The British have such a command of decorum and aplomb to which we can only aspire. This message is for my friends who appreciate the finer points of the English language used correctly.
His Lordship was in the study when the butler approached and coughed discreetly.
Filed under Humor
By lex, on March 28th, 2004
Every other week or so, one of my two daughters will have some friend, or assortment of friends, over to the house for dinner and a sleep over. And if it is a friend who has not heard our ghost story, at some point during the evening meal, one of my daughters will look at me, a joyful kind of malice shining in her lovely, angelic eyes and ask, “tell the Story, Daddy. You know, the ghost story.
As ghost stories go, it is not so very frightful in itself. It does have one advantage over those told over scout campfires and sold in paperback novels –
It is entirely true. Which is strange, because I do not believe in ghosts, and have not, to my certain knowledge, ever seen one. For certain.
But on to the story:
My family and I were back in Virginia for our annual Christmas visit. That night we were dining at my sister’s house, a Cape Cod built on what had been the outer grounds of a still standing 18th century house. This older house had belonged to a wealthy merchant family with southern sympathies, and during the American Civil War (the war of northern aggression), the house and its lands had been expropriated by the federal government to serve as a hospital for gravely wounded soldiers, all of whom were in great suffering, many of whom would die there. And in that place, if no one else came to claim them, some were buried.
So as the evening meal wound down, we sat in that familiar glow of a reunited family, happy in each others’ company, well fed and deeply satisfied. All were there assembled, and I myself was at the head of the table, facing the hall, with the Hobbit on my right hand.
As I was talking to my niece, on my left, I suddenly noticed from the corner of my eye that someone was standing in the hallway, looking at us. I could feel the intensity of his regard. He was a large figure, shrouded in shadows. A man by size, but strangely clad in a large, two-piece cloak, the kind that Union soldiers would have been issued in garrison, but that southerners would have to do without. These impressions were formed almost instantly, and given texture by reflection, because I also instantly grew a bit alarmed as I realized that all the menfolk of that stature were already assembled at the table – there should have been no one else in the house.
And when I turned quickly to challenge this intruder, he was gone. Nothing at all there. My mouth still open with a peremptory question still unformed, opened a bit further due to dumb shock. It closed again, as I turned my head a bit to the side to try to determine what combination of light and shadows in the room across the hall could have formed this strange illusion, made stranger still by my realization that the form, as it had been recognized by my brain from that quick glance out of the corner of my eye, had been headless.
But nothing was in the opposite room that could have given suggestion to what I had glimpsed. Having broken off the discussion with my niece in mid sentence, I paused for a moment longer, saying not a word, while trying to make sense of what I had imagined. And in that moment of thoughtful reflection, the Hobbit turned to me and said, “I saw it too.”
“What did you see?” I asked.
“A large man, standing in the hallway, strangely dressed.”
Eyebrows were lifted around the table, questions were asked, and both the Hobbit and I related what we had seen. Being a sensible family, we turned it over in conversation for a while before assigning it to strange coincidence, and went back to our polite discourse. But it’s fair to say that we were all a bit unsettled, and all a bit thoughtful.
And that is where the ghost story ends. But this is why the girls always ask for it, when a new friend shows up at the house.
Having in my heart a streak of mischievousness, I stepped away from the somewhat freighted atmosphere at the dinner table in Virginia that night, in a way that I would do over and over again in succeeding years from a dinner table far removed in California, in a different but equally unsettled company. Making my excuses in Virginia and in California, I would proceed by various means unobserved to the back yard of the house, shrouded in darkness.
From that position I would slowly approach the window facing the dinner table from the outside and there, standing in absolute silence, I would place my face up against the glass. Where eventually, someone inside, having an unsettled imagination, and distracted by the strange patterns of reflections in the window, would catch a glimpse of something that almost looked, you know, like a head, and turn to make some sense of it. And my sister in Virginia, and my daughters’ friends in California, would focus, see my face there at the glass and SHRIEK aloud – usually causing everyone else at the table (even those in the know in California) to scream aloud as well, although not always at first knowing why. So it’s important to stay at the window, as those not in a position to observe directly recover their breath if not their composure, look around to see what had startled the first person, and see that face at the window. And then the SHRIEKS begin again, and sometimes there are girls under the table, and always there is much rejoicing after, when I walk smiling into the room.
