Journal of a Sabbatical

January 28, 2001

in the grippe of hypos, and a really pink movie

Today's Bird Sightings:

Watchemoket Cove
Canada goose (313)
ring-billed gull (250)
herring gull (10)
bufflehead (6)
hooded merganser (4)
mallard (37)
canvasback (33)
great black-backed gull (1)
Bonaparte's gull (3)
common goldeneye (4)
mute swan (110 - Yikes!)
starling (8)
domestic goose (3)

Today's Reading: How to Use Your Eyes by James Elkins

The "baths" picture was taken last week on the way home from something or other. I loved the way the light reflected in the window sort of spread out and merged the colors.

We rented Not One Less last night. It's a wonderful story about a 13 year old substitute teacher in a remote rural village in China who goes to the big city to retrieve one of her students. The first part moves really slowly and is really pink. Really. I don't know what the director's or cinematographer's thing about pink is but the land is pink the sky is pinkish, the kids wear pink shirts, did Mao proclaim "The East is Pink!" and I missed it? In one scene in the city, this obnoxious receptionist (who reminded me of the fax and copier harridans at the Beijing National Herbarium) has a pink telephone and a pink thermos on her desk. I don't remember China as being that pink. Otherwise, I highly recommend this movie. The children are spontaneous and adorable and the story unexpectedly powerful and moving.

In one of Whittier's letters that I was reading aloud to Nancy last night he referred to having just recovered from grippe. Nancy: "What's grippe?" Me: "One of those things people only got in the 19th century like hypos." Both of us: "No, wait, people had grippe in the 1950's!" We both remembered hearing of people having grippe, though neither of us remember ever being told we had it. Then we started wondering. When did people stop getting grippe? Why wasn't there a big announcement from the CDC about how they'd conquered grippe? Was it related to hypos? I just kept laughing harder and harder.

I wondered about hypos too. For the longest time I thought Melville had made it up, that it wasn't a real disease. The only place I'd ever heard of it was in Moby Dick after all:

. . . whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. -- Moby Dick, Herman Melville

However, I began to think it might be a real diagnosis, albeit one people could only suffer from in the 19th century when I saw a reference to it in Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian by Sarah Anna Emery. Then one of Whittier's letters referred to it (in the passage about the cerulean influences of the blue-visaged imps) so I got curioser and curioser.

In reading a hilarious poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes about all these luxuries he could do without we came to a reference to "buhl". Neither of us knew what that was so it was time to drag out the huge unabridged dictionary, what with buhl, grippe, and hypos to look up. The entry for buhl said to see boulle.

boulle (Pronunciation: 'bül, 'byü(&)), noun

Etymology: André Charles Boulle died 1732 French cabinetmaker

Definition: inlaid decoration of tortoiseshell, yellow metal, and white metal in cabinetwork

grippe: (Pronunciation: grip), noun

Definition: an acute febrile contagious virus disease; especially : INFLUENZA

hypo: (Inflected form: hypos)

Definition: hypochondria, extreme depression of mind or spirits often [but not always] centered on imaginary physical ailments. This one wasn't in Nancy's big dictionary. I found it at Britt's Ever-Expanding Vocabulary.

So now that we know people still get grippe but call it the flu, we want to know when it changed. And what do we call hypos now?

And somehow both of us had forgotten that Oliver Wendell Holmes the poet who wrote Old Ironsides was not the same person as Oliver Wendell Holmes the Supreme Court Justice Nancy is always quoting: ". . . it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged never to have lived." Just goes to show how much or how little of that grade school stuff sticks in the brain. I can still recite "Aye tear her tattered ensign down... the harpies of the shore shall pluck the eagle of the sea..." and so on but the fact that it was the poet's son and not the poet himself who distinguished himself on the Supreme Court just flew right out of the old noggin. No wonder I thought he must have been extraordinarily talented as well as long-lived. He was two people!