I "drag" my wife to art museums. Today we went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum and witnessed enjoyed a Latrec exhibit. You might ask what Latrec and Asian art have in common; a lot as it turns out. But she gets into it when we arrive; she's indulgent that way. Then we walked around the most beautiful park you can imagine in weather that is right out of mid summer. We both thought it was a great day. So there you have it. I like art and she likes me, so we get along very well, thank you. Oh yes, I pretend to like reading non-fiction from time to time. That's marriage.
Marriage is a great game indeed. Earlier today I came up with a good response for my wife when I have (as usual) misheard a word, "Please spell it, don't yell it".
Thank you Mr. Keillor for the icing on the cake of a perfect fall day. I shared this with my mate of many years, as the lovliest description of the intricacies and small concessions that make a relationship sing.
When I read your description of “appreciating Greek statuary, it seems to me that you should have been the “chaperone” when the O’Brien boys went to visit the art museum at the California Institute of Technology! If I want to represent the “crew” accurately, I would first point out that Jean O‘Brien was a divorced mother, raising her boys alone. The only male relative of any significance was an uncle who was monk in a monastery. Kevin, aged 14 perhaps, was our leader. Terry – “the middle child” was 12. Kelly, at 10 – was “The Baby.” I was the “wanna-be gang member” who happened to have a vehicle, keys and a driver’s license.
Long before, the boys had picked up on the cues that I was actually a boy – their age – at heart. Many is the time we went body surfing at “The Wedge” in Long Beach, with waves that were twice as tall as Kelly when he was situated vertically in them.
However, for variety’s sake, sometimes we did “Cultural Things” as well. We took in the museum complex in Los Angeles, and when that didn’t seem like enough, I took them over to the California Institute of Technology (CIT) to explore that area as well.
That’s where we saw “IT!” The boys took one look at the ancient Grecian statue of a naked man, and nearly went ballistic! “He! He!” They couldn’t even say it! Here I was, a female, and perhaps I’d be as straight-laced as their mother was.
“That’s what men look like when they’re grown up,” I said, casually.
We couldn’t move! They stood there, gape-mouthed, thinking “That’s what our uncle, the Catholic Monk, looks like if he’s not in his robes…” Hands went toward crotches, as I pretended to be looking up the staircase that the statue was housed underneath.
I don’t know how long we stood there. We had been at the Natural History Museum and beheld the behemoth bones of a dinosaur and those of a saber-toothed tiger. But that was nothing at all to them, in comparison with that statue of the naked Greek man.
Times have changed a lot since the early 1960s. Back then, the best the school system could do was to assign the boys to male teachers whenever possible – so that at least they’d gain a few ideas of what they might be like when they grew up. But- “the birds and the bees!” I wouldn’t be surprised if, after that CAL TECH experience, Kevin, perhaps, might have found some access to a simple anatomy book, or some “Blue” literature. I doubt if any of the boys dared to ask their priestly uncle any of the questions that gnawed at them!
But – then there’s Grecian statuary – which has been around for millennia! Sooner or later, in one form or another, most of us eventually come across information that can be essential to our having a normal, balanced adulthood. I’ve always been happy that “Our Gang” stumbled across that Greek athlete. Just the fact that this female didn’t “Cringe at the sight” might have helped them to accept their own anatomy. Who knows?
We SO enjoyed joining you in song at the San Juan Capistrano Roadhouse last week. Made us reflect back on seeing you backstage in Costa Mesa, CA in 2015, and you and husband Don speaking a few phrases of Danish, with great joy. Greetings too from mutual friends Paul Verner and Birthe in Svenborg, with whom we’ve just nattered a bit about the world, via FaceTime, our alarming tendency to just go to war rather than just get along. Paul Verner and my husband Don were schoolmates and best buddies way back in 1957, when an AFS student exchange took place at the Statsgymnasium in Gentofte. Here’s to world friendship!
A sidebar, still about things-Danish. We seem to remember you once did a memorable program, a Christmas in Denmark. Is there a link to that program, by any chance?
WanderingSioux Oct 9 SEXIST! I wouldn’t even know how to do “The eye roll” – and I’ve never experienced it myself. More likely – it’s probably generational.
