Quote of the Day: Saul Bellow

BettyLeave a comment
Though really you’ll find mysteries on either side.

Update: Revisited old blog posts from when I was about to graduate college and was more or less in the same job-hunting boat. Except earlier this week I felt much closer to despair because I thought five years later I’d be in a different boat. And now looking back I think, “What needless drama I caused myself. What a dope I was!”

The boat is fine. Just unclear where it’s headed. Anyway. Wise words from Saul Bellow in The New York Times. 

“To fall into despair is just a high-class way of turning into a dope. I choose to laugh, and laugh at myself no less than at others.”

Can’t be a dope. Now closing my computer and getting a cheap massage. Happy Friday everyone!

Focus

Betty3 Comments

This past weekend I caught a glimpse into the focused mind – a brain capable of tuning out and zooming in on whatever task or idea sits before the body. Ben, old Ben, changed but unchanged, with a sprinkling of gray hairs on his young head, stood a little straighter, dressed a little neater, walked a little faster than I remembered. He welcomed me with open arms to his new Alma Mater, Stanford University, granter of his future Doctorate in Computer Science. We walked through the campus; I saw everything and nothing.

But he unlocked the door to his office, which he shares with another PhD student and I began to pay attention. It was a narrow room with a large window at the end wall providing a refreshing vista of Stanford’s campus. “I like the view,” he said, and I nodded, knowing the need to look up from one’s screen sometime and wish to see something far and natural, like a tree, mountain or glistening lake. But whatever respite the eