowly aerating the lawn in front of our house. Doing it by hand using a four-prong spading fork (pictured) is a lot of work, but preparing the soil for winter is a necessary task.

Much to my surprise, a lot of the work uncompacting the turf had already been done for me. As I dug into the thatch at short intervals, up from the grass came dozens of earthworms. Imagine that! All year long they’ve been silently tilling the soil, composting the dead cuttings, and helping the grass roots get moisture and nutrients.

As a child, I used to marvel at these odd creatures. We called them “nightcrawlers” and they were easy to find in puddles after a rainstorm. If you cut one in two, both halves would continue wiggling, so the big ones were particularly good for baiting our hooks when we went fishing.

But I live in a desert climate now. I don’t think I’ve seen a worm here in seven years, what with all the densely packed clay and xeriscaping, the lack of rain and the absence of flower gardens. I’ve been growing cactii mostly. Then suddenly, to see a virtual army of these “megadriles” appear, disturbed by my vigorous attack of their home ground… well, it really surprised me and took me back to those childhood days when playing in the dirt was just about the most fun a boy could have.

I’ll finish aerating by next week. Next month I’ll apply winter fertilizers. And as I do, I’ll be mindful of our little tennants down there, ever working behind the scenes to keep the grass green and the earth fertile. Earthworms – so simple, so ignored, and so worthy of a bit of celebrating.

It is so prevalent, I pretty much take glass for granted. The computer screen in front of me as I write this, the compact fluorescent bulb that lights my work space, the beverage container I sip water from, the window on the north end of my study… glass is all around me, so important, yet so underappreciated. In fact, I wear glasses and think of the lenses only when they are dirty and need to be cleaned, a bothersome little task, nothing I typically celebrate.

So I did a little reading about glass and discovered that its origins are unknown, dating back at least to the third millenium BC, when artisans in Mesopotamia made glasswork so well that bits of it still exist today. In the Bible, lead glass (crystal) has been compared to gold (Job 28:17). By the time Christ was born, the glassblowers of Rome had taken their craft to a high art form and spread it far and wide throughout the Roman empire. By the 12th century, stained glass windows became popular in churches and monasteries. In the 15th century, Venetian glassmakers were “forbidden to leave the Island of Murano” for fear that their secret techniques might be spread abroad. So the idea of glass as commonplace is still quite a modern concept.

In my research, I found that glass has been mistakenly called a super-cooled liquid. In fact, it is an amorphous solid, silicon-based sand that has melted and rehardened in a new state. To melt sand to make glass, a special furnace is used, generating a temperature of about 3,600°F (1,982°C). Iron present in sand gives glass a naturally greenish color, so only sand of exceptional purity, white sand, is used.

I tap on the computer screen – solid enough – and rediscover a feeling I had as a small child, when the transparency of glass amazed me. I can see right through it; it’s “invisible!” How can that be? I used to marvel at that property of glass. When did I forget how magical glass seems?

So today, I am celebrating it. Plain old glass. So mundane. So functional. So much a part of my everyday life.