Reading: Seventeenth Summer

Moving: swimming and walking

Learning: how addicted I am to clear skies and good weather

Watching: hazy skies

 

3 August 2000: A different era

Yesterday I shared an elevator with a woman who acted like she'd never been on one before. And if generalizing from her appearance is at all fair, she wasn't just acting.

When I walked into the elevator vestibule, she was ahead of me, gazing around. What I noticed more than the gazing was her beehive. It wasn't really a beehive hairdo because she didn't have enough hair, but it did rise in a cone with vertical curls held in place with bobby pins. She obviously once had a beehive.

When the elevator doors rolled open, I strode on while she gathered her wits and followed me. Her outfit had already made me think she didn't live in the city, and the way she got on the elevator made me think this was her first visit.

She stepped over the two-inch gap between lobby and elevator floor gingerly. I have avoided monsters under my bed, in dark corners of attics and musty cellars, but I have never considered that trolls might reach up through the elevator gap. Perhaps, given her hesitation, I should rethink my casual attitude.

Once in the elevator, she turned to the control panel. The buttons are arranged in two columns of descending numbers with 2, the first elevator'd floor, at the bottom left (the bottom right is the emergency button).

A quick glance at the buttons should have indicated two things: the pattern in which the buttons are arranged (descending even numbers left, descending odd right), and that there are actually two buttons per floor: one with a raised Arabic numeral and Braille number and the other that you actually push to indicate your floor. We other riders had pushed our three floors already, so the correct buttons were already lit.

A quick glance was not enough. She scanned both columns up and down before locating her floor (2) and pressing the decorative button. She pressed it harder and only then realized her mistake and pressed the call button next to it.

She reversed her procedure getting out, examining the single numeral set into the wall to ensure it was the one she wanted and carefully stepping over the gap.

Or perhaps it was only her first ride in a self-service elevator. Perhaps the goose-step over the gap was a mistrustfulness that the elevator could align itself with the floor absent human intervention.

---

DMB brought several movies for RDC2. He abandoned the supper table in preference of "The Land Before Time" and later the four of us wound up watching the second half of "Toy Story" with him. JJT had never seen it before, and of course it's delightful. I don't know how, but at supper as any silly phrase was uttered, we glommed on it: "Great domain name! Great web business!" Near the end of "Toy Story," in the truck, the Sicilian Dinosaur commands wildly, "Wind the frog!"

"That's the best domain name yet!" I exclaimed. And it is perfect. Unfortunately, Network Solutions has claimed it.

I checked that this morning, was disappointed that Network Solutions already owns it, and told Egg about "Wind the frog." She hasn't seen "Toy Story" yet and asked why the dinosaur was Sicilian. I told her its voice is that which uttered the immortal line, "Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha! HA! Hahahahah---" [clunk]. But she didn't remember "Princess Bride" well enough. I chided her: we'd just been talking about Rob Reiner the day before; and I'd said how I hadn't known until "When Harry Met Sally" that Meathead and the movie director were the same person; and how somehow in another elevator incident, another wandering stranger lost in the elevators had inadvertently set me up perfectly to say, "But these go up to eleven!" and I said it and he understood and we were gleefully mirthful at the perfection of the moment (to the mystification of other, ignorant elevator passengers); and she had enthused about "Waiting for Guffman." None of this refreshed her memory of "Princess Bride." Silly person.

---

So I'm reading Seventeenth Summer. Perhaps only because its first line was mentioned in the same quiz as Beverly Cleary's The Luckiest Girl, they remind me of each other. To the point that I suspected Cleary, whose book was published in the '50s, must have cribbed from Daly, before I remonstrated myself that Cleary would never ever ever do anything so heinous and I should be spanked for thinking it.

It's more than the chaste nature of teenage romance books of 50 years ago. There's Jack and Phil and their well-fed, blond sidekicks Swede and Frisby. There's the orderly etiquette of Shelley's home and Angie's. The carnival and the jealous other girl. There's the girl going to University v. the blue-collar honest labor of a baker or landscaper. Oh, and basketball.

What I find really touching about the book or its era is how totally ignorant Angie is. There are jokes she doesn't get because she just doesn't think like that. That's Angie. The era is also what was acceptable in book publishing, too: Daly skillfully writes around the embarassment of Angie and Jack seeing each other in only bathing suits. She hints in a way easily overlooked by an equally ignorant reader at Angie's desire.

Throughout the book are sensual details about vegetables and flowers growing, about the sight of sunlight on the lake, the physical satisfaction in the process of keeping house. This is borne out later as the two protagonists discuss their pleasure in sensation, how they enjoy sights and smells so intensely that they can feel them.

I keep waiting for the mother to die or the sister to wind up pregnant, though. I'm a jaded gen-x reader.

---

Oh, and I finished Nobody's Fool Tuesday night, which was a fine thing, just in time. I told Minne how much I liked it and told her about Sully, his working under the table at odd jobs, his calling all women "dolly," his renting a room and never cooking for himself, swilling coffee and knocking back cigarettes and alcohol and unlabeled drugs. "And you like this character?" she asked in some surprise.

Do I like Sully? I'm still not sure. Russo likes Sully, which is what matters. As does the eponymous protagonist of Littlejohn, Sully has a lot more to offer than I in my youth and education would assume on superficialities. I will still merrily believe that a skilled author can give the unlikeliest character wisdom that a real-life red-dirt farmer or foul-mouthed contractor isn't likely to possess.

I have Mohawk and Straight Man from the library and expect to love them. Russo's characterization and dialogue are brilliant. Speaking of libraries, a minor detail in Nobody's Fool that Russo messed up: Sully knows that his son, who despite his father wound up a university professor, isn't going to stay with a particular woman long-term; Sully knows this because he's seen Peter smile when the woman mispronounces "library" as "li-berry." Why is this a mistake? Because Sully wouldn't distinguish between the utterances himself, and therefore wouldn't draw any insight from someone's reaction to the wrong one.

---

I'm reading Seventeenth Summer very carefully. Yesterday Minne came into my cube and I tried to surreptitiously slide my sandwich over its back cover. I had already been careful to place the book face down. She, among my coworkers, would understand, though. I told her about this first lines quiz I had just read, and how I guessed one of the ten totally wrong because it was the one book I hadn't read, and how of course now I had to read it, and how the book was originally published in 1942 but to make it look superficially desirable to contemporary readers has been re-issued in hot-pink paperback with a frolicksomely hugging teenage couple on the cover. And how therefore I wouldn't want anyone to misunderstand what I'm reading. All together now, hiss: "hypocrite..." But she understood.

The quiz was mostly from older books; the only recent one was Tuck Everlasting, which still isn't hip and new. I checked Seventeenth Summer's publication date, just to make sure; if the year matched the cover I wouldn't've read it, quiz or no quiz: no Sweet Valley High for me. As I began it, I wondered at what point its being sixty years old would have become evident to a contemporary reader, and whether that realization would be the book's immediate death knell.

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