Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Your flexibility is the first thing to go

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Mike Peterson Published: March 29, 2013 1 minute 2 comments

"Between Friends" is more a "chuckle of recognition" than "burst of laughter" strip, a genre which takes a certain touch of insight if it's going to rise above "guys always leave the toilet seat up" observational so-whatness. Sandra Bell-Lundy, fortunately, has that touch.

Which is to say, sometimes it's more of a sigh than a chuckle. The girls have been trying for the entire week to plan a quick getaway, but, while they all want to get away, "quick" has become something of an issue, as has the definition of just what a "getaway" consists of.

Part of Lundy's craft is that only Maeve would ask "What has happened to us?" 

The most disheartening sigh of all comes from how readily the other two are able to answer the question. Perhaps a decade ago, they'd have wondered, but now they have their reasons right at hand, and they don't introduce them as "Oh good lord, you're right, what has happened to us?" but as actual answers. 

Sigh, indeed.

Here's what we're not talking about: Over in another of my favorite female-penned strips, Stone Soup, Joan and Wally are off on a trip to Paris, but not without the past week-and-a-half having featured Joan's unwillingness to leave the kids in the capable and familiar hands of her sister and mother.

But this is not stodginess. This is a guilt-and-insecurity issue related to workaholism.

It is a commonplace to say that workaholics refuse to take vacations because they fear their employers will find out that the place can get along without them. I don't buy it: I think it's because they fear that they will find out the place can get along without them.

If Val and Evie want to be kind, they'll rub some dirt and spaghetti sauce on the kids before they pick Joan and Wally up from the airport at the end of the trip.

That's a different matter, however, than simply not being flexible enough to make a plan on the spur of the moment, and, while Susan and Kim could, technically, plead parenthood as an excuse, it would be a stretch: their kids are in middle school and high school respectively and their husbands are supportive.

No, they aren't guilt-stricken. They're just stuck in the mud.

Nor is this about overall life-altering flexibility. Maeve isn't proposing that they all quit their jobs and strike out on some kind of odyssey. 

That's a whole other topic, which sparked this reasonably epic rant last year. I sometimes think about getting a camper and hitting the road, but I remember how, when I went footloose in the Sixties, I lasted about a week before I looked for a room to rent. Lease-free turned out to be all the rootlessness I wanted.

I felt somewhat guilty about that over the years, until "Travels With Charley" was proven to be largely bullshit. Now I'm okay with it.

No, we're talking more about just having the flexibility to head down to Pamplona for a few days of fiesta and bullfighting. 

When I read "The Sun Also Rises" at 20, I was totally enamored with Brett Ashley and the whole scene, and I wasn't alone. Young men my age were buying botas and filling them with bad wine, and I even knew a guy who moved to Paris for a year or two to write.

I knew, even at 20, that being in Paris would not improve the quality of your prose, but I had broken up with a Brett Ashley of my own about a year before, and it wasn't until I re-read the book in my early 40s that I realized how very, very, very lucky I was to have done so. 

Still, yet another 20 years down the road, I have picked up enough of archy the cockroach to think there is something sad in having become so freaking wise and cautious.

As it happens, my father, who was 48 at the time, turned me on to this archy poem shortly after he met my version of Lady Brett Ashley. He didn't mention her specifically, but neither was it a coincidence: 

i was talking to a moth

the other evening

he was trying to break into

an electric light bulb

and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows

pull this stunt i asked him

because it is the conventional

thing for moths or why

if that had been an uncovered

candle instead of an electric

light bulb you would

now be a small unsightly cinder

have you no sense

plenty of it he answered

but at times we get tired

of using it

we get bored with the routine

and crave beauty

and excitement

fire is beautiful

and we know that if we get

too close it will kill us

but what does that matter

it is better to be happy

for a moment

and be burned up with beauty

than to live a long time

and be bored all the while

so we wad all our life up

into one little roll

and then we shoot the roll

that is what life is for

it is better to be a part of beauty

for one instant and then to cease to

exist than to exist forever

and never be a part of beauty

our attitude toward life

is to come easy go easy

we are like human beings

used to be before they became

too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him

out of his philosophy

he went and immolated himself

on a patent cigar lighter

i do not agree with him

myself i would rather have

half the happiness and twice

the longevity

but at the same time i wish

there was something i wanted

as badly as he wanted to fry himself

AND SPEAKING OF MOTHS AND OF BULL:  "The Sun Also Rises" was based on an actual trip that Hemingway made, and I have a book that analyzes that true-life experience, his first drafts and the final novel. While I recommend that for serious students of literature, those of a more frivolous bent will get more out of A.E. Hotchner's telling of going to bullfights with Hemingway for The Moth. It is one of the funniest stories I have ever heard, and I'd have linked it farther up, but then you'd have never made it here. Call it a reward for those who have!

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.