Carey Lives Here

On April 3, 1956, according to news reports, a Mrs. Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland, while on a tour of the White House, slipped away from her tour group and vanished into the heart of the building. For four and a half hours, Mrs. Chase, who was described later as “disheveled, vague and not quite lucid,” wandered through the White House, setting small fires - five in all. That’s how tight security was in those days: a not-quite-lucid woman was able to roam unnoticed through the executive mansion for more than half a working day. You can imagine the response if anyone tried anything like that now: the instantaneous alarms, the scrambled Air Force jets, the SWAT teams dropping from panels in the ceiling, the tanks rolling across the lawns, the ninety minutes of sustained gunfire pouring into the target area, the lavish awarding of medals of bravery afterward, including posthumously to the seventy-six people in Virginia and eastern Maryland killed by friendly fire. In 1956, Mrs. Chase, when found, was taken to the staff kitchen, given a cup of tea, and released into the custody of her family, and no one ever heard from her again.

The headlands and broken bays, with the rough, steep mountains coming sheer down into the blue waters. The closeness of the land, and the narrowness of the passages, all tend to create a mysterious charm, which he who gazes at them finds himself unable to analyze. He feels tempted to land at every gully which runs up among the mountains and to investigate the strange wild world which must be beyond them. He knows, in truth, that there is nothing there,-that one brown hill would lead only to another, that there is no life among the hills, and that the very spots on which his eyes rest really contain whatever there may be of loveliness in the place. But though he knows this as fact, his imagination will not allow him to trust his knowledge. There is always present to him a vague longing to investigate the mysteries of the valleys, and to penetrate into the bosoms of the distant hills. The sweetest charms of landscape are as those of Iife ;-they consist of the anticipations of something beyond which never can be reached. I never felt this more strongly than when I was passing from one land-Iocked channel to another along the coast of Cook’s Straight.

Hoping you could help me with something. I have a book here that’s called “War Before Civilization.” It was thrown out of a moving vehicle (I guess the reader didn’t agree with the sentiments) and I’m thinking to myself, who would like a book like that? Want it?

At the upper reaches of society, we litigate ever more readily and accept misfortune with ever less stoicism. Being fired from a job becomes the beginning of a negotiation, while a routine school suspension instantly goes to appeal. In part, this is probably the inevitable reckoning for a culture that gives trophies to every Little Leaguer because, as the saying goes, we’re all winners. Shouldering defeat is, after all, a skill that has to be learned early, like speaking Mandarin or sleeping through the night. A blown call on a home run hooking foul used to be part of the game, a generations-old lesson in the randomness of adversity. Now the crowd breaks for hot dogs while the instant replay delivers its verdict and the homer is revoked. There are no more bad breaks in life — only bad umps.