writing challenge

Perfect Day?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“You’re going to reap just what you sow.”

“Excuse me?”

And he repeats it four more times.

After deftly sketching some snapshots of a perfect day—a walk in the park, a moment in a zoo, me and you—the speaker/monotone voice in Lou Reed’s song of that same name leaves us with that pushy, inexplicable, and echoing last line.

On its surface—and like many good songs, it has more than one level—on its surface “Perfect Day” describes just that: The small moments of togetherness that make a perfect day. Heck, I would like this to be a song at my wedding, if I have one, except for that last line.

It was the B-side to Reed’s one top-40 hit, “Walk on the Wild Side,” so “Perfect Day” has been a radio regular for over four decades. Of the two songs, “Walk on the Wild Side” is the less complicated lyric, being a list and description of the personalities populating Andy Warhol’s Factory in the late-’60s–early-’70s.

“Perfect Day” starts out as a verbal picture postcard:

Just a perfect day
drink Sangria in the park
And then later
when it gets dark, we go home

Just a perfect day
feed animals in the zoo
Then later
a movie, too, and then home

“Just” is a heartbreaking word. The singer does not say it was a “merely,” “only,” or “simply” perfect day. Those modifiers look down at the word they are assisting. “Just” indicates completeness. A day spent doing whatever one planned on doing, visiting the zoo or not visiting a zoo, is perfect, complete unto itself. Further, “perfect” is not a step above good or excellent and has nothing to do with the quality of the day. It is not a “good” day or a “bad” day; it is a perfect day. A complete one, a full one. If all your ambitions for the day are small and are met, yes, that is just a perfect day.

And it sounds like it was a fine day, too. The activities are unimportant in the way that the mundane details of lives other than our own are not all that important. When we hear details about a friend’s date, we nod, smile emptily, and say that it sounds like it was “nice.” When our friend tells us he went to the movies with his new girlfriend, we don’t ask about the ticket price or how dirty the theater appeared to be, even though those are details that might be interesting, more interesting than “later a movie, too, and then home.” “Perfect Day” sounds like it is about a “nice” date, which is part of why the song is loved: We all (I hope) have experienced a nice date. It makes the song seem universal.

But then something happens:

Oh, it’s such a perfect day
I’m glad I spend it with you
Oh, such a perfect day
You just keep me hanging on
You just keep me hanging on

“Such” is not “just.” This is how tautly the song is composed, that a minor shift in the language betrays a change. “Such” is emphatic. Now, “perfect” seems to be statement about the quality of the day, and it is almost pushy, demanding agreement. “It’s a PERFECT DAY!” your scary friend declares when he has had a few too many. In performance, this is where most singers, Lou Reed included, start to sing. Here is where the music shifts, too. Up till now, it has been the singer’s voice and a piano, at least in most recordings. From the very first recording of the song, it is at this moment that strings appear and the voice gets double-tracked, bringing out the sweetness of the melody. In one famous performance, Luciano Pavarotti sings/bellows the “Oh, such a perfect day” line.

In 1966, The Supremes had a number one hit called “You Keep Me Hanging On.” Its opening verse

Set me free, why don’t cha, baby
Get out my life, why don’t cha, baby
‘Cause you don’t really love me
You just keep me hangin’ on

is not something that would be sung or spoken by someone having a “just” anything sort of day, much less a perfect one. It is one of The Supremes’ biggest hits, it is one of Motown’s most loved songs, and a songwriter can not quote it without invoking all the upset that that song contains and the declaration of independence that it presents. In Lou Reed’s song, the perfect day now is less of a nice postcard and just got interesting.

But he returns to the narrating of the day/evening/date, and now problems are acknowledged:

Just a perfect day
problems all left alone
Weekenders on our own
it’s such fun

Just a perfect day
you made me forget myself
I thought I was
someone else, someone good

That is a compliment that anyone in a good relationship would like to pay to their beloved. I would love to say this to my girlfriend, except the “someone good” phrase. Someone who says that you make them think they are someone good is either fishing for a compliment (“Honey, you ARE someone good”) or thinks that he or she is not good.

