(In college I majored in English, then went on to teach it for 30 years.  Here's one reason why.)

Cunningham was buttoned down and belted back.  Above a macaw's beak his eyes glinted like reflectors.  He was from Harvard, and he knotted his own bow ties.  Some laughed at his questions: What is the soul?  What is fate?  Most ignored them.  Our noise and self-absorption were to him merely bad manners, tattling on our breeding.  One day he put the Bible he kept on his desk into the wastebasket for a minute (lesson: don't idolize the object itself; treasure its wisdom and poetry), and one of the girls called him a communist.  I warmed to his mellow arrogance, his cool flamboyance.  In his class, Cultural Heritage, ideas were discussed; thought, for the first time in my innocent life, mattered.  There was only the one great goal of education: liberation through literacy.  One day he treated me to an entire period of private talk about the journalist Lincoln Steffens while the rest of the class twittered.  I was watching a mind at work.  I saw that there was muck, that it could be, should be, raked.  Another day,  late in the semester, studying Laughing Boy, he asked the class what "hozoji" meant.  I suddenly wasn't content to point and guess.  I wanted to know and wanted Cunningham to know that I knew, and  I struck off on a page-by-page search, tracking down all occurrences of the word, listing, classifying, categorizing, generalizing, qualifying.  Ultimately, to me, at least, in beauty it was finished. It was a neophyte's first deliberate act of literary criticism.  I was 17, and I had found a calling.

(In answer to a question posed in a recent issue of the Seattle Times ("Is art of chivalry dead?"), please note the following obituary.)

Monsieur Chevalier, a gallant Gallic gentleman, died recently after a long illness that had left him comatose for years.  He was celebrated early in life for his courteous treatment of what he called "the fair sex."  He always opened a door for a lady, and with even greater alacrity if it led to a kitchen or a bedroom.  He unfailingly offered her his seat in a crowded bus, delighting in the implication that she was too fragile to stand on her own two feet.  He consistently took the street side of the sidewalk when in her company to guard against that one-in-a-thousand chance that a vehicle would splash muddy water in their direction and besmirch her frock or bonnet (and, should a car suddenly careen curbward, he would of course be in position to fend it off with his bare hands, saving his damsel even before she could feel distress).

Chevalier first felt queasy upon the publication of Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" in 1963.  Subsequent work by Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer complicated his illness.  Then, after gamely rereading Sigmund Freud and several tomes on the medieval doctrine of courtly love, he seemed to recover for a time, becoming active in the fight to keep women out of military combat and bringing in his glazier's kit to repair cracked glass ceilings in corporate offices.  However, he suffered a severe relapse and was confined to a hospital bed as more and more women became doctors, lawyers, clergymembers, congresspersons, cabinet members, astronauts, computer technicians, professional basketball players, police officers, 18-wheel truck drivers, bulldozer operators, and holders of flags on highway contruction projects.  He finally expired after regaining consciousness just long enough to note that his attendant was a male nurse.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters.

Shortly before dinner at my 50th high school class reunion, I happened to notice two classmates, once close friends, bump into each other, shake hands, then with an ah-what-the-heck-we're-old-now shrug, awkwardly embrace.  I slipped behind a nearby pillar and shamelessly eavesdropped on the dialoguing duo, one sanguine, eupeptic; the other saturnine, dyspeptic; one upbeat, the other beat-up; neither of them quite like you or me.

"Hey, old buddy of mine, long time no see.  How've you been?"

"Oh, man, not too good.  Lately, I've kind of been in the soup, out of the loop.  I feel like my life is falling apart."

"Can I help with that?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I just mean, let's talk, tell me what's wrong."

"Well, for one thing, my body, man.  It's on a downward slide.  As a young guy, it was all just 'easy come, easy go,' you know?"

"And now?"

"You kidding?  Like I told my urologist: 'not so easy come, not so easy go.'"

"Hey, that's normal, pal.  There are natural reasons for these problems.  And pills to help take care of them."

"Well, I don't know if everything happens for a reason, but I'm certain that everything happens for a season--and mine is growing short."

Oh, relax.  There's still plenty of time for joy.  Remember what you thought when you were wallowing in the mud in that communal baptism with your brothers and sisters at Woodstock?"

"This is a cursed day for the rest of my life?"

"Well, I was thinking of a word that rhymes with 'cursed' but, honestly now, don't you feel that these are exciting, challenging times in which to be alive?"

"Not really.  To me it's a crazy world of confusion and paradox.  Isn't it true that Islamic militant females are fighting for the right to be subjugated?"

"I wouldn't put it quite like that--"

"Then in our own culture, fervent believers are yearning for the apocalypse, unrepentant sinners are dying to raze hell, and yesterday I heard some gal say, 'I believe in evolution--honest to God, I do!'  So what am I supposed to think?"

"You mean it's surreal?"

"No, it's real, sir.  And what about the phonies in our own class of' '57?  Five minutes ago I went over to talk to a woman who was one of the most popular girls in our class, and she's just been to Japan, you know, big deal, so she greets me with 'Konnichiwa, tomodachi.'  What a bunch of crapola!  Pardon my French, amigo, but people who sprinkle foreign phrases into everyday English are my bete noire.  You may be jonesing for a rapprochement with everybody, but I'm Smith-and-Wessoning for a confrontation."

"I hear you, guy, but take it easy, will you?  Now that I think about it, when we elected Senior Celebrities back in '57, you should have been voted most likely to exceed!  To me, that lady's phoniness is nothing.  Nada.  Sorry, I mean, no prob."

"Easy for you to say.  She didn't make you feel small the way she did me.  And speaking of small, how's your old portfolio doing?  So many of us seniors on fixed pensions are looking for some help from the market, and suddenly global warming has a chilling effect on the whole economy."

