Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 6

Happy Thanksgiving

Today I am thankful for many things, including:

A loving family.A comfortable home.Turkey.International readers who don’t mind being wished a happy Thanksgiving today even though they are not specifically celebrating the act of giving thanks.Neighbors who refuse to plug in their Christmas lights until tomorrow. I guess the other neighbors, too. Readers near and far who are patient with me when I blow off blogging in favor of eating turkey with my loving family in my comfortable home where the Christmas lights will not be plugged in until tomorrow.

So Many Ways to Say Mustache

There are several things happening right now in my corner of the world. First, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is upon us and though I am not participating this year, I know lots of writers who are. I am cheering from the sidelines. Go! Go! Go! Also, despite my non-participation, I, too, find myself eyeballs deep in a novel project, working on the other end of the process toward the final draft. I’m currently on the cusp of getting the manuscript into the hands of several excellent beta readers and daily vacillating between the belief that this is shaping into a great read and the certainty that I am a no-talent hack. So, I’m right on schedule.

Good luck to all the NaNoWriMos! Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

Also going down is the annual premature Christmasification of the Thanksgiving season. I don’t think it’s actually any worse this year than it has been for the last several, but maybe it is. With inflation making life a little more difficult for folks these days, perhaps the retailers are pushing a little harder into their best money making time of the year. I pretend to mind, but I must not as I have begun to consider some possible gift ideas.

Perhaps because it is also No Shave November, my gift-giving ponderings have been drawn toward Englishman Harvey Adams, who joined his family’s pottery business in 1861 and changed the world of fashion forever. Or at least for several decades, because what Adams did was cleverly solve a problem that was plaguing parlors throughout the British Empire where fashionable gentlemen found themselves melting into their teacups. 

Driving the ladies wild. Image by geri cleveland from Pixabay

The height of gentlemanly fashion was, of course the mustache (or moustache, if you happen to be a British gentleman), required as part of the British military uniform, and preferred, evidently, by the ladies. But it wasn’t that simple, because if you were going to wear a lip sweater, you also had to engage in some fancy grooming practices and you needed to have a few tools handy, like comb, scissors, dyes, and enough wax to give your facial hair that natural look and feel of molded plastic.

The problem with all of that excessive grooming became apparent at tea time, when the steam rising from a dainty cuppa could turn a carefully coiffed cookie duster into a messy, melting glob of goo. Then comes along Harvey Adams, genius inventor of the mustache cup with a small guard inside to protect a man’s sculpted masterpiece of a lip doily from the hot liquid inside the cup. And the trendiest gift of the holiday season was born.

By 1885, mustache cups were everywhere—widely manufactured and in use throughout the British Empire as well as the United States—and Adams had grown wealthy enough to retire from the pottery business. 

Richard Huber, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The mustache and its accompanying teacup enjoyed popularity until World War I when grooming a glorious stache became more difficult in the trenches and a well fitted gas mask seemed more important anyway.

Lip foliage has made a comeback, though, as is evidenced both by how easy it is to find a lengthy list of mustache slang on the internet and by how many products have surfaced this almost-holiday shopping season designed for men and their mouth brows.

Despite how it may sound, I tend to like nicely trimmed facial hair, though I definitely don’t share the Victorian and Edwardian obsession with waxed, sculpted, and dyed snot catchers. Still, I do have at least one mustachioed loved one on my shopping list this season. After No Shave November is over, maybe you will, too. Thanks to the genius of Harvey Adams, I think I may have an idea.

The Phantom Blog Theory

In 1991, German historian Heribert Illig discovered a discrepancy that shocked the world when he suggested that around three hundred years of human history never actually existed. To draw this conclusion, Illig looked at the comparatively scant archaeological evidence from the years 614 AD to 911 AD, the presence of Roman-type architecture in Europe that clearly doesn’t date as far back as the Roman Empire, and that one weird time glitch created when Pope Gregory XIII decided the Julian Calendar wasn’t far enough behind the times.

Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, a structure that is super Roman and therefore serves as evidence that there’s closer to 1400 years of phantom time. Michael Jimenez, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The theory goes that buddies Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII conspired to shift time in order to make their own lives and legacies more auspicious.