In 1997, the BBC created an ad to promote itself and came up with a clever idea: have over thirty performers sing one line each of a classic song. The song was “Perfect Day,” and Reed not only gave his blessing, he performed on the single. His is the first voice heard, thus giving the single (it raised money for charity) his imprimatur. It was a huge hit and went to number one in the United Kingdom, Reed’s only number one there.

Depending on the singer, the final line, “You’re going to reap just what you sow” can sound demanding, creepy, a declaration of independence, or the promise of a treat. Because now we have a distinct you versus me, no longer a we, and the singer is passing judgement. It could be a happy judgement: the object in the song has been sowing love and understanding so the singer could be promising a sweet result. But when sung in the same song as “You keep me hanging on,” something malign is being foretold. “Reap what you sow” is something usually said as a tsk-tsk, at minimum.

The BBC rendition has several participants share duties on the line, and they all seem to emphasize the interpretation of the song that promises a happy future with more perfect days to come. Especially Tom Jones.

I am not a reader or a critic who thinks that the absence of evidence means that whatever is absent from a work is what the work is “about.” There lies madness. Some critics have interpreted the song as a love song to addiction or at least to a substance. This is because Lou Reed was a heroin user, a junkie. Is this a love song or a conflicted love song to the needle? Perhaps, but the needle is not in the song. When Reed wanted to sing about heroin, he did, clearly and emphatically. (“I’m Waiting for the Man.” “Heroin.”) What is in the song, what the song is about, is a not-unconflicted, not-uncomplicated love story, which is every love story, and thus is about one perfect day in that.

Thus, conflicts hinted at and all, it is a nearly perfect song, but that is why it will not be played at my wedding.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 20 asks, “What’s your idea of a perfect day off: one during which you can quietly relax, doing nothing, or one with one fun activity lined up after the other? Tell us how you’d spend your time.”

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Who’s My Great-Great-Great-Great … Grand-Who?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

To the best of my knowledge, there are no murderers in the part of the family tree that leads directly to me. I have done my best to maintain this streak of successfully not murdering anyone, but if I am ever accused, I will not be the first person named Mark Aldrich to be charged with murder.

Almost every person with the last name Aldrich in the United States is descended from George Aldrich of Derbyshire, England, a tailor who was born in 1605 and emigrated to America in 1631, a decade after the Pilgrims. He is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and probably the only one whose name I will know. George and his wife Katherine Seald Aldrich settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, had 10 children (one, a daughter who died in infancy, bore a classic Puritan name, “Experience”) moved to Braintree, and then moved to Mendon, Massachusetts, where his name is inscribed on a monument naming the town’s first settlers.

His second son, Joseph, is the great-great-great-great grandfather of Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich, whose daughter Abby, married John D. Rockefeller II and was the mother of several prominent Rockefellers. One son, Nelson Rockefeller, carried “Aldrich” as his middle name.

Another son, Jacob, had a dozen children, and those from his son, Joseph, were early settlers (in the 1740s) of Mattituck, on the east end of Long Island, and the Tafts, including President Taft.

One of Jacob’s other sons was named Peter, born in 1686, and he is my direct ancestor.

The sheer proliferation of Aldriches in America—when ten children have ten children, the family tree suddenly has a lot of branches on it—makes research a challenge. The genealogies have notes like, “Jacob 2 and Jacob 4 both had sons named Jacob who married wives named Sarah, or they are the same Jacob.” I exaggerated that a little.

Thus I do not know which line in upstate New York produced Mark Aldrich. The one in 1801. The Mark Aldrich from upstate New York born in 1968, that one is me, last I checked. But in 1801, Mark Aldrich was born near Lake George, New York, son of Artemus Aldrich. He is not my namesake. By the date of his death, September 1873, in Tuscon, Arizona …

Tuscon?

