If you’ve been reading Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz, you know I have an affinity for odd things. To start the week, I posted my archive of 30-plus quizzes to Substack, rereading each one along the way. I was struck by 3 things:
“And yet…”
Oxymorons
3 things
“And yet…”
“And yet” is a phrase I picked up from “The History of Love,” an outstanding novel from Nicole Krauss. It’s the perfect statement of the yin and yang of life--and love. The dynamic dualism that explains the push and pull of life--and love.
Instead of sympathy cards, I like to send a card from Story People called Bittersweet.
In his powerful interview with Anderson Cooper, Stephen Colbert explained his own father’s sudden death and the grief that followed. Colbert says that grief is actually an affirmation of the gift of life.
It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. I don’t want it to have happened. I want it to not have happened, but if you are grateful for your life—which I think is a positive thing to do, not everybody is, and I am not always but it's the most positive thing to do—then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you're grateful for.
In love, it’s opposites that attract. The balance of noise and silence. Too much and not enough. Extrovert and introvert. Sara and I used “And yet” as the central theme in our wedding vows in 2006, “You know me and yet you love me…” That says it all.
Steve and Sara, June 23, 2006; Instagram: @lorifleissner_photography
Oxymorons
My love of oxymorons plays off these tensions of two. In Quiz #27. Good Monday!, I wrote about a better name for the day after Easter--especially compared to the name given to the Friday that comes before Easter. Shouldn’t that be “Bad Friday”?
3 things
And yet, there are the 3’s. In my many lists and the rhythm of my writing, I found I always seem to be attracted to 3’s. In Quiz #33. The Pledge on April 22nd, I wrote about how this quiz is a diversion--”a diversion in the face of disruption, devastation and death.” It seems to me that the third element in any prose always adds its own power, pulling up and amplifying the previous two. A verbal triangle that broadens your mind from the straight connection of two words of phrases, transformed when a third is introduced.
Sara has always told me that nature does not like a straight line. I created the border for our backyard garden. Before Sara, it would have been a straight line. Listening to her, it has curves, bends and is better. Sara is a Master Gardener (there is such a thing) and says horticulture design highlights odd numbers, 3’s, 5’s, etc. which are always more pleasing to the eye. Almost as if God is trying to throw off the balance of our brains to take a closer look and not see things stacked in equal piles.
One of the first lessons of photography is the rule of thirds. Never split your photos in half. The horizon should be on the upper or lower third. A face should be in the left or right third. Use the one third to focus attention on the other two--and then back again.
The rule of thirds (with a selfie-stick); Steve, framed in one third, looking into the open other two-thirds with the horizon in the upper third.
Again, “3” is strong--but it’s also got help from its odd cousins, “5” and “7.” My quiz always has 5 answers to the “What did NOT happen?” question. In his Understandbly newsletter, Bill Murphy Junior always highlights “7 things worth your time.”
And yet, if two is the language of couples, odd numbers are the language of families and siblings. When there are more than two people in any family, there’s a whole new rhythm that plays out as each new person enters--and leaves--the scene.
For the youngest in a family, like Sara whose sisters are more than 12 years older and my brother Richard who is 8 years younger than me, there is always the sense that they have jumped onto a connecting flight, are a piece in a half-finished jigsaw puzzle or, in the words of Jane Smiley, entering the third act of a play.
In “Golden Age,” the final book in her brilliant trilogy (of course), Smiley writes about Claire, the fifth daughter in the Langdon family that’s traced through 100 years of the trilogy.
… for the fifth and last, it was like walking into a stage where the lights were up and the play was beginning the third act, gloriously permanent, soon to close, but always a lost world.
I’ve raised 3 children and 2 stepchildren. They’ve all gone to college and each time one of them has left the house, it completely changed the dynamic in the family left behind. The next in line always blossomed in new and unexpected ways in the sifting trilogy of family life.
There’s also a reason they say “The third time is always the charm. In Quiz #20. Curbing My Enthusiasm” on April 5th, I wrote about the first time I made homemade, chocolate peanut butter cups from a video I had seen by @Jomboy, the sports blogger. The first time you do something, following a recipe, trying a new tool or putting together Wayfair/Ikea furniture, you’re so busy trying to figure out the instructions that they get in the way. You stumble, make a mistake and need to start over, remaking the drawer to the dresser because you mixed up parts “F” and “L.” The second time through you think you have it figured out and you think you’re making the recipe your own--until you realize that you added way too much peanut butter, yet another mistake.
The third time, you have it figured out, the balance between reading the directions and following them--finally making it your own.
What does any of this have to do with the coronavirus and the climbing death toll that on April 23, 2020 now stands at just under 50,000? Not much.
So far, we’ve been lucky. We still have jobs and our family is not infected. The longer this goes on, the harder it is for me to say something that’s helpful--especially for people who are in pain, have lost a loved one or job. And yet, I’ll keep cranking out these ridiculous diversions. I hope the quizzes help and aren’t, well, too odd.
What did NOT happen?
A. I take note of the time I wake up every morning. This morning, it was 6:39. I took that as an affirmation of my knowing that I’d be writing about odd numbers today;
B. I still take my temperature each morning and took it as a bad omen when the number came up even at 98.4;
C. Once again this morning, at 9:01am, I texted Annie as she began her staff meeting as a psychiatric social worker in Queens. “It’s 9:01am. Do you know where your father is?”
D. Annie texted me that my college friend Brooks was the “Greek chorus” of the quiz after his email prompted me to include a link to the answer with each quiz;
E. I posted Quiz #44. Brooks on Facebook. Nancy, Brooks’ wife, commented, “Nice picture.” No mention of the writing.
Want the answer?
Answer #35. Odd, April 23, 2020
If you’re a subscriber, the answer will be sent to you as a separate email when the question is published.
Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #36. Promises, Promises.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #34. Brooks.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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Comments, corrections and confessions welcome.
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