[lit-ideas] Re: Fish and Geary's Question

  • From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 20:51:59 -0600

DR:

Which is not the same as saying I wasn't intensely curious about girls; they were just absent from my planet, alien beings with bras and hockey sticks, spotted in passing trains and at the other end of buses.


That made me laugh out loud. The paraphernalia of women still strikes me as a marker of mysterious difference. How I used to marvel at their underthings and all their cosmetic appliances and the fact that they managed to carry a large part of their world with them in their purses. I was fascinated and afraid of their "feminine hygiene" things and I could almost get drunk on the scent of them. (only much later by their sense). If I were a little more weird I'd probably have become a fetishist, an undiscriminating one though, enthralled by all things womanish. I've gotten a bit more used to them over the years, but they still seem strange, alien beings in many many ways.

Mike Geary
Memphis


----- Original Message ----- From: "David Ritchie" <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 11:55 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Fish and Geary's Question



On Feb 17, 2006, at 6:16 AM, Ursula Stange wrote:

THE FISH

I had about as much chance, Mother,
as the carp who thrashed
in your bathtub on Friday,

The tale I remember is, I believe (I can't find out copy and the house experts are not available) Barbara Cohen, "The Carp in the Bathtub." It goes: kids decide that this year's carp is loveable and so move it to a neighbor's bathtub. Father figures this out and the fish gets the chop (as it were!) but kind old Dad buys the animal-loving kids a cat to make up for the loss. Keeping Passover fish in the bathtub was evidently a widespread practice.

Mike's question: I attended two high schools, one all boys, the other co-ed. I preferred the latter to the former, but in the all boys school my out-of-class hours were filled with training for the Munich Olympics--which I didn't reach, thank goodness--and homework, so there wasn't much time for "I wonder if my social life is up to par," and angst about not having dates. Which is not the same as saying I wasn't intensely curious about girls; they were just absent from my planet, alien beings with bras and hockey sticks, spotted in passing trains and at the other end of buses. At my second high school--Atlantic College (which Judy knows)--I took up hockey.

David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon

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