And it clearly happened just that way, because in 1582, Pope Gregory’s astronomer pals calculated that they could correct the Julian calendar, created in 45 BC, by subtracting a day for every one hundred and twenty-eight years. It was a solid plan until they rounded to ten, thereby correcting the calendar dating all the way back to the year 325 AD, the year of the Council of Nicaea.

That might be a little tough to follow, but don’t worry because in the 90’s, Illig did the math. What he realized is that 128 times ten is 1280, which leaves 347 years unaccounted for between 45 BC and 1582, as if it never happened at all. And the Phantom Time Theory was born.

To say that Illig shocked the world might be a little bit of an overstatement, but his theory did raise some historians’ eyebrows for a minute. And I can sort of understand why, because I have definitely experienced my own version of phantom time.

Silly theory or not, I gotta admit “phantom time” sounds pretty spooky and cool. Image by lidago from Pixabay

You see, five hundred and ninety-eight weeks ago, on May 9, 2012, I posted to this blog for the first time. I admit that at first I didn’t know exactly what I was setting out to create, but what it ended up being was a quirky mashup of history, as viewed from a slightly ridiculous angle, and my life, as viewed from an entirely ridiculous angle.

My aim was to blog once a week, realizing that some bloggers work on a much more ambitious schedule, but acknowledging that with the general demands of a busy life, I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with more. So, without any idea what I was doing, I got started and blogged once a week, for the next eleven-and-a-half years.

Now, if we do the math, that means that today’s post is my five hundred and ninety-ninth in this space. Not too shabby. Except that, according to the number-crunching monkeys at WordPress, this is my four hundred and twenty-fourth post. That sounds way less impressive. And it leaves one hundred and seventy-four weeks unaccounted for, as if they never existed at all.

What happened to those weeks? Well, any number of things might have occurred. It’s possible I was working on a book, or maybe I bumped my head and forgot to post, or I might have spilled a drink on my computer, or I could have blown off blogging and gone to a water park instead. That does sound like something I might do. Or is it possible that those weeks simply didn’t happen and I’m actually a little more than three years younger than I thought?

Yeah. I like that. I think I’m going to assume that’s what has happened here.

Now, I realize that some of you particularly astute readers might question my conclusion by suggesting that time was still passing for you during those missing weeks. Perhaps some of you even posted to your own blogs during the unaccounted-for one hundred and seventy-four weeks, leading you to believe that you have some sort of evidence that time kept marching on even without my contribution to the blogosphere. I mean, I guess if you’re that egocentric, your point could maybe be a little bit valid.

History-schmistory. This looks like way more fun. Image by cafrancomarques from Pixabay

That’s also the best argument against the Phantom Time Theory, which didn’t have most historians scratching their heads for very long. The theory assumes that the presence of 5th to 8th century artifacts from other world cultures sheds no light on whether or not time existed in Europe during the same period. It also relies on the impossibility that anyone in a later era might mimic an architectural style of an earlier era. Both of these assertions are a little hard to swallow.

Then there’s the astronomical evidence. While Otto III, Sylvester II, and Constantine VII were busy conspiring, it seems they forgot to reschedule the comets and eclipses reliably observed here on earth. So, maybe Europe just blew off history for a few centuries in favor of a trip to the water park. For the rest of the world, however, I think it’s safe to assume that time kept on ticking.

In a Roundabout Way

About a week ago, the worst thing that can ever happen to a community happened in my town, and it has been absolute pandemonium ever since. Everywhere I go I hear the cries of the people, from the grocery store checkout lines to the ladies’ locker room at the community center. And don’t get me started on the city’s Facebook page, where many comments contain exasperated emoji faces, excessive exclamation points, terrible grammar, and sometimes even ALL CAPS.

People are pretty upset, and it’s little wonder why, because last week, after months of public notices, published plans, and inconvenient construction, an old interstate ramp connected to the town’s main commercial thoroughfare was suddenly closed and replaced with a new one that includes, of all things (and I’m sorry if this is too upsetting for your sensibilities), a roundabout.

Oh, yeah. That looks easy to navigate. Arpingstone at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I know. It’s difficult to process. I’ll give you a minute.