And calls to do it again, daddy, please!
It’s the little things, sometimes.
Filed under Best of Neptunus Lex, by lex, Uncategorized
By lex, on July 13th, 2008
Saturday morning dawns cool and clear with the Kat tapping at your correspondent’s shoulder whispering, “I’m late.”
It’s not quite six AM. On a Saturday morning.
The only plausible explanation for anyone being late at 5:45 AM in Southern California on a Saturday morning in July is that this is horse show season. Plagues of locusts would not have otherwise sufficed.
It’s a quiet drive to the Del Mar Show Park on Saturday morning at 0600. You’ve got the roads pretty much to yourself and your daughter. Who – bless her soul – has her thoughts elsewhere entirely, at least until we get to the stables. Already seeing it. In the moment.
We arrive on scene and she asks if I would like to come in and see Harold. Harold being the new horse. Recently owned by famous regional jumper, but now relegated to school work and jumping at three feet or less. Because of his superannuation, at age 18, the poor beast.
I know the feeling.
Of course I’d like to meet Harold, I replied. The question being, in all honesty, almost entirely rhetorical. She’ll spend the day aboard or around this brute in one way or another and entrust her precious life to him. A “getting to know you” session between the two of us is entirely appropriate, never mind the importance of showing interest. I have things I want to say. Things he needs to hear. The nature and origin of canned dog food might be a worthy topic of discourse. Such a fate being a not unlikely end for elderly horses who are not attentive to the needs of their riders. Such as their continuing need to remain properly saddled, unhurled and untrampled.
The Kat joins her cohort, the rest of them – like her – tousle haired, pink cheeked and puffy eyed. It’s mid summer, and it’s not like they’ve been greeting the dawn with song since school let out. Mariachi music plays in the background as caballerangos walk around trying (and failing) to look busy. The girls wear flannel pj’s atop their best riding breeches, and club jackets atop t-shirts. The jackets will have the name of their barn on the back, and their own names on the front, and the having of one is an ineffable symbol of belonging. A fighter pilot might look in his closet and see a jacket of his own, with a name tag on the front, and various patches of experience and excellence everywhere else and gain a glimmering insight into all of this. But these are young women, and their magic is deeper, it thrums at a pitch below male hearing. It always has.
In an hour’s time or so they will spend a moment in mentor-assisted chrysalis – hair nets, rat catchers, jackets and helmets – to emerge as fully mature Ice Princesses (First Rank) of the Equitation Imperium. In the meantime, these girls (most of whom would not lift a finger to pick linen off the deck at home) cheerfully muck out stables like any set of stable hands.
You’d think that seeing your youngest child vaulting through the incorporeal air over fences atop a twelve hundred pound animal with small – and, it must be pointed out, unnecessarily sharp feet – might be bad enough. But first you have to earn the right to get there. First you must watch her warm up amongst thronging legions of variously grouped, differently abled competitors, each of them fully focused on their own lines in blissful ignorance, and all of them seeming to run at cross purposes.
Bedlam ain’t in it.
Eventually they head to the competition ring, where – at this age – each of them enter the arena alone to face the stern judgment of equestrian officialdom and fate. They will do their best, and at the end of the day some of them will walk away at the end of the day with yet another gaily colored strip of ribbon to hang against the wall. While others will walk away with little more than their pride, and the experience of having once again been “the woman in the arena.”
Oh, and the jacket with their name in front, and their barn on back. They’ll have that too.
You ask, isn’t it pricey, all of this anachronistic tomfoolery?
No, I reply.
It’s priceless.
Filed under Best of Neptunus Lex, Uncategorized
Ed Note: Unfortunately a lot of the links lex referenced 12 years ago are gone. I have included the links that are still live and given that he wrote this almost exactly 12 years ago though some of the things he said were still funny. To wit: How sh!t happens in the Navy; the world’s most humiliating store, etc…
Hope you enjoy the post. To me so much of what Lex wrote has a timeless aura to it…
BB
Sun – December 19, 2004
Wow – glad that’s over.
