For the 22 years of my marriage and a few years thereafter, I carefully traced the history of our little family by designing a special addition to our Christmas tree skirt each year. Each new shape represented something of importance that had happened that year—marriage, the first cars, the first home, kids, divorce, pets—always something that in some way changed our lives.
For the past few years, I haven't actually gotten around to finishing the new ornaments, although I've cut them out and made a few notes about why I chose them.
This year, I haven't even done that, but I'm sure the ornament I'll make (when I get back around to it, and I promise I will) will be a moving van. Not me moving, but each of the kids, and each of the moves has touched me in a special way.
The first move, early in the summer, wasn't even one of my kids but instead Dramatic Daughter's Prince Charming. These two have known each other for a decade or so, and I suspect PC has kept DD in mind for most of that time. Romance actually first flared a little over a year ago, but DD had had a long-distance romance once or twice before and drew a line in the sand: if he was really interested, he had to move to California to be near her job and her lifestyle. As illogical as it was, he cut the ties to a job with possibly a good deal more potential than anything California might offer and made the move. Things have gone swimmingly, and I wonder whether the blue topaz he gave her for Christmas has more meaning than the birthstone it purports to be; I suspect the chances are good. That move could change my daughter's life.
The second move came in August, when Number One son left a job in Austin and wedged his mattress between the sewing machines and computer desk in my office to be near the local community college, where he is hoping to retrain from auto mechanics to radiation technology. His current plan is an associate's degree that will give him a start in the medical field, which is foreign to anything he's tried before. I'm crossing my fingers for him, but I know that whether this works out or not, his life is going to change for the happier.
The third move came today, and I find myself a bit melancholy because of it: I took Soldier Son to his Army recruiting station to be inducted into full-time military service. He and I have talked this over a great deal over the past year, so I knew it was coming, and I'm mostly very happy for him. As we have discussed, much the Army has to offer is very good for him, and his experiences as an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran and a 6-year reservist assure us that much of the Army lifestyle fits well with his personality and his needs. I don't know what has future as a soldier will be, but I think he has made the right choice for himself.
And yet, the lump in my throat just hangs there, gently pressing on my heart. This son is the most of all of them like me in his personality, his thinking, and his sense of humor.
This is the son of silver-sky-blue eyes that I described once as a burst of balloons, bobbing in a dozen different directions. He has always been the one who has reached out for love when he needed it for himself but who has been hesitant and uncomfortable in reaching out to share it with others. He is a gentle spirit with a fierce Christian faith but he sees the irony of Christians who cannot forgive and accept others for who and what they are. He is a pigpen and a loner, but he can swoop in and take charge and make sense of chaos when a situation needs a clear mind and a strong heart. He wants to be successful on his own terms: he doesn't want to be in debt, but he doesn't need to amass wealth.
This son has never lived away from home except for his tour in Iraq, his senior year in college, and a few weeks after his graduation; otherwise, he has been here with me and for me for nearly 28 years, and I already miss him.
But time has come, and we're all moving on.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Changing the names to protect the (in)nocent?
Christmas at our house was pretty much an orgy of excess from the time the better-heeled grandmother discovered Toys R Us until the divorce, at which time it pretty much crashed for the kids and me into our best hope to be able to come up with any gifts for each other at all.
That first year, we stubbornly put up the tree and draped it in Christmas memories, nestling the few small gifts we could afford easily within the rim of its smallish round skirt. The kids spent Christmas Eve exchanging gifts with their dad's side of the family, pretty much coming home with washtubs of gifts that were more useful than special, but much appreciated in our tight times nonetheless.
The kids were eager to have time with their dad's family, but they insisted Christmas morning was time for their Santa at home and for exchanging gifts with me. I have always loved that.
At first, I tried to keep traditions as much in place as possible, pulling out what I could by way of gift wrap and bows, but I couldn't just let the tree skirt sit bare until Christmas morning, so I developed a code to identify the gifts. That way, the kids could look and shake and try to guess what was in the packages, but they didn't know whose was whose, which I assumed sort of added to the challenge.
Sometimes the code was as simple as a string of random numbers so that their birth order appeared as one of the digits (only gifts for Number One son had a 1in them, only those for Second Son had a 2, and Darling Daughter had a 3); sometimes it included their birth year, sometimes it had an initial.
Since this year I have a blog they don't know about and I use names that aren't theirs, I just used the "blog" initials: NO, SS, and DD. I wound up wrapping gifts they were giving each other, so I tacked the giver's real initial on the end, so SSM meant a gift to Second Son from me.