But – aren’t we all “sexist” at times! I came across a “Word Search” page (Kappa Publishing) with a list of “Quality Leadership” traits. They could apply to Dean Robert M. Hayes of the UCLA Graduate School of Librarianship and Information Science (GSLIS) – my “boss” when I was getting my Masters in Library and Information Science, what, four decades ago, now! They could equally well apply to “Our Fearless Leader” here on this page! “Able, Alert, Example, Guide, Innovate, Order, Pioneer, Politics, Respect, Smart, Sure, Vision, Wise.
Dean Hayes was at the formative stages of writing an article on an NIH [National Institute of Health] grant on “The distance people travel to use public libraries.” He gave a talk on the project, partially “FYI,” and partially because he was looking for a “GoFer” – a bibliographic assistant who would collect a ream of relevant papers – a “Literature Search” on the subject. I was a commuter from the “burbs” who got on the Freeway (free from traffic at 6:30 a.m., bumper-to-bumper by an hour later!) I would sit in the main lecture hall for perhaps two hours and study until the first formal classes began there.
On this particular day, the Dean’s assistant, “Bunny”, saw me as they came into the room. “You’ll have to leave,” she said. “Dean Hayes interrupted her: “Let her stay. She might be interested.” He was giving a pitch to recruit a library researcher to compile articles on models of the effects of distance on the use of public facilities – a “Downtown YM(W)CA,” for example. Here I was, an obviously “Long Distance Commuter” student – the longest distance, at 30 miles, of all the students in the school. The room held half a dozen folks by the time his talk began. The Dean began by saying “There’s going to be some technical stuff here. Feel free to iinterrupt if hou have questions.” As the slide projector flung images of graph after graph on the screen and he outlined the project, I interrupted, and interrupted, and interrupted again. It was virtually a two-person conversation, due in part to “natural selection.” Most of the applicants who looked forward to working in public libraries “Loved Books.” As an engineer’s daughter, I had always been interested in things like the “Dewey Decimal System” toat puts books of the same topic together on the library shelves. Beyond that, with a Masters degree in Secondary Science Education, where would a biologist be without an ability to read bar graphs? What about an evolutionary geologist, speaking about eons of past time? Visual means of comparison were second nature to me.
When the formal delivery was over, the others in the room left. I still had some time on my hands until my first class. Maybe ten minutes later, Bunny came in. “The Dean wants to speak with yu about this job. When can you come in. I mentioned a time after my classes, and went to see him then. Dean Hayes had pulled my student record. He could see my teaching certificates for Geology and Chemistry, and my Master’s Degree in Genetics.
“WE HAVE TO HAVE YOU!” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair, with his fingertips touching each other in that somewhat “praying” motion that decisive people use when they’re sure of themselves. I pointed out that commuting might be a problem, since I was coming from an hour’s drive away in the best of times.
“Don’t worry about specific times. Come when you can and keep track of your hours. We’ll get you a parking permit so you can be close to your work. You’ll have access to the “Staff” floor here in our building. Whatever you find, you can bring over here and photocopy on our machines, so there won’t be an extra, incidental cost.” As it turned out, I spent a lot of time in the City of Los Angeles Main Library as well. They helped me with parking there, too. This was before GOOGLE days, when many libraries have their full reference collections online. I blew the dust off of the tops of reference books and old abstracts that had been accumulating there for decades. It’s a good thing I’m not asthmatic!
It was a fascinating and challenging job! For Dean Hayes’ mathematical models, themselves, I found most of the pertinent articles in the grocery business. They were developing models to chart how far their customers came to use their shops. To run these models, he needed “hard data.” Fortunately, the City of Chicago had conducted distance surveys for every library in the metropolitan and outlying area. In this respect, they came the closest to the Los Angeles Public Library System, since both cities have extensive “bedroom communities” encircling the downtown area.
If memory serves me, I think Dean Hayes was impressed enough with my work, that I’m actually listed as the second, coauthor, on our Journal of Library and Information Science paper. But beyond the “product” itself, it was an exhilarating experience to work with Dean Hayes! Because of protocol, I always called him exactly that “Dean Hayes.” For the job, I’d be wandering through the School’s office areas, with secretaries and various professors stationed or waiting here and there. I’m pretty certain that there would have been gossip at the water fountain if I had called him “Bob.” We never said a word about it. There was just this peaked fingers motion, and a “knowing glance” - “You Understand,” and I did. If we had acted “too casually” toward each other, the gossip mill would be grinding away in minutes!
