The Oversharing Homeric Dreams of Home Edition of the Pub Quiz Newsletter with Dr. Andy
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Today is the most overcast day that we’ve had in a month, but if my wife Kate and I had stepped outside on a day like today when we lived in London, it probably would have been the sunniest day we could have enjoyed during the fall of 1987, a rainiest of all autumns when the two of us met and moved in together.
I remember finally returning home from studying abroad that December, perhaps a week before Christmas, setting my huge black rucksack by the front door of my Tunlaw Road house in the Glover Park neighborhood of Washington DC. I collapsed in the recliner my parents had bought a decade earlier when they were still together in that house, a place that resonated with all the influences upon my nascent identity. Both my (then) living grandparents had joined us for dinners in that house. My (then) living best friend Tito had slept over perhaps 100 times. I was 20 years old, and I was just beginning to understand who I was, or who I might be. Younger than my years, I was probably unable to grow a proper beard.
Returning to my DC home should have brought me comfort and relief. After all, everything was pretty much the same as when I had left four months earlier. Along the walls of our living room I saw the familiar high-end replications of paintings by Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser (we seemed to love the Austrians), movie posters from my time working at the Tenley Circle Theatre, and an upright piano that none of us knew how to play with two hands. What’s more, my row-house had central heating, a working stove, and a shower that maintained a steady temperature.
Any of those luxuries would have been relished in the closet-less, phoneless, shower-less hardscrabble fourth-floor walkup barely-heated Hampstead flat where Kate and I lived. We weathered the pervasive autumn rains when our tall windows wouldn’t close all the way, but the November frost necessitated additional measures: more visits to the landlord, more woolly jumpers, more blankets, and more closeness.
I appreciated all the ways that Kate found humor in hardship, joking that while we were approaching the end of the 20th century, we had somehow chosen to study abroad in the 19th century. Denizens of the Underground, takers of long walks, our eyes seeking out the spires of Christopher Wren churches, we did not see the inside of a car during our entire time in London. As residents of our street did 100 years previously, we took baths and bought groceries from the shops across the street. We could see from our window if our local market was stocked with fresh oranges, KitKat bars, or Ribena blackcurrant juice.
I had never met anyone as lovely and charming as Kate; recollections of our conversations sustained me during the long flight back alone. Back in DC, the December skies were bright, but my mood was dim. I had no firm reason to believe that I would see my “beautiful London roommate” again. I remember on the plane staring at the scant photographs I had of my Chicagoan, my London co-explorer, my Indian restaurant dinner companion, my whisperer of stories after the lights were out. I feared that we might have shared our last dinner, our last kiss. I had returned “home,” but peculiarly the only house I had ever known did not feel like home.
Soon after my return, I was rereading The Odyssey and came across a line in book six, “Shew me the city,” that Odysseus speaks to Nausicaa, a Phaeacian princess, and it reminded me of Kate, an American “princess” that I had encountered unexpectedly, and who had helped to show me the city of London. Odysseus continues: “And for thyself, may the gods grant thee all that thy heart desires; a husband and a home may they grant thee, and oneness of heart—a goodly gift. For nothing is greater or better than this, when man and wife dwell in a home in one accord, a great grief to their foes and a joy to their friends; but they know it best themselves.”
As Odysseus suggests in this clearly heteronormative passage, home is not a location, but rather a place where one can start a new family, what he calls a “oneness of heart,” with one’s beloved. I did not know how or when (and frankly, the odds were against me), but upon returning to the shores of the Potomac, I knew that one day I would reunite with Kate so that we could start living our life together, one that we had rehearsed when we lived so far away. As Odysseus says, “Nothing is better than this.”
So as I look again at this overcast day, I brim with gratitude that the rain was so intense and so consistent in the fall of 1987, and that my future wife Kate and I had to spend so much time inside getting to know each other. Any Odysseus is lucky indeed to have a Penelope waiting for him to get his act together, to let memories of her love guide his travels, and to return home.
I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. In addition to topics raised above, expect questions about the following: Happy Days, astronauts, shared passwords, rich celebrities with one thing in common, big cities that are not in Texas, Oscar-winners, hair implements, revelatory hearts, baby birds, palaces, merciful deaths, sadnesses, misspelled words, cushioned people who sleep, Alabama, popular TV shows, famous battles, odd words with columns, young inventors, Mount Everest, wolves, words and pages, the quality of mercy, repeated answers, odeons, yearly Christmas trees, golden globes, years that end in zero, gazelles, current events, and Shakespeare.
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Thanks to the 50 people who joined us on the roof last Thursday for poetry by Jabez Churchill and Katy Brown. On April 7th, we welcome Davis Poet Laureate Julia Levine!
Be well.
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s pub quiz:
- European Cities. What B city of now 1.7 million people was overrun by Soviet tanks in 1956?
- Instagram Accounts. As of September 2021, one magazine’s Instagram page has 191 million followers, the most of any account not belonging to an individual celebrity. Name this magazine founded in 1888.
- Books and Authors. Marlon Brando earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for reprising the role of Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film adaptation of what Tennessee Williams play?