Rarely do I really lose track of the calendar, but I did
this week as I became immersed in the excitement of a new research
project. Only last night as I was
going to bed did I remember that I was facing blog day. Thus I find myself sitting before a computer
screen instead of setting off for my regular early morning swim—the obligatory
nature of which is for me as the law of the Persians and the Medes. Naturally there is a back story. As most of the world is aware,
the northeast coast of the United States has been experiencing a serious cold
snap. The current thermometer
reading is 9ยบ Fahrenheit. Getting
to the gym and back involves a fair amount of outdoor walking. It is not entirely inconvenient for me
that the law of the Persians and the Medes should on rare occasion be subject
to meteorological modification. I
am not unwilling to invoke the “Tillie Adjustment”.
I
had a great uncle named Win or Wynne.
He has been dead for probably sixty years, but he is oddly fresh in my
memory. He was an older brother of
my paternal grandmother, and he would briefly descend upon the Arkansas farm at
long and irregular intervals. I
never saw the name written out. I
now presume it was an affectionate nickname or abbreviation for something more
mainstream and conventional, even if I can’t tell you what. Like my grandfather Fleming he was a
veteran of the Spanish-American War.
Having served in the Spanish-American War appeared to be by far the most
significant fact of my grandfather’s life in the years I knew him, and he
seemed always happy to welcome under his roof a brother-in-law his children
seemed to regard as suspect.
Little
pitchers have big ears, and I deduced from unintentionally eavesdropped talk
among my aunts that Uncle Win was some kind of Bad Boy. His turpitude, so far as I could tell,
was largely stylistic. He smoked,
but so did my own parents as well as two of my uncles and one of my aunts. He also—rarely but memorably—did use
very vehement and foul language. I
thought that Uncle Win was a pretty stylish old guy. I never had known a man with jewelry, but he wore a dramatic
Masonic ring with actual sparkling stones. He would descend upon us from somewhere in the Chicago area
driving an older model of a huge luxury car. Once it was a Cadillac. While not technically in violation of state law, this
vehicle was so culturally inappropriate for an Ozark farm as to fall beneath my
aunts’ barely suppressed censure.
I
now realize that his real crimes were marital. He had been married to somebody named Aunt Elsie. Aunt Elsie has been universally beloved
of the Flemings, but she had died before the dawn of my consciousness. Uncle Win shocked his nephews and
nieces by declining to remain a widower.
He married again—and again.
Number two wife was also deceased by the time I became aware of things,
but it was clear in the eyes of my uncles and aunts she had fallen far short of
the standard set by the sainted Aunt Elsie.
This
anecdote involves wife number three who, like Win himself, had an odd name. It was
Tillie. Win and Tillie probably were both about eighty when they
married in Saginaw, Michigan, or some such place. Very soon thereafter Win put his new bride into a big old
Oldsmobile and headed south. One
of the few things known to us in advance about Tillie was that she was a
practitioner of Christian Science.
The fact was damning on the face of it. Better by far a Zoroastrian. They arrived, melting, in the middle of a hot Arkansas July
day. Win said, as he always said
on such occasions, “I thought I’d just pop down for a little visit.” What “a little visit” entailed was a
talking contest of gigantic proportions undertaken by talkers of heroic
abilities. Uncle Win talked about
the good old days with a geography and population unknown to me. What the Flemings mainly countered with
was the good old days as exemplified by how great Aunt Elsie had been. Seldom in human history was so little
said by so many at such great length.
Tillie
was hard to take, but I did feel sorry for her. She was a demanding, obtuse whiner; but I tried to think
what it must be like to be thrust among strangers, ignored by an equally obtuse
husband whose relatives’ sole topic of conversation appeared to be the virtues
of his former spouse. She
was suffering terribly from the heat.
She actually panted. Air
conditioning did not exist in that time and place. She fanned herself with a folded magazine. She mopped sweat, real or imagined,
from her brow. She made a great
show of being unbearably hot.
“Win,”
she said, “I need some ice cream.
Do you think they have ice cream?”
Although “they” were sitting within ten feet in the same room, Tillie
addressed all her remarks concerning the establishment to her husband, who
ignored her. She continued at a
slightly higher pitch: “Win, do you think they could get us some ice cream?” At this point one of “them” stipulated
that “they” had no ice cream and that the nearest ice cream was about twelve
miles away. This information was
conveyed in such a manner as to suggest that people who require ice cream to
endure the supposed rigors of unexceptionally seasonable weather are
sissies. Tillie’s next utterance
was in the imperative voice: “Win, get in the car and go and get me some ice
cream.”
For
some reason the peremptory tone riled Uncle Win. “My God, woman” (he actually talked like that) “my God,
woman, can’t you put up with a little heat?” He went on to appeal to the principle of mind over
matter. “I thought you were
supposed to be a Christian Scientist!”
Her reply, now enshrined in my private philosophy as the “Tillie
Adjustment”, was striking. “I
usually am,” she said, “but not in
Arkansas.” What a sensible
subordination of the theoretical to the meteorological.
