All Cats are Grey in the Dark (and Other Sayings)

All through childhood I heard these little aphorisms from the grownups. I don’t mean the kind still shiny with steel-bladed wit such as you see in Poor Richard’s Almanac, all penned by Ben Franklin in his idler days at the print shop before nation-building and the delicious women of Paris captured all his interest.“Fish and visitors smell in three days.” That’s one of his, about the burden of harboring house guests.  “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” That’s another  with its suggestion to  steer clear of companions ‘with a past’ as they used to say. Poor Richard is also the one who said “All cats are gray in the dark,” his tart little observation about sexual act,  which, it seems to be suggesting, is never as much about your partner's relative beauty as it is about you and your own gratification.Anyway, these quips aren’t the kind I’m thinking of here. I’m thinking of the high-minded “thought gems” people once so cherished, the kind schoolgirls once embroidered onto samplers. Everyone born in the first two-thirds of the last century had these maxims spooned into them like cod liver oil."Hitch your wagon to a star. Hang on tight and there you are!” That was one, by sweet old Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then there's Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's oft-quoted “Lives of great men all remind us we should make our lives sublime,  and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. But the one  I’m thinking of today, anonymous as far as I know?"As a rule man’s a fool, when it’s hot he wants it cool. When it’s cool he wants it hot, always wanting what is not."I think of it because just yesterday in this space I was saying, Hey where’s winter?” And  also, “What about snow and skiing and those bracing mornings when you see the arms of the rhododendron branches clasped tight to their sides so they look like so many Irish step dancers? Where is all THAT in this balmy post-autumn spring we’ve been having here in Grovers Corners? I wrote this just yesterday. Yesterday!  And today the temperature outside my window?8 degrees and look at the rhodies today!As a rule I’m a fool is my personal aphorism. I have occasion to cite it every single day.

Go to Your Room

Well, our boarders moved out the second their power came back on. They went home, even though trees still litter the landscape over in their town. They were up before 7 and gone within the hour.Word is they spent their day mopping up the puddles from their long-thawed fridge-and-freezer; I spent mine washing all the linens from the beds they slept in, and the towels from their many baths and showers. It was fun actually. And with all the mindless work of the Tide and the Bounce, the smoothing of sheets and the stuffing of fat-lady pillows into their corsets I realized a few things:(a) It’s easy to have house guests who go to bed right after supper.(b) It's equally great and easy if there’s a 'no-TV-on-school-nights' rule. The talk was excellent.(c) I found it wonderful that I could exploit the two younger boarders, in a Child Labor kind of a way; turns out little kids like nothing better than to clean out a closet. They can't get enough of the task of pulling things out and examining them. Someplace over the last few days I saw the bottom of one closet for the first time in 25 years.(d) Old Dave and I turn out to bicker less with houseguests around even when one of them is our own child. Not that we ever argue that much; still, these last few days we were acting like a couple of people lobbying for sainthood. I know I don't want to be seen as some witch in front of that sweet little family. I don’t want to come across like the yammering wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.I want my kids to miss me when I’m gone, not be dancing down the aisle behind my casket. I want them to remember me as the placid ventriloquist’s puppet David wishes he had married. (Click there to see me perched on his knee that week we went to Paris.)So that’s all I wanted to say here. Good houseguests have many qualities, but that going-to-bed-right-after-supper is possibly the awesomest. If we all had a bath and a book and Lights Out just after supper, there'd be a lot less grouchiness in the world --- and that's the truth, pbbbbt!