Once More to the Lake

                                                           Once More to the Lake

Upon reading E.B. White's Once More to the Lake, I too started to be overcome with nostalgia. To me, lakes are the source of a great number of memories, good and bad. In many ways, my experiences mirrored what White wrote about in his memoir. Similar to White, I can relate to seasonal visits, "We returned summer after summer-always on August 1st for one month". In Canada, this is referred to as "Cottage Season", from Victoria Day(May 24th) until Labor Day(first Monday of Septembre). Another visit down memory lane arose when White describes his son putting on a damp and cold bathing suit, as he prepares to jump into the lake, "Languidly, and with no thought of going in in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death." White captures this experience perfectly. Putting on a cold swim suit, is very unpleasant. In my opinion, the chill of death experience refers to the anticipation of jumping into the cold water of a lake. You have to be out your mind to voluntarily jump into 60oF or 70oF water. The immediate experience is shock. The best method is to jump in, because the pain is over relatively quickly. Some people meander in, claiming that they want to acclimatize themselves slowly, inch by inch. This method is as close to torture as I would ever like to come.

     

Mother Tongue

                                                            Mother Tongue


I was not impressed with Amy Tam's commentary in her essay Mother Tongue. What is more, I am an immigrant to the United States, so I believe I have skin in this game. Furthermore, none of my grandparents had English as their first language, making my parents the equivalent generation as Amy Tam. I understand Chinese(correct me if I am wrong, but she never specified: Cantonese or Mandarin) has absolutely no correlation to English. Understandably, when Tam's mother moved to California, she started English from nothing! Similarly, two of my grandparents conversed in Hungarian amongst themselves, and spoke English and French with an accent, as they moved from Slovakia and Romania, to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Herein lies the difference; nothing mattered more to my grandparents than assimilation into North American culture. They did not teach my father and his siblings any of their 6 languages, only English. So, it sounds foreign to me when I read " I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well." First of all, what does "almost" imply? Secondly, Tam was in Pre-Med before transferring to English as a major in university, what possibilities were limited?  At no point throughout this memoir do I recall feeling compassion towards the victim mentality status Tam pontificates upon.

The Fight

09/15/12

                                                   Champion of the World


I think it's appropriate to firstly lay some contextual facts on the main event of the story. Joe, the "Brown Bomber" Louis, an up an coming Heavyweight boxer, had a successful bought against Primo Carnera, on June 25, 1935, remaining undefeated at 20-0. Dr. Maya Angelou(née Marguerite Ann Johnson) was born on April 4, 1928, making her 7 years old at the time of the contest. Dr. Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969.
I don't believe the boxing match was the content of the story. Ironically, I see it as a vehicle in portraying the fight people of color were having against segregation, particularly in the Jim Crow south. If my interpretation is even remotely accurate, the psychology of this seven year old child had been molded around existing with racism.
The most conclusive evidence of the presence of segregation is Dr. Angelou's parting words, " It wouldn't be fit for a black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world." I would conclude that no matter the outcome of the fight,  under no circumstance should a person of color been caught on a country road, because racist authorities could use a victory or defeat as an argument to provoke a violent encounter. To say that there was a double standard for black people during that time is a gross understatement. To say that race tensions are a thing of the past in the United States, is laughable. I am fortunate however that Dr. Angelou wrote this chapter in her auto biography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as it humanizes people that were unjustly accused of being "lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes." I can't imagine myself at age 7 having that frame of mind, can you? I wouldn't wish it upon anyone!

  Eye to eye, minus the scale.