Word-Wednesday for October 12, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 12, 2022, the forty-first Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of fall, and the 285th day of the year, with 80 days remaining.


Wannaska Phenology Update for October 12, 2022
Tamaracks Just Starting to Change
Larix laricina, commonly known as the tamarack, has a lot of other names, as its native space stretches from Inuvik to Newfoundland to Cranesville Swamp, West Virginia. Other names include hackmatack, eastern larch, black larch, red larch, American larch, and akemantak in Algonquian, which means "wood used for snowshoes".

The tamarack is a boreal coniferous and deciduous tree — having needles that it loses each year — reaching 33–66 feet tall, with a trunk up to 24 inches in diameter. The tamaracks near Hayes Lake are just starting to change into their fall wardrobe.

October 12 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


October 12 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for October 12, 2022
Sunrise: 7:39am; Sunset: 6:41pm; 3 minutes, 30 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 7:55pm; Moonset: 10:54am, waning gibbous, 91% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for October 12, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             53                     81                     50
Low              32                     13                     33


October 12 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Farmer’s Day
• National Freethought Day
• National Gumbo Day
• National Savings Day
• National Vermont Day
• National Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work/School Day
• National Curves Day
• National Emergency Nurse’s Day
• National Fossil Day
• National Stop Bullying Day
• National Take Your Parents to Lunch Day
• International Top Spinning Day
• Freethought Day
• Feast Day of Fiacc

October 12 Word Riddle
What’s the best unit of measurement to weigh a Millennial?*


October 12 Word Pun
When she saw her first strands of grey hair she thought she’d dye.


October 12 Walking into a Bar Grammar
An elderly verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful young noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.


October 12 Etymology Word of the Week

October 12 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1609 Children's rhyme "Three Blind Mice" is published in London in a book edited by and possibly written by Thomas Ravenscroft.
• 1823 Charles Macintosh of Scotland begins selling raincoats (Macs).
• 2017 Long-lost bust of Napoleon by Auguste Rodin confirmed found in Madison borough hall, New Jersey.

 

October 12 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1490 Bernardo Pisano, Italian composer.
• 1742 Johann Peter Melchior, German sculptor.
• 1773 Mary Anne Holmes, Irish poet.
• 1840 Helena Modjeska [Modrzejewska], Polish Shakespearian actress.
• 1872 Ralph Vaughan Williams, English composer.
• 1880 Louis Hémon, French novelist.
• 1887 Paula von Preradović, Croatian-Austrian poet.
• 1891 Edith Stein, German philosopher and Discalced Carmelite nun.
• 1902 Dick Binnendijk, Dutch poet.
• 1904 Ding Ling, Chinese writer.
• 1904 Lester Dent, American writer.
• 1908 Paul Engle, American poet.
• 1910 Robert Fitzgerald, American poet.
• 1916 Alice Childress, American playwright,.
• 1929 Robert Coles, American author.
• 1933 Guido Molinari, Canadian painter.
• 1939 Vladimír Körner, Czech writer.
• 1935 Luciano Pavarotti.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem or pram) from the following words:

• accidie: /ˈæk-sɪ-di/ n., spiritual sloth; apathy; indifference.
• commonplace book: /ˈkäm-ən-ˌplās ˌbo͝ok/ n., a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.
• excelsior: /ik-ˈsel-sē-ər/ n., used in the names of hotels, newspapers, and other products to indicate superior quality.
• florilegium: /ˌflô-rə-ˈlē-jē-əm/ n., a collection of literary extracts; an anthology.
• gammerstang: /ˈɡæm-ə-ˌstæŋ/ n., an awkwardly tall person, especially a woman.
• lustrum: /ˈləs-trəm/ n., a period of five years; a purification sacrifice made after a census every five years.
• melpomenish: /mɛl-ˈpɑ-mə-nɪʃ/ adj. tragic; of a tragic demeanor.
• plashy: /PLASH-ē/ adj., abounding with pools or puddles; marshy, wet.
• rubberneck: /ˈrəb-ərˌ-nek/ v., what you do to relax your wife.
• suasion: /ˈswā-ZHən/ n., persuasion as opposed to force or compulsion.