His death notice in the Arizona Citizen fills in some blanks: “Hon. Mark Aldrich died in Tucson, Sunday evening, of old age. … A very large number followed his remains to the grave. The Masonic Brotherhood took charge of his remains and buried him in accordance with the rights of the order.

Mark Aldrich. Not me.

Mark Aldrich. Not the me Mark Aldrich. The other one.

The deceased was seventy-one years of age. He was born in the state of New York, but subsequently settled at Warsaw, Hancock County, Illinois. We know but little of his early history, but are informed that he was three times a member of the Illinois Legislature, and served with Lincoln, Douglass, and other distinguished men who have since written their names high on the roll of fame.He came to California in 1849, and we believe engaged in mercantile pursuits. Of his history while there we are not informed.

He came to Arizona in the latter part of 1855, and has since resided in Tucson. He was the first American merchant in this town, the first postmaster, and the first alcalde.

“Mercantile pursuits” in California in 1849? Whatever might those have been? That was the year the Gold Rush started. The first alcalde of Tucson? “Alcalde” is spanish for “Mayor,” so he was the first American mayor of Tuscon, Arizona.

But the early history that the newspaper writer “knew little of?”

Hancock County, Illinois, in the 1830s was where Joseph Smith had led his followers in the Latter Day Saint Movement. Aldrich tried to sell Smith and his followers some land that he owned but Smith did not purchase. After renting the land, however, Aldrich turned into one of the worst landlords (or best, for Mormon history) and started changing the terms of the lease at whim. Smith and the early Mormons left and settled what became Nauvoo, Illinois; Smith named himself mayor and announced a run for President of the United States. Aldrich went bankrupt.

Nauvoo is in Hancock County, the same county that Aldrich’s land had been on. Now a vocal opponent of the incipient LDS movement, Aldrich was also one of those figures one still sees a lot of in small-town America: he seems to have always been in at least one elected or appointed position wherever he resided. He was a major in the Illinois State Militia, and in June of 1844, Joseph Smith had been arrested and was being held in the Carthage City Jail.

Smith was charged with ordering the destruction of the Nauvoo newspaper facilities because the paper, founded by former associates who turned against him, had printed stories accusing Smith of polygamy. The newspaper was declared a public nuisance and its press was destroyed, but so was its building. When a neighboring town issued a warrant for Smith’s arrest, he declared martial law in Nauvoo, which turned the issue into an Illinois issue and the governor ordered Smith put on trial.

Smith was held with his brother in the Carthage City Jail and on June 27, 1844, a mob of hundreds stormed the jail. The two prisoners were killed. Someone had to have let the mob in. Someone had to have directed the mob. Aldrich, a militia major with men under his command who took part in the mob, was charged with four other men. A trial was conducted and an all-non-Mormon jury acquitted the five. Aldrich ran for sheriff of Hancock County the very next year.

When I lived in Iowa, near Nauvoo, a friend invited me to visit Nauvoo. She did not know this history and I decided against risking matters.

Within a decade, Aldrich was an early settler of Tuscon and its first American mayor. And his body is, to this day, buried under the streets of Tuscon. The cemetery in which he was interred was closed by 1890 as the city grew into city-hood and paved things. Most remains were moved to other locations in subsequent decades but no record exists that states that any Aldrich relative claimed the body of the former mayor and accused-but-acquitted murderer of the founder of the Mormon Church.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 19 asks, “We all have that one eccentric relative who always says and does the strangest things. In your family, who’s that person, and what is it that earned him/her that reputation?”

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Good Old Days Ahead, Right Behind You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler published “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” a book that has remained in print ever since. (The first edition and the second edition use Fowler’s sentences; the third edition, which was published in 1996, is a substantial rewriting of the classic and uses the Fowler name as a form of brand.) Fowler’s book is not a dictionary of definitions, like Johnson’s or Webster’s, it is a usage dictionary, an instructional manual for better using this beautiful tool we have devised called the English language.