Or almost over – we still have the debrief to go on Monday morning. Jump up in front of the three star with my merry band of principal warfare assistants and subject matter experts, pontificate (but not at length, not as who should say “great length” – he’s a busy man – so are they all, all busy men) and then sit back down, await the momentary frisson of approbation that comes with a exceptionally difficult job, done exceedingly well, and then move on to the next thing. Which right now, happens to be Christmas. So I’ve got that to look forward to. Which is nice.
But no, the Christmas shopping is by no means complete, thanks for asking.
You might have advised that I try to shop at sea, via the internet, but that would only mean that you had never tried to shop at sea, via the internet, before.
You know those itty-bitty straws they use in night clubs to mix the well drinks? Imagine that you have been without water in the desert for six days, while forced to do push ups and sit ups in the burning sun, in between wind sprints. Now imagine being asked to drink your table spoon-sized ration of water through one of those cocktail straws it and you’ll have some idea of what surfing the World Wide Wait can be like at sea. It’s not like we don’t have bandwidth. Bandwidth we’ve got, great huge frothy galumphing amounts of bandwidth – it’s just that none of it is apportioned that way. For Christmas shopping, I mean.
Oh, sure – if you know exactly what you want: Google up “Airborne Laser Volcano Lancing ,” for example – you can probably get that done. That is, unless you were for two times in the preceding three months while at sea the victim of credit card theft, and the credit card that you actually have in your wallet is now cancelled, and now there is no reliably secure way to email or fax your new credit card number to the ship.
In that case you’re pretty much SOL, airborne lasers on your shopping list or no.
Neither am I one of those preternaturally organized, invariably smug and sand-poundingly self-satisfied shoppers that has crossed every item off their Christmas list by the preceding ides of March. No, I greatly prefer the carefully controlled lab experiment in chaos theory which comes from traveling across the country to Virginia, my own, my native land, on the 22nd of December, going pied-à-terre in the world’s most maddening shopping mall on Christmas Eve, and catching the sport at its very best. The pleasures are simply indescribable.
In fact, the only thing more wonderful was last year, when after several hours of hurling myself repeatedly (and it must be admitted, with little success) upon the altar of consumerism, I found myself looking about longingly for a store that sold any of the following items: Firearms and ammo, razor blades/rubber tubing, rat poison, quality braided rope of not too rough a texture and capable of supporting roughly 190 pounds, moving at, say, 32 feet per second, squared. While thus (fruitlessly) engaged I saw the actual Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who stands in precedence to your humble scribe in roughly the same proportion as he himself stands to single-celled organisms) doing his Christmas shopping in the same circle of hell as was I. Or me. Myself.
Whichever.
And so seeing this, I grasped at the beginnings of wisdom. These I will share with you, constant reader, free of charge: Death may indeed be the great leveler of men, but Christmas shopping is repeatable, and as a form of practice for the real thing, not to be lightly cast aside.
All that being true, then it can’t get any worse, you say?
Come, let me disabuse you: Have I failed to report that the Biscuit (age 13) now considers it nothing less than normal, indeed quite natural, that a portion of each trip to the shopping mall must be spent inside the world’s most humiliating store (for a man to enter, anyway)? I feel like a vampire at the church doors each time I go near the place. I stand there in front stammering “No, fine actually!” to all the several passersby who, alarmed at the sight of my violently blushing complexion, wonder if perhaps it isn’t possible, even likely, that I’m having a stroke or seizure of some sort? Because from my perspective, there simply isn’t a plausible or creditable reason for me to be on the same level as that store, not to mention standing on its threshold. Which is not to say that I’m a prude. It’s just to say that, well… I’m not exactly sure what it’s to say, but it’s deuced uncomfortable, old chap. To all of this, of course, the Biscuit is either sublimely unaware, or acutely unconcerned. And I can not quite decide which.
But this is all to look forward to, and perhaps one of you would prefer to be caught up:
We’ve been busy. Long time readers of this blog (I mean you two, over there) will know that your humble scribe has been at sea more or less continuously since the 12th of September with some all-to-brief intervals of sand crabbing in between to remind myself where I park my car, which office is mine (there’s that sandwich!), and to reacquaint my family with my gross physical characteristics. But as I mentioned above, our own Long March is over, for the now, and the workload should become a little more normal in the discernible future.
