Normally I don't have a lot
to say about either acedia or plywood cows, yet today I
do.
The glasses place called yesterday
morning to tell me the custom clip on sunglasses for the
new hip glasses had finally arrived and I could pick them
up any time. Did I rush out to pick them up? No. I went
back to bed untl Car Talk came on the radio. I
wrote a couple of journal entries for last week and
yesterday. I took a long shower. I got dressed. I made
cheese and avocado sandwiches and a pot of coffee, which
I then consumed. I went to the ATM to get money to pay
for the laundry. I picked up the clean laundry and
dropped off the giant mound of dirty laundry. By the time
I made it to the glasses place, they had closed for the
day. I forgot they close early on Saturday. Since I'd
already paid for parking, I wandered into the Andover
Bookstore sort of vaguely in search of The Best
Spiritual Writing of 2004. Why that was on my mind
today when what I wanted it for was to give to La Madre
for Christmas, I have no idea. Anyway, they had it and I
bought two copies: one for La Madre and impulsively one
for Nancy.
So before going out to dinner at
Ran Zan and renting Triplets of Belleville so we
could see it for the third time, we were sitting around
talking. For some reason, Nancy was talking about acedia
(a kind of spiritual ennui, classified as one of the
seven deadly sins). Normally I think of acedia in terms
of afflicting desert-dwelling monks, but she was talking
about grad students. Me? I think there's such a general
lack of spirituality of any kind in so much of American
life that it's hard to conceive of not experiencing
acedia at least in daily working life. A bit later,
leafing through the table of contents of The Best
Spiritual Writing of 2004 and reading the titles of
the selected writings aloud to Nancy, I read "The Noonday
Demon". Nancy perked right up at that. "The
Noonday Demon? That's
another name for a word I just said!" Of course the
conversation had meandered and it took me awhile to
realize she meant acedia. Somehow, I don't think many
couples are sitting around talking about acedia on a
Saturday night.
Then Sunday afternoon we were
having tea at The Coffee Depot in Warren, when I picked
up a copy of The
SouthCoast Insider,
Actually, there was a copy of it on every table, and
turned to an article about turned to an article about
some kind of exotic calf recently born at the
Buttonwood
Park Zoo in New Bedford.
After all the interesting stuff about their preserving
rare cattle breeds, it mentioned that they had also added
a plywood cow so that kids could experience what it's
like to milk a cow. Milking a plywood cow? In what way is
milking a plywood cow anything like the experience of
milking a cow? I imagined pulling on the plywood teats
and getting splinters. I lamented to Nancy that a plywood
cow couldn't possibly be the same as feeling the warm
teat in your hand, smelling the cow, smelling the hay,
sitting in the barn early in the morning... I had such a
vivid memory of milking cows on my cousin's farm in Maine
as a child that I could almost taste the milk. There is
nothing quite like warm milk fresh out of the cow's
udder. Especially when you squirt it all over yourself.
This total disconnect between us and food in the modern
world struck me as grounds enough for acedia as the
normal mental state of modernity.
When I got home tonight I browsed
around the web for more information on plywood cows and
found out that they use non-latex gloves filled with
milk-tinted liquid to simulate the cow's udder. OK, so at
least kids aren't getting splinters from milking plywood
cows, but the idea that this is as close as kids ever get
to cows nowadays just strikes me as very very sad.
