Recovering from Barbara Pym

Listening to myself breathe this morning I can still hear the rales of a bad cold from this past weekend. I sound like the bellows of a thrift store accordion. And recently having recovered from a severe case of plantar fasciitis, I still have little desire to get out and walk among God’s creations. I’m afraid of a flare up. O ye of little faith . . . and uncertain health . . .  and no car.

To top it all off, I am suffering from a near terminal dose of Barbara Pym -- a British author who wrote sad, disappointing books about sad, disappointing women during Britain’s sad, disappointing decade of the 1950’s. I took her book, Excellent Women, with me to my sickbed this past Saturday and Sunday, having bought a cheap copy on Amazon after reading in the New York Times book review that she was the most underappreciated author of the Twentieth century. She doesn’t have to worry, wherever she might be now -- her secret is safe with me; she will remain devotedly underappreciated as long as I have a creaky breath left in my body. To read her mousy prose is to taste the oleomargarine of a life not lived, but stifled with weak tea and whale curry. (Can someone please tell me if there really was such a thing as whale curry during and after World War Two in England? I have googled it endlessly but only get Japanese restaurants and the Food Channel -- nothing about how this exotic-sounding dish may have helped Churchill beat the Nazi menace.)

Reading sad books while sick is worse than taking poison. You can always have your stomach pumped and filled with activated charcoal to counteract a chemical poison, but how do you fight off a soul-numbing and toxic literary work once you’ve read it? I am hoping a generous helping of Rumpole of the Bailey and P.G. Wodehouse will pull me out of this blue funk, but until it does I must deal with this shallow melancholy as best I can without losing a few more of my dwindling supply of marbles.

And so I’m writing a bit of memoir again, as an anodyne. Something I thought I was done with. Something I wanted to be finished with -- saying with smug satisfaction to my children, “There, it’s all finished; everything you need to know and that I’m willing to tell you about myself. An instant classic, of course -- you kids can divvy up the proceeds from this bestseller any way you see fit. I just want a cast iron statue raised in my honor back in Van Cleve Park in Minneapolis.”

But I suppose they don’t raise statues anymore to anybody -- chances are much too great that I’ll be discovered to be a crypto-nose picker or something and there will be ceaseless demands by The Hygienic League of Minnesota Authors to have my snotty likeness removed from Van Cleve. No, I guess I’ll settle for a gift certificate to Red Lobster instead.

I am weary of delving in the debris of my childhood. Of making judgement calls, accusations, or juggling speculations. And I can’t be bothered to lie very much, come to that. It either happened the way I remember it, or it didn't. Take it or leave it. Like it or lump it. The only axe I have to grind is the one I want to shave my cheeks and chin.  

Which brings me to Butchey Hogley. That is his name. The spelling may be off, but that’s how I and everyone else pronounced it: “Butch - ee Hog - lee.” No particular emphasis on the syllables. I suppose his parents gave him a real first name, but I never heard it.  And if I had I would not have credited it. Some kids come into the world as just plain Butchey. And Butchey was one of them. His dad had a garage down on Como. This was over a half century ago, and back then motor vehicles apparently demanded oceans of black tarry oil, for Butchey’s dad was forever covered from stem to stern with sooty grease whenever I laid eyes on him. Their house was cluttered with Bardahl-scented socket wrenches, spare engine parts, grease rags, and bars of Lava pumice soap.   

Butchey had a Saint Bernard, which he fed Milk-Bone treats. And he introduced me to their unique flavor by keeping a handful in his pocket to chew on and offering me one from time to time, like Mel Gibson in the original Lethal Weapon movie.

And now my memory completely fails me as I search for a visual image of him. I remember that my pal Junior had six toes on his left foot, and that my pal Wayne was Japanese (or his parents were -- they both got locked up in concentration camps out in California during World War Two) and I remember my pal Randy had straw blonde hair, and even that little runt David Rathbun, whom I hated all through grade school, I remember he had pegged teeth, widely spaced and disgusting. But Butchey? Well, there you have me. He might have been a giant or had two heads -- I no longer recall any physical characteristics about him, except that he somehow shared in the universal greasiness of the house that he lived in -- where every stick of furniture and every frock and shirt was tainted with Pennzoil.

Sadly, I cannot remember the boy himself -- only his Saint Bernard, and the 1949 DeSoto hulk his dad kept in the backyard. That dog had a huge dog house all to itself in the backyard, which I resented. It seemed bigger than my own bedroom back home. So whenever I could inveigle Butchey into it, we would spend the whole afternoon inside the dog house, rolling around in the dog’s fragrant and dusty blanket until even our case hardened nostrils began to revolt.

Then it was off to the DeSoto, which had a bright red plastic knob on the steering wheel, and the remnants of a pair of fuzzy dice dangling from the rear view mirror. The seats were upholstered with that unique bubbly kind of plastic sheeting that made the Fingerhut Company rich back in the Fifties and Sixties. It grabbed on to unprotected skin like an octopus tentacle, with a fatal tenacity matched only by the comic flypaper seen in Three Stooges movies. Butchey and I took turns traversing the imaginary highways and byways of the country as we yanked the steering wheel to avoid semi trucks and an occasional dinosaur or erupting volcano. What I do definitely remember about Butchey, that good ol’ boy, was that he adamantly refused to let any girls into the car to play. Ever. Even his own two sisters, who were much older than him and looked like the kind of molls who carried blackjacks in their purses. His sisters were verboten, my sisters were verboten, and even beautiful Marsha Henderson, who lived at the end of the block, had soft blonde hair, and was learning to play the guitar, who we all secretly loved in that desperate, heartbreaking way little ignorant boys have (and which most of us never outgrow) -- even she was forbidden to enter the DeSoto, no matter how she batted those luscious eyelids of hers. And her dad was an insurance salesman, who belonged to the Rotary Club, for the cat’s sake -- in our neighborhood that was tantamount to being both a four star general and a millionaire!

Yes, I liked Butchey for keeping all those girls out of the DeSoto. It was a boy’s place, for wild dreaming and puerile boasting. You could spit out the window and urinate on the back seat. Butchey and I figured that was the way the world was gonna be when we grew into men. We’d drive around spitting and peeing just as we darn well pleased.

But then Butchey Hogley and his family, with the Saint Bernard, moved away, to some foreign land called Eden Prairie. And I never saw him again. And I never really got to spit out the car window once I got married and had a car -- or do the other thing (not that I really wanted to!) And now I’ve still got that bitter taste of Barbara Pym in my mouth, and even writing this Proustian little tidbit has not cheered me up at all.

So I’m going out. The sun is out and the forecast calls for highs in the fifties all week long. Damn the plantar fasciitis, full speed ahead! I’ll walk over to the Fresh Market for a piece of deli fried chicken, get a big Idaho baking potato, a jar of chicken gravy, some frozen peas, and a package of Hostess Twinkies -- no Little Debbie imitations for Mrs. Torkildson’s beamish boy! I’ll eat myself into a comfort food stupor, collapse on my chaise lounge, and, as the Bible says, be one of the old men that dreams dreams.



(I finally found info on whale curry at http://www.cooksinfo.com/british-wartime-food:

At the same time, the Ministry of Food made whale meat available off-ration as well, and encouraged people to eat it, releasing recipes, etc. But housewives complained that they just couldn't get the taste out of it, even after soaking it overnight in vinegar, and boiling it all day.)