When I Die

As I have mentioned before, a few months ago my husband and I wrote some new wills. We also had a spate of family and friend deaths back in December, leading me to think that in addition to my will, I need to make my funeral preferences known to my likely survivors. 

Of course, I could just leave it  up to those survivors, seeing as how by time my funeral rolls around, I’ll be dead and they won’t so they are going to have the last word anyway. If I make my wishes known, though, when they do something else they won’t be able to claim, “She would have wanted it that way.”

So as I told my husband, I want a closed casket. That will spare family and friends the chore of trying to think of something to say about how my body looks. Besides, I rarely wear makeup in life, so I’d just as soon skip wearing it in death.

A display of pictures would be nice, though. In addition to pictures of me, I’d like a display of some of my favorite pictures that I took in my travels. They will serve as a reminder that when I was on this earth, I was all over that sucker. If I live long enough, it will include a picture of me in the Sydney, Australia airport holding up a homemade sign that says, “This makes all seven.”

And yes, John can include that spectacularly ugly picture he took of me in Antarctica wearing my Amelia Earhart cap. He tried to warn me about that cap, but I didn’t listen.

A few picture suggestions:

My funeral should be called a funeral, too. Anyone who tries to call it a “celebration of life” should be summarily beheaded. Then they can have their own funeral and call it whatever they like.

I want a plain casket, but I have a suspicion that the kind of simple but warmly finished oak or mahogany box I imagine will actually cost more than something more flashy looking.

Then there’s music. As much as I’d like to think of my mourners second lining, jazz funerals (more properly called "funerals with music", even though all funerals have some kind of music) are generally reserved for musicians or those with some connection to the music industry. My musical talent consists of being able to pick out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a toy piano or xylophone. There’s nothing to stop me from downloading “When the Saints Go Marching In” to my iPhone and encouraging my nearest and dearest to play it, however.

The most important thing is that I want my mourners to be fed right. Much as I enjoy the idea of a post-funeral crawfish boil, I doubt anyone would want to peel crawfish in their good clothes and anyway I’d have to die during crawfish season for that to happen. Unless I die in some spectacular accident, there are unlikely to be enough mourners to make a whole, or even half, suckling pig necessary, so a cochon de lait is out. Maybe a fish fry. It would be really cool to provide fresh fried oysters, French bread, lettuce, tomatoes, mayo and Tabasco so that folks could make their own oyster po-boys. The critical thing is that there is enough to drink.

Of course, by time I need a funeral all the preparations will be out of my hands. I know I can trust my husband to make arrangements and be hospitable to anyone who shows up. My son, I’m not so sure. His idea of funeral music would probably be something like this. 

Hmm.

Et Voilà

I “collect” misspellings of familiar foreign phrases and unfamiliar English ones, for the sheer fun of it.

Voilà is one of those words I often see misspelled. I have seen “wah lah”, “wall a” “wallah” and probably others I do not remember. I can understand that, being that it is a foreign word first of all and more importantly, one that is more likely to be heard than read. If a non-French speaker does read the word, zie is unlikely to connect it to the pronunciation anyway.

To be fair, I try to imagine how I would spell je ne sais quoi if I didn’t have the internet with which to look it up. Around our house, we say something has a certain je ne sais quoi if what we really mean is that we either don’t like it or can’t figure out what it is, or maybe both. I rarely have reason to spell it, but if I had to guess, what would I come up with? Since I know it is French, I’d probably get “je” and “quoi” right, but I suspect what I would end up with is “je nai sez quois” or “je nez sais quoi” or something like that. I don’t think I’d wind up with “Jenny Saykwa”*, but maybe I would.

What brings up these musings is that recently on his blog Pharyngula, PZ Myers posted an email he received in which the writer used the phrase “gore and tenacity” in the sentence “The gore and tenacity to take the consecrated Host and desecrate it by piercing a nail through it and discarding the Blessed Sacrament.” Commenters speculated on the meaning of “gore and tenacity” and finally realized the writer meant “gall and audacity”. That led one commenter to declare “gore and tenacity”  the new “raisin date”.

Pharyngula, like many well read blogs, has a number of inside jokes that come from the lengthy comments thread, especially the nameless threads, and I don’t keep up. “Raisin date” left me scratching my head. I finally realized I was going to have to ask. As I was composing my question, the answer popped into my head. So I amended my question somewhat, to “What was the old ‘raisin date’? Was it by any chance a misspelled attempt at raison d’etre?”

