And Finally

When heading to China on a business trip, I was somewhat bemused to be warned about the banquets I would be attending. Do not sit next to the host, I was told. I was to find out why. Learning the rituals of banquets is an essential part of doing business in China. I was treated to at least one every day on a ten-day trip around the country – and sometimes two or three. There is no such thing as a casual business lunch. Any meal will turn into a semiformal event held in a private room and hosted by the most senior person in the organization. The meal starts slowly, with a few rather unappealing cold dishes laid out on a lazy Susan that sits on a round table, though initially no one sits down.

One of my favorite scenes in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy martial arts film, is the meeting of Beatrix “the Bride” Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman, with sword-maker Hattori Hanzo at his scruffy sushi bar in Okinawa. Hanzo: What do you want with Hattori Hanzo? Kiddo: I need Japanese steel. Hanzo: Why do you need Japanese steel? Kiddo: I have vermin to kill. Hanzo: You must have big rats, to need Hattori Hanzo’s steel. Tarantino filched his sword-maker’s name from history. Hattori Hanzo was a real ninja (or rather, the historically correct word shinobi). Born in 1542, he spent his life in the service of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and compiled the manual Shinobi Hiden (Legends of Ninja Secrets).

My husband was so excited about learning the term perigee-syzygy that he kept saying it over and over, until the words blended into his regular breathing and he dozed off in his chair. The compound word describes what the vulgar press calls a supermoon. A syzygy happens when the Moon, Earth and sun line up, creating a full moon (or a new moon, which we can’t see because only the far side gets lit up). The perigee is when the moon comes closest to Earth (its farthest point is called the apogee). The distance changes because the moon’s orbit around Earth is oval-shaped.

I must have seen it in a movie, one of the old black and white ones: jovial carolers coming into the manor, brushing the snow off their shoulders and stamping their feet. Or rosy-cheeked sledders whacking their boots against the doorstep as the fluffy stuff obligingly disperses. That’s not the way it works in north Georgia, where I remember about four or five childhood snows. Soggy, 35-degree snows. Snows that bring down pine trees onto every powerline in ten counties. Snows that nevertheless thrill the hearts of schoolchildren, who almost instantly find that they’re not equipped for their Alpine fantasies. That was not mitten country, or sweater country, or even often warm hat country.

Christmas travel dates back to... well, do a hundred donkey-miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem count? I’m sure irritating New Atheists fixated on when, exactly, the Judaean lambing season is would argue that it doesn’t. My festive journey has consisted of a return flight over the ocean for the last nine years — with the exception of 2020; I wonder why. A recent review of my calendar reveals that I’ve made over fifty transatlantic crossings in that time. My yuletide offering to our subscribers is the knowledge I have picked up along the way. If your schedule permits, flights seven to ten days before and after Christmas Day always work out significantly cheaper than those closer to the big day.

When hearing “Taiwan,” people who have some awareness of the world will think of its focal role in US-China relations or computer chips. And if they don’t have much awareness they’ll confuse it with Thailand — yes, this has happened to me multiple times. But most simply do not know much about the island that was once known as “Ilha Formosa” —beautiful island — by Portuguese settlers in the sixteenth century. The colonizers knew what they were talking about. The media tells us about military activity in the South China Sea, fostering fear in most. Before I left for study abroad in Taipei, most people’s first reaction when I told them where I was going was, “Aren’t you concerned about China?” or “Isn’t this a risky time to go?

I love the first day of school. Summer break was the perfect amount of time to make me long for the tedium of learning again. Mom would purchase new binders; I would begin to dream about that perfect first-day-of-school outfit; friends would discuss frightening future assignments and school supplies would be gathered. I would wake up that morning and have everything ready for me — only to arrive sleepily at the kitchen table in my pajamas, with my six siblings and our not-so-beloved Saxon Math books. My high-school experience as a homeschooler included a hodge-podge of extracurricular activities... orchestra, soccer, debate, church responsibilities and a bunch of random classes in things like graphic design and Polynesian dance.

James Madison is consistently forgotten. Admittedly, many of the Founding Fathers are forgotten. The average American could probably name two of the forty or so founders in Howard Chandler Christy’s Capitol painting “Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States.” But while Washington and Jefferson get imposing monuments in DC and Hamilton gets a musical, the father of our beloved Constitution hardly has a memorial. Asking Google why will pull up an article from the Harvard Law Bulletin quoting Professor Noah Feldman. “Unlike George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, no monument was built to honor Madison in the nation’s capital. You have to see the Constitution as his monument,” said Feldman. “His influence is hidden in plain sight.

"Rollicking time,” sang my husband to the tune of “Mull of Kintyre.” He had been amused to hear of this misapprehension of the lyrics and smugly enjoyed it not being his mistake for a change. That kind of mull is a Gaelic word meaning “bare headland.” I think it is related to the Welsh word for a bare hill, moel, which Gerard Manley Hopkins used, with initial mutation, as voel in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” That is all very well, but I have been annoyed recently by people saying that they want to mull things. I don’t mean wine, but possibilities. I would say “mull things over.” Why can’t everyone else? But the history of mull is fearfully complicated and obscure for such a little word.