Since Last We Spoke: essays

By Mary Langton

In her latest collection of newspaper columns, Mary Langton once again displays the wit and wisdom her readers have come to expect. By turns humorous and touching, "Since Last We Spoke" is Langton's long overdue new book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823016858

Mary Langton

Mary Langton has been a teacher, a newspaper columnist, and a radio personality. Originally from Queens, she lives in Orange County, New York.

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© 2023 Mary Langton. All rights reserved.

© by The Senior Gazette

Author photograph by P.A.L.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/13/2023

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1686-5 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-1685-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023920667

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

In Memoriam

Helen Cotter Walsh

1905-1978

Also by Mary Langton

Essays

News from the Neighborhood

American Idylls

The Bright Processional

Sense and Nonsense

Fiction

Dividing Line: Stories

Satire is what closes on Saturday night.

—George S. Kaufman

Contents

SINCE LAST WE SPOKE

Ghost Ship

In Search of a Floorwalker

April’s Fools

What’s in a Ship’s Name?

Donald Hall: Still Writing at Eighty-Six

The Season for a New Furnace

Of Lollipops and Character

Preparing for a Disaster

The Day the Rabbits Got Greedy

On Becoming a Great-Grandmother

Ye Gods! What’s Up with Greece?

DOLLAR SIGNS

Brother, Can you Spare Two Dimes?

Burning the Mortgage

So You Want to Cash Your Bonds?

No Such Thing as a Free Mug

Full Nest

Saving for a Rainy Day

How to Be a Millionaire

My Kind of True-False Test

The Meeting of the Malls

Saving the Post Office

Dude, Where’s My Tire?

The Elusive Dream of Retirement

LEISURE TIME

Danger at the Movies

Barbara Cook: Still Singing at Eighty-Eight

Senior Health and Fitness

A Thunderclap Voice

Don’t Miss This Show

All Aboard for Legoland?

Skipping the Movies

Remote Possibilities

Back to the Movies!

The Internet at Twenty-Five

The Marx Brothers Never Get Old

The Once and Future Library

What We’ll Miss About Downton Abbey

April is the Most Poetic Month

E-mails are Forever

I DON’T FEEL SO GOOD MYSELF

Butterfly or Bust

Are Women’s Memories Better?

Hold the Salt…and the Sugar

Nauseated

Of Shingles and Downton Abbey

The Mull on the Floss

Yoga, Forsooth!

David Shows His Age

Oh, to be Eighty-Five Again!

OF THEE I SING

Fun with the Farmers’ Almanac

Grover Cleveland’s Secret

A Presidential Pop Quiz

A Fourth of July Test

Until Every One Comes Home

Duty, Honor, Country

FARE THEE WELL

So Long, Mary

James Garner: An Appreciation

A Fond Farewell to Maureen O’Hara

Olivia de Havilland: A Golden Age Actress

Doris Day: A Timeless Star

A Pillar of the Community

HOLIDAY CHIRPINGS

A Halloween Story

Seventy-Five Years of Chocolate Chip Cookies

Decking Morrison Hall

The Perfect Holiday Pet

O Christmas Tree

How to Avoid Gift Returns

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!

Blessings on Your House

Acknowledgments

About the Author

SINCE LAST WE SPOKE

Ghost Ship

If you’re a fan of Errol Flynn movies—and who isn’t?—you’ve surely seen both Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. The best parts of those swashbucklers are the sea battles. Tall, majestic ships face off on the open sea, cannons blazing and decks serving as hosts to dueling privateers whose skill with rapiers is nothing short of astounding. Plus, there is Errol Flynn in tights, a look so few men can pull off.

So when I read in the newspaper that a replica of an actual Spanish galleon had pulled into port at the Newburgh waterfront, where it would dock for six days, I knew I had to go see it.

I drove to the waterfront on a recent Saturday, the second-to-last day of the ship’s planned stay in Newburgh. On the way, I did not listen to the radio or pop a CD into the CD player. Instead I invented a sea shanty:

I’m off to Newburgh to see a great ship,

Aye, the floating beauty will be worth the trip.

