On Saturday morning I worked out the chords to the rest of the intro and the first three lines of “Mangos” by Serge Gainsbourg.
I weighed 87.1 kilos before breakfast.
In the late morning I rode down to No Frills. There were only soft grapes and so I got three bags of navel oranges instead. I also bought an oven glove for $14, a jug of orange juice, Greek yogourt, skyr, dark coffee and a box of spoon size shredded wheat. When I got home I realized I'd forgotten to buy milk, but I have enough to get me through to the middle of next week.
I worked on my US Lit essay for about half an hour but my brain was low in energy.
I weighed 87.3 kilos before lunch. I had Breton crackers with five year old cheddar and a glass of blackberry drink.
Lunch gave me the energy to work a bit more on my essay but it was close to nap time so I just moved a few passages around and deleted others.
I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor after my siesta. At Yonge and Adelaide my bootlace was undone and so I got off to tie it up. I also turned on my flashers. I went west along King. I weighed 87.1 kilos when I got home.
I posted my blog and got caught up on my journal.
I started back on my essay with 23 hours to go before the deadline. I worked for two hours before dinner, moving some passages around, changing the wording of some, and deleting others. I finished a run through the whole text and with 21 hours to go I had it pared down to just 900 words over the maximum.
I went to bed with my clothes on at 22:00, thinking that I might get up in a while and go back to work. I got up at 23:30 to take my clothes off and go back to bed.
I got up at 2:30 on Sunday. I worked on my essay until 5:00 and then did my yoga. At 6:00 I went back to work.
I weighed 88.5 kilos before breakfast.
My word count was 2478 at 10:00, which is 778 over the maximum.
I laid down at 10:00 but wasn't able to sleep and so I rested for an hour.
I weighed 86.7 kilos before lunch. I had Breton crackers with five year old cheddar and a glass of blackberry drink.
My word count was 1839 at 14:00, which was 139 over the maximum with three hours to go.
With about two hours to go I worked out a thesis.
With about one hour to go I started doing the citations but with ten minutes to go I had to settle for missing the last three or four citations so I could meet the grace deadline. My essay was about 50 words short of the minimum. Here it is:
Everybody has a cousin in Miami – Jimmy Buffet
The Comedy and Tragedy of Cousin Connections
in “The Ballad of the Sad Café” by Carson McCullers
and “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie
In Carson McCullers's story “The Ballad of the Sad Café” the kinship connection between half cousins allows Amelia to bridge the defensive distance she maintains between herself and others in order to take on an afflicted man-child as her son. But her attachment to their relationship leads to her tragic downfall. In Sherman Alexie's story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” Jackson's detached generosity towards those he considers to be cousins allows for magic to bring about a happy, fairy tale ending. The lesson that both stories teach is that when one cannot let go of a lost loved one the result is tragedy. But Alexie's story offers the solution of a balance that can breed magic.
In order to gain a perspective on the meaning of these stories, we will begin with some thoughts on the significance of the concept of the cousin. We then look at how cousins play into the lives of Amelia and Jackson at periods of their lives when they are mourning the losses of loved ones. We find that each character experiences a crucial event, with Amelia's at the beginning leading to tragedy and Jackson's at the end resulting in magic. We watch Amelia as she takes on the role of the surrogate mother of her cousin and follow Jackson as he cares for cousins as part of his quest for his grandmother.
“Cousin” is the most general of kinship terms. While siblings cannot be less than half, cousins are the least kin one can have because they can be removed. They become less and less kin with each removal and yet even if they could be removed to infinity they would continue to be kin. That allows the tag to establish more ambiguous links and perform more diverse functions than those shared with siblings, parents and children. The kinship of cousin links one to history in a way that friendship cannot and yet unlike friends one can hold cousins at a comfortable distance. One can disconnect from one's immediate family and connect with cousins with less of the burden of obligation. Cousins can be distant enough that we may remain indifferent to their lives and deaths; or they can be distant enough to mate with and so there is an ironic distinction between closeness and intimacy. The connection of cousin could motivate someone to care for another cousin as one's child who one would not consider adopting otherwise. Calling people “cousins” who are the members of an ethnic group that is more related to one's own than it is to that of the dominant population can create solidarity in the face of oppression. People can pretend they are cousins to create a sense of belonging.
Amelia Evans and Jackson Squared are each mourning the death of a cherished parent or grandparent. Amelia grieves the loss of her father while Jackson laments the passing of his grandmother (McCullers 21)(Alexie 26). These sorrows over the absence of direct source-kin who cared for them as children have resulted for both of them in disconnection from any other immediate relatives. Amelia has a cousin who is as related to her as a half sibling but they do not get along and she rejects any attempts by others who try to establish a familial connection (McCullers 4-5). Jackson is so disconnected from immediate kin that he does not know if he has two or three children (Alexie 1).
But unlike Amelia, Jackson maintains loose kinship connections with those he calls “cousins” and “pretend cousins (Alexie 10, 20).” Big Heart's Indian bar is a pretend cousin bar where he and his cousins join to buy one another drinks until the money runs out (Alexie 24). With these cousins he can engage without the commitment that would be required to connect with his real, almost forgotten children.
But Jackson and Amelia each experience crucial events that allow for the semblance of a closer kin connection through caring for distant cousins.