The dreaded roundabout can trace its roots, as well as its generally bad reputation, back to the mid-nineteenth century when French Emperor Napoleon III decided to give the streets of Paris a makeover. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann was chosen for the job, and the city underwent a major overhaul to its public works, including the Place de l’Étoile (today known as the Place Charles de Gaulle) which circles around the Arc de Triomphe.

The circle, which has no lane markings, serves as the convergence point of twelve roads that all empty straight into it. Traffic traveling around the circle must yield to incoming traffic and those vehicles that have made their way into the innermost portion of the circle have to stay there probably forever.

Fortunately, I’ve never driven it, but when I attempted to find a graphic demonstrating what the traffic pattern should ideally look like, the best I could do were some videos of rush hours nightmares and a delightfully helpful list of tips that include “be a little bit pushy” and “know what your insurance covers.” Of course there have long been terrible traffic circles in other places as well, including the US and, as Clark Griswold demonstrated in the 1984 film National Lampoon’s European Vacation, in the UK.

But in 1966, the traffic circle got an overhaul itself thanks to British city designer Frank Blackmore who developed a newer, friendlier roundabout in which traffic entering from soft curves, yields to the traffic already moving around the circle. When implemented, his design reduced accidents, and maybe after a while didn’t seem like the worst thing ever.

In 2016, Carmel, Indiana received the International Roundabout of the Year Award from the UK based Roundabout Appreciation Society. This isn’t a picture of the winning intersection, but I did think it was worth noting that there is such a society that gives out such awards. Image by Roberto Ramon Diaz Blanco from Pixabay

Then in 1984, when the English had been happily driving around in circles for nearly two decades, American engineer Leif Ourston reached across the pond with a possibly slightly over-the-top appeal, suggesting to Blackmore that as Sir Winston Churchill once asked America to join Britain in a struggle to protect democracy, it would be lovely if Britain might join us to bring the love for the roundabout to America.

Since no one could say no to an appeal like that, Blackmore agreed. The two toured the nation’s cities, proposing their safer alternative to stoplight-controlled intersections. Perhaps predictably, complaining people shouted them down everywhere they went. Some even held protest signs that included excessive exclamation points and ALL CAPS!!!!

It wasn’t until the city of Las Vegas agreed to give it a go and placed two roundabouts in a residential area of the city that they made any progress at all. The number of accidents went down and the incidences of roundabouts crept up throughout the US, leading the town of Carmel, Indiana to become the roundabout capitol of the nation with upward of 138 of them serving a population of just under 100,000 spread over an area of forty-nine square miles.

See? Easy-peasy. Loginname, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I bet the citizens of Carmel did their fair share of grumbling at first, though I imagine they’ve gotten used to it by now. It’s hard to spend too much time arguing against an 89% reduction in traffic delays, a 56% reduction in stops, a 29% reduction in carbon emissions, a 28% reduction in fuel consumption, a 38% reduction in accidents at intersections (which account for 50% of traffic accidents nationwide), and a 90% reduction in fatalities at intersections.

I think folks in my town will eventually accept their tragic fate as well. This is, after all, not our first brush with these horrid circles. Just a quick count in my head comes up with at least six other roundabouts in town that I drive through regularly. I suspect there are more than that, each one initially met with righteous anger by local skeptics who grudgingly admitted after a while that it maybe didn’t seem like the worst thing ever.

People do come around, if in a somewhat roundabout way.

Thinking About the Roman Empire

I’ve been at this blogging thing for going on twelve years now, which is long enough to lose a little steam, and also to not always remember what territory I’ve already covered in this space. I am pretty sure, however, that in the first eleven years, I never once wrote specifically about chickens*. Now in year twelve, I have so far found myself writing about them twice.

Oh, maybe this is why all of the men are thinking about the Roman Empire! Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s not that chickens aren’t fascinating creatures. I’m sure they are. I just never realized they held much of a significant role in history. That is until we all started thinking about the Roman Empire so much.

Actually, maybe you haven’t been thinking about the Roman Empire all that much lately. It started as an Instagram post turned Tik-Tok trend with a couple of Swedish influencers challenging women to ask the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire. An oddly large percentage of men responded that they do think about the Roman Empire fairly often.

I’m a little late to the game because I don’t spend a great deal of time on either Instagram or Tik-Tok, but still several of the men in my life have played along and posted more than once that they are thinking about the Roman Empire again, which in turn makes me think about chickens.

