CSotD: Love in the Time of Dog Biscuits
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When I was in college, Notre Dame had a game against Tulane. I was in the reception area of a dorm at St. Mary’s when a group of people got back from the game, including a girl who had been to Pat O’Brien’s, and brought one of the bar’s special Hurricane glasses all the way home as a souvenir.
Almost.
She dropped it as she came in the door.
Which tragedy came to mind when I saw today’s Bizarro (KFS), because of the glass in his hand but also because Mardi Gras — “Fat Tuesday” — is a paganesque celebration of the flesh before Ash Wednesday begins the penitential season of Lent.
Which is to say, if you are tardy, you’ll have to settle for grace, not gras. Also, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Garfunkels, “Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.”
To which I would add that, if you keep a firm grip on your hurricane glass, it will be easier to explain to your grandchildren how you got it than if you preserve several strings of beads, though I don’t think that was happening much in 1970. Beads, yes. Exhibitionism, no.
A friend of mine told me about Mardi Gras back then, but I never went, and I suspect it’s like Grateful Dead concerts: If you didn’t get there before the throngs discovered it, you’re too late.
Tardy Gras, indeed.
This year, Valentine’s Day also follows Mardi Gras, as Joe Heller and others have pointed out, and the traditional penances of Lent often include swearing off candy, though that’s optional.
You can have candy if you didn’t specify it in your vow, so long as you eat it as part of your dinner, since you should be fasting.
Speaking of things as they were a half century ago. Not only has fasting become almost exclusive to religious conservatives, but instead of giving up something, people are now encouraged to add a positive act instead.
Which generally boils down to something they should have been doing anyway.
It’s another step away from the source material. Francis Yeats-Brown, known for Lives of a Bengal Lancer, returned to India after WWI and noted how the people there lived much as the people in their scriptures had lived, while, by 1936, Westerners had long left Biblical lifestyles behind, which transformed the land of our prophets into a distant fairytale:
There is a deep insincerity running through modern Christendom, because the average man and woman who goes to church no longer accepts the Church’s teachings on Heaven, Hell, the reality of the Devil, or the terror of the Wrath of God. We repeat the rich, rolling phrases of the prophets of Palestine, without giving them literal credence and hence we tend to similar hyperbole in our worldly affairs. A civilization that has lost its Faith, cannot keep faith in anything.
That was nearly a century ago, which makes me envy my modern, Western Muslim friends who still fast during Ramadan and try their best to make the Haj at least once in their lifetimes.
I gather we’re still supposed to kind of believe in St. Valentine, though he was demoted because most of what we think we know about him is legendary. He’s less historical than Patrick, who certainly existed but didn’t drive snakes from a place they never lived, and he’s far more historical than Christopher, who probably didn’t exist at all. And you can slip St. Nicholas in there any place you like, perhaps next to George Washington’s cherry tree.
But I’ll conclude this theological lesson with the observation that, given the blanket dispensations people give themselves to over-celebrate St. Patrick’s Day each Lent, I doubt anybody’s gonna go to Hell for eating a few chocolates today.
Assuming they’ve got anything to celebrate. Martyn Turner suggests that Cupid isn’t getting a lot of clearances this Valentine’s Day, with his marginal observation that we could use a few of those arrows and for god’s sake don’t click on that link.
And to remain political just a tad longer, the holiday was made for Brian McFadden, because there is such a rich potential for satirical Valentines that he had no problem in filling out his regular six-panel format.
At his age, Edison Lee (KFS) isn’t supposed to understand all this valentine’s stuff. What I remember about elementary school was making valentine packets out of construction paper and then buying sheets of cheap valentines and signing each one for everyone in the class and putting them into each other’s packets.
Which should have been our first clue that loving everyone is like not loving anyone at all.
Kids today seem to have a little better focus, what with Edison giving Katie a valentine and Amelia giving Spud a valentine in Wallace the Brave (AMS) and Spud blowing it because kids haven’t actually changed a whole lot after all.
Not to worry. As Ben (MWAM) notes, guys never do figure it out, but they at least learn the rules. It took me years to learn that women don’t want a beautiful flowering plant that will live forever because love is not supposed to be practical.
They want cut flowers that will fade and love that won’t, however incompatible those things seem to the male mind.
Rhymes With Orange (KFS) explains that love is fleeting at best and we should make the most of it. I always tried to be as decadent as possible, mostly to forestall having my head bitten off, but your mileage may vary.
Come to think of it, my mileage varied enough that my most romantic sustained relationship began with a first date on Valentine’s Day. I took her to a hockey game, and she gave me a box of dog biscuits. Lasted seven years and we parted as friends.
Hardly a record, but it sure was fun, and brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Love is a gas. You just have to find the right time, the right place and the right person to share it with.
Although if you wait for all those things to line up, it might not happen at all.
My advice? Just jump in.
If the dog biscuits don’t work, climb back out and try again.
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