It turns out my guess was right.

I can understand how these errors happen. It would be easy to make fun of other people’s ignorance, but we really don’t learn language from the bottom up, we learn it from the top down. We learn intonation, inflection, and phonology (the music of language) first, and then imitate sentences which we then parse into smaller units that we can rearrange. So if you recall hear a speaker use a phrase like “gall and audacity” in a hectoring voice and need that “voice” in a criticism, and if you can’t remember the words “gall” and “audacity” because they aren’t in your everyday vocabulary, you could come up with “gore and tenacity”. And your audience, while puzzled at first, can figure it out, because they are hearing the music of the phrase in their heads.

That is how those banes of my life, “The proof is in the pudding” and “begs the question” used to mean “raises the question” obtained widespread circulation. People don’t parse those phrases to realize they don’t actually make any sense. The phrases as a whole function as “super words”, the way a child’s first “I don’t want to” functions as a “super word”, so that the meaning is in the whole even if the sum of the parts should leave you going “wait, what?”

I like “raisin date”, though. It has a certain Jenny Saykwa.

*I can’t pronounce French, either, so my spelling guesses use Anglicized pronunciation.

Wow

Back in my working days, I worked in a building next door to an elementary school. The waiting area had large windows, almost walls of glass, looking out at the school and the street. The week before Christmas 2002, shortly before the start of our two week break, we could see parents gathering for the school assembly next door. That meant we could also hear the squealing of brakes, followed by screaming, commotion, and in due time, sirens. 

Our janitor went to check on what had happened and came back with a sad story. A car had gone out of control and hit a mother pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, hard enough to knock the 11 month old out of the stroller. Rumor had it, and later turned out to be true, that the baby was dead.

The driver of the car did not stop but sped off, chased by another driver who got a license number to give the police. In due time Sheri McElveen was arrested and found to have a blood alcohol level of 0.27 (0.08 is legally drunk) and to have traces of cocaine and prescription drugs in her system.

For some reason that incident came to mind last week, and I vaguely wondered where McElveen was doing time.

This morning I saw this story in our local newspaper.

A woman convicted almost a decade ago of killing a toddler while driving drunk was arrested Tuesday and is accused by State Police of causing a head-on collision with a tow truck, again while driving drunk.
Tuesday’s crash occurred at 12:45 p.m. on Airline Highway near Berringer Foreman Road when Sheri McElveen, 52, crashed her Honda Accord into a tow truck while driving on the wrong side of the road’s median, an affidavit of probable cause says. . .

McElveen pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide, first-degree vehicular injuring and hit-and-run driving on Sept. 3, 2003. She was sentenced to a year in the Ecumenical House, a year of home incarceration, followed by five years probation.

I am not usually a person who complains about courts being “soft on crime” or who wants all criminals locked up and the key thrown away (that person would be my older brother). But really, a year in a halfway house for killing a child? Is that justice?

Wow.

Fossils from Liaoning Province, China

Tuesday, I took my husband and my good friend D to the Lafayette Museum of Science to see the exhibit Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries before it closes on Sunday. I had seen it before, but wanted to see it again and take a few more pictures with my good camera. I think I may have done better with my iPhone.

I began to have my doubts about the wisdom of bringing my husband when his first words were, “We’re too late. They’re all dead”, but he made up for it by paying for lunch.

A big part of the exhibit is a diorama of what Liaoning Province, China, would have looked like 130 million years ago, along with several of the actual fossils discovered there. The fossils, which were discovered in the early 1990’s, not only show skeletons, but skin texture and feathers as well. It was hard taking pictures of the fossils, which were all in glass cases, but I did my best. Click "read more" to see pictures of the diorama and the fossils themselves. If you click on the pictures themselves, you see a larger version and the details show up better.

Ah, Wilderness

Hubby and I just got back from the postponed trip to Hodges Garden State Park. We stayed overnight in a log cabin nestled along a lake in the pine woods of northwest Louisiana. It was nice to get away from the bustle of everyday life, and watch the geese swim along the lake, the bluebird perch on the mailbox at the park entrance, the eagles soar over the pines, and Property Brothers on the 26 inch satellite TV in the cabin’s combined kitchen/dining/living room.

