Lift drivers and other lost things (Part One)

 

Do you remember when lifts had human beings operating them? My favourite were the lift people in department stores announcing what was where: “Fifth floor, Manchester, sixth floor Ladies’ Fashion …”

So many jobs and “things” have simply disappeared in the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Take the telegram, for instance. In WWII telegrams often brought news of death in combat but also then and later, good news. Could it be that overseas telephone calls were too expense and telegrams cheaper? I think that telegrams were sent to your local post office then delivered to the house by a postman, but I’m not sure. Certainly there were telegrams sent with good wishes on a wedding day, usually messages from relatives overseas and read out traditionally by the best man. I understand that now there are gorillagrams and singing telegrams but I think the bog-standard telegram is in the past.

Speaking of postmen, when my family of orientation lived in a house we would leave out something for the postie at Christmas and also for the garbos, usually a slab of beer. (A family of orientation is the one you come from; the family you establish with spouse and children is your family of procreation; cute, I think)

Personal letters are fading into the past, replaced by email. No more thank you notes after a party or dinner; thanks are now delivered by computer. I cannot remember the last time I received a letter or wrote one and had to buy a stamp. Post offices are places you go when you need to send back an item purchased online. They are also retail precincts for a bizarre assortment of things. My daughter came home the other day after a visit to the post office with a rubber strap for backscratching in the shower, a special foam ball which you put in the dryer with your damp washing which apparently helps to eliminate wrinkles and a very large lint remover.

I’ve mentioned before the disappearance of guys in garages. They would come to your car and fill it with petrol then pump the tyres to whatever their pressure should have been. I’m not being sexist about “guys in garages”; I don’t recall ever seeing a lady doing the job.

There were charm bracelets, a kind of ante-diluvian Pandora bangle. Charms were usually symbols of where you’d been or what your interests were: a piano or violin if you played an instrument, an Eifel tower for France and I frankly don’t recall any others, but you could accumulate a whole wrist-full of them, attached to the original bracelet’s links, not threaded on a bangle in the Pandora style.

When I worked with my grandsons during lockdown, I discovered more things missing. I couldn’t see any evidence, for example, that they used plastic maps of Australia around which you would draw and then fill in the outline with information such as principle crops and the like. I also never saw the big boy use a compass or one of those dinky half circles with angles marked called, I think I recall, a protractor – or its companion triangle. And where have Derwent pencils gone. I remember the utter joy of being given a huge collection of Derwent coloured pencils, stored in tiers in a box which opened out to show you the whole wondrous collection. Of course the grandchildren have collections of coloured pencils and textas but nothing as delicious as the Derwents.

Also missing is Dressing Up To Go To Town. I recall putting on my best clothes (and I think gloves) for the train trip to the city, but I think this was past the time of wearing hats to town.

My mother and I would often go to Mark Foys, a rather gorgeous department store in the building on the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool Streets which is now law courts.

However this paled into insignificance compared to another department store, Farmers (now Myers or Grace Bros), where there was a Penny Lady. She stood guard over the small resting room attached to the conveniences for which you had to pay a penny; hence the expression “to spend a penny” for “going to the loo”. My cousin Penny and I were so overwhelmed by the queenly magnificence of this woman that we decided we would be Penny Ladies when we grew up. (Penny’s name was not regarded as a problem as she would just be Penny the Penny Lady.)

 

Quote of the week, from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations;

American educator Robert M. Hutchins: “Whenever I fee like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.”

 

 

 Poetry pathways

 

This week, I’m going to treat you to a sliver of the wonderful world of slightly odd poetry. I’ve rabbited on before about poetry and how marvellous it is but there is definitely more in this story.

Take this snippet, which I hope I’ve remembered correctly:

“From noise of scarefires, rest ye free,

From murders, benedicite; (pronounce it ben-e-dic-it-ee and you get the rhyme)

From all mischances which may fright

Your pleasing slumbers in the night,

Mercy secure ye all,

And keep the goblin from ye, while ye sleep.”

 

Here’s another:

“Some angry angel,
Bleared by Bach and too inbred,
Climbed out of bed,
Pulled on a sock,
And, glancing downward,
Threw a rock
Which struck an earthbound peacock’s head.
The peacock fell.
The peacock’s yell,
Outraged by such treason,
Cried out to know why it,
Out of billions,
Should be hit,
And instantly invented a reason.”