Its entries give instructions on pronunciation, offer the pros and cons of employing a variety of idiomatic expressions, and argue again and again for simplicity in expression. Many style guides have followed—the MLA, the AP, the Chicago Manual—and each one is more useful in answering day-to-day questions about one’s writing than is Fowler but none is as entertaining as his. His fight was a fight against cliché, obfuscation, and empty rhetoric.

He fought against pointless rules. One might think from the description of his work that he is the reason for the commonplace rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. The opposite is true. In a two-page essay on the topic (two pages!), titled, “Preposition at end,” he writes:

It was once a cherished superstition that prepositions must be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late (‘They are the fittest timber to make great politics of,” said Bacon; and ‘What are you hitting me for?’ says the modern schoolboy). ‘A sentence ending in a preposition is an inelegant sentence’ represents what used to be a very general belief and it is not yet dead. […] The fact is that the remarkable freedom enjoyed by English in putting its prepositions late and omitting its relatives is an important element in the flexibility of the language.

Fowler then gives many examples (two pages!) of worse blunders made by pointlessly hewing to this nonexistent “prepositions go here” rule. And the way he uses his examples, for instance his pairing of the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon with generic “modern schoolboy,” displays his desire to keep a light hand on one’s writing.

His entry on the use of the word “literally” anticipates the world in which we now live, a world in which that word means almost nothing in the way we use it:

We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression, ‘Not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking,’ we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate. Such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible. (Emphasis mine.)

The “literally” problem has literally bedeviled anyone who cares about precision in language for almost a century.

Fowler wanted writers to avoid using the obscure metaphor merely because it is commonly employed. Hence his entry on the idiomatic expression, “salad days”:

Salad days (one’s raw youth) is one of the phrases whose existence depends on single passages (see Antony and Cleopatra, ‘My salad days when I was green in judgement’). Whether the point is that youth, like salad, is raw, or that salad is highly flavoured and youth loves high flavours, or that innocent herbs are youth’s food as milk is babes’ and meat is men’s, few of those who use the phrase could perhaps tell us; if so, it is fitter for parrots’ than for human speech.

Avoid the empty turn of phrase unless one is making a point of the phrase’s emptiness.

Fowler died on Christmas Day 1933, at the age of 75. He had recently completed his work on the first edition of the “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,” a two-volume version of the full, twenty-volume, 20,000-page, Oxford English Dictionary. In 1928, a few years before his death, Oxford offered to pay the wages of a servant to help him speed the work along (dictionaries always take longer to put together than first supposed) and he refused the help in a memorable letter. At age 68, he described his day thus:

My half-hour from 7:00 to 7:30 this morning was spent in (1) a two-mile run along the road, (2) a swim in my next-door neighbor’s pond—exactly as some 48 years ago I used to run round the Parks and cool myself in Parson’s Pleasure (an Oxford locale). That I am still in condition for such freaks I attribute to having had for nearly 30 years no servants to reduce me to a sedentary and all-literary existence. And now you seem to say: Let us give you a servant, and the means of slow suicide and quick lexicography. Not if I know it: I must go my slow way.

Help meant a slow suicide but a faster dictionary. Fowler needed no cliché to tell Oxford that he was living in his “salad days” in the here and right-now. If the friend I quoted above had not overlapped with H.W. Fowler on this planet for a year or so, and if reincarnation was an actuality … well, it would appear they were cut from a similar cloth.

For most of us—not all of us, certainly, because sadness and horror and terror are ever-present and ever-possible, but for most of us—these are the good old days. And “tomorrow is just your future yesterday,” as one former late-night host once sang it.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 18 asks, “Is there a period in your own personal life that you think of as the good old days? Tell us a story about those innocent and/or exciting times (or lack thereof).”

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