Because chickens were pretty important to the Roman Empire, particularly the sacred chickens from the Greek Island of Euboea, whose opinions on foreign policy held great sway. Rightly so, because there was at least one incidence when their advice was not taken and disastrous results followed.

The story goes that during the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage, Roman consul and naval commander Publius Claudius Pulcher decided to attack the Carthaginian fleet at in the harbor of Drepana off the western coast of Sicily. As one evidently does while in Rome, he consulted the sacred chickens.

He asked his friendly neighborhood pullarius (Latin for chicken priest, just in case that ever comes up in conversation), who offered feed to the chickens and waited to see what would happen. If the chickens decided to eat, that would have been a sign of good luck. If not, then perhaps Pulcher would have been better off planning his attack for another day.

It seems reasonable to assume that if these creatures don’t feel like eating, it might be an ominous sign. Image by Emilian Robert Vicol from Pixabay

On this particular day, the chickens did not prove hungry, but Pulcher was not going to be told what to do by a bunch of bird-brained soothsayers. He allegedly responded to the chicken priest’s report that if the chickens didn’t want to eat, perhaps they could drink, and he ordered them all thrown overboard. He then went on to suffer the greatest naval defeat of the war and returned to Rome in shame.

It turns out that thinking about the chickens may be a worthwhile endeavor after all. If you spend much time thinking about the Roman Empire, they’re bound to come up eventually. Maybe even twice in only a few months.

I don’t know that I would say I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire, at least not as much as many of the men in my life apparently do. But I would bet that the time I spend writing blog posts about chickens is above average.

*After writing this post, it occurred to me that I did write about Mike the Headless Chicken once, back in June of 2016. You can begin to see why the topics are not coming as easily these days.

When Life Hands You Apples

In the late sixteenth century French Jesuits brought the first apple seeds to America and by the time missionary John Chapman became the legendary Johnny Appleseed in the late eighteenth century, the fruits were already a pretty important part of American culture. Apple pies were on their way to becoming as American as they were ever likely to get, and the hard cider was flowing.

Image by Michael Strobel from Pixabay

Then came the increasing influence of German immigrants who brought with them an enthusiasm for beer. Barley grew well in the US. It was a quicker and cheaper crop, too, and recovered more easily when it occasionally fell victim to the whim of the temperance movement. Apple trees began to decline, beer surged, and apple cider became the drink of the backward-thinking country bumpkin.

That’s probably why, during the presidential campaign season of 1840, a Democratic newspaper insulted the Whig challenger to the Democrat incumbent Martin Van Buren by stating that you could “give [William Harrison] a barrel of hard cider. . .and he will sit out the remainder of his days in a log cabin by the side of his ‘sea coal’ fire, and study moral philosophy.”

The insult turned out to be a pretty big misstep because the US was in the midst of an economic depression that had occurred under the watch and policies of Van Buren and his Democrat predecessor Andrew Jackson. People were stressed and were perhaps feeling nostalgic for better days, even longing for a return of the hard cider they’d previously dismissed.

I mean, the man might have been a little hoity-toity, but he was as American as hard apple cider. Albert Gallatin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Harrison, who’d been raised as a wealthy and well educated Virginian with a pedigree every bit as hoity-toity as Van Buren’s, embraced hard cider which paired well with his reputation as a western hero of the War of 1812. Yes, it was maybe a little disingenuous, but when life hands you apples, you make hard cider.

That’s what we’ve decided to do this fall at the Angleton house. Shortly after moving into our current suburban home more than ten years ago, we planted three apple trees, of different varieties. One started producing a pretty good harvest the first year or two. The others took a little longer, but now all three are going strong and we are drowning in apples.

This is not a terrible problem to have. We share a lot of them with friends, family, neighbors, and food banks. With the rest, we get creative. Over the years we have canned applesauce, made apple butter, baked pies and cakes and muffins and doughnuts. Our apples have been the star of salads, hors d’oeuvres, main dishes, and snacks. The only thing we hadn’t done was make cider because we didn’t think we had the right kind of apples to make it work.

But then we found a stovetop recipe that isn’t too picky and it turned out really well. The next logical step then was to try our hand at fermenting it, because it felt like just the kind of thing nostalgic Americans should do.