Maybe as early as that first Christmas I managed to scramble the code so that even I didn't remember it, so something of NO's wound up going to Darling Daughter, and something of hers wound up going to SS. This year, even with what I thought was the easiest code ever, I inverted a couple of them so the givers wound up getting back the gifts they were giving because I put the wrong initials first, but they just slipped them back into the wrappings and sent them on their way.
Although I think all three of the kids have enjoyed trying to figure out the code, DD has typically been the one whose interest in the code has sometimes superseded her interest in the gifts. This year, thee last gifts under the tree were pet toys for the dogs, so they were the first ones out. Since I had used the dogs' real initials, DD thought she had it figured out: first initial the receiver, last initial the giver.
The next gift up was for NO from me, so when he read the code, I interpreted. The next one up was for SS from me, so DD piped up right away with her interpretation: Soldier Son! Since he's shipping out for basic training on a 6-year Army hitch, that's appropriate, but since I haven't told her about the blog yet, I didn't indicate that her assumption was wrong.
After a couple more for SS, NO found one for DD.
"Dramatic Daughter," she interpreted.
"Ah," NO reasoned, "then mine must be 'Not a Mechanic.'" The fact that NOM wouldn't likely stand for that and that a couple of later gifts would come up with his siblings' initials instead of the M didn't seem to faze him.
But his thinking in terms of jobs—SS is off to be a soldier here in a couple of days, and DD holds a degree in theater arts—makes sense. SS is bunking here for a while to work on a degree and career change so he'll really be "not a mechanic."
None of the kids questioned why the NO didn't work (they wound up happier than I had expected with my off-the-wall assortment of gifts), and I didn't volunteer it. But Soldier Son alleviates my concern about having a kid in second place, and DD really can be something of a drama queen. I'm not sure where I'll go with the third one, but I think I've backtracked from existing initials to a whole new set of names!
That first year, we stubbornly put up the tree and draped it in Christmas memories, nestling the few small gifts we could afford easily within the rim of its smallish round skirt. The kids spent Christmas Eve exchanging gifts with their dad's side of the family, pretty much coming home with washtubs of gifts that were more useful than special, but much appreciated in our tight times nonetheless.
The kids were eager to have time with their dad's family, but they insisted Christmas morning was time for their Santa at home and for exchanging gifts with me. I have always loved that.
At first, I tried to keep traditions as much in place as possible, pulling out what I could by way of gift wrap and bows, but I couldn't just let the tree skirt sit bare until Christmas morning, so I developed a code to identify the gifts. That way, the kids could look and shake and try to guess what was in the packages, but they didn't know whose was whose, which I assumed sort of added to the challenge.
Sometimes the code was as simple as a string of random numbers so that their birth order appeared as one of the digits (only gifts for Number One son had a 1in them, only those for Second Son had a 2, and Darling Daughter had a 3); sometimes it included their birth year, sometimes it had an initial.
Since this year I have a blog they don't know about and I use names that aren't theirs, I just used the "blog" initials: NO, SS, and DD. I wound up wrapping gifts they were giving each other, so I tacked the giver's real initial on the end, so SSM meant a gift to Second Son from me.
Maybe as early as that first Christmas I managed to scramble the code so that even I didn't remember it, so something of NO's wound up going to Darling Daughter, and something of hers wound up going to SS. This year, even with what I thought was the easiest code ever, I inverted a couple of them so the givers wound up getting back the gifts they were giving because I put the wrong initials first, but they just slipped them back into the wrappings and sent them on their way.
Although I think all three of the kids have enjoyed trying to figure out the code, DD has typically been the one whose interest in the code has sometimes superseded her interest in the gifts. This year, thee last gifts under the tree were pet toys for the dogs, so they were the first ones out. Since I had used the dogs' real initials, DD thought she had it figured out: first initial the receiver, last initial the giver.
The next gift up was for NO from me, so when he read the code, I interpreted. The next one up was for SS from me, so DD piped up right away with her interpretation: Soldier Son! Since he's shipping out for basic training on a 6-year Army hitch, that's appropriate, but since I haven't told her about the blog yet, I didn't indicate that her assumption was wrong.
After a couple more for SS, NO found one for DD.
"Dramatic Daughter," she interpreted.
"Ah," NO reasoned, "then mine must be 'Not a Mechanic.'" The fact that NOM wouldn't likely stand for that and that a couple of later gifts would come up with his siblings' initials instead of the M didn't seem to faze him.