For a female in the early 1980’s, that library research job got me closer to a sense of “equality” in the “Outside World” than anything else I had done before! I was “a Co-worker” – in a sense, a Partner” – since the leads I discovered channeled the future development of the paper. What use would I have had for the “eye-roll” technique? When Dean Hayes peaked his fingers together – yes – his body language was saying “This is MY paper. It’s MY project – and this is the way I’ll do it.” I was the one feeding the kernels of corn into the popcorn popper, and he was the popper - he expanded them into they became something significant! But – this had nothing to do with gender, per se! The data was there. I was the one who found it. He was the one who worked it into a visible product.
My “SEXIST” initial comment was “just an observation”, not a “put-down.” Socially, we’re in a time of flux. Couples can find their own ways of dealing with differences. But, as an identifiable “female of the species,” it seems as if “Doors Are Opening” in ways that couldn’t have been imagined before. Dean Hayes didn’t choose me for my gender, he chose me for my scientific/mathematical background. In a school in which the students are focused in dealing with books – literature, and such, finding a student with a strong science/math background was a plus. My gender didn’t matter – the way I processed visual information did.
Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” – and his dream of racial equality has certainly been making progress since that speech! In this new century, perhaps women who dream of true equality won’t rely on “eye rolls” as a form of criticism. Getting in the pool and swimming with the rest – maybe that’s where it’s at! I noticed a “Sally Ride” quarter the other day. I heard Sally Ride give a talk to a Toastmaster’s conference way back when. She was the first female astronaut to go into space. In Houston, I had visited their facility. We saw the swimming pool in which the trainees learned to do tasks in a relatively “gravity-less” space. Was there a difference between male and female applicants? Yes. At her Toastmaster’s talk, Sally held up a toilet seat with perhaps a one-inch diameter hole in it. In space, men could aim at the hole and hit it, using the same techniques they do on earth. For Sally, though, she had to train and train, to hit a hole she couldn’t see. She succeeded – and has the honor of being the first woman in orbit!
Viva La Difference! - But in this new millennium, perhaps we won’t find the differences in gender too constrictive, in terms of mental abilities!
I love love love this one.
I "drag" my wife to art museums. Today we went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum and witnessed enjoyed a Latrec exhibit. You might ask what Latrec and Asian art have in common; a lot as it turns out. But she gets into it when we arrive; she's indulgent that way. Then we walked around the most beautiful park you can imagine in weather that is right out of mid summer. We both thought it was a great day. So there you have it. I like art and she likes me, so we get along very well, thank you. Oh yes, I pretend to like reading non-fiction from time to time. That's marriage.
Marriage is a great game indeed. Earlier today I came up with a good response for my wife when I have (as usual) misheard a word, "Please spell it, don't yell it".
My dailyreminder to myself: Have something to look forward to.
Thank you Mr. Keillor for the icing on the cake of a perfect fall day. I shared this with my mate of many years, as the lovliest description of the intricacies and small concessions that make a relationship sing.
When I read your description of “appreciating Greek statuary, it seems to me that you should have been the “chaperone” when the O’Brien boys went to visit the art museum at the California Institute of Technology! If I want to represent the “crew” accurately, I would first point out that Jean O‘Brien was a divorced mother, raising her boys alone. The only male relative of any significance was an uncle who was monk in a monastery. Kevin, aged 14 perhaps, was our leader. Terry – “the middle child” was 12. Kelly, at 10 – was “The Baby.” I was the “wanna-be gang member” who happened to have a vehicle, keys and a driver’s license.
Long before, the boys had picked up on the cues that I was actually a boy – their age – at heart. Many is the time we went body surfing at “The Wedge” in Long Beach, with waves that were twice as tall as Kelly when he was situated vertically in them.
However, for variety’s sake, sometimes we did “Cultural Things” as well. We took in the museum complex in Los Angeles, and when that didn’t seem like enough, I took them over to the California Institute of Technology (CIT) to explore that area as well.
That’s where we saw “IT!” The boys took one look at the ancient Grecian statue of a naked man, and nearly went ballistic! “He! He!” They couldn’t even say it! Here I was, a female, and perhaps I’d be as straight-laced as their mother was.
“That’s what men look like when they’re grown up,” I said, casually.
We couldn’t move! They stood there, gape-mouthed, thinking “That’s what our uncle, the Catholic Monk, looks like if he’s not in his robes…” Hands went toward crotches, as I pretended to be looking up the staircase that the statue was housed underneath.
I don’t know how long we stood there. We had been at the Natural History Museum and beheld the behemoth bones of a dinosaur and those of a saber-toothed tiger. But that was nothing at all to them, in comparison with that statue of the naked Greek man.
Times have changed a lot since the early 1960s. Back then, the best the school system could do was to assign the boys to male teachers whenever possible – so that at least they’d gain a few ideas of what they might be like when they grew up. But- “the birds and the bees!” I wouldn’t be surprised if, after that CAL TECH experience, Kevin, perhaps, might have found some access to a simple anatomy book, or some “Blue” literature. I doubt if any of the boys dared to ask their priestly uncle any of the questions that gnawed at them!
But – then there’s Grecian statuary – which has been around for millennia! Sooner or later, in one form or another, most of us eventually come across information that can be essential to our having a normal, balanced adulthood. I’ve always been happy that “Our Gang” stumbled across that Greek athlete. Just the fact that this female didn’t “Cringe at the sight” might have helped them to accept their own anatomy. Who knows?
We SO enjoyed joining you in song at the San Juan Capistrano Roadhouse last week. Made us reflect back on seeing you backstage in Costa Mesa, CA in 2015, and you and husband Don speaking a few phrases of Danish, with great joy. Greetings too from mutual friends Paul Verner and Birthe in Svenborg, with whom we’ve just nattered a bit about the world, via FaceTime, our alarming tendency to just go to war rather than just get along. Paul Verner and my husband Don were schoolmates and best buddies way back in 1957, when an AFS student exchange took place at the Statsgymnasium in Gentofte. Here’s to world friendship!
A sidebar, still about things-Danish. We seem to remember you once did a memorable program, a Christmas in Denmark. Is there a link to that program, by any chance?
WanderingSioux Oct 9 SEXIST! I wouldn’t even know how to do “The eye roll” – and I’ve never experienced it myself. More likely – it’s probably generational.
But – aren’t we all “sexist” at times! I came across a “Word Search” page (Kappa Publishing) with a list of “Quality Leadership” traits. They could apply to Dean Robert M. Hayes of the UCLA Graduate School of Librarianship and Information Science (GSLIS) – my “boss” when I was getting my Masters in Library and Information Science, what, four decades ago, now! They could equally well apply to “Our Fearless Leader” here on this page! “Able, Alert, Example, Guide, Innovate, Order, Pioneer, Politics, Respect, Smart, Sure, Vision, Wise.
Dean Hayes was at the formative stages of writing an article on an NIH [National Institute of Health] grant on “The distance people travel to use public libraries.” He gave a talk on the project, partially “FYI,” and partially because he was looking for a “GoFer” – a bibliographic assistant who would collect a ream of relevant papers – a “Literature Search” on the subject. I was a commuter from the “burbs” who got on the Freeway (free from traffic at 6:30 a.m., bumper-to-bumper by an hour later!) I would sit in the main lecture hall for perhaps two hours and study until the first formal classes began there.
On this particular day, the Dean’s assistant, “Bunny”, saw me as they came into the room. “You’ll have to leave,” she said. “Dean Hayes interrupted her: “Let her stay. She might be interested.” He was giving a pitch to recruit a library researcher to compile articles on models of the effects of distance on the use of public facilities – a “Downtown YM(W)CA,” for example. Here I was, an obviously “Long Distance Commuter” student – the longest distance, at 30 miles, of all the students in the school. The room held half a dozen folks by the time his talk began. The Dean began by saying “There’s going to be some technical stuff here. Feel free to iinterrupt if hou have questions.” As the slide projector flung images of graph after graph on the screen and he outlined the project, I interrupted, and interrupted, and interrupted again. It was virtually a two-person conversation, due in part to “natural selection.” Most of the applicants who looked forward to working in public libraries “Loved Books.” As an engineer’s daughter, I had always been interested in things like the “Dewey Decimal System” toat puts books of the same topic together on the library shelves. Beyond that, with a Masters degree in Secondary Science Education, where would a biologist be without an ability to read bar graphs? What about an evolutionary geologist, speaking about eons of past time? Visual means of comparison were second nature to me.
When the formal delivery was over, the others in the room left. I still had some time on my hands until my first class. Maybe ten minutes later, Bunny came in. “The Dean wants to speak with yu about this job. When can you come in. I mentioned a time after my classes, and went to see him then. Dean Hayes had pulled my student record. He could see my teaching certificates for Geology and Chemistry, and my Master’s Degree in Genetics.
“WE HAVE TO HAVE YOU!” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair, with his fingertips touching each other in that somewhat “praying” motion that decisive people use when they’re sure of themselves. I pointed out that commuting might be a problem, since I was coming from an hour’s drive away in the best of times.
“Don’t worry about specific times. Come when you can and keep track of your hours. We’ll get you a parking permit so you can be close to your work. You’ll have access to the “Staff” floor here in our building. Whatever you find, you can bring over here and photocopy on our machines, so there won’t be an extra, incidental cost.” As it turned out, I spent a lot of time in the City of Los Angeles Main Library as well. They helped me with parking there, too. This was before GOOGLE days, when many libraries have their full reference collections online. I blew the dust off of the tops of reference books and old abstracts that had been accumulating there for decades. It’s a good thing I’m not asthmatic!
It was a fascinating and challenging job! For Dean Hayes’ mathematical models, themselves, I found most of the pertinent articles in the grocery business. They were developing models to chart how far their customers came to use their shops. To run these models, he needed “hard data.” Fortunately, the City of Chicago had conducted distance surveys for every library in the metropolitan and outlying area. In this respect, they came the closest to the Los Angeles Public Library System, since both cities have extensive “bedroom communities” encircling the downtown area.
If memory serves me, I think Dean Hayes was impressed enough with my work, that I’m actually listed as the second, coauthor, on our Journal of Library and Information Science paper. But beyond the “product” itself, it was an exhilarating experience to work with Dean Hayes! Because of protocol, I always called him exactly that “Dean Hayes.” For the job, I’d be wandering through the School’s office areas, with secretaries and various professors stationed or waiting here and there. I’m pretty certain that there would have been gossip at the water fountain if I had called him “Bob.” We never said a word about it. There was just this peaked fingers motion, and a “knowing glance” - “You Understand,” and I did. If we had acted “too casually” toward each other, the gossip mill would be grinding away in minutes!
For a female in the early 1980’s, that library research job got me closer to a sense of “equality” in the “Outside World” than anything else I had done before! I was “a Co-worker” – in a sense, a Partner” – since the leads I discovered channeled the future development of the paper. What use would I have had for the “eye-roll” technique? When Dean Hayes peaked his fingers together – yes – his body language was saying “This is MY paper. It’s MY project – and this is the way I’ll do it.” I was the one feeding the kernels of corn into the popcorn popper, and he was the popper - he expanded them into they became something significant! But – this had nothing to do with gender, per se! The data was there. I was the one who found it. He was the one who worked it into a visible product.
My “SEXIST” initial comment was “just an observation”, not a “put-down.” Socially, we’re in a time of flux. Couples can find their own ways of dealing with differences. But, as an identifiable “female of the species,” it seems as if “Doors Are Opening” in ways that couldn’t have been imagined before. Dean Hayes didn’t choose me for my gender, he chose me for my scientific/mathematical background. In a school in which the students are focused in dealing with books – literature, and such, finding a student with a strong science/math background was a plus. My gender didn’t matter – the way I processed visual information did.
Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” – and his dream of racial equality has certainly been making progress since that speech! In this new century, perhaps women who dream of true equality won’t rely on “eye rolls” as a form of criticism. Getting in the pool and swimming with the rest – maybe that’s where it’s at! I noticed a “Sally Ride” quarter the other day. I heard Sally Ride give a talk to a Toastmaster’s conference way back when. She was the first female astronaut to go into space. In Houston, I had visited their facility. We saw the swimming pool in which the trainees learned to do tasks in a relatively “gravity-less” space. Was there a difference between male and female applicants? Yes. At her Toastmaster’s talk, Sally held up a toilet seat with perhaps a one-inch diameter hole in it. In space, men could aim at the hole and hit it, using the same techniques they do on earth. For Sally, though, she had to train and train, to hit a hole she couldn’t see. She succeeded – and has the honor of being the first woman in orbit!
Viva La Difference! - But in this new millennium, perhaps we won’t find the differences in gender too constrictive, in terms of mental abilities!