The Cicadas

 By the middle of May, there were cicada shells thick on many lawns in the neighborhood. I saw a little boy a block from here collecting the shells as his mother watched. I saw one fly by that weekend, and my wife saw one walk across the garage stoop. During the third week of May we saw few flying, but many squished on the pavement. The neighborhood dogs had mixed reactions. One I know of--with suspect tastes to begin with--ate every cicada he could reach. Others would sample them, others still regarded cicadas as something to look at but not to eat.

When we first started to hear them, they sounded like the sort of mechanical noise one hears through a large building's air-conditioning system, suggesting something poorly lubricated in the machinery. At their peak, about the beginning of June, the cicadas made a noise like sirens half a mile away. The volume of the noise seemed to be correlated with the heat. It took a while for them to be heard in Rock Creek Park, which is usually a few degrees cooler than the surrounding areas.

A couple of Saturdays ago, a young man came down the street with a plastic bag, harvesting what cicadas he could find. I thought it odd that someone who planned to eat cicadas should be wearing latex gloves to grasp them. But I referred him to the locust trees a couple of blocks away, where my wife had said that the cicadas were thick.

Then there was a heavy rain, and after that one did not see or hear the cicadas as much.

They are not handsome or agile insects. They are slow in flight, slow afoot, and they are top-heavy--a cicada on its back is unable to right itself. But every seventeen years they make quite a show.

The birds appreciate them. A neighbor whom I saw picking serviceberries said that most years he has to race to get them before the birds, but that this year the birds were indifferent to them, apparently preferring protein to sugar. And the cicada killing wasps of course appreciated them. One of these wasps dug its hole in our front flower bed, removing a good deal of spoil:

 

 

Signs

1.  With graduation ceremonies canceled last year, families of seniors graduating from high school put out yard signs with the schools' names, colors, and emblems. This year, there is a yard with two signs, one for middle school just left, one for high school to be started. The signs are a novelty, and informative: I'm not surprised that so-and-so graduated from X, but who's the kid that went to Y?--I never saw a teenager at that house. I know three students in the neighborhood due to graduate from the same high school next year. I trust they'll get an in-person ceremony, with or without a yard sign.
2. About every two hundred yards along a stretch of Rock Creek, one sees two signs close together: "Stay Safe/Stay Dry" and "Mantente Seco/Mantente Seguro", each with a statement in smaller type stating why one should stay out of Rock Creek. At greater or lesser intervals, there are people in Rock Creek. Some are small children, some teenagers, some adults. This happens even where one often catches the whiff of sewage. My wife has spoken to some of the people in the creek, with no greater effect on them than the signs had.
   

Back to the Barbershop

 For many years I have gone to a barbershop near my office, in the basement level of an office building mostly occupied by a think tank. It is close enough that I can get a haircut on my lunch hour, or after work be close to my usual bus stop. But its convenience depends on my being at the office, which I hardly been have since last March.

 At first, my wife would cut my hair. She has a good eye, and is good with her hands, so that she did an excellent  job despite the lack of adequate scissors. She got tired of this, and when our son returned from Los Angeles and located a decent barbershop in Adams-Morgan, I tagged along. The barbers there are good, but the shop is not in convenient round-trip walking distance.

 Yesterday I called the barbershop near work. The barber was in and recognized my name and voice--she asked whether I had a pandemic pony tail--and we arranged a time. I found that I had forgotten the convenience of going to a familiar barber, who does not need to ask what one wants. She may have asked, The usual?, or she may have not. In any case, she gave me the usual haircut with her usual proficiency.

At the end, she showed me her phone, with an array of before-and-after pictures of men who had arrived with manes of hair and left with good haircuts. For more than forty years, I have aimed to have a haircut about once a month, so I am no longer a good judge of this; but I'd say that most of the men pictured had done without a haircut for three or four months, and the champion perhaps six months. All pictures were taken from behind to preserve privacy in case she should put them up on her Facebook page. I don't think my hair on arrival was shaggy enough to warrant a place in the array, but I didn't notice whether she took photos.

 

Exegesis

 Some years ago, the University of Notre Dame hired a new football coach. The position of football coach at Notre Dame is an important one in American sports,  so I happened to read an account of his first press conference in one of the eastern papers, either The New York Times or The Washington Post. There was nothing particularly interesting until the end. Then, according to the reporter, the coach said, I intend to die like St. Peter,  leaning on my staff. However, the coach's brother, I suppose one of his staff, tugged at his sleeve and whispered a correction. The coach then amended St. Peter to St. Paul.

I thought this oddly at variance with the received hagiographies, particularly for men with an Irish surname coaching at a prominent Catholic school. I remarked on this to family members with connections to Notre Dame, and forgot about it.

But last week in reading Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise I found

Those who are ignorant of this fact cannot justify the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews for interpreting (chap. xi:21) Genesis (xlvii:31) very differently from the version given in our Hebrew text as at present pointed, as though the Apostle had been obliged to learn the meaning of Scripture from those who added the points. In my opinion the latter are clearly wrong. In order that everyone may judge for himself, and also see how the discrepancy arose simply from the want of vowels, I will give both interpretations. Those who pointed our version read, "And Israel bent himself over, or (changing Hqain into Aleph, a similar letter) towards, the head of the bed." The author of the Epistle reads, "And Israel bent himself over the head of his staff," substituting mate for mita, from which it only differs in respect of vowels. Now as in this narrative it is Jacob's age only that is in question, and not his illness, which is not touched on till the next chapter, it seems more likely that the historian intended to say that Jacob bent over the head of his staff (a thing commonly used by men of advanced age for their support) than that he bowed himself at the head of his bed, especially as for the former reading no substitution of letters is required.

 Evidently the coaches had in mind a garbled version of the story of Jacob, who according to Genesis was indeed approaching his death but not quite on his deathbed. Quite possibly their version can be traced upward through a succession of football coaches to the days before face masks.

It had never occurred to me that reading Spinoza would enable me to understand coach-speak. But football is imperfectly distinguished from religion in some parts of America. It can be a stepping stone to politics also: there is a former college football coach in the Senate now, and football careers have led to the House of Representatives, the Cabinet, and the Presidency. Perhaps a theological-political treatise is just the thing.

Back to the Office

Yesterday I was at the office for the first time since March 13, 2020. I walked in, which as expected took just under an hour. The man at the security desk took my temperature with a forehead scanner, I tapped my wallet with the security card on the gate, and proceeded to the elevator. The rule says occupancy is limited to two persons, but there was no second person that side of the gates and desk.

The building was largely empty, perhaps thirty persons where the capacity is ten times that. Downtown was not deserted, but appeared to have many fewer persons than usual. A hamburger restaurant looked to have half a dozen patrons at 12:30 pm. Restaurants with outside tables might have had a quarter of them occupied. The sidewalks had plenty of space for all.

My commute to work was just an hour, walking. I ran an errand after work, so I can't say what the commute home would have been: forty minutes is a safe guess. When working from the dining room table, of course, my commute is either nil or the time it takes to walk down a flight of stairs.