Talking With Ginny On Saturday

What a happy day!

The Post Office delivered the galley proof pages for my fire department history book and at first glance, I see fewer mistakes than I usually find in proof pages.

Of course, I immediately spotted a few formatting errors and began kicking myself for being so stupid… Long ago a psych major told me that self-negation is the highest and most insidious form of pride.

He said that I put myself down before anyone else can because I’m so proud and full of self that I really think I’m higher than anyone else; and if I say loudly, “I am a lowly worm” then the hearer will jump in to correct me by saying, “Not so, John. You’re really an eagle!” That way I get double strokes—they said it, not me.

Of course, after 40 years of marriage, Ginny knows better than to play my silly mind game. When I put myself down, she does not contradict me, but says, “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way; it annoys me”.

Puts an end to my game playing.

So when she called me up short this afternoon, I retrenched to my own comfort level saying:

Self-flagellation Beats The Hell Out Of Being Flagellated By Somebody Else!

She said I ought to engrave that Cowartism on a polished walnut plaque and see how many of them I could sell on E-bay as office wall-hangers.

Talking with Ginny is one of the great joys of my life. I get such a kick out of this strange woman who was wise enough to love me and see me as better than I truly see myself … Not all my downputting is an act or a mind game; sometimes it reveals genuine pain; and Ginny discerns the difference.

Over the course of the day we talked about: sex; car maintenance; the vice-presidential debate; 12^th Century stave churches in Norway; Jimmy Stewart as an actor; tv programs we each watched as kids; Jewish newspapers; English drawing room mysteries; living wills; the people moving in next door; our children; the use of radios to communicate in disasters; our tentative plans for 2009; our philosophy of life; recipes for pot roasts; wild birds; windshield washer fluids, the parables of Jesus; checks and balances in government, prescription medicines, Neolithic monuments, a book on ethics she’s reading, a philosophical society in Scotland, and I forget whatall else.

My but we have fun!

As we discussed the question “Who Is My Neighbor” over Bar-B-Que at Georgie’s , I told her this story my e-friend Carol sent me the other day:

A Sunday School teacher, wanting to emphasize social responsibility, told the kids about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, how robbers mugged this guy, robbed him, beat him, stripped off all his clothes, and left him for dead in the road, but the Good Samaritan came along, found him, rescued him, and nursed him back to health.

The teachers asked the kids, “What would you do if you were walking along the street and found a man laying unconscious in the gutter all beat up and bruised and naked and bleeding? What would you do?”

One little girl replied, “I think I’d throw up”.