Things you may not know about prothonotaries

Every year we visit my wife's parents in Naples (Florida, not Campania), and every year we spend half a day going to Corkscrew Swamp, an Audubon preserve 45 minutes inland. Corkscrew after days of beach and sun is like salad after the main course or cheese with apple pie, a contrast that refreshes the senses, revives desire, and satisfies the craving for complexity in the universe.

This year we saw Painted Buntings, a baby raccoon, a Ghost Orchid so high up in a faraway tree that it had to be viewed through a high-powered monocular on a tripod, bear shit, a baby alligator, and a giant alligator that surfaced silently from the algae on the pond in front of us. But the best thing we saw was a Prothonotary Warbler.

Prothonotary Warblers aren’t rare, but they are difficult to see because they forage in dense foliage low to the ground. Even bird-watchers and ornithologists get excited when they see one, and Alger Hiss’s boast of having sighted a Prothonotary Warbler became, for HUAC, one of the facts that linked him to Whittaker Chambers.

Now, unless you’re tragically incurious, drugged, or dead, you of course want to know what a prothonotary is. I’m glad you asked.

Prothonotaries were high-ranking civil administrators in the Byzantine Empire, 7th through 12th centuries. Prothonotaries still are high officials of the Roman Catholic Church, but they no longer wear the golden robes that give the warbler its name. In the Canadian federal courts, a prothonotary is a judicial officer with many of the powers of a judge. In Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, the prothonotary is the chief court clerk, as he is in the Supreme Courts of the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria.

Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten all of this by tomorrow. It is, after all, a random collection of facts held together by a 12.5-gram bird. And cravings for complexity are quickly sated. My 12- and 14-year old boys forgot the Prothonotary Warbler even faster than tomorrow, first decrying the depressing ugliness of inland Florida strip malls as we drove back from Corkscrew Swamp, then demanding that we stop at one for Dunkin’ Donuts.

I had a Chocolate Glazed Cake Donut and a Chocolate Kreme Filled Donut, and, many days later, I'm still wondering where the salad course is.

Pantywaist goes to hockey game

Once a year my brother-in-law gives the family tickets to a Wild game. We all look forward to it. Hockey is beautiful and exciting. Xcel is a great place to see a game. And the whole experience is other-worldly, not just being surrounded by space aliens, but actually visiting their planet.

This year, as usual, the four of us were the only people in the arena not wearing Wild paraphernalia. And this year, as usual, the greatest pleasure for the 12- and 14-year olds was eating the kind of food they don't get at home. Both boys were done with their Philly cheese steaks before the Star Spangled Banner began, and no, they didn't care that their sandwiches bore no relation to what's served in Philadelphia, or that the cheese glopped over it was mostly vegetable oil with artificial coloring.

A few minutes into the first period, there was a fight. Not a little fight, but the kind where the referees stand aside and let the two guys go at it. The St. Louis Blues player lost his helmet, so his head served as a punching bag for the Wild player. It was probably 60 seconds; it seemed like ten minutes. It was unpleasant.

Not so much because I expected the punchee to start bleeding from his ears and be carted off to die in some green-tiled, fluorescent-lit St. Paul emergency room. But because the crowd cheered every punch, standing and screaming with pleasure, so excited that they might even have spilled some of their beer.

"Watch out," you're thinking, "he's going to make a last-days-of-Rome reference." No I'm not. The cheering needed no tired similes; it was horrible enough on its own. The 12-year old, who spends every waking minute splattering the brains of opposing Call of Duty soldiers against the concrete block walls of nameless Eastern European cities, all the while chortling "head shot" into his headset, was visibly upset. He'd never seen real grownups really fighting, he didn't like it, and he particularly didn't like that thousands of people loved it. The 14-year old asked why they allowed it. "Because everyone loves it," I said, "look around you."

Oh well. The rest of the game was filled with dazzling skating and shot-making. The boys recovered sufficiently to each eat a pizza at the beginning of the second period. The Wild won. We all went home feeling we'd had a cultural adventure. We were exhausted in a good way and, at the same time, excited, so excited that we had huge fight in the car over how to pronounce Guayaquil.

Now there's something worth fighting over. I think if we'd been on skates, there might have been a death or two.

