save it for a rainy day

We've been having summer showers today. They make for a delicious invitation to nap. I declined only because I slept so late into the morning, not that that eliminated the possibility of napping. We need the rain. People seem to say that when it rains, whether it's true or not. It's just part of the script. Like, in old Westerns someone would mutter, "It's a good day for a hangin'" and some tumbleweed would roll by across the parched main street of the town where the gunfight was supposed to take place. A good day for a hanging? That's rough. You would hope most think the opposite, as if no day were good for a hanging. Not if you were the hangee, that's for sure. Rarely, if ever, would the black and white movie depict a hanging. And if it did, the execution would be sanitized and visually bowdlerized so as not to acquaint viewers with anything resembling the real act, for fear of ruining that line about its being a good day and for fear of having viewers throw up and just maybe walk out of the theater, or the living room, opposed to the death penalty. The sound of rain on the metal roof of a car while you sit inside and watch the rivulets form on the windshield and wonder if there's a pattern to it, and then you don't care but just enjoy it. The Beatles had a song about rain, eponymously titled. Bob Dylan wrote and sang "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," but the words "rain" or "rainy" never show up; "stone" and "stoned" appear about 347 times. The Beatles song derides those of us who shun direct contact with nature, be it rainy or sunny. Has there ever been another song about rain itself, as opposed to rain involving romance or remorse or love or love's loss? When it rains it pours. Then it's pissing down, in the United Kingdom. If you want to get biblical about it, "...for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:45). Save it for a rainy day. Save what? The sunshine, allegorically? Save the rain from the last rainy day? No, save money, they say. To mean: in halcyon or sunshine-imbued times, sock away some cash for the less-sunny, the rainy, times. As if people do. Most don't in American society.  I have read that Germans are adept at saving it for a rainy day. Save it for a rainy day doesn't quite work for attributes of beauty, fertility, pleasure, or luck. It's not as if you can horde it, whatever the "it" is, until a time comes for splurging. But we try. I do. As if that one great time, thing, event, person, episode, or instance can be cast in amber and later melted or have its DNA reconfigured for later cloning. Like those rivulets on the windshield and the saturating symphony on the car roof. 

The Litany of Wintry Gamboling

A crevice of light in the sky.

The Slavic man shouting into his cell, outside his car, in the night, echoing.

Slush.

Our dog gamboling in drifts spindrift snow dolphin leaping.

Wet pavement black.

Leaps of faith that say, "This is this; exalt!"

The pebble in my hiking boot that turns out to be a grain of (rock) salt.

Biblical pillars of shoveled detritus.

Naked branches.

The missing chickadee.

Muzzle in the shards of crystalline alabaster.

January.

Filthy Lucre

I find the phrase filthy lucre semantically bountiful, with its oxymoronic hint of silvery luster besmirched by something shameful, perhaps even feces; its ambivalent conjurings of lust, Lucifer, and luck, all puritanically punished by the adjective filthy. As pointed out by the American Heritage Dictionary entry linked above, William Tyndale's 1526 English translation of the Bible used the phrase "filthy lucre," and the two words are now inseparably linked, at least in English. (Any readers of foreign tongue are invited to weigh in with their own versions of this phrase.)

I'm no Freudian (or even Jungian) psychoanalyst, but it has been said talking about money is the last taboo. An article by Alina Tugend in The New York Times of February 3, 2007, noted how, at least in America, people will divulge revelations of sexual abuse or details of sexual intimacy way more readily than financial secrets, especially among siblings, co-workers, and neighbors. In fact, the article noted that an anthology of 22 writers, called Money Changes Everything, edited by Elissa Schappell and Jenny Offill, lost out on the contribution of Writer 23. "He had written about his drug addiction, about a nervous breakdown, but he would not write about money."

Some say our obsession to have more than the next guy, or gal, is fueled by this secrecy; others say it is simply envy, or greed, or materialism, or media marketing. A movement known as voluntary simplification is seen as an antidote to this acquisition fever. Similarly, some call for a commercial-free childhood.

I wonder if athletes get terribly upset when their exorbitant salaries are announced. I have little doubt Armando Benitez and others would prefer that such facts be kept secret. I call it the price of fame. (Obviously, the price of fame is too high a cost for many, witness the current or former behavior of many celebrities.)

It turns out blogging is a salutary vehicle for many who are hugely in debt. They talk about it openly but more or less anonymously. One couple blogs about it. It's apparently easier than face to face.

I don't know where I'm going with any of this. At first I was going to write about semicolons, but I got sidetracked. Now I've run out of steam (John Dryden once scathingly wrote of "...the steaming ordures of the stage...").

Filthy Lucre just seemed like a more alluring topic. It's no wonder a band chose it as a name.

What would be the opposite of filthy lucre? Clean Cash? Pristine Profit?

Just doesn't have the same ring to it. Plus, is it really possible to have pristine profit?