Amelia's event is the coming of Cousin Lymon and because her connection to him becomes like that of a mother to a son, his arrival is like a birth. He comes down the birth canal of the dusty road from outside of town and he is first mistaken at a distance for an infant animal and then as a human child. He arrives small, out of breath, helpless, and discoloured as a newborn child. He begins to cry and Amelia gives him a bottle. He the baggage or after birth of disconnected parts of machines that sew fabric together and seeks kin connection with Amelia. She reaches out and touches him where he is most visibly in need of healing and their relationship begins with Amelia in the role of mother (McCullers 4-6).
Jackson's event is his connection to his dead grandmother through the winning back of her lost ceremonial dancing regalia (Alexie 39-40). But the difference between the two events is that Jackson's connection takes place at the end of the story, making it a quest towards that happy achievement; while Amelia's joyous connection happens at the beginning, and so provides a height from which Amelia's tragic fall occurs.
Amelia soars in the bliss of maternally caring for Lymon in response to his illnesses and childlike qualities. She protects and nurtures him as he changes overnight into her surrogate son. She spoils and pampers him like a baby, rubbing ointments on his body night and morning (McCullers 11, 14). He is cleaned and dressed in knee pants. He follows wherever she goes and she carries him where he cannot walk (McCullers 15). She comforts him in his fear of the dark and that is also what the café is for (McCullers 15). She puts him to bed and stays until he has finished his prayers. She draws careful safety guidelines to protect him from danger (McCullers 28). He uses her father's snuff box the way a child might pretend by replacing tobacco with cocoa and sugar (McCullers 11). This man-child has “an instinct which is usually found only in small children ... to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in the world (McCullers 12).” He crosses the threshold of Amelia's hard heart to soften it and make her happy in her role as his mother.
Jackson's grandmother's regalia has made him focus although not enough to try to make the money he needs in a conventional way. His way of saving the money he acquires involves depositing it into a bank of kinship as he climbs towards his event. He gets money from a white pawnbroker, a lottery game, and a white cop and spends it on those he considers to be his cousins (Alexie 9, 18, 33). By sharing this money with his “Indian”, Aleut, and Asian cousins rather than saving it he pays into magic. This magic leads to him winning back his grandmother's ceremonial dancing dress and through it a complete reunion with her. He speaks of winning his grandmother's regalia back as if he were a knight in a fairy tale working towards a holy grail. But he gains it back not by striving for money but by connecting with kin in an unconditional way. The pawnshop containing the ghost of his grandmother appears when he has given up and the prize is gained when the pawnshop owner is convinced as if by magic to give the regalia to Jackson. The story is a fairy tale about struggling without seeming to try in an ironic quest in which no obvious effort is made.
Jackson wins a connection with no home while Amelia haunts a home while losing all connection. Her flawed effort to hold onto Lymon is evidenced in her spoiling him beyond reason. She was a midwife to his symbolic birth, she cared for him as a surrogate child but then logically she must face the reality him symbolically growing up and becoming attached to someone else. Attachment brings suffering when it continues in solitude after loss. That is the key to both of these stories. Amelia was attached to her father after he died and that led to a life alone until she became attached to Cousin Lymon. Her abandonment by her surrogate son results in further secluded attachment to mourning that results in her tragic fall from grace. Jackson also fell when he lost his grandmother and this resulted in mental illness, alcoholism and homelessness. But Jackson never drinks alone and his story is a comedy as shown by the fact that he connects with others while still being benevolently detached from them. He maintains a sense that despite his homelessness he continues to belong because he is the flaw sewn into a work of art that completes it.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” The New Yorker. Condé Nast, 2019, pp. 1-40. pdf.
McCullers, Carson. “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” Harper's Bazaar. Gothic Digital Series @ UFSC. 1943. pp. 1-42.
There was snow on the ground plus it was after dark and so I didn't bother to take a bike ride. Instead I did some exercises while watching some more of the “Othello” movie from 1981.
I weighed 87.9 kilos at 18:00.
I made pizza on naan with Florentine sauce, pepperoni, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of The Addams Family.
In this story Morticia's old boyfriend Lionel Barker is coming to visit and Gomez is jealous. She insists he was just a friend. Meanwhile Lionel is now a scam artist selling phony stocks. When Gomez walks into the room in the middle of a conversation he hears Lionel declaring his love for Morticia but he's actually just reciting a poem that he wrote for her a long time ago. Gomez tries to drive Lionel away by making his room uncomfortable. He replaces the hard bed with a soft one and replaces the raven in the cage with a canary. But of course Lionel likes it. Gomez tries hiring a maid named Mildred who is not conventionally beautiful but whom Gomez thinks is a temptress. When her charms don't work on Lionel, Gomez tries to give her her some pointers but Morticia walks in and thinks that Gomez loves another woman. Gomez tries to get Fester to shoot him but he misses and when he tries to hang himself with Fester's rope it turns out to be a magic rope. Both thinking the other loves another Gomez and Morticia are about to say goodbye when Lurch plays a tango and brings them together. Meanwhile Lionel learns that Mildred puts most of her money in stocks and they end up getting married.
Mildred was played by Pattie Chapman, who played Miss Duffy on the show “Duffy's Tavern.”
Lionel was played by Del Moore, who started out in radio. He co-starred with Betty White on Life With Elizabeth and played Cal Mitchell on Bachelor Father. He appeared in several Jerry Lewis movies.
I went to bed at 23:00 because was exhausted after working on and handing in my essay.