State parks are not what they used to be. In addition to the TV, our cabin had a DVD player and wireless internet access, as well as the more common microwave and coffee maker in the well-equipped kitchen. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to spend as much time outdoors as we expected, since it rained off and on. We got to take a cursory tour of the gardens and to feed the geese leftover breakfast biscuits, but not to walk along the several hiking trails the park boasts. We’re thinking of going back for a longer trip before the weather heats up. In the meantime, we did get a few pictures.

(If you click on the pictures, you can see a larger version and they don't look so dark.)

View from our cabin porch

Entrance to the gardens

Entrance to the main garden

Dogwood tree in bloom

View from the lookout point

Narcissus

Camellia

So Which Word Was That?

So the wrong words you used in attacking law student Sandra Fluke, Mr. Limbaugh? Which words were those? When you mischaracterized her testimony before Congress, saying

. . . who goes before a Congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex,

what words should you have used instead? What words would have made that less than a complete lie? Because as someone may have pointed out to you by now, what Sandra Fluke said was that a friend of hers lost an ovary because she could not afford the medication that would have prevented her ovarian cysts. And the reason her friend couldn’t afford her medication is because Georgetown University does not cover that medication in their health insurance, because its primary use is for birth control.

So which words should you have used to make it clear that when you said Sandra Fluke wants to be paid for sex you really meant Sandra Fluke wants insurance to pay for medication women need for our health? I’d really like to know.

And when you said,

If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

Which word was the wrong word then? Is there a more appropriate technical term for videos that would have made the statement more palatable? Or maybe it was the word “we”. Because I know for sure that I don’t want to watch videos of Sandra Fluke having sex online, and I doubt most other women do either, especially if we knew she was coerced into it as the cost of health care. So what was the word you meant to use instead?

I’m getting older, too, so I know how it is to use the wrong word sometimes. I have been known to ask my husband to pass the salt when I really want the butter. I’ve been known to use my son’s name when I mean my husband’s name and vice versa. I’ve been known to call D’Artagnan, my black and white cat, “Truffle”, which is the name of my Siamese cat. I have even been known to call my husband “Truffle”, although I try to pass it off as an endearment. But I’ve never been known to use the word “slut” when I actually meant “activist”. And I’ve certainly never been known to say, “Sweep the damn floor, would ya,” when I meant, “Please pass the salt.” 

So I’m waiting, Mr. Limbaugh. Which words were the wrong words?

Cause I’m thinking - all of them.

Travel Brochures

In the course of catching up on my mail yesterday, I found three travel brochures from the Tulane Alumni Association, all for trips this coming fall. “We’re not going on any of these, huh?” I asked my husband, I thought rhetorically. 

“Let me see,” he said. 

The tours are all in Europe, which is someplace we will be in the fall anyway, visiting our ex-patriate son. One is a tour of the Italian Lake District, one a cruise from France to Corsica, Italy, Greece and Turkey, and one a tour of the French Alps. I get these brochures from my alumni association on a regular basis, since they operate under the assumption that my degree from Tulane has made me rich. Interestingly enough, all the tours cost around the same amount. A lot.

“If the market goes up another 3 or 4 percent,” he says, “We can go.” 

The last time we went on an alumni tour, through LSU, not Tulane*, the stock market took a nose dive shortly after we paid our non-refundable deposit and crashed further, to its lowest point, while we were crossing the Drake passage. Even if it goes up another ten percent between now and March 26th, the day by which we need to make reservations to get the early discount, there is nothing to say it will stay that way. I don’t point this out to him, however. The man is offering to take me on a romantic trip of some kind. I’m not usually the kind of wife to bat my lashes and mutter “Whatever you say, dear”, but when I do, it’s at times like these.

I’m kind of leaning toward the “Village Life in the Italian Lake District”. It covers a smaller area, which means we will see it in more depth. I enjoyed our ten day tour of the British Isles last year, but we did spend a lot of time en route compared to time spent in the places we were visiting. That worked out well for me and my broken foot, but the odds are I’m not going to break anything else between now and then. Besides, if I am going to be around Mediterranean, as opposed to British, cooking, I need to get out and burn off some calories.

Since all of this is contingent on an improbable further increase in the Dow Jones, I guess I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I’m hanging on to the brochures, though. If nothing else, they have pretty pictures.

*Ours is a mixed marriage.