The English poet Dryden coined this couplet:

“Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

 

Then there’s this offering from the poet John Skelton (1460-1529 and yes, of course I looked the dates up!)

 

“Ah, my bones ache, my limbs be sore;

Alas I have the sciatica full evil in my hip!

Alas where is the youth that was wont for to skip?

I am lousy and unliking, and full of scurf …”

 

I quoted this often to myself before my back operation when I, too, had “the sciatica full evil in my hip …”. And by the way, I’m fairly sure it’s pronounced louse-ee, not lousy.

 

As is well known, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an opium addict; how’s this for a drug induced vision:

 

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

…..

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

 

Then there are Clerihews, named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley.

 

Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.

 

Sir Christopher Wren said

I am going to dine with some men.

If anybody calls

Say I’m designing St Pauls.

 

Here’s an evocative poem by T.S. Eliot:

 

“The winter evening settles down

With smell of steak in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.”

 

And, finally, a little humour from Arthur Waley, translator of Chinese poetry.

 

“Families, when a child is born,

Want it to be intelligent.

I, through intelligence,

Having wrecked my whole life,

Only hope the baby will prove

Ignorant and stupid,

Then he will crown a tranquil life

By becoming a Cabinet Minister.”

 

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

 

The actress Betty Grable:

“There are two reasons why I’m in showbusiness, and I’m standing on both of them.”

 

 Blood and circuses

Our balcony looks like it recently hosted a chain saw massacre. There is blood all over the place. Thankfully, it’s fake blood which was being applied last week to a small flock of ghosts and ghoulies about to step out for a sugar hit. At one point there were six or seven of them and a gaggle of mothers painting them with makeup. All the children were, of course, dressing up for Halloween, a festival which the Grumpy Grandma disprizes and mutters against each year.

Why do we celebrate Halloween? It’s an American festival based on the annual Christian commemoration of All Hallows Eve, the day before Allhallowtide (November 1), the time in the Western Christian liturgical year to remember the dead including the saints; apparently the saints, with which the Christian Church abounds, can also be called “hallows”. Halloween probably originated in Celtic harvest festivals but became Christianised and its customs brought to the USA by Irish and Scots immigrants during the nineteenth century.

It wasn’t the first pagan tradition which made its way to Christianity. Christmas Day itself, December 25, was the birthday of Sol Invictus or the Unconquered Sun and Easter was originally a festival celebrating the spring equinox. The early Christians were clever in blending ancient traditions with Christian teaching but sometimes it went the other way around. Valentine’s Day on February 14 is descended from a celebration of one of the St Valentines (apparently Christianity had more than one saint of that name or similar and they were all martyrs) but has evolved into a day to mark romance. Some scholars believe the day as it came to be was a Christian whitewash of the Roman Lupercalia on the Ides of February (February 15), a festival which celebrated sex with a lot of hanky panky. (Remember the Ides of March when Julius Caesar got his come-uppance in a rather permanent way.)

I think I recently broke my seven-year-old’s heart by telling him that there wasn’t actually a Santa Claus coming down the chimney with presents on Christmas eve. Santa was, as I’m sure you all know, a composite invention of various Americans vaguely based on the 3^rd Century CE St Nicholas, through the Dutch Sinter Klaas. He cheered up a bit when I reminded him that we celebrate Chanukah and he will get lots of chocolate money wrapped in gold paper.

Navigating through and around the various things children want to know is not easy. Pre-Covid and maybe sometime again in the next decade, I taught Jewish scripture to the handful of Jewish children at Mona Vale Public School. The material I use for teaching is prepared by the Board of Jewish Education and follows the basic Jewish traditions including, of course, the central tenet – teachings about God. The children would occasionally ask me if I believed in God. Happily, I remembered the way I taught my own children, using the handy phrase “most people think …”.

Mortality is another idea which worries the seven-year-old. Because I now have to wear a mask to sleep at night, I told the boys about my diagnosis of severe sleep apnoea and what it meant. Asher has taken to giving me cuddles at night-time and telling me not to go to sleep; he worries that I won’t wake up. I’ve promised him I’ll try to stick around till I’m really, really old (as opposed to just plain old, a stage I’ve already reached).

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Novelist L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”