Un Dia de los Muertos vivo!

I needed to sleep in on Sunday, since I'd been up too late the night before, writing that entry on Czech names. (Don't let the timestamp fool you; I was making corrections and additions well past midnight.) However, I failed to and got off to a bleary start. At Cermak, there were two CTA employees looking for a Spanish-speaker to translate for a lost Latino. One of them was a very hot bear named "Boddie", so even if LinguoBoy Pride hadn't've snared me, Lust would've. It was a humbling corrective to my success with the Italian couple: After several minutes of chatting, I still wasn't sure whether he was trying to get to the bus station or to meet his friend on the South Side. Fortunately, a real bilingual had been scared up, so I apologised for my failure and made to leave, but Boddie said, "No, you did good!" in such an enthusiastic fashion that I could've kissed him.

As a result of this distraction, by the time I got to the Centro Museo de Bellas Artes Mexicanas, e., bunj, mollpeartree, and princeofcairo had given up waiting for me. I didn't know this, however, and hung around for a short while before deciding that hunger was more powerful than duty. I walked a block to Speedy's and got a torta de pierna de puerco in a salsa roja that could've made anything taste fantastic. I'll never understand why no place north of Roosevelt and east of Ashland can put together a sauce half that good. Is there some kind of ancient artifact buried beneath the North Side that mystically denatures all Mexican cuisine? I washed down my treat with a lime Jarrito, hosed myself off, and did the temporary exhibits. Wandering through the gift shop, I spotted princeofcairo and discovered he was in the company of mollpeartree, lhn, prilicla, and luckymarty. Shortly after, e. and bunj arrived and I ended up doing the main exhibit again.

There were several strong offerings this year, but the one I kept returning to was an abstract ofrenda to the eighteen migrants who suffocated to death in a truck in Victoria, Texas last spring. It consisted of a booth with an outline of the Virgin of Guadelupe traced on the back wall. The interior was hung with lead weights in the shape of teardrops and a black-and-white film of dusty Texas roads was being projected over the Virgin. On the floor of the booth were written the names of those who suffocated. A plaque to one side noted that none of the numerous articles on the tragedy had actually named the victims, so I forced myself to read through the list and think about each person who had died. I didn't realise that one was a five-year old boy who perished along with his father. (I wish I could tell you his name.)

After that, I decompressed with mollpeartree and prilicla, both of which know more about the process of elabourating cloth than I ever will, in the textiles exhibit. (Apropos of which: The slow-as-bureaucracy-today online OED defines dodder as "the common name of the genus Cuscuta, family Convolvulaceæ". Hmph, common indeed! An online Spanish dictionary translates bejuco as "liana".) By the time we left, heathey had joined us and we were ready to seek food. El Nuevo León had a substantial wait for a party of nine, so we set off east along 18th in search of a place which could seat us. After several blocks--on the doorstep of Birrieria Reyes de Ocotlan (the door had an oversized painting of a goat's head saying "ME DICEN 'EL SABROSO'!")--we decided to return and take our chances. The wait turned out to be not so bad after all--the lunch rush was winding down--and we feasted suitably on meat and cheese. Nothing wrong with my asado de puerco, but I think the main things the place had going for it were atmosphere and service, which, in a room filled with large parties, was excellent.

Afterwards, e. gave me the pan de muertos she'd thoughtfully picked up for me at Bom Bon while I was waiting at the Museum and dropped me off at the hospital to see Nuphy. (For the record, e., he has met both of his grandchildren--once each.) He demanded to smell as well as view the bread and, though I was dying to taste it, I waited respectfully until I had left the room. The head and shoulders formed my dinner, actually, since I felt too full of pork to fix myself anything more substantial.

My trip home was a bit of an adventure. By the time I left Nuphy, it was raining again. I was standing at Ashland, hoping vainly for a cab, when the Ashland bus came by and I impulsively hopped on. The trip across the Near West Side neatly hooked up several places I've been--the Hollywood Diner, the heart of West Town, the clinic where I had my endoscopy, Wishbone, etc.--and made me regret that I spend so much of my time in Chicago clinging to the shore of the Lake. The driver let me off right at the entrance to Graceland Cemetery and less than half-an-hour later, I was snug in bed reading from a book of Czechoslovak short stories and sipping the fruit tea I'd bought at Meinl the day before.

Raræ aves

Looking over my lists of Czech surnames, one thing that really struck me was the number of ornithonyms. In addition to the ones I gave in that earlier post, we also encountred Straka "magpie", Sojka "jay", Holub "dove/pigeon", Kohout "cock", Pěnkava "finch", and Sýkora (which my dictionary translates as "tit", but which is almost certainly a titmouse) on tombstones. Intrigued, I did some web research and found hits for Vrabec "sparrow", Skřivan "lark", Sokol "falcon", Luňák "hawk", Slavík "nightingale", Orel "eagle", Tetřev "grouse", and Sova "Owl", all used as surnames.

Many of these have equivalents in German, e.g. Hahn, Fink, Nachtigall, Adler, Kauz. But some are very rare, like Lerch(e) or Dohle, and others don't seem to exist. Going further afield, counterparts are even harder to come by. How many of the corresponding names exist in English, for example? I mentioned the phenomenon to monshu and he couldn't think of a single common French surname derived from an avian designation. Apparently, though, the phenomenon is common in neighbouring Slavic languages, like Polish and Ukrainian. (I was delighted some years ago to find that the name of my favourite Ukrainian-American baritone, Pliszka, means "wagtail".)

Oh, and for the Gallery of Unfortunate Czech Surnames, here's one that looks innocuous in English: Uher. It originally designated a Hungarian who settled in Czech territory, but, in the modern language, uher means "zit". Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the new politically-correct term is mad'ar (pronounced almost exactly like Hungarian magyar).

Goretti girls get gory!

Oh, one of the stories I read in the paper while keeping Nuphy company was this little gem. Now those sound like the kind of Catholic schoolgirls I went to school with! What makes the incident nigh-perfect is the dramatic irony implicit in the school's name.

Update: Just received an email from a friend who wanted me to know "from close by, it's not really a haw-haw news-of-the-weird type story." In my experience, that's usually the case; violence gets uglier with proximity and intimacy. Assault and battery is a crime, after all, and there's no justification for it in this instance, since there was no direct threat against the girls. Plus, the tone of the lead girl's father crowing about how his darling didn't need the police to get her revenge made me uneasy.

On the balance, I still think the idea of some guy getting his ass kicked by Catholic schoolgirls is haw-haw funny. What really makes it for me, however, is the name of the school. St. Maria Goretti was a victim of sexual assault. She knew her attacker and failed to inform anyone of his numerous advances; finally, he dragged her into the bedroom and, when she told him she'd rather die than submit, stabbed her to death. Immediately, she began saying she forgave him his crime. Thirty years later, after a miraculous vision, he repented. And that, boys and girls, is how to get canonised in this day and age. (She died in 1890.)

Clearly, the Goretti girls learned from her example--but I don't think it was the lesson the Church meant for them to take away.

Concrete footsteps

The ride up Ashland last night reminded me of something I've wanted for years: A map of the city made up of lines tracing where I've been. Maybe a hard black line for routes I've walked and a soft, broken, or coloured line for ones I took in a bus or a car. The more times I'd been over a particular route, the thicker the line would be, so that much of the city would be covered in thin tracery, at best, whereas parts of Hyde Park in particular would be almost solid black.