If Dad had been present, he’d undoubtedly have commented that most of the adults present were “dangerously close to relinquishing their dignity” and that it was sad and disturbing, because “they were all searching for something they’d never recognize, even if they found it.” Dad was notoriously severe when it came to commenting upon the behaviors of all people other than himself. Yet, watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah’s neat stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you’re so busy waiting for, you don’t notice it never actually comes.
Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can’t help but pick up lint.
The phenomenon of Dad interacting with a beautiful woman was always an odd, sort of uninspired chemical experiment. Most of the time there was no reaction. Other times, Dad and the woman might appear to react vigorously, producing heat, light and gas. But at the end, there was never a functional product like plastics or glassware, only a foul stench.
Obviously, being able to simply ____________ was a skill supremely underestimated in the Western world. As Dad was fond of pointing out, in America, apart from those who won the lottery, generally all Winners were in possession of a strident voice, which was successfully used to overpower the thrum of all the competing voices, thereby producing a country that was insanely loud, so loud, most of the time no actual meaning could be discerned—only “nationwide white noise.” And thus when you met someone who listened, someone content to do nothing but _____________, so overwhelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that everyone else, every person you’d encountered since the day you were born who’d supposedly listened, had not really been listening to you at all. They’d been subtly checking out their own reflection in the glass bureau a little to the west of your head, thinking what they had to do later that evening, or deciding that next, as soon as you shut up, they were going to tell that classic story about their bout of Bangladeshi beachside dysentery, thereby showcasing how worldly, how wild (not to mention how utterly enviable) a human being they were.
Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.