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Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I’ve actually enjoyed the time that I have spent with my family over the last two years of relative confinement.
Many people COULDN’T WAIT to send their kids back to face-to-face school, or kick the older kids out of the house, but I’ve really relished this time. Our kids are 24, 21, and 16, and, like the rest of us, they have all faced different sorts of challenges caused by this odd era in which they live. (Seneca said, “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”) These challenges are of course caused or exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, whether because it was not safe to expose ourselves to others, or because, in these days of decreasing infection rates, we still act as if it is not safe to expose ourselves to others. Our attitude is, “If you have to ask, wear your mask.”
This week I wrote a poem for my wife Kate in which I imagined that we had raised as many children as our Catholic and Mormon friends get to do. As environmentalists, agree with Isaac Asimov: “Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.” As a dad who is crazy about his children, however, I sometimes wonder how much fuller our life would have been had we had an irresponsible dozen children, rather than “just” three.
Recently I changed the verb tense of this poem from the conditional to the present, for I like to live in the present, and the present tense is where my dreams (rather than my goals) spend their time.
Family Planning
For Kate, who has planned our parenthood
Catholics and Mormons
are the lucky ones,
for they populate
their homes and neighborhoods
with people who love them.
I’ve largely kept secret my wish
to have had a dozen or more
children with you.
In my full heart are rooms
laden with bunk beds,
and a master closet with a couple more kids
in sleeping bags that need tucking in.
The insulated garage in my heart’s home
Is crowded with cots.
At Homecoming, we lead
our own noisy parade,
originating from
a back yard replete with tents.
At present, every seat is taken.
To reserve private time and space,
each bathroom, cleaned every four hours,
has a calendar on the door.
Everyone’s clothes look familiar,
the increasingly threadbare
patterns having appeared first
in blankets, and then coats,
and then hats, and then buttons,
passed down from sibling to sibling
along with tailoring skills.
In our fairy-tale house,
every day is labor day.
The teenagers are eager
to head off to college,
if only for a break
from the perpetual vegetable garden duty.
Necessarily chefs and storytellers,
they feed our bellies and our souls.
Surrounded by library sale books
instead of screens,
all of the children raised in our house
are be scholarship students
or like apprentices of old,
they will be lifetime indentured
to their schools and colleges,
for we’d have no money left.
But oh, how rich I am,
my heart’s home so full,
seeing your large eyes
and healthy cheeks
everywhere I look.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to Kate for being such an active and loving mom to our kids. This week’s pub quiz touches upon topics raised above, as well as the following: Ways forward, tracked cars, real-time locations, words in a document, productions of Hamlet, selection committees, casual presidents, character developments, regrettable prejudices, rocks of the ages, stones, vacuum cleaners, award-winners, leeches in the newspaper, snowbirds, solo projects, forgotten foxes, salesmen, pillow talk conversations, world capitals, loved leaders, famous daughters, French standbys, alphabetical place names, time spent alone, faraway islands, confederacies, remade donuts, underground music groups, singer-songwriters, radiated emissions, famous bridges, current events, and Shakespeare.
I hope you get to see the Quiz. If you are not yet a subscriber, drop me a note with your interest, and I will send you a free quiz. Meanwhile, teams like The Outside Agitators, The Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo are making this whole thing possible. Join them on Patreon!
Be well.
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are four questions from last week’s Pub Quiz:
- Internet Culture. Tux the Penguin is the mascot of what?
- Musical Plays and Movies. Amadeus is one of only four productions to win both a Tony Award for Best Play (1981) and the Best Picture Oscar (1984). The other three films were all released in the mid-1960s. Name one of them.
- Name the Commonality. What do a fellowship, a staff, and a sap all have in common?
- Pop Culture – Music. Born in 1950, what singer, songwriter, and actress referred to her family as “the Black Kennedys” and started singing on her father’s albums at age 6?
P.S. I have never had a sister, but I like this quotation by the poet Christina Rossetti: “For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; to cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.”