Hope

At the beginning of his poem “The Waste Land” Thomas Stearns Eliot, after wowing us with an opening volley of Latin and Greek, wrote the following:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

I beg to differ with Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot.

April is not the cruellest month.

February is.

[Editor’s note. Readers in the southern hemisphere may wish to substitute August for February. Also, before we proceed further, here is a translation of line 12: “I’m no Russian, derived from Lithuania, truly German.” --RWP]

In February one has usually had quite enough of winter, yet it feels as though winter will go on forever.

In February one forgets what spring, summer, and fall even felt like.

In February one hears weather forecasts such as the one I heard earlier today, “Two feet of snow are expected in the area from New York to Boston and beyond.”

Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot was a strange duck, or at least he had some very strange relatives. Why his cousin, the archduke, would take him out on a sled down a mountain in the middle of summer (that is clearly what the poem implies) and tell him, “Marie, Marie, hold on tight” is beyond me.

And Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot is just plain wrong about winter keeping us warm.

In February one cannot wear enough clothing to get warm.

I know. I’ve tried.

It may be true that April breeds lilacs out of the dead land, but February, if one is very fortunate, will breed jonquils like the ones I saw today growing in a patch by the side of the road.

Those jonquils, my dear readers, are why I called this post “Hope.”

How’s that again?

My son was playing saxophone in a band onstage behind a girl singer at a Christian concert when she urged the college-aged audience to “get up out of your chairs and give Jesus a standing ovulation.”

My 94-year-old friend Rosemary, who always celebrated her birthday for the entire month of February, died last week and just missed being 95. Her most memorable statement in my opinion occurred last year when she asked our mutual friend Sharon to take her to the mall, saying, “I want to get a manicure and a pedophile.”

A third, truly humorous malapropism would have fit nicely into the post at this point, but I cannot vouch personally for a third, truly humorous malapropism. Here’s one, however, that is true but not nearly as humorous. I was present one Sunday evening in 1967 when Blanche D. of Poughkeepsie, New York, who has probably been dead now for years and years, upon hearing of a church trip that was being planned, asked, “What will it curtail?”

What, indeed?

You cannot make this stuff up.

Perhaps you prefer non sequiturs to malapropisms.

We aim to please and, being us, we shall do it in the form of the following poem, which we did not write but which we have known for years and years:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and no wonder,
All the rest eat peanut butter,
Except Grandma, and she smokes a pipe.

I close by wishing my readers a happy February, no matter how many days it has, who eats peanut butter, or what Grandma smokes. Somewhere, Rosemary is celebrating.