Why such much? Glad you asked: For the Iraq War we got every ship to sea that we could, and so all the carriers that went and joined the war in 2003 all came back pretty much at the same time. Which meant that they were all pretty much ready to go to sea again at the same time. Which was the last four months. Which is where me and my merry band come in.
But in between coming home from the war, and going to sea again, the CNO , who by the way is (for a Shoe) an incredibly smart individual, besides being a powerful and handsome man, made some decisions. For one, he decided that it would be keen to institutionalize our capability to surge the force in case of emergency, rather than discerning a crisis on the horizon and then walking the strand and turning over rocks to look for ships, like we’d always done in the past. This strategy is called the FRP, or Fleet Response Plan (variously, the Fleet Readiness Plan, no one seems to be able to authoritatively decide) and it’s an Exceptionally Powerful Idea¹
Which is a precise formulation guaranteed to send staff officers scurrying to shopping malls, looking for stores which sell: Firearms and ammo, razor blades/rubber tubing, rat poison, quality braided rope of not too rough a texture and capable of supporting roughly 190 pounds, moving at, say, 32 feet per second, squared.
Because it’s all very well and good for service secretaries and four stars to have Exceptionally Powerful Ideas, but someone has to figure out how it’s all going to actually work. And that someone is us!
So yeah, we were busy, but now we’re not and that pretty much encapsulates all you need ever know about the naval service.
More later, as it comes to me.
——————–
Note 1:
In the beginning was the Plan
And after the Plan came the Assumptions
And the Assumptions were without form
And the Plan was without substance
And darkness moved upon the faces of the action officers.
And they spake unto their Division Heads, saying:
“It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh”
And the division heads went unto their Chiefs of Department,
And Sayeth unto them in turn:
“It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odor thereof!”
And the Chiefs of Department went unto the First Flag Officer
in their Chain of Command, and Sayeth unto Him:
“It is a container of excrement, and it is very STRONG!”
And that Flag went unto his Fleet Commander, and
Sayeth unto Him:
“It is a Vessel of Fertilizer, and none may abide its Strength”
And the Fleet Commander went unto CNO, and Sayeth:
“It contains that which aids Plant Growth, and it is very strong”
And the CNO went unto the Chairman and Sayeth:
“It Promoteth Growth, and it is very Powerful”
And the Chairman went unto the Secretary,
And Sayeth Unto Him:
“This Powerful New Plan will Actively Promote the Growth
and Efficiency of the Department, and this area in Particular”
And the Secretary looked upon the Plan,
And he saw that it was Good, and so the Plan became
Policy.
And that is how shit happens.
Filed under Best of Neptunus Lex, Funny Stuff, Uncategorized
By lex, on December 6th, 2005
Phase II of the flight physical today. In the room alone with the doctor, the stethoscope and the tube of cold jelly.
Oh, the indignity!
So many things get better in the Navy, as one grows more senior. Your jokes get funnier. You get a nice parking place. Everyone calls you “sir,” and very often they appear to mean it. Which is a tremendous improvement from ensign days, let me tell you. People tend to be nicer in general, even solicitous at times: “Would you care for the VIP room, Captain?”
“Why yes. Yes, I would.”
You could get full of yourself, if you weren’t careful. All puffed up, even. But in a flight physical follow-up on the wrong side of forty, you are not offered the VIP treatment. Oh no, my son, not at all – not if it were ever so. In fact, it begins to appear as though this is how they let the hot air out:
“Elbows on the table, grandad. You know what to do.”
You: Did the fact that your doctor was a fetching lass of some thirty-odd summers do nothing to mitigate the intense position of moral disadvantage you found yourself in, Lex?
Me: It did not, Gentle Reader. To a surprising degree, it did not.
You: Were you at all concerned when the conversation, pre-… well, you know – when the conversation turned to how difficult it could be to be a female flight surgeon in a male dominated world at times?
Me: I will confess to a moment’s Seinfeldian angst at where this might take us, Gentle Reader.
You: Because of the payback potential?
Me: Precisely.
You: Ah.
Me:
You: Oh, right – it’s still my go. Was it cold in the room, Lex?
Me: Oh so very.
You: And because of that, did you experience any…
Me: That’s quite enough, I think!
So. 364 days and a wake-up.
At least she had small hands.
Filed under Best of Neptunus Lex, by lex, Uncategorized
