WWLVS?

Do you know Lady Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham? If you don’t, then it’s safe to say you didn’t watch Downton Abbey. I’m sorry. You need to know this about her, at least: if having a sharp tongue and just the right words required a license, she would have an “open-carry permit”.

The Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lady Violet Crawley

The Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lady Violet Crawley

Every single time she would deliver a wonderfully crafted zinger I would wish I could do that. Sometimes I would picture the person I would say the words to. In one episode she said, “Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.” I thought of Donald Trump. In another episode she said, “Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?” I thought of Ted Cruz.

Then I thought, maybe it would be fun to list some of the best quotes from the Dowager Countess herself and match them up with the presidential candidate that it best fits. Turns out it was fun—you know in the spirit of laughing to keep from crying. Maybe you would like to give it a try. Here’s the list. Simply put the initials of the candidate that first comes to mind when you read that quote.

__________ “He looks as if he’s waiting for a beating from the headmaster.”

__________ “I wonder your halo doesn’t grow heavy, it must be like wearing a tiara round the clock.”

__________ “I am a woman. I can be as contrary as I choose.”

__________ “Principles are like prayers; noble, of course, but awkward at a party.”

__________ “At my age, one must ration one’s excitement.”

__________ “Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?”

__________ “I don’t dislike him. I just don’t like him. Which is quite different.”

__________ Mrs. Crawley: “I take that as a compliment.”
Countess Violet: “I must have said it wrong.”

__________ Dr. Clarkson: “You want me to lie?”
Countess Violet: “Lie is so unmusical a word.”

__________ “There’s nothing simpler than avoiding people you don’t like. Avoiding one’s friends, that’s the real test.”

__________ “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.”

__________ “You are a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining and find something to do.”

__________ “Sir Richard, life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”

__________ “We don’t always get our just desserts.”

__________ “All life is a series of problems which we must try and solve.”

__________ Isobel: “How you hate to be wrong.” Countess Violet: “I wouldn’t know, I’m not familiar with the sensation.”

__________ “It always happens when you give these little people power, it goes to their heads like strong drink.”

__________ “I cannot find the words to say how I feel.”

That last one--“I cannot find the words to say how I feel", That's the one that keeps running through my mind every time the topic of the race for the POTUS comes up.

In The Third Place

I just finished reading a story titled, Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim” by Norman Maclean, the man that wrote, A River Runs Through It. The story tells of a contentious relationship between two guys who work together as lumberjacks. The older one is pretty much a career lumberjack, the other, the narrator of the story, is a student who works in the logging camp during the summer. The older seems intent on breaking the younger one by wearing him down, but the younger is determined to stick it out until his set quitting date. Day after day they each worked the end of a saw without speaking. At the end of a particularly long hard day:

After Jim disappeared for camp. I sat down on a log and waited for the sweat to dry. It still took me a while before I felt steady enough to reach for my Woolrich shirt and pick up my lunch pail and head for camp, but now I knew I could last until I had said I would quit, which sometimes can be a wonderful thing.

One day toward the end of August he spoke out of the silence and said, “When are you going to quit?” It sounded as if someone had broken the silence before it was broken by Genesis.

I answered and fortunately I had an already-made answer; I said, “As I told you, the Labor Day weekend.”

This blog, About POPS is written by a guy, “Pops”, who is now 65. It’s theme is about living the life of a “man of a certain age,” or what I like to call my Second-Coming of Age. Now that I’ve reached that chronological point when, in American culture we think retirement, I’m asked that question from time to time: “When are you going to quit?”

I assume that those who ask are talking about vocation, cutting down trees so to speak. The answer is, I don’t know; yet. I have the privilege of working in a role, for an organization, and with people that I enjoy a great deal. And while there are likely some in that company who will feel some jubilation when I do retire, for the most part, at least to my face, people seem to enjoy having me around or at least tolerate me; something I struggle with myself from time to time.

The truth is though, as the end of the workaday world draws near, I find myself more easily frustrated and sometimes discouraged. Sometime my thoughts run like this:

I could fix that if I still had time.
What does it matter now?
Let the youngsters worry about that.
I won’t have to put up with that crap much longer.
Is there still time to leave this in good hands.

I love this line from Maclean’s short story: “It still took me a while before I felt steady enough to reach for my Woolrich shirt and pick up my lunch pail and head for camp, but now I knew I could last until I had said I would quit, which sometimes can be a wonderful thing.

Mostly now I try to imagine what my place in life will look like after the job is done.

Several years ago, a friend introduced me to the concept of “The Third Place”. She explained that while we have home and work, we need a third place. I first thought of the neighborhood bar on the long-running TV show Cheers, a place where “everybody knows your name”. For some people their third place might be church or Lion’s Club. I’ve been observing the behaviors of old geezers some. Apparently, McDonalds or any place that has cheap coffee can be a third place. Somewhere to hang out, piss and moan about politics, tell stories, and remember the past better than it was.

Pops' Amazing-Missus at our Third Place

Pops' Amazing-Missus at our Third Place

Starbucks, unofficially proclaimed themselves the third place several years ago. And really it is for a lot of people. In a recent article in Wired magazine about Starbucks opening a place in Italy, the home of the latte, the reference came up. The writer, in trying to explain why Starbucks might actually succeed in the birthplace of espresso struck a resonant chord with me.

It’s because Starbucks performs such a service for its customers, because it essentially provides a vessel into which they can pour themselves and then buy themselves back, that Starbucks has been so successful. While its coffee may actually be better than most Italians are prepared to give it credit for, it’s nonetheless likely that this coffee is incidental to the paying for the privilege of going somewhere in public where we’re able to relax and be who we think we are. Thanks to its reputation for furnishing its patrons with “atmosphere,” Starbucks has become a global “third place” away from work and home. — From Wired Magazine.

When will I “quit” the 9 to 5? Maybe not until I find a place “to relax and be who I think I am.” In other words, how can I quit my second place (work), until I have a legitimate third place?

For while my Amazing-Missus is truly amazing, if I don’t find a third place after leaving my second place, she might become so weary having me around the first place that she’ll find me a fourth place.

And they lived happily ever after.

The Super Tuesday Buffet

YOU KNOW THAT LESSON YOU LEARN AS A KID: “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all”? Well, since we’ve been in the cesspool of politics lately I’ve tried to not say anything at all; at least not in writing where it could come back to haunt me.

But I will say this, I did vote in the Super Tuesday Primary. It didn’t feel super at all. As a matter of fact it was sort of like eating lunch at a convenience store. You know the ones that have the brightly lit buffet of fried, brown stuff like okra, mushrooms, chicken fingers, lizards, gizzards, beaks, hearts other parts, along with pizza, corndogs, burritos, chimichangas and fried pies.

The food is salty, greasy and cheap. It will take away your appetite, and there is something strangely compelling in the presentation and partaking of the glistening greasiness. Still, deep down, you’re haunted by the reality that in the long run it’s not healthy or wise, and a steady diet of it will be sickening if not fatal.

For Sunday, February 21, 2016

From Luke 10. The Bible.

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’’”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”


“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.” —Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. b: April 28, 1926, d: February 19, 2016.


God, forgive me when I become so full of vitriol, fear, hate, scorn and blindness that I can’t even see my neighbor anymore.