If you didn’t know better, you might almost think we know what we’re doing.

Turns out it’s not that difficult. It does require some precision and care and a bit of patience. Our first batch isn’t quite through its initial fermentation yet, but as best as we can judge from all our recently obtained YouTube expertise, it’s coming along nicely so far.

Hard cider worked out for Harrison, too. He defeated Van Buren in an electoral college landslide, becoming the oldest person ever elected to the office (a record that has definitely been broken since) as well as the first to lay claim to a campaign slogan.

His success didn’t last, however, because after delivering the longest ever inaugural address (a record he does still hold), in the cold, without even stopping to take to his bed, he developed pneumonia and just a month later, became the first US president to die in office, after the shortest term ever served.

I do hope we have better luck with our hard cider.

A Book for the Chore Doers

Spurred by the return of soldiers blinded from service in World War I, the American Foundation for the Blind was established in 1921. The organization quickly set about the work of becoming a wellspring of knowledge, research, and advocacy for the visually impaired. It ushered in important standardization in English Braille, pushed for universal design in manufacturing, and encouraged considerations of accessibility.

How audiobooks got their start. American Foundation for the Blind, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And in 1932, led by AFB Education Director Robert B. Irwin, and with the lackluster support of Helen Keller who thought there might be more important priorities, the foundation established a recording studio for the purpose of putting books on vinyl records.

A year later the Library of Congress got in on the action. Soon audio performances of the Constitution and the writings of William Shakespeare became available in 15-minute segments on vinyl. The Bible also made the cut, as did many of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, and Helen Keller, who finally decided she was pretty much on board with that.

In the ninety years since, the audiobook has grown up quite a bit alongside some pretty impressive advances in technology, to become the fastest growing segment of the publishing market for going on twelve years now. The consumers of audiobooks have expanded beyond the visually impaired to include the commuters, exercisers, and household chore doers.

I’m just glad we no longer have to change the record every fifteen minutes. Image by sindrehsoereide from 
Pixabay

Like Helen Keller, I was a little bit of a latecomer to the audiobook, but over the last few years, I have listened to more and more of them. It’s still not my preferred method of book consumption, but as much as I would like to sit and read books all day long, I do occasionally have other things I need to get done. When that happens, it’s nice to have someone read to me while I work.

About a year ago, I set out to put one of my own books into this format. I have started with Gentleman of Misfortune, my first published novel, which you can learn more about here if you like. The project took a little longer than I expected, primarily because of slow communications with distributors, but finally, the audiobook is available in enough places that I feel like I can start to tell people about it.

For when you just want to read a book, but you really need to clean your house.

If you are into audiobooks, I hope you will consider checking it out at whatever link below would make you the happiest. Also, in case this is important to you here at the murky dawn of everything AI—and I really do hope it is—the reader for Gentleman of Misfortune is a real live human being with a real live voice.  His name is George Sirois and he is a talented voice actor, podcaster, and writer, who I think did a pretty bang-up job bringing my story to life in this way.

At this moment, Gentleman of Misfortune is available on audio in the following places, but platforms are still being added, so if your favorite isn’t listed, you still might find it there.

Audible

Spotify

Scribd

Libro.FM

Storytel

Kobo, Walmart

Google Play

BingeBooks

Chirp

NOOK Audiobooks

Audiobooks.com

Overdrive

Chapters Eight

In 1955, responding to a Life magazine article that explored the problem of underachievement in American children’s literacy rates and a book published soon after titled Why Johnny Can’t Read, then Houghton Mifflin education director William Spaulding reached out to an old friend with a challenge.

Theodore Geisel thought it would take him at most a month or two to use a provided list of 348 words every six-year-old should know, whittle it down to about 225 words, and shape them into a story that, at Spaulding’s insistence, “first graders can’t put down.”

It’s been a few years since our household has contained a first grader, but this is still in the collection because you never know when one might pop by for a visit.

It turned out to be a much taller order than the beloved Dr. Seuss, who was accustomed to making up silly words when he couldn’t find a rhyme, first assumed. At one point, he claimed he looked at the list and determined that the first two rhyming nouns he found would be the subject of his book. When he put a striped hat on a naughty cat, children’s literature was changed forever. He ended up using 236 unique words to write his The Cat in the Hat. It took him a year-and-a-half to do it.