But his thinking in terms of jobs—SS is off to be a soldier here in a couple of days, and DD holds a degree in theater arts—makes sense. SS is bunking here for a while to work on a degree and career change so he'll really be "not a mechanic."
None of the kids questioned why the NO didn't work (they wound up happier than I had expected with my off-the-wall assortment of gifts), and I didn't volunteer it. But Soldier Son alleviates my concern about having a kid in second place, and DD really can be something of a drama queen. I'm not sure where I'll go with the third one, but I think I've backtracked from existing initials to a whole new set of names!
Monday, December 21, 2009
Junk Yard Dog comes to visit
Darling Daughter came home for the holidays with both Prince Charming and her junkyard dog—all 15 feisty pounds of her—in tow. Junk Yard gets that moniker from her origins at the Pasadena animal shelter, where she showed up one day slathered in mud from the construction site where she had been found and may have lived a good part of her four-month lifespan. She’s pretty much wire-haired terrier through and through, with an overlay of beagle giving her a black saddle with white boots, vest, and taillight, all trimmed up with soft tan. She’s stocky, so in isolation she looks much larger than she is, and she typically makes up for size in volume.
Which is not terribly effective around the dogs that live with me the rest of the year. My own dog can be wonderfully sweet and affectionate, but those aren’t exactly the traits that earned her the position of Alpha Bitch next to the boxer/bird dog Tank that moved in with us just over a year ago. Alpha Bitch also seems to be part hobbit; she delights in snatching toys that Tank has dropped, dashing off to my bedroom, and “hiding” them on my bed. She doesn't take well to annoyances, and anything that irritates her is likely to get a tongue-lashing, quite likely accompanied by ugly snarls and growls and probably at least baring of teeth, if not some gratuitous snapping to seal the point. When she is asleep, even small movements can yank her to rowdy reprobation.
Tank is usually quite the opposite. He was starved for both food and affection when Second Son, who yo-yoed back home last year, found him at the local shelter. Affection is as important as food to Tank, who works hard to get both of them now. He would never dream of stealing a toy; in fact, he’d be more likely to offer one than to snatch it. In spite of his size (when he rises up on his hind legs, his face is inches from mine) and his energy, his current objective in life seems to be controlling his whiplash tail and eager paws enough to win the affection of our cat, who suffers through with Alpha Bitch but just isn’t too much into the enthusiastic Tank. Otherwise than intimidating the cat, he’s quite gentle and quiet and usually more than eager to please.
To get an idea of how these three stack up, imagine Junk Yard standing on my patio. Alpha Bitch can (and sometimes does) stand over her, her belly clearing Junk Yard’s back. Tank can stand over Alpha Bitch.
In the past, Junk Yard has enjoyed coming to our house. When Alpha Bitch was a puppy, Junk Yard buddied up to the cat and had a fine time playing with her, and Junk Yard had plenty of experience to keep her ahead of the pack. The next year she stood up on her hind legs to explain reality to Tank, and he obediently accepted her word as law. Now that the other two have had some time together and she’s the new kid on the block, they’re a lot less frightened by her purely terrier noisemaking, and she’s feeling a bit nonplussed about losing her status as queen of the castle.
That became painfully apparent when I had the three of them in the back yard yesterday afternoon to play fetch. Now, I had seen videos of Junk Yard playing fetch with an assortment of toys when she was fresh home from the shelter, and she had cheerfully brought back anything that was thrown for her. Not so much now; from what I hear now, she is happy to chase whatever is thrown for her, but in her digs, humans may throw all of her toys for her to hide in various places not where they originated.
In the sandpit the bigger dogs have made of my backyard, she can give the others a good run for the ones that are farther away, although she typically doesn’t come up with the ball. That initially translated into her scrambling to snag any ball that landed close enough for her to get it and digging furiously in an effort to keep it away. Her industry is admirable but extraneous; the other two seem to have established long ago that He Who Gets the Ball Keeps the Ball, so the one who snags it has the privilege of taking it back.
I sort of thought that praise for the return of the ball would encourage Junk Yard to stop being so possessive, but that hasn’t worked; neither has grabbing her by the scruff and telling her no before prying it from her jaws. The best solution so far—when the other two are willing to break their code of honor to keep the ball in play—has been for Tank to distract Junk Yard long enough for Alpha Bitch to snag the ball when Junk Yard isn’t looking.
