Tuesday
Our household is in turmoil at the moment. My nine-year-old grandson arrived on Friday, only to see his 95-year-old great grandmother loaded into an ambulance that evening with a fractured pelvis. Rest, physical therapy, and more frequent meals is all they can prescribe, but she’ll be in the hospital for a while. She will appreciate how Alban and I are fulfilling my father’s vision for the house, however.
We’ve been playing many of the games my father loved. There’s a shuffleboard court on one side of the house, a ping pong table on the screen porch, and we’ve taken on chess and checkers on the deck off the dining room. We’re currently reading a course my father read to us–Cecil Day-Lewis’s Otterbury Incident–and yesterday we went swimming in the lake that our house overlooks, spending some time in my father’s rowboat. We haven’t yet set up the foosball table, and his vision of bat mitten and ring toss on the upper deck had to be abandoned years ago when the roof developed leaks. Poison ivy also abounds around the horseshoe court so we’ll probably pass that up. Still, my father would love to see what we’re up to.
I’m gratified that Alban is also enthusiastic about my own passion, which is tennis. He had a very successful lesson with Sewanee’s wondrous tennis coach, John Shackelford, and we’ve been doing his tennis exercises since then.
To get a sense of my father’s vision, here’s one of his Christmas poems that I’ve shared in the past. It’s a parody of the famous Francois Villon poem, which I’ve included for comparison purposes.
I can report that Alban hasn’t lamented our lack of video games.
Ballad of the Games of Yesteryear
By Scott BatesOh, tell me where, in what fair lands
Lie all the games we used to play,
The gliders launched with rubber bands,
Trucks, trains, and marbles, kites, croquet,
Diabolo and bilboquet,
Kick the Can and Ducks and Deer;
Where are the toys of yesterday?
Where are the games of yesteryear?The stockings stuffed with jelly beans
We used to open starry-eyed
Now swell with murderous machines
Designed for kiddy fratricide;
Malevolent monsters lurk inside
The packages of Christmas cheer
Angrily waiting to get untied . . .
Where are the games of yesteryear?
Computer wars are grimly in
And guts and gore are all the go,
Death Stars invade the Planet Minh,
And cosmic killers run the show;
“As Barbie’s kissing G.I. Joe,
Six slimy aliens appear…”
(Which costs, of course, a lot of dough)–
Where are the games of yesteryear?
ENVOIConsumer Parent, spare thy purse,
Waste not thy wealth on guns and gear;
Go buy a book—you could do worse—
And dream of games of yesteryear.
Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times
By Francois VillonTell me where, or in what land
is Flora, the lovely Roman,
or Archipiades, or Thaïs,
who was her first cousin;
or Echo, replying whenever called
across river or pool,
and whose beauty was more than human?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?Where is that brilliant lady Heloise,
for whose sake Peter Abelard was castrated
and became a monk at Saint-Denis?
He suffered that misfortune because of his love for her.
And where is that queen who
ordered that Buridan
be thrown into the Seine in a sack?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?Queen Blanche, white as a lily,
who sang with a siren’s voice;
Big-footed Bertha, Beatrice, Alice,
Arembourg who ruled over Maine;
and Joan, the good maiden of Lorraine
who was burned by the English at Rouen —
where are they, where, O sovereign Virgin?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?Prince, do not ask in a week
where they are, or in a year.
The only answer you will get is this refrain:
But where are the snows of yesteryear?
