Life: Enjoy – This is Not A Dress Rehearsal

There is beauty in sleet.

Really. Mostly it’s beautiful if you’re indoors, not being blown to a dead stop by the harsh pellets of ice rattling against your back, but there is a beauty in the symmetry of white shards shurtling past your window. There is beauty in rain, snow, sleet, dark of night… We’re not going to go so far as to say there’s beauty in floods, but… well, it’s been raining so much that we’re trying to find something nice to say.

Our friend Van (YES, Mr. Blinkey. Van AGAIN. You’d think T. had known him since she was nine or something.) has been warned to wear wool socks and thermals, but only a week ago a city resident scoffingly said it wasn’t yet cold. Now that the wind has been clocked between 36 – 60 mph, and the temp’s been rocketing between thirty-one and thirty-six degrees, inquiring minds want to know: is it cold yet? Seriously: people have a point of pride in bragging that they’ve seen worse. As newbies (or N00bs, as our friend Sarah says) we’re honestly wondering if this is as bad as it gets. (If it’s not… Mom, maybe you’ll want to send a few more thermals?)

It’s cold, wet and raw, it’s still dark and the wind howls and rattles the building at night, and we have tons to do. However, in the spirit of enjoying life (and to send up a flare to let you know that we still are), we’re taking a page from our friend Erin’s book, to give you the Thursday list of This Week’s Things that made us smile:

• The realization that we don’t have to drive in this weather. That alone is worth a cackle of glee. We might be wind-battered at the bus stop or trying to stay upright on the cycle, but it’s unimaginable to think of driving in this driving snow/sleet/rain. It’s a small comfort when we’re trudging toward the flat with our faces frozen.

• The Charwomen in our Building: When T. was weetinysmall, she remembers often seeing the credits of a show her mother used to watch… a cartoon woman with a mop and a bucket, looking cranky as the names rolled by. We now know it was the end of The Carol Burnett Show, and honestly, the women who clean this building could be the image from which the cartoon comes. They chatter like a flock of starlings, leaning on their mops and saying, “That’s all right, luv,” if we happen to need the elevator (and their mop bucket is in there). Every week — through the closed doors of the flat — we can hear them coming, gabbing away. They sound like they’ve found a way to make drudgery more fun.

• Our First Invitation: Five months into our sojourn, we have been invited to the home of a Glaswegian. As we have found, it’s not that Glaswegians or Scots are unfriendly, rather it’s just not the way things are done, to socialize in homes so easily — which is fine with us, since D’s stacks of reading and T’s stacks of revision keeps us both busy. But because of the joke about a “foreigner” having lived in the country for “fifty years, so he doesn’t have friends yet,” we feel quite privileged to have made a good enough impression to get an invitation only five months in!

• Glaswegian Obscenities: Oh, we know this one isn’t… nice. We were well brought up children, we know it’s not appropriate or necessarily refined to speak this way. But good grief, do Glaswegians somehow make swearing an art form. Two cabbies and our property manager in the last week, and we’ve had to avoid eye contact with each other for fear of shrieking with laughter. When we first moved here we were shocked by the collective vulgarities. Now, it’s just… wrongly, horribly funny. And the worse the weather / traffic /road work delay gets, the more multisyllabic, descriptive, cathartic, euphemistic and, er, colorful the vocabulary becomes. Don’t worry Mom: we’re not picking it up. We, um, swear.

• Scots speaking Hebrew: Oh, aye, you knew we were in for some good fun when the Choral Society decided to do a piece in Hebrew. T. heard a tenor explain to a fellow singer, “See, in Hebrew there’s a wee dot under the ‘h.’ That sounds just like the Scots ” — ” and proceeded to make some completely unmanageable guttural ch-sound. T. about fell off her chair. Oddly, the Latin we’re learning for the John Rutter piece is mystifying more Scots than the Hebrew seems to be!

• Teaching a Glaswegian Taboo: Oh, my. There is really nothing like playing a game when you have two wildly different vocabularies. Taboo is a game where you try and have your teammate guess a word by describing it, but there are certain words you cannot use. Much of the time we just sat laughing helplessly as our friend M., born and bred in this fine city, gave guesses that were greeted from his American teammate with “What?!” We learned that the words ‘boardwalk’ and ‘touchdown’ are virtually unknown, while ‘calamine lotion’ is apparently universal.

• Teaching a Spaniard Taboo: Much the same as teaching a Glaswegian, except when our Spanish friend B. plays, she gets excited and her clues come out — in Spanish. Also, she learned English …in Glasgow, so the variations in vocabulary apply. Our favorite word from last week’s game will always be “a partin.'” The word was “part,” and of course the words to describe it could not include hair, or Moses, or the Red Sea, or any number of other random words. B. got it, but in Glasgow, the phrase isn’t that you have a “part” in your hair. No, one has a “parting” in one’s hair. Add a thick Spanish/Glaswegian accent to the word “partin'” and you’ll understand why this word effectively ended the game.

At the moment it sounds as if someone is flinging handfuls of pebbles at the window. As the hail continues to sleet against the panes, we’re bundling up to venture out to Choral Society and an evening of tongue-twisting Hebrew. It seems like a good night to spring for a cab!

Hang on, friends. Spring is coming. Downtown there is a row of misguided trees in bloom in front of a bank. Hold on… the sun will come out… tomorrow. (and apologies for those of you who will now have that vicious earworm of a song stuck in your head for the rest of the day).

yours in dogged cheerfulness,

– D & T

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