The rabbit in the back yard

I don't care how cute and furry they are, I hate rabbits.

They eat the garden. They're stupid, prone to dying needlessly under the wheels of cars because they freeze in terror, spreading guts and brains and blood and fur all over the road for the crows to clean up. They shit everywhere at will, leaving perfect and delicious Rabbit Trix for my Corgi (a big, manly Cardigan Corgi, by the way, not a small, overweight, sissy Pembroke Corgi) to hoover up endlessly, which is even more disgusting than rabbit bodies in the road. And rabbits breed like rabbits, producing adorable bunny treats for Alice the cat. Alice eats the whole baby, leaving only the skull for me to clean up and the scream of the dying innocent echoing in my ears.

So it was with dismay that I discovered we've acquired a resident rabbit who lives under our front porch. He was in our back yard every night this winter, eating like a king from our compost heap, where he can choose from the leavings of pears, apples, bananas, pineapples, kiwis, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, cabbages both green and red, brussels sprouts, lettuces of all nations, cucumbers, tulips, lilies, and whatever else, all of it flash-frozen to preserve the flavor and nutrition, and decorated with a tasteful dusting of ridiculously expensive coffee grounds from Dunn Bros. With the exception of the root vegetables, it's a small lesson in the evils of the carbon-based economy: burn fossil fuels to transport food, instead of eating locally, and your rabbits will come home to roost.

Even worse, I've come to like him. I'm proud that he's bigger than any other rabbits I see in the alley. The whole family cuts those weird little black berries from the chokeberry bush for him to eat, then applauds when they're gone in the morning. And now that he spends a lot of time in our neighbors' yard, I worry that he's ok.

It can't end well. Spring is here, and he'll start to eat the garden, starting with the alpine strawberry plants that just yesterday appeared from under the ice. Or he'll cross the road looking for a mate and die and I'll have to watch his body decay while the crows carry away the juiciest pieces. Or he will turn out to have been she all along, and she'll have babies, and Alice will eat them, and I'll have to worry that she's sad.

Yeah, I know rabbits don't get sad. But this is my rabbit.

Christmas trees and pigs

I once knew a woman who, when I mentioned my Christmas tree, said, "oh, it's like having a dead body in your house." I understood right away, pondered why I'd never seen it her way before, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it her way ever since.

It hasn't, of course, stopped me from having Christmas trees. But every year at Thanksgiving I wonder what it would be like to have a house with an atrium where our live Christmas tree grew, decorated in late November and undecorated in early January, a member of the family, growing tall with our kids.

This year, for the second or third year in a row, our discarded Christmas tree is propped perfectly vertical in a backyard snow bank. It adds architecture to the yard, relieves the monotony of white, and, as whatever broadside that gave us the idea promised, it gives shelter to the birds. It looks perfectly alive, green and healthy, and it will until the snow melts. Then it will fall over, and all the needles will come off at once, and it will be a skeleton instead of a body, lying on its side in the middle of the spring rebirth.

In perfect non sequitur it will remind me of another friend, a man I knew when I was a vegetarian. "You know," I told him one day, "pigs are really smart animals, you shouldn't eat them." To which he replied, "that's exactly the animals I want to be eating, the really smart ones."

Alfredo, Caesar, and God

Two years ago, when he was 10, #2 son looked up from his banana bread one morning during a discussion of chapel attendance at his Episcopal private school and said, with a directness no one else in the family seems able to muster, "This god stuff is just stupid, there is no god." I didn't argue, since that's my opinion too, but neither did I rush out to buy him a Richard Dawkins book. If he joined his older brother in the kind of atheism that just wants to sleep in on Sunday morning, that was fine with me.

But then his older brother brought up Alfredo and Caesar.

He wanted to know why we didn't have Alfredo sauce in jars so that at a moment's notice he could have Alfredo chicken just the way they serve it in the school cafeteria. He wanted to know why we didn't have Caesar dressing in bottles so that at the drop of a hat he could have a chicken caesar just like the ones he eats in the school cafeteria.