This morning the big dogs decided to honor the code, but Junk Yard caught onto the fact that if she tried to bury the ball, her Grammar was going to be upset. A couple of times she even got it onto the patio so I cold pry it out of her jaws and praise her for bringing it back. The next time she got that close, she took off into the house with it, so I closed the door and continued to play with the other two. I meant for shutting her out (or in) to be punishment, but she seemed thoroughly self-satisfied as she stomped off upstairs to report to her mother about how mean I was!
DD and PC have taken off for a couple of days, leaving Junk Yard to work out her differences with the other dogs and Grammar. We’ll see if she gets the hang of it over the next couple of weeks.
Which is not terribly effective around the dogs that live with me the rest of the year. My own dog can be wonderfully sweet and affectionate, but those aren’t exactly the traits that earned her the position of Alpha Bitch next to the boxer/bird dog Tank that moved in with us just over a year ago. Alpha Bitch also seems to be part hobbit; she delights in snatching toys that Tank has dropped, dashing off to my bedroom, and “hiding” them on my bed. She doesn't take well to annoyances, and anything that irritates her is likely to get a tongue-lashing, quite likely accompanied by ugly snarls and growls and probably at least baring of teeth, if not some gratuitous snapping to seal the point. When she is asleep, even small movements can yank her to rowdy reprobation.
Tank is usually quite the opposite. He was starved for both food and affection when Second Son, who yo-yoed back home last year, found him at the local shelter. Affection is as important as food to Tank, who works hard to get both of them now. He would never dream of stealing a toy; in fact, he’d be more likely to offer one than to snatch it. In spite of his size (when he rises up on his hind legs, his face is inches from mine) and his energy, his current objective in life seems to be controlling his whiplash tail and eager paws enough to win the affection of our cat, who suffers through with Alpha Bitch but just isn’t too much into the enthusiastic Tank. Otherwise than intimidating the cat, he’s quite gentle and quiet and usually more than eager to please.
To get an idea of how these three stack up, imagine Junk Yard standing on my patio. Alpha Bitch can (and sometimes does) stand over her, her belly clearing Junk Yard’s back. Tank can stand over Alpha Bitch.
In the past, Junk Yard has enjoyed coming to our house. When Alpha Bitch was a puppy, Junk Yard buddied up to the cat and had a fine time playing with her, and Junk Yard had plenty of experience to keep her ahead of the pack. The next year she stood up on her hind legs to explain reality to Tank, and he obediently accepted her word as law. Now that the other two have had some time together and she’s the new kid on the block, they’re a lot less frightened by her purely terrier noisemaking, and she’s feeling a bit nonplussed about losing her status as queen of the castle.
That became painfully apparent when I had the three of them in the back yard yesterday afternoon to play fetch. Now, I had seen videos of Junk Yard playing fetch with an assortment of toys when she was fresh home from the shelter, and she had cheerfully brought back anything that was thrown for her. Not so much now; from what I hear now, she is happy to chase whatever is thrown for her, but in her digs, humans may throw all of her toys for her to hide in various places not where they originated.
In the sandpit the bigger dogs have made of my backyard, she can give the others a good run for the ones that are farther away, although she typically doesn’t come up with the ball. That initially translated into her scrambling to snag any ball that landed close enough for her to get it and digging furiously in an effort to keep it away. Her industry is admirable but extraneous; the other two seem to have established long ago that He Who Gets the Ball Keeps the Ball, so the one who snags it has the privilege of taking it back.
I sort of thought that praise for the return of the ball would encourage Junk Yard to stop being so possessive, but that hasn’t worked; neither has grabbing her by the scruff and telling her no before prying it from her jaws. The best solution so far—when the other two are willing to break their code of honor to keep the ball in play—has been for Tank to distract Junk Yard long enough for Alpha Bitch to snag the ball when Junk Yard isn’t looking.
This morning the big dogs decided to honor the code, but Junk Yard caught onto the fact that if she tried to bury the ball, her Grammar was going to be upset. A couple of times she even got it onto the patio so I cold pry it out of her jaws and praise her for bringing it back. The next time she got that close, she took off into the house with it, so I closed the door and continued to play with the other two. I meant for shutting her out (or in) to be punishment, but she seemed thoroughly self-satisfied as she stomped off upstairs to report to her mother about how mean I was!