October 12, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
Words on Aging
/ˈā-jiNG/ n., the process of growing old. A recent post by Mr. Hot Coco on old age begs the question, should we age our cocoa before mixing our hot drink, or should we all just be drinking more hot coco as we get older? Apart from enhancing the enjoyment of our chocolate beverages, what does it mean to grow old? What actually happens? Everybody seems to have an opinion. Today Word-Wednesday explores some of those opinions.

On the one hand, ever the philosopher, Bertrand Russell notes:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

On the other hand, ever the bon vivant, Henry Miller sees things differently:
“If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”

On the third hand, we can look to Ursula Le Guin for a woman's perspective in her The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination:

One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it’s the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of ’em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it.

And yet I look at men and women my age and older, and their scalps and knuckles and spots and bulges, though various and interesting, don’t affect what I think of them. Some of these people I consider to be very beautiful, and others I don’t. For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.

I know what worries me most when I look in the mirror and see the old woman with no waist. It’s not that I’ve lost my beauty — I never had enough to carry on about. It’s that that woman doesn’t look like me. She isn’t who I thought I was.

A child’s body is very easy to live in. An adult body isn’t. The change is hard. And it’s such a tremendous change that it’s no wonder a lot of adolescents don’t know who they are. They look in the mirror — that is me? Who’s me?

And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy.

Seldom does one perspective walk hand-in-hand with another. But, one woman tried to pull together the spectrum of human aging experiences -- Jane Ellen Harrison -- in her book Alpha and Omega, a collection of essays published in 1915, which included the essay, "Crabbed Age and Youth". Noting the great friction between the young and the old across time, Harrison believes that, “if rightly understood and considerately handled on both sides, take the form of mutual stimulus and attraction”. She also sees this friction as the source of an interdependent complementarity of the two life-stages:

Youth and Crabbed Age stand broadly for the two opposite poles of human living, poles equally essential to any real vitality, but always contrasted. Youth stands for rationalism, for the intellect and its concomitants, egotism and individualism. Crabbed Age stands for tradition, for the instincts and emotions, with their concomitant altruism.

The whole art of living is a delicate balance between the two tendencies. Virtues and vice are but convenient analytic labels attached to particular forms of the two tendencies. Of the two, egotism, self-assertion, are to the youth as necessary — sometimes, I sadly think, more necessary — to good living than altruism. Moreover, the egotism of youth is compulsory, inevitable, and equally the altruism of age is ineluctable.

Long before the Internet, Harrison used the term "masquerade" to characterize the most difficult issue faced by the young:

Masquerading is borrowing another’s personality, putting on the mask of another’s features, dress, experiences, emotions, and thereby enhancing your own… Youth, and especially shy Youth, is strongly possessed by the instinctive desire to masquerade. Masquerading bores Crabbed Age. Why? Simply because the impulse to imaginative self-enhancement dies down as soon as liberty to live is granted. Crabbed Age is busy living, not rehearsing, and living, if sometimes less amusing, is infinitely more absorbing. It takes so much out of you.

While Youth may be self-possessive, Crabbed Age tends to be Youth oppressive in ways that alienate people of all ages:

It is a waste of time putting up signposts for others who necessarily travel by another, and usually a better, road. Old people are apt to make disastrous confusion between information that can be accumulated and conveyed, that is identical for all time, that is knowledge, and experience, that which must be lived and cannot be repeated.

But Old Age does worse than that. In trying to impose its experience as a law to youth it sins not only through ignorance, but from sheer selfishness. Parents try to impose their view of life on their children not merely or mostly to save those children from disaster — that to a certain extent and up to a certain age we must all do — but from possessiveness, from a desire, often unconscious, to fill the whole stage themselves.

The truth that it has failed to grasp is a hard one for human nature. This truth is that, in all matters that can be analyzed and known, Youth starts life on the shoulders of Age, and therefore sees farther and is actually more likely to be right.

Harrison's perspective on aging is one where life itself provides an answer for the alpha Youth and omega Crabbed Aged:

Real life — and here comes the important point — real life, as contrasted with life imagined and rehearsed, on the whole compels at least a certain measure of altruism. There are many methods of compulsion, some gentle, some violent. We will consider for a moment only two, and these the most normal.

