Warm Recollections #11
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
LA has wound up doing a very good self-mythology job. By counterpointing the dream with its own cautionary tales of itself, it has established both a heaven and hell within more-or-less the same zip codes.
Sometimes it feels as if men scurry about on the surface of the earth, whereas women are a part of it.
There was a Celtic word ‘bw’, meaning ‘terror’. French children used to shout ‘bou’ at others, to scare them, presumably because of this, as that’s how it was pronounced. And now we say ‘boo’ — and everyone assumes it’s just what you do, a phatic utterance without meaning, with no idea of where it came from.
Canadian rich girl on train, to Irish friend:
‘Did you buy anything in Budapest?’
One of those early middle-aged dinner parties where the men are ponderous and paunching, the women forceful and thickening; which start off with everyone politely paying court to the hosts’ most extrovert child — and end with one of the couples having to leave hurriedly because their babysitter has exploded, apparently. Each pair exasperatedly (but good-naturedly) carping at each other, except for the couple whose marital problems are too serious for such recreational outlets, and who therefore appear to be basking in slightly formal equanimity.
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I remember fondly the spontaneous dinner parties in the middle of the week where a neighbour pops in for a chat, smells the cooking, next thing you know another turns up, husbands are called, alcohol gets served, the kids put themselves to bed. The next morning, bleary eyed people are seen handing their kids lunch money for school canteen instead of home made food. Adults go to work medicated with aspirin and Gatorade.
The etymology of boo is pleasantly surprising. And those are two interesting characterisations of women there: both about them being part of the earth as opposed to on the surface of it in the second recollection, and the usage of "forceful and thickening" in the last... "Thickening" in particular has so many different connotations, and since it isn't entirely obvious which of them you meant, I'm imagining them all simultaneously, and so that dinner party just turned into a comedy-horror movie in my head.