Month / February 2018

by CIDU Bill

Seat

seat

Okay, it just seems to me if he’s polite enough to pick up her handkerchief, you’d think he would have offered her his seat in the first place.

Or should I not be trying to make sense of Mutt and Jeff at 4am?

Thinking about this — because, again, it’s 4am — I still offer my seat to women, even though it’s long out of fashion, because that’s how I grew up. But only to adult women: offering my seat to a woman forty years my junior just seems weird (not that this is usually a conscious decision).

You know what really made me feel old? The first time somebody offered me a seat. Maybe I looked particularly aged that day.

Interesting how these things differ regionally: when the extended family was in Boston a few years, I noticed that nobody was offering my octogenarian mother a seat. My son, who lives in Boston, explained that Bostonians rarely offer their seats to the elderly, but seem happy to give them up when asked.

(He himself always offers, because he’s still a New Yorker)

by CIDU Bill

My Mrs. Olsen [semi-OT]

eraser

This comic brought back memories of my own Mrs. Olsen.

My Mrs. Olsen was my 8th grade history teacher, Mrs. Ryan. Where Mrs. Olsen is a big woman, Mrs. Ryan was frail, bird-like. She was born when Teddy Roosevelt was president, which was impressive even then.

And I was her Caulfield. I suppose I was everybody’s Caulfield growing up, but Mrs. Ryan was having none of it. She was strict and she scared me. And I didn’t have a janitor friend enabling me when I wanted to undermine her authority (not that I’d ever accuse her of being stupid, mind you: just not as clever as I was, of course).

But my unwillingness to get with the program was bad enough. That she hated me was common knowledge.

Instead of writing a paper about comparative religions, I created a board game where the players passed through various religions’ afterlives.

(getting to the comic reference…)

In April, I convinced her to let us have an Anzac Day party during class. Because, you know, it was history. There was cake. There were balloons.

After a while, one of the balloons became the centerpiece of a volleyball game. And in the middle of it, Mrs. Ryan came out from behind her desk and joined us, at one point giving that balloon an impressive spike. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been more shocked if our neighbor’s dog stood on his hind legs and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy.

I’d like to say that I immediately realized that all the assumptions I’d made about Mrs. Ryan were wrong: but I was thirteen. It came later.

I still have that board game. I got an A.