Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Today is my brother Oliver’s 51st birthday. Happy birthday, Oliver!
A couple years after I turned 40, I was in conversation with Yolo County Supervisor Don Saylor and a few friends when someone asked if I was going to rent out the John Natsoulas Gallery again for a birthday party. I told them that I only booked room at the Gallery or in our favorite pub for “big” birthdays.
“I attended your last big birthday, Dr. Andy,” Saylor said. “You turned 50, right?” We all had a good laugh over that one. Back then, I had no grey hair on my head, or even in my beard. Because of my jet-black hair and my irrepressible energy, I was widely regarded as a youth.
Our Davis schoolchildren have all been trained not to bully, but what about our Yolo County Supervisors who are former mayors and former school board members? Should they also have to attend bullying prevention trainings?
Actually, I enjoyed the light roasting. Back then, no one was ever cancelled for giving their friends what Eddie Haskell used to call “the business.” I was left wondering if Saylor enjoyed the primary antagonist (in both senses of the word) of Leave It To Beaver in the late 1950s as much as I did in the late 1970s.
It seems appropriate for people so inclined to throw themselves a big party every ten years or, at the very most, every ten. My brother Oliver recognizes this. Last year on his birthday, I wrote and posted a poem celebrating him and our brother hood. As you will be able to read in the postscript, below, the poem contained all appreciation, and no roasting.
This year, I posted a link to the poem and wished him a happy birthday. When I caught him earlier today on the phone, Oliver said that he was going to hang out with our mom (who had to be reminded more than once that today is Oliver’s birthday – she shared her amazement), but that otherwise he would wait to celebrate when his wife and daughter return from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware (where Oliver, Mom, and I saw Grease in 1978). 51 is not as big a deal as 50.
Last year when President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary, hundreds of people were on the party invitation list, including President and Mrs. Clinton, and several dignitaries and elected leaders from the State of Georgia. I bet that even some Republicans attended that party.
This year, for their 76th wedding anniversary, according to their spokesperson, the Carters enjoyed a quiet dinner together and then had some ice cream. 76 years is almost too many to be measured. I read that after 75 years, the U.S. Census stops keeping track of how long people have been married.
As Kate and I got married at age 25, I plan to throw a really big party commemorating the occasion of our 75thwedding anniversary, to be held in the year of our 100th birthdays. As that party will take place in the year 2067, many of you will be sadly unavailable to join us.
Hopefully, my younger brother Oliver will attend the party, though. I bet he will lead the roast.
This week’s Pub Quiz will be its own special event worthy of celebrating, I say. I hope you get to enjoy it. If so, expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: hybrids, country estates, Little Tokyo, faraway cities, ledger awards, revolutions, alphabets, Irish culture, island nations, Kansas accomplishments, Kurt Vonnegut, fallacious slogans, British royalty, famous ladies, singles, decks of cards, palindromes, divorced parents in Texas, pineapples, inventors, hockey humor, famous feasts, gothic stories, current events, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to all the supporters on Patreon who make all this happen, especially the Outside Agitators, the Original Vincibles, and Quizimodo. New supporters are always welcome. Let me know what I can do for you. While I wish we could gather together, the newspapers suggest this is a good time for us to keep our distance.
Be well.
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Books and Authors. In the Peter Pan books and plays, Wendy Darling has two brothers. Name one of them.
- Film. According to the American Film Institute, two Billy Wilder films are among the 15 greatest films ever made. Name one of them.
- Funeral Culture. The word “mortician” was coined as a friendlier and less funereal alternative to what?
P.P.S. And here is the poem I wrote to celebrate the 50th birthday of Oliver Jones:
For Oliver on His 50th Birthday
Oliver, I shared my start with you,
and it might be said that your arrival –
I remember that first time that mom and dad brought you home –
also marked my start.
My earliest memories had long since faded,
their source by now confirmed and perhaps even originated
in grainy, square photographs rather than anything I can summon.
To make meaning of my own childhood,
I look to you.
Mom and dad taught me how to smile,
my watching their young eyes
for hints on how to respond,
a tiny wannabe actor waiting for direction.
You made us more of a family,
your arrival opening our ensemble performance.
During those few short years of the four of us together,
you taught us how to laugh.
As you turn 50, I call for an intermission,
a pause of the inexorable and now rushing sweep of years,
to consider the unspoken and almost unrealized blessings
of our shared thousands of unrushed hours
suspended in a state of play.
Play is how this we that we are came to be.
Dad’s love of games – played and televised –
kept us attentively orbiting him, sampling his uncompetitive love,
experimenting in myriad new and well-worn
permutations of connection.
At age ten, I was a short kid who towered
over five-year-old you,
both of us in unfortunate dressy hobo shoes, or none at all.
The differences between us were plain:
I could carry you, both of us laughing.
Years later, weekend ambassadors between our two families,
we would be called upon to repeatedly pivot,
and come to strain against Dad’s oddly formal family routines,
rituals overwrought.
Back at “home,” with a laugh and a wave
mom would let us loose upon two city blocks
of unsupervised parks and alleys,
perhaps three hours shared with a Frisbee.
We explored all our differences then,
but forty years later, perhaps mistaken for fraternal twins,
the creaky two of us are chronologically collapsed,
the momentous conflicts and disparities,
to which so much attention was once paid,
now negligible.
Today you are the keeper of our parents’ flame,
kindled by overlapping iterations of adult conversations
over a beer, your reporter’s ear receptive
to nuances of humor or history to which I was not privy.
To your credit, as the years pass,
I see so much of them in you.
Every decade on your birthday, I am reminded
that my own age is real, for, like my crucial foundational
Ineffable, signifying and profoundest early moments,
It is again shared.
Throughout it all, I have been grateful for the company.