I can sort of relate. I’m in the middle of a second draft of what I hope will someday be my fourth historical novel. That is, by the way, the best of my many excuses for not being super consistent on my blog lately. Also travel and the chaos of summer and life in general, but mostly it’s the novel thing. I’m fairly certain the novel won’t delight many first graders, but I would like to think it may someday be a book readers won’t be able to put down.

It’s a long way from that right now. A good portion of the book is still in that terrible rough draft stage in which the plot contains holes, the research has thin patches, the word choices are sloppy, the pacing is erratic, and the irresponsible characters are largely calling the shots. At this stage, I’m still hoping someone who loves me would have the good sense to destroy it if anything should happen to me before I’ve had a chance to clean it up.

Slowly but surely, I am working my way through the second draft. This is when I consider the rhythm of the story. I might move things around a little, adjust the pacing, fill in some background information, answer a few more targeted research questions, rein in those rambunctious characters, and start to play more intentionally with language. And like Dr. Seuss writing The Cat in the Hat, I’m finding that the whole thing is taking a lot longer than I thought it would.

Fortunately, I have not been tasked with changing the face of children’s literature and the landscape of early literacy education, but I do have approximately one million words in the English language I can choose from. I will not be trying to figure out how many unique ones I end up using, but my goal is somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000 words or so, which does require some whittling.

For right now, most of that whittling needs to happen in chapter eight, which is where the pacing of this story really went off the rails. I must have been on a roll when I got to that part of the rough draft because I threw everything in there, including something like a quarter of the book’s major plot points.

It’s a monstrous hot mess that will eventually become at least five chapters, if not more, in the second draft. The problem is that it’s hard to convince myself I’m making much progress when, after days and days, I’m still trying to shape chapter 8d.

I’ll get there. Eventually. In the meantime, it does help to recognize that while I’m struggling with a process that is taking longer than I expected, the Greats have struggled with this, too. It also helps that even though my ninety-ish thousand words probably shouldn’t be made up, very few of them have to rhyme.

I’m okay. Mostly.

It’s a big week in the Angleton household. Son number one is preparing to leave this weekend for his first college move-in day.

I’m okay. Mostly. I’ve never been one of those moms who wanted to keep my kids from growing up because I just enjoyed them so much when they were babies. I did, but to be honest, every stage has come with its own frustrations and moments of joy. I know this one will, too.

I look forward to seeing what this smart, funny, loving, messy eighteen-year-old with the whole world open to him does with his independence and how he will change and grow over the coming weeks, months, and years. And yes, I’m a little scared, too, to watch it all unfold.

Did I mention he’s messy? How he’s going to fit all of his stuff in half of a tiny space like this, I still don’t know. Sdkb, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I still get sort of misty eyed when I think about the first time I dropped him off at preschool and he came home with knowledge someone besides me put into his little head. Driving away from him at college will be kind of like that, I imagine, only harder because I won’t get to pick him up three hours later.

So, we’ve spent this week organizing and packing, making sure he’s equipped with all the things he will need—extra-long bedsheets, a brand-new computer, and the best advice I have to offer. I did not, however, think to tell him what not to do in college. That is until I stumbled on a little book that pretty much covers it.

The book is The College Freshman’s Don’t Book by George Fullerton Evans, published in 1910. If you have the time and inclination, it is a pretty delightful read. As you might imagine, some of the advice is a bit dated, and I feel quite certain is fairly tongue-in-cheek. I doubt, for example, my son needs to be told to leave his fine china and Turkish rugs at home, and it’s unlikely he would choose to carry a cane or wear an excessively tall hat, which are frankly, pretentious things for a freshman to do.

But it contains some highly useful don’ts, too, such as:

Don’t pawn your pocket watch. That’s timeless advice. Charles Frank Ingerson. Public Domain.“Don’t imagine that you own the College Town from the moment you strike it.”“Don’t think that Exams can be passed without any preparation.”“Don’t put off that long piece of written work till the night before it is due.”“Don’t be surprised or disappointed, if you find you have neither time nor inclination to keep up with everything you thought you would, when first coming to College.”“Don’t hesitate to hear other people’s opinions. The World did not begin, nor will it end, with you.”