DD and PC have taken off for a couple of days, leaving Junk Yard to work out her differences with the other dogs and Grammar. We’ll see if she gets the hang of it over the next couple of weeks.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Happy birthday, Angel
Today is Darling Daughter's birthday.
I might have made a bigger deal of it if my life hadn't careened around a strange bend several months ago such that I've spent this whole day in mid-December grading papers. (Okay, I've taken a couple of short breaks, but you get the drift.)
The south turn started at the beginning of the semester when a senior professor informed me that I would be coteaching a couple of courses with him. I taught both courses myself for about 8 years before they were yanked away from me last year; the argument was that an engineer would be able to solicit higher-quality projects from our students. That professor isn't the one teaching with me; turns out that wasn't such a good idea, either.
I've never been really happy with having the course yanked as it was, so I was less than enthusiastic when I was called back in on it; I was also not particularly cheered when I discovered that "coteaching" would me that I would do virtually all of the design of one course and coordinate four teaching assistants to grade them, with little assistance from the senior professor. Worse, I was given little control over the teaching of the second course but all of the responsibility for grading the formal, senior-level reports. And apparently I'm doing this without any formal credit from the university.
The glitch in all this is that the grading rubric for the course I'm grading for is clearly derived from the one I used when I taught the course, but the instruction didn't really prepare the students to measure up to its demands. Consequently, when the papers came in in mid-November, few of them earned passing grades, and most of them shocked and disappointed their authors, most of whom have been top students in their classes since kindergarten.
Sometimes the classes have been rewarding; a couple of my lectures in the class I have controlled went off very well, and one of the TAs has remarked a couple of times that she has seen significant improvement in the writing she has been grading over the course of the semester. When I asked last week for examples of good, average, and poor final reports, they TAs said they had plenty of good ones and several "average" ones, but "poor" ones were hard to come by. I'm okay with that.
And except for the long, long hours of grading in the other class, sometimes it has had its rewards. I was surprised several times by students whose first-round grades were poor but who stopped to thank me for the detailed comments I gave them. I was pleased by a couple of students who told me they had been in a laboratory I had graded a couple of years ago and had used techniques from that class as they wrote excellent formal reports as seniors. And I have been gobsmacked by a surprising number of students who first grades had been horrifying to them but whose revisions have merited As or low Bs.
I've never still been grading papers this close to the end of the semester (I have only hours, really, before I have to submit final grades), and I resent the hours I've had to steal from other opportunities that I consider more important to my life, but I have to admit I appreciate the students who clearly responded to my advice and did well.
A small group of them had permission from the professor to do one of the course assignments today, provided they got permission from me. I assured them that I would accept the late assignments (because he was willing to), provided they all sang happy birthday to my daughter. Their responses have been amusing: what's her name? where will she be? why do we have to do that? None of them matters except the last: because I said so!
I'm not sure if they did it (I doubt it), but I'm quite sure the daughter half a continent away didn't hear it. But I do hope she had a lovely day!
I might have made a bigger deal of it if my life hadn't careened around a strange bend several months ago such that I've spent this whole day in mid-December grading papers. (Okay, I've taken a couple of short breaks, but you get the drift.)
The south turn started at the beginning of the semester when a senior professor informed me that I would be coteaching a couple of courses with him. I taught both courses myself for about 8 years before they were yanked away from me last year; the argument was that an engineer would be able to solicit higher-quality projects from our students. That professor isn't the one teaching with me; turns out that wasn't such a good idea, either.
I've never been really happy with having the course yanked as it was, so I was less than enthusiastic when I was called back in on it; I was also not particularly cheered when I discovered that "coteaching" would me that I would do virtually all of the design of one course and coordinate four teaching assistants to grade them, with little assistance from the senior professor. Worse, I was given little control over the teaching of the second course but all of the responsibility for grading the formal, senior-level reports. And apparently I'm doing this without any formal credit from the university.
The glitch in all this is that the grading rubric for the course I'm grading for is clearly derived from the one I used when I taught the course, but the instruction didn't really prepare the students to measure up to its demands. Consequently, when the papers came in in mid-November, few of them earned passing grades, and most of them shocked and disappointed their authors, most of whom have been top students in their classes since kindergarten.
Sometimes the classes have been rewarding; a couple of my lectures in the class I have controlled went off very well, and one of the TAs has remarked a couple of times that she has seen significant improvement in the writing she has been grading over the course of the semester. When I asked last week for examples of good, average, and poor final reports, they TAs said they had plenty of good ones and several "average" ones, but "poor" ones were hard to come by. I'm okay with that.