Way, hey, blow the man down!

She’s near two-hundred feet and weighs five-hundred tons,

With a crew of twenty and replica guns.

Way, hey, blow the man down!

But as the buildings that line the waterfront hove into view, the sea shanty died in my throat. I should have been able to see the ship’s main-mast rising above the buildings; galleons are not also known as tall ships for nothing. I could spy no mast, no sails. Something was amiss.

The Dutch were the first Europeans to colonize Manhattan, and one of the reasons they did it was to have a convenient port from which to set sail in search of Spanish galleons to attack and plunder. In his fascinating book on Dutch Manhattan, Island at the Center of the World, Russell Shorto describes one such attack.

It occurred in 1628. By that time, Spanish galleons had for decades been transporting riches from South America to Spain twice annually in convoys of as many as ninety ships, comprising what was known as the treasure fleet. These ships were laden with gold, silver, and spices. In May of 1628, thirty-one Dutch gunships lay in wait off the coast of Cuba. When the Spanish galleons came into view, the Dutch pounced. The galleons were too slow and heavy to fight effectively against the smaller, more nimble Dutch ships. The amount of the haul—twelve million guilders of silver and gold—was enough, Shorto writes, to stoke the Dutch economy for years.

If the actions of the Dutch seem mean, consider the fact that Spain and the Netherlands were at war at the time. All’s fair.

The ship I searched for at the Newburgh waterfront would have looked very much like the Spanish galleons that made up the treasure fleet. The replica ship, named the Andalucia, was carefully designed over a period of five years to ensure authenticity before being built and then setting sail in 2010. It is made of hardwood, just as its predecessors were, and has a total of seven sails and a hull roomy enough to carry tons of trade goods, which is what galleons were designed to do.

But where was the Andalucia? Nobody seemed to know. I’d parked the car and then stood at Newburgh’s Riverfront Marina, scanning the horizon like an old-time mariner’s wife and asking passersby if they’d seen the tall ship.

What tall ship? was the invariable response. Bunch of landlubbers.

I finally spied a small sign attached to the marina’s fence. It read, Due to bad weather forecast, the Spanish galleon had to leave early.

Alas, the ship had sailed. I never got a chance to see it, let alone board it and take a tour. As a pirate would say, Arrrgh!

In Search of a Floorwalker

At the pharmacy I frequent the cashiers have begun to ask me a question as I place my purchases on the checkout counter. The question is this: Is there anything else I could have helped you find today? The fact that every cashier asks this question and phrases it in precisely the same way is proof that they have been directed to do so by management.

The question is an odd one because it comes too late. By the time customers are asked if anything could have been done differently, we have already done what we came into the store to do. Mission accomplished. Or, if the mission is only partially accomplished—if, for instance, we could not, after five minutes of trying, locate the salsa—we have signaled our desire to end the search mission by joining the checkout line.

(These days, drug stores really do sell salsa. I know, right? Weird.)

The verb tense used by the pharmacy’s cashiers is a clear signal that we have moved into the realm of alternate history. In fiction, the alternate-history genre is popular with some readers. Novelists create scenarios in which history as we know it is turned on its head—for example, the Axis powers, rather than the Allies, win World War II—and explore what the world would be like if the fake history were the real history.

I am not a fan of alternate history. The real thing is interesting enough for me. I am also not a fan of being asked if something could have been done for me at some point in the past, something that was not done when I needed it and can’t be done now. The cashiers in the pharmacy are doing what they are trained to do, and management may mean well, but it’s too late.

And there’s this: By asking if there is anything else she could have helped me find, the cashier implies that she already helped me find something. In fact she did not. More alternate history.

Where was the cashier ten minutes ago, when I needed help finding things? She was stuck behind the checkout counter, that’s where. She was busy ringing up other customers after asking them if there was anything else she could have helped them find even though she could not have helped them find anything because she was behind the checkout counter ringing up customers…and so on into infinity.