I especially like that last one, and I sincerely hope it is a lesson my son will carry with him into the wider world.

There are two more pieces of advice in the book’s long list of don’ts that I find particularly important. They say this: “Don’t forget to receive your visitors as if you were glad to see them,” and “Don’t forget to write home once every so often. Mama and Papa are always glad to see the College-town postmark.”

Of course, I do stand a better chance of getting a text or call or even an email than an actual letter, which outside of mandatory thank you notes, I doubt he’s ever written in his life. But any contact at all would be nice. I hope a little enthusiasm when I occasionally visit isn’t too much to ask, either.

What I do know is that for all the don’ts that I hope he won’t do, my young adult son is going to do and discover and learn amazing things. It won’t be long at all until he doesn’t miss me nearly as much as I will still miss him. And also, I’m okay. Mostly.

Really Fowling Up the Place

In March of 1847, 19th century literary journal The Knickerbocker published what is most likely the first printed version of what has become one of the most ubiquitous terrible jokes in the English language. It asks, “Why does a chicken cross the street?” It also offers up the answer: “Because it wants to get to the other side!”

Gas station chicken.

And because as everyone knows, a joke is always funnier when its punchline is thoroughly explained, the editor includes that as well: “There are ‘quips and quillets’ which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none.” In other words, the joke is vaguely funny, because it’s not.

This joke has been running through my head a lot the last couple of weeks because my family and I recently returned from a vacation in Hawaii, a big trip when you consider that we live in Missouri.

Many years ago, my husband and I decided we wanted to visit all fifty states in the US by the time we turned fifty. Our ambitious now eighteen-year-old son decided he would do it by the time he turned 25. He’s close, and pretty smart, so when we asked him to choose our family vacation destination before heading off to college, he didn’t hesitate.

Parking lot chicken.

When the boys were small, and we lived on the West Coast not far from an airport with direct flights to the islands, the two of us left the kiddos with grandparents and visited the Big Island, but this was the first trip there with all four of us.

We chose Maui this time (with a quick hop over to Oahu to visit Pearl Harbor for the history buffs among us) and it was as absolutely gorgeous as you might expect. There were waterfalls, and rainbows, and sea turtles, and lava tubes, and secluded beaches, and deadly narrow roads on mountainsides, and feral chickens.

So many chickens. There were chickens at the airport, at our hotel, on hiking trails, in the parking lot of the grocery store, and even hanging out beside the pumps at the gas station, where I assume they were fueling up to head out across the road.

Resort chickens. What is funny is the amount of time I spent during my vacation to beautiful Hawaii taking pictures of chickens.

I was more or less expecting most of the sights we took in, but I admit I was not expecting feral chickens. I didn’t remember noticing them on the Big Island. I’ve since discovered that while it’s a problem there, too, the islands of Maui and Kauai are especially overrun.

There have been chickens on the islands for as long as there have been people there. When the Polynesians first arrived as early as 1200 AD, they brought food supplies with them, including several crops and animals like red junglefowl, which is believed to be the ancestor of the domesticated chicken.

When Captain Cook arrived in 1778, he brought a more domesticated version with him. So did the missionaries, turned businessmen who ran large sugarcane plantations. That industry surged through the American Civil War when the North couldn’t import sugar from the South and then declined sharply toward the end of the century. Chickens, which were good to have around for pest control on the plantations, were then released into the wild where they began really fowling up the place.

The state hasn’t managed to get control of the chicken problem, but their efforts have resulted in a number of signs. So I guess that’s something.

And then there are the hurricanes and storms that blow up and tear apart chicken coops, releasing even more of the birds onto islands where there’s abundant food for them and not much in the way of predators that want to eat them.

Of course, humans make a pretty formidable predator of chickens, except that these have crossbred with the protected red junglefowl, making it difficult to know which, if any, can be legally harvested. Also, rumor has it, they are awfully gamey.

The state has made attempts to address the growing problem of loud, messy, feral chickens scratching up gardens and making a general nuisance of themselves, but they haven’t made a lot of progress. And so, for now, Hawaii has breathtaking sunsets, gorgeous flowers, awe-inspiring starry skies, majestic marine life, and a whole bunch of chickens crisscrossing its streets. That could seem vaguely funny, except that of course, it’s not.