And except for the long, long hours of grading in the other class, sometimes it has had its rewards. I was surprised several times by students whose first-round grades were poor but who stopped to thank me for the detailed comments I gave them. I was pleased by a couple of students who told me they had been in a laboratory I had graded a couple of years ago and had used techniques from that class as they wrote excellent formal reports as seniors. And I have been gobsmacked by a surprising number of students who first grades had been horrifying to them but whose revisions have merited As or low Bs.
I've never still been grading papers this close to the end of the semester (I have only hours, really, before I have to submit final grades), and I resent the hours I've had to steal from other opportunities that I consider more important to my life, but I have to admit I appreciate the students who clearly responded to my advice and did well.
A small group of them had permission from the professor to do one of the course assignments today, provided they got permission from me. I assured them that I would accept the late assignments (because he was willing to), provided they all sang happy birthday to my daughter. Their responses have been amusing: what's her name? where will she be? why do we have to do that? None of them matters except the last: because I said so!
I'm not sure if they did it (I doubt it), but I'm quite sure the daughter half a continent away didn't hear it. But I do hope she had a lovely day!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
And about don marquis and e.e. cummings
If you don't know about e.e. cummings and his propensity for writing in lower case, you have no one but yourself to blame. I recommend Wikipedia to start.
If you don't know Don Marquis, you may just have missed The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, Marquis' hysterical account of the life of a cockroach who shared Marquis' office space at The Evening Sun in New York during the early part of the last century.
I discovered Archy and Mehitabel when I was in junior high or high school, when a friend of mine loaned me her copy to read. I was fascinated by the fact that Marquis had managed to turn out an entire book in lower-case type (I'm not sure I had even heard of cummings yet, but I'm sure I hadn't been terribly smitten by him), and even more by the explanation: Marquis attributed the entire book to Archy.
The idea was that Archy was actually a reincarnated poet who still loved to write (even in his incarnation as a cockroach), but he felt obliged, apparently, to share the office news from his view on the underside of the world in exchange for the use of Marquis' typewriter.
As a cockroach, his only means of typing was diving from the top of the machine onto the keys; since he was only one cockroach, he couldn't strike two keys at once, so he couldn't hold the shift key. As I recall, at least one segment (I sort of hate to call them chapters; I suspect they were actually collected from Marquis' daily column in the Evening Sun) appeared in all caps as a concession to those who wanted capital letters, but Archy made the caps by locking the caps lock key for the entire segment. After all, using the caps lock would have required three leaps from the top of the machine to capitalize normally: one to lock the caps, one to strike the letter, and one to unlock the caps. I agree with Archy; sounds like way too much work to me.
You can read snippets of Archy's work from the Don Marquis website at http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/, and copies of the whole book are still available on the web. As the website shows, archy was Marquis' voice for a lot of observations of his world, but his bug's-eye view makes them even funnier.
If you don't know Don Marquis, you may just have missed The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, Marquis' hysterical account of the life of a cockroach who shared Marquis' office space at The Evening Sun in New York during the early part of the last century.
I discovered Archy and Mehitabel when I was in junior high or high school, when a friend of mine loaned me her copy to read. I was fascinated by the fact that Marquis had managed to turn out an entire book in lower-case type (I'm not sure I had even heard of cummings yet, but I'm sure I hadn't been terribly smitten by him), and even more by the explanation: Marquis attributed the entire book to Archy.
The idea was that Archy was actually a reincarnated poet who still loved to write (even in his incarnation as a cockroach), but he felt obliged, apparently, to share the office news from his view on the underside of the world in exchange for the use of Marquis' typewriter.
As a cockroach, his only means of typing was diving from the top of the machine onto the keys; since he was only one cockroach, he couldn't strike two keys at once, so he couldn't hold the shift key. As I recall, at least one segment (I sort of hate to call them chapters; I suspect they were actually collected from Marquis' daily column in the Evening Sun) appeared in all caps as a concession to those who wanted capital letters, but Archy made the caps by locking the caps lock key for the entire segment. After all, using the caps lock would have required three leaps from the top of the machine to capitalize normally: one to lock the caps, one to strike the letter, and one to unlock the caps. I agree with Archy; sounds like way too much work to me.
You can read snippets of Archy's work from the Don Marquis website at http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/, and copies of the whole book are still available on the web. As the website shows, archy was Marquis' voice for a lot of observations of his world, but his bug's-eye view makes them even funnier.
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