The cashiers themselves doubtless wish they did not have to ask such a silly question. I try to imagine the staff meeting at which they received their training. I imagine it went something like this:

STORE MANAGER: Okay, folks, listen up. A new directive has just come down from corporate headquarters. From now on, whenever customers come to the checkout and start placing their items on the counter, cashiers are to say to them, Is there anything else I could have helped you find today?

FIRST CASHIER: Isn’t it too late by then? Isn’t it kind of reminding the customers that they didn’t get the assistance they needed when they needed it?

SECOND CASHIER: Really. Won’t that question just make the customers mad?

STORE MANAGER: It’s always a thousand questions with you cashiers. Why this and why that. How about a little cooperation for a change? This comes from corporate.

What customers need is not nonsensical questions. What customers need are floorwalkers. Remember floorwalkers? As their job title implies, floorwalkers were store employees who roamed the store, supervising employees and, more importantly, assisting customers long before the customers reached the checkout stage.

Floorwalkers seem to have vanished, a casualty of retail’s bottom line. All too often these days I find myself leaving a store in frustration, unable to find what I am looking for and equally unable to find an employee to assist me.

The next time a cashier asks me if there is anything else she could have helped me find, I just might say, Yes. A floorwalker.

April’s Fools

By the time you read this, April the giraffe may have given birth, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

April was due sometime in the middle of February. At this writing it is sometime in the middle of April (the month, not the giraffe). You are reading these words sometime in the middle of May. Let me guess: still no baby giraffe, right?

A female giraffe is known as a cow. The reason I know this is that I just looked it up. The reason I looked it up is that I was hoping to learn that a female giraffe is known as a doe. The reason I was hoping that a female giraffe is known as a doe is that I had a pun in mind that I really wanted to use: Waiting for a doe.

Waiting for Godot. Waiting for a doe. Not only is that a delightful pun, it serves a dual purpose: we are waiting for April to give birth, and we are also waiting for the baby giraffe to be born. And if that giraffe is female…a double pun!

It would have been awesome if a female giraffe were known as a doe, but it’s not. It’s a cow. And a baby giraffe, male or female, is a calf. Too bad. Such a delightful pun gone to waste. What can you do with cow and calf? Not much.

Ever since a live stream of a very pregnant April was posted to YouTube by zookeepers at Animal Adventure Park in upstate Harpursville in February, the long-necked bovine has been an Internet sensation. Millions of people around the world tuned in to see the miraculous event.

In a sure sign that April had arrived, she even became the subject of a censorship controversy: some individuals believed that showing an animal give birth was a naughty thing to do. My own concern was that April may be a modest giraffe who would prefer not to have such a private moment broadcast. But the controversy died away, as controversies often do, and the April feed was up and running again.

But then viewers began to tune out. It turns out that waiting for a miraculous event can get pretty boring when the event refuses to occur, and because people had other things they had to do, like go to school or work, or take out the garbage.

The problem is that April, when she is not giving birth, which is virtually all the time, doesn’t do much of anything else. Mostly she just stands in her stall. Animals can be funny that way: they stand when they can sit. Horses do it. So do cows. Humans are smarter: you will never catch a human watching TV while standing up. I want to say to April, Sit down while you can, hon. Once the baby comes you won’t have a chance to.

But on the first of April (the month, not the giraffe) former followers of April (the giraffe, not the month) returned in droves when it was announced that the little one’s arrival was imminent. Unfortunately, that announcement turned out to be a hoax. An April Fools’ joke, and a pretty good one. It certainly fooled me.

I’m starting to suspect that there may be another, bigger joke going on here. Is April even pregnant? She doesn’t appear to be. She’s just not very—how can I put this?—fat. She seems rather streamlined for someone about to experience a blessed event.

I’ve seen enough nature documentaries to be able to tell when a wild animal is in the final stages of pregnancy. Like pregnant humans, pregnant animals get big and unwieldy. Plus, we have received no reports of April making middle-of-the-night requests for ice cream and pickles.

Is it possible that the whole story of April the pregnant giraffe is in reality an Internet hoax? Maybe we’re all April’s fools. But no, because in order for that to be the case, the zoo would have to be complicit. And if you can’t