"Ah, come on, look on the bright side--there's a sunny forecast for stocks in solar energy!"

"That's what the environmentalists want us to think.  Those guys care more about fish than people.  We'll soon be facing power shortages but the greens are crying, 'Torpedo the dams!  Full speed ahead!'"

"Oh, no, I believe that scientists will lead us into a better world.  For example, they've been able to identify which types of fish carry toxins of mercury.  We can take a lesson from that."

"Like be careful what you fish for?  And that reminds me of the growing problem of obesity, restaurants supersizing portions and larding on the fats and sugars."

"As a matter of fat, I'm here to tell you, my friend, that it is quite possible to halve your cake and eat some, too."

"And then the traffic today.  Don't even get me started.

"I know it's bad, but--"

"No, it's not just the congestion.  The transportation experts in Seattle are social engineers these days.  They all have carpool-tunnel syndrome and believe they have a date with density.  They think that single guys like me driving SUVs in HOVs are SOBs."

"Well, now, I think that we do need to change some of our ways.  Sometimes those who don't dismember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"Man, right now I'm so down that I doubt I'll even be around to repeat it.  I feel like the late Iraqui dictator when he was found in that spider hole: Saddam was damn sad.  So, I'm wondering: will you come to my funeral?"

"With pleasure."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Only that I'll be glad to honor your memory.  And, you know, I've actually thought about my own ending a little bit.  I'd like my life summed up in an epitaph of exactly six words."

"Yeah, right.  I can think of a bunch for me in six, too.  I came, I saw, I capitulated.  Burned the candle at one end.  Forgot everything but my pass-on word.  May have exceeded my sell-by date.  I'm off to join Generation Ex."

"Oh, look, buddy, they're about ready to serve dinner.  Sure has been great talking to you.  You keep on keepin' on now, you hear?  I want to see you at our 55th."

"But if I don't live to see that day?  What then?"

"Then we'll definitely get the old gang together and have a moment of noise for you!  Just joking!"

"Yeah, sure.  But, hey, wait.  Before you go--what about your six-word epitaph?  What's it going to be?"

"My life was to die for." 

(I'm actually sympathetic to much of  the substance of what the environmentalist Cassandras are telling us these days.  It's the stale language that we hear and see in the various media that offends me.  Of course, we could consider the repetition of the same old words and phrases as another form of recycling.)

As we seek to wrap our heads around the chilling effect of global warming,
as we ratchet up our efforts to downsize our carbon footprints, as energy prices skyrocket and plastic bag usage spirals out of control, as iconic Al Gore becomes a jaw-dropping rock star pronouncing our way of life a train wreck yet simultaneously empowering us to step up to the plate and hit a home run against greenhouse gases, as we dismiss the possibility of oil-commodity trader-Gate, as we scramble to put in place mass transit so gasoholics can achieve a soft landing, as we are poised to think globally and eat locally, as we go green, as we make conservation the bottom line, as hot-button issue pundits engage in a battle of the trite ones, at the end of the day can we please sequester, along with our carbon, all of the twenty-five cliches that pollute  this sentence?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) declared today that slurring references to non-human creatures are an insidious form of animal abuse, a cruel passive-aggressive attack on the animal kingdom that it will no longer tolerate.

"Saying, for example, that someone 'chickened out' is an outrageous form of speciesism," stated PETA spokesperson Buck Faun, "and those who indulge in that kind of animal profiling and stereotyping will find themselves hit with a phylum-action lawsuit for slander and hate speech."

According to PETA, genetic-sequencing studies have shown that animals lack the requisite genes to be held responsible for perceived moral or character flaws.  Pigs, for example, have no moderation gene.  Sloths lack the ambition gene; chickens, the courage gene.

An ameliorative use of animal references--"graceful as a gazelle," "eagle-eyed," "lion-hearted," "lambie-pie"--is always acceptable, Faun indicated, but never a pejorative one.

"We give you fair warning," he said.  "Insult human beings as much as you want to--we're all for that--but don't do so by making invidious comparisons to animals.  If you do, we're coming after you.  From now on, no one will: act sheepishly or cattily or like a jackass; be slothful, cowed, buffaloed, or bullied; be a loan shark or crazy as a loon, stubborn as a mule, randy as a goat, silly as a goose, dumb as an ox, slimy as a slug, slow as a tortoise; chicken out, eat like a pig, wolf down food, weasel or worm her/his way out of something, speak with forked tongue, horse around, dog it, crow over his/her success, scavenge like a vulture, get antsy, thieve like a magpie, go at a snail's pace, hog something, sing like a canary, rat someone out, bug or badger someone, go ape, or grab the lion's share."

"These example are meant to be representative, not inclusive," Faun added.  "Any derogatory comparisons not listed here are equally liable for prosecution."

To drive home his point, Faun presented the following list of animals and the genes they lack, as gleaned from genetic-sequencing studies:  mule--compromise gene; jackass--sociability gene; cow--forcefulness gene; dog--competitiveness gene; ox--intelligence gene; wolf--moderation gene; weasel--responsibility gene; worm--backbone gene; snake--honesty gene; buffalo--problem-solving gene; tortoise--quick-twitch fiber gene; crow--modesty gene; shark--fairness gene; bull--non-controlling gene; vulture--kill-it-yourself gene; cat--play-nice gene; goat--abstemiousness gene; sheep--independence gene; horse--seriousness gene; ant--relaxation gene; snail--pacekeeping gene; slug--dryness gene; lion--sharing gene; badger--give-it-a-rest gene; canary--reticence gene; rat--loyalty gene; magpie--respect for others' property gene; bug--sense of boundaries gene; fawn--assertiveness gene; ape--sense of appropriate response gene.