"Because there is no such thing as Alfredo sauce," I said. "There's a famous dish called Fettuccine Alfredo, which is cream and butter and parmesan with a hint of freshly ground nutmeg tossed with fresh pasta. There's no such thing as Caesar dressing either. The famous dish called caesar salad is made with salt, garlic, Tabasco, dry mustard, oil, vinegar, a one-minute egg, anchovies, pepper, and parmesan tossed with romaine."

"If they don't exist, how come everyone else gets to have them?" he asked.

Buying a hat

Fedex has it now. It's on a truck somewhere north of Houston. There's no turning back. I've gone and bought a hat.

Not like my beloved Peruvian wool knit hat from the Linden Hills Coop that's incredibly warm and silly looking. Or like the real French beret made in the Pyrenees (not some hideous Australian knockoff) that I bought for my wife at Saks. She never wears it so she gave it to me, and I never wear it because I look exactly right in it, which makes me feel as if I've stepped out of central casting and I'm waiting for my baguette and bicycle from the prop girl.

Not even a New York Times logo baseball cap, bought at The New York Times itself, bought twice even so each son would get one and then inherited twice when neither wore it more than once.

No, I'm talking about the kind of hat that friends and strangers alike will see, and think, "another silly fart trying to look like Don Draper." Hah, a lot they know.

The hat adventure is an inevitable consequence of the winter coat adventure. I have a terrible electric blue down coat good for walking the dog in fifty below but I didn't have anything else. Brooks Brothers sells a double-breasted camel hair I wanted for $1300. They sell a wonderful cashmere chesterfield for $1200. (Last year their super-fancy label had a dark blue double-breasted number that was right out of a Gilbert and Sullivan production for twice those prices. I wanted it desperately, it became the beautiful girl I couldn't talk to, I gave up.)

So I went to eBay and bought a dark, dark grey, double-breasted, way-below-the-knee overcoat from Hart Schaffner & Marx, that famous Chicago brand. It was $106 plus shipping, it's in perfect condition, and even if the lapels say it's from the 1970s, I look great in it. What's more, Barack wears Hart Schaffner & Marx. But if winter in Minnesota isn't enough reason, the coat cries out for a hat.

A real hat, a fedora, the kind my father put on his head before he walked out the door with The New York Times tucked under his arm, smelling of coffee and Yardley's lavender, heading for the A train that took him to Wall Street. Fedoras are in right now, they're sprinkled liberally all over the web. You can buy one with silly little brims that makes you look like a 1950s hoodlum for $50; you can buy one with felt made of beaver fur that makes you look like a 1950s capitalist for $500.

I was paralyzed. I spent days not working, poring over the alternatives, learning the different shapes and creases and brims. I agonized over linings, sweat bands, silly little feathers, price, and, when I'd decided everything else, brand. Then I made myself buy a hat so I could return to living.

Anyway, Fedex has it, and they should be bringing it to me in a day or two. It's a real Borsalino, and if you laugh at it, I'm going to have Guido beat the crap out of you.

Stone dust

The workmen began the new patio for the house next door about a month ago. The first day or two they used the machine that makes the ground perfectly flat and very hard. It's the kind of machine you'd want to have if you were a little kid, a thumper, and so, even though it's noisy, it's hard to get mad at it. And it doesn't make a mess.

Then the men began sawing stone. No little kid would want the stone-sawing machine. It's like having a dozen giant, evil dentists drilling in your front yard, minus the screams of pain from the dozen victims. It also produces a cloud of white stone dust that floats merrily in whatever direction the wind wants. Most of the time, that's toward our house. The men did take a break for a day or two to saw brick, and that changed the dust cloud to a dried blood pinkish red. They've long since gone back to stone, but I know that, if they ever finish, there are 25 or 30 steps up from the street still to be covered in brick.

A month into the work, every window and every windowsill is coated with stone dust. We've long ago given up any thought of having a drink or eating on our front deck. The dog and cat leave stone dust footprints as they walk through the house. And when we close a screen door, the bang produces a little mushroom cloud of stone dust.

The most alarming part is that we've gotten used to it. We're like the people who live in the one-industry town who know that the exuviae from the giant factory is poisonous and ugly but who also know that complaining about it is futile. Would our lovely, polite, friendly neighbors understand if we told them how we feel? And would that stop the work? No and no.

I'm just glad I can't see our lungs.