Normally, in the first place, life itself will lure you, catch you, and marry you, make a father or a mother of you, and your children will soon stop your masquerading, and teach you that you are not the centre of their universe — nay, compel you to revolve round the circumference of theirs. Marriage, through the lure of passion for the individual, compels your service to the race. This great education in altruism is necessarily more drastic and complete for woman than for man.

But suppose you elude the natural lure of life. There is society waiting with its artificial lure — waiting to catch you and make an official of you, a functionary, a thing that is only half or a quarter perhaps yourself, and a large three-quarters that tool and mouthpiece of the collective conscience. How often one has seen a year’s officialdom turn a man’s spiritual hair grey! The gist of all officialdom is not its labels, its honours, but the sacrifice of the individual will; and for this society is always ready, and rightly, to pay a big price. Of course, though there is loss, there is great gain in officialdom as in marriage. Each is a godly discipline by which the young man learns not to be the centre of his own universe.

It is one of the tragic antinomies of life that you cannot at once live and have vision… Looking back on life I seem to see Youth as standing, a small, intensely-focused spot, outside a great globe or circle. So intense is the focus that the tiny spot believes itself the centre of the great circle. Then slowly that little burning, throbbing spot that is oneself is sucked in with thousands of others into the great globe. Humbled by life it learns that it is no centre of life at all; at most it is one of the myriads of spokes in the great wheel. In Old Age the speck, the individual life, passes out on the other side, no longer burning and yet not quite consumed. In Old Age we look back on the great wheel; we can see it a little because, at least partially, we are outside of it. But this looking back is strangely different from the looking forward of Youth. It is disillusioned, but so much the richer. Occasionally nowadays I get glimpses of what that vision might be. I get my head for a moment out of the blazing, blinding, torturing wheel; the vision of the thing behind me and without me obscurely breaks. It looks strange, almost portentous, yet comforting; but that vision is incommunicable.

 

Born in 1934, and still with us, Navarro Scott Mammedaty, a Kiowa Indian born in Lawton, Oklahoma, captures a healthy balance of Youth and Crabbed Age just about perfectly:

A Benign Self-Portrait
A mirror will suffice, no doubt.
The high furrowed forehead,
The heavy-lidded Asian eyes,
The long-lobed Indian ears.
Brown skin beginning to spot,
Of an age to bore and be bored.
I turn away, knowing too well
My face, my expression
For all seasons, my half-smile.

Birds flit about the feeder,
The dog days wane, and I
Observe the jitters of leaves
And the pallor of the ice-blue beyond.
I read to find inspiration. I write
To restore candor to the mind.
There are raindrops on the window,
And a peregrine wind gusts on the grass.
I think of my old red flannel shirt,
The one I threw away in July.
I would like to pat the warm belly of a
Beagle or the hand of a handsome woman.
I look ahead to cheese and wine,
And a bit of Bach, perhaps,
Or Schumann on the bow of Yo-Yo Ma.

I see the mountains as I saw them
When my heart was young.
But were they not a deeper blue,
shimmering under the fluency of skies
Radiant with crystal light? Across the way
The yellow land lies out, and standing stones
Form distant islands in the field of time.
here is a stillness on this perfect world,
And I am content to settle in its hold.
I turn inward on a wall of books.
They are old friends, even those that
Have dislodged my dreams. One by one
They have shaped the thing I am.

These are the days that swarm
Into the shadows of legend. I ponder.
And when the image on the glass
Is refracted into the prisms of the past
I shall remember: my parents speaking
Quietly in a warm familiar room, and
I bend to redeem an errant, broken doll.
My little daughter, her eyes brimming
With love, beholds the ember of my soul.
There is the rattle of a teacup, and
At the window and among the vines,
The whir of a hummingbird’s wings.
In the blue evening, in another room,
There is the faint laughter of ghosts,
And in a tarnished silver frame, the
likeness of a boy who bears my name.

Young or old, enjoy your October hot coco!



From A Year with Rilke, October 12 Entry
When I Go Toward You, from The Book of Hours I, 53

I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its sources.

When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.

Apothecary at Vitebsk
by  Marc Chagall

Be better than yesterday,
learn a new word today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.







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