My sister-in-law Paula in London wrote:
"My kids hardly ever come out with us anymore. sob! The other Sunday Louis and I were told by our kids Sam and Georgia that we are an embarrassment. I took great offense and when they left the table burst into tears. I took the dog for a long walk, sobbing intermittently, but not before slamming the front door so hard it nearly came off its hinges!
After I stomped round the park for an hour blubbing I decided I better go home as I was all out of tears, and it was starting to rain. Just as I approached the house, I spotted one of the lads who has his eye on Georgia walking down the driveway with a bunch of flowers in his hand. So I had to hide behind a tree so not to spoil the moment. Can you imagine a bleary-eyed middle-aged woman wearing an old Barbour jacket arriving at the door pushing her way between love's young dream!"
Here is a pic of Paula and Louis in Tuscany last summer. They don't look like embarrassments to me.
But wait, on the other hand, here's a pic of my husband and Louis 'taking the waters' in a spa in Italy on the same trip. Now this is embarrassing:
7 comments:
Quit picking on the boys. They are very practical and you would not have wanted to ruin your coiffure either! ;-)
No, Vidal, that cling-film headwear was a definite fashion mistake!:):) But I'm more troubled by that cylindrical thing rising like Leviathan out of the water. The caption for this shot should be, "Is that Triton blowing his wreathed' horn, or are you just happy to see me?:):)
All kidding aside (but I was NOT kidding about losing those awful shower-caps, boys! Let's not see those again!) one's children are supposed to be embarrassed by parents. It's part of becoming one's own person, which inevitably involves the step wherein they say, "OMIGOD if I EVER start acting like those fools---my mother/father---please just SHOOT me!" Things mellow out eventually. What was that Mark Twain quote? Something about how ashamed he was( in adolescence) of his father's stupidity, but by the time he [Twain] got to be an adult, it was amazing how much wiser the ol' dad had gotten...oh, go Google the quote, as I'm too lazy to do so.
I would have left a comment about an earlier comment on this post but I don't know what 'Leviathan' means.
Leviathan means a ton of things, most of them biblically oriented, and outside of that it usually means enormous.
But the most interesting Leviathan, if I do say so, has to do with Thomas Hobbes' book of the same name where the Leviathan is the symbol for the supreme authority figure that rescues people from the state of nature, which is most commonly cited from the book as being "...solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
I spent too much time on Hobbes back in the old days when I was studying political theory. It's good stuff, if not as uplifting or interesting as someone as romantic and racy as Rousseau.
But I digress (sorry). She meant it as the biblical reference to a sea monster. :-)
I can't enter into intelligent discourse on Hobbes, you've caught me out, but I have been trying to finish a biography of Tom Paine since last winter. Let's see, what intelligent thing can I say about Tom P? His nose was an enormous size. See how much I retain from my reading?
I so agree about only recalling irrelevant trivia in a serious work. I found a lovely antique edition of Boswell's *Life of Johnson* in a New Orleans bookshop, and read (most of) it...and the only thing I recall is that ol' Sam had a cat named Hodge. Apparently, in his London neighborhood, there was an evil ring of cat-murderes loose, so he had to keep a careful eye on his pet. "No, no, they shan't harm Hodge," he said.
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