Heavy Weather – The Coming of the Toads

Whether Weather, or Not

One thing might be certain as we embark onboard ship 2021, there should be weather. Notice the qualification, for there are times when the weather seems to disappear. These are the days we sit out, barefoot, open, a grassy hill overlooking the houses and farther in the city, where the cars are the size of ants and behave accordingly, one on the tail of another. Whether or not we enjoy the weather seems to be a matter of taste. An old friend called on Thanksgiving to say hello. The weather here Thanksgiving week was cold but calm and mostly dry, highs in the low 40’s, lows in the high 20’s. In the afternoon, we put a couple of cafe umbrellas over the deck. The plan was to set out dips and chips and cut fresh vegetables, drink a beer or two, and grill some goose (aka chicken), and eat on the deck, three in our party, masked and distanced, at separate tables. Jacketed and hatted with blankets to drape over one’s legs. A small outdoor heater provided a psychologically friendly red hot burner, but its heat dissipated quickly and wasn’t of much practical use. Still, there it was, in the center of things, and we took turns moving up to it to warm our hands and seats over the fire, as it were. Meantime, down on the southern coast, winds over 100 miles per hour blasted away at Cape Blanco. I briefly described out situation, our predicament, over the phone to above said old friend, and asked for a description of his plans for Thanksgiving. He said it was too cold in their location to eat outside. What’s the temperature, I asked. 65, he replied. Degrees, or age? I wondered. Now, here, we are in the throes of a wet January winter, the temperature mild, highs in the 40’s, the rain coming as it does off the Pacific, moving inland over the valleys, pushing colder air to the east of us. But the point of this little post isn’t to sound like a weather report. Still, the weather is with us, and we ignore it at our peril. Better to go out into it, walk unsteadily the tipsy decks of ship 2021, the better to say, if we survive the storms, we lived them, and did not cower, though we did mask up, even if we might sound like our favorite Shakespearean Dad:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!”

Weather Retort

Day One: A trance of rain, ear churn momute.

Day Two: Slide high noontide, sundersthorms plate.

Day Three: Moistly scattered sneers and a few frizzles.

Day Four: Chants of wrinkles, dartly cloudy and chowdery.

Day Five: Humility Poor Boy Talls, Barometer IPA 75%.

Day Six: Moggy, very low viability.

Day Seven: Topical air mass pew point, wind clam.

Extended Forecast:

Thick hot pine tar air dropping from powerful trees.
Rosemary, basil, garlic, and spearmint mixing with tales of salt water.
Soft golden sun boiling over salsa garden.
Bare feet in wet sand, nibbled by sand crabbed bubbles.
Plenty of weather to write or not in the forecast. Some pressure to publish sun only.

Janet Groth’s The Receptionist: A Reflection

The receptionist receives. Receives what? An education, a memoir. One purpose of a memoir, a narrative of memory, might be to raise eyebrows, for it’s a tool to talk back, to reflect not only on what was taken in but to evaluate and tell on the givers, the repellers, those who dismiss, to give back some sass. One may also be received, received into, into the club; but not in Janet Groth’s case. Miss Groth, to use the New Yorker office convention of the time, was the receptionist on the writer’s floor for a little over two decades, and, never having been promoted or published or even encouraged, finally left, graduating on her own terms, storing the education for a later memoir, much later – 30 years later. Groth’s memoir has already been discussed by those in the know, but here’s a view from a different coast.

Why was Miss Groth never given “a better job” (224) at the magazine? She offers four possibilities: 1, nepotism; 2, lack of Ivy League connections; 3, lack of submissions (only three in twenty-one years, an output Joe Mitchell would however have understood); and 4, she was kept a receptionist because she was a kept receptionist – she was good and that’s where they wanted her. None of these explanations by themselves sound all that convincing, but maybe all taken together they amount to a decision deferred that becomes the dream deferred. And receptionist, in the world of business, is a feminine noun, while what’s needed to push the business forward is a masculine verb.

For a memoir to be successful, the main character must be a dynamic character; she must change from the beginning to the end. Throwing her change into relief are all the static characters she receives over time, characters that don’t change, but that remain their dismissive selves throughout, and the photos of static characters are rarely charming or lovely, and may even offer unflattering profiles.

When I think of memoir, of the self-important profile it proclaims, I also think of P. G. Wodehouse’s “Heavy Weather,” wherein “…the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, brother of the Earl of Emsworth and as sprightly an old gentleman as was ever thrown out of a Victorian music-hall, was engaged in writing the recollections of his colourful career as a man about town in the nineties, the shock to the many now highly respectable members of the governing classes who in their hot youth had shared it was severe. All over the country decorous Dukes and steady Viscounts, who had once sown wild oats in the society of the young Galahad, sat quivering in their slippers at the thought of what long-cuboarded skeletons those Reminiscences might disclose.”

Not to worry in the Wodehouse world, for Galahad has already sent a note to his publisher: “Dear Sir, Enclosed find cheque for the advance you paid me on those Reminiscences of mine. I have been thinking it over, and have decided not to publish them after all.” But what then develops is indeed a bit of nepotism in the publishing world as the memoir in question becomes a pig to nobble, even as there are real pigs to nobble as the plot unfolds.

We don’t know what Groth has held back, of course, but she wants to persuade us she’s told most of the story. That story is not only about a receptionist, but about an existential (she confides she once wanted to be a female Camus) question: shall we be defined by the roles received from our parents, where we come from, or from our employers, our tribe or our set, or will we, like Huckleberry Finn, “light out for the territory” and define for ourself what it means to be ourself, refusing to receive any other’s limiting or corralled view of us? Yet what of the receptionist who can’t stop receiving? Who will tell her memoir?

“The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker,” by Janet Groth. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012. 229 pages.

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