Weddings

I've only been to a few weddings in my lifetime. (My mother didn't care for them herself.) And I've never actually married anyone...

Back when I was 19 I woke up early in the morning to watch Charles and Diana's royal wedding.  Today I feel a bit ashamed to admit that I cared about the Royals that much. (I didn't see William's wedding or Harry's.)

MTV used to show music videos connecting marriage to death, a rather adolescent cliche.  In Greg Kihn's "Jeopardy" his bride decomposes before his eyes.  In Billy Idol's "White Wedding," we see a coffin being nailed shut.  Commitment is death!

Remember the cartoon Herman?  In one episode someone asks a minister, "If you're dead set against gambling, why do you perform so many marriages?"

My parents were married for almost 60 years.  Which reminds me of a joke, of course.  This man has been married for sixty years and his grandson asks, "How have you stayed married for so long?  What's your secret?" And he answers, "My secret is, I decide all the big stuff and she decides all the small stuff.  And so far, it's all been small stuff!"

Skydiving

I've never parachuted.  My life isn't any emptier for it.

I read somewhere that in World War I the British air force didn't provide their pilots with parachutes because they wanted them to be motivated!

I remember when I was little reading about D.B. Cooper hijacking an airplane with a fake bomb, then parachuting out with a suitcase full of ransom money.  Neither he nor any of the money ever turned up again.  Even with his parachute, he probably didn't survive hitting the ground.

I remember this movie The Longest Day, about the D-Day invasion.  One character was a paratrooper played by Red Buttons.  He parachuted into France, but his chute got caught on a church steeple and he hung there helplessly for hours with this big battle going on around him.  When they finally got him down, he'd been left permanently deaf!  Somehow that got to me more than soldiers getting killed.

Getting lost

I usually avoid getting lost and the few times that I have been I feel ashamed to talk about.  You think, "This too shall pass," yet part of you wonders, "What if I stay lost forever?"

I read somewhere that when you're lost in the woods, the smart thing is to go downhill. And I've also read that if you see a blind person standing in the same place for a long time, it may mean that he's lost!

I've never watched the TV show Lost. (I heard that the later seasons got weirder and weirder...) And Lost in Space was before my time.  Though my brother put together a model of the Lost in Space robot.  He had a lot of models, like the car in Get Smart and the early airplane that Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel.

Ring Lardner wrote a piece with this exchange: "'Are we lost, Daddy?' 'Shut up!' he explained."

Lost and found

Don't put down people as losers!  At the end of the day, we're all losers--we all lose to the Grim Reaper.

My problem with sports movies it that after the team gets their act together and comes from behind to pull off a dramatic upset victory, I'm left wondering, "How did the other team feel?" (A critic in The New Yorker wrote, "Only two kinds of people usually enjoy sports movies:  children, who like fairy tales, and businessmen, who like motivational lectures.")

Losing can benefit us. Remember the Falklands War in 1982?  Argentina actually benefited more from losing the war--they got rid of their dictatorship--then Great Britain did from winning!  It's a shame that both countries couldn't have lost.

There's a Gordon Lightfoot song, "If You Could Read My Mind," with the line, "The hero often fails."  It seems to me that this is something Canadians understand better than Americans, who are such believers in winning that they think a hero has to win all the time!  I guess people like the Russians and the Irish understand it too.

Halloween

I actually lost interest in Halloween trick or treating early, at twelve or so.  It just felt like a little kid thing to me.  Did you know that trick or treating was developed only in the 1930s and '40s, as an alternative to more rowdy behaviour?  

There was a funny episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David wouldn't give a treat to a teenage girl whose idea of a costume was a T-shirt with a scarf, so she trashed his whole front yard, then he complained to her father, who turned out to be this guy who'd been calling David a bad Jew and started shouting him down, so David hired an orchestra to play Wagner in front of the guy's house!

Halloween is interesting in its pagan roots.  It started out as the Celtic Samhain festival, and the jack o' lantern is very Celtic imagery.  Halloween as we know it was brought to America by the Scottish and Irish. 

The Christian church characteristically co-opted Samhain by putting All Saints Day on November 1 and All Souls Day the day after. (The first is a day for all the saints, and the second is for all the regular dead, sort of like Mensa and Densa.) In Mexico All Souls Day has become the Day of the Dead, with candy skulls and such, in a way that reflects pre-Columbian culture.

I haven't gone to a Halloween party for years.  Some years back I went to one as a beatnik, wearing a glued-on beard, a turtleneck and blazer, shades and my mother's beret. (She'd stopped wearing it because of that footage of Monica Lewinsky in a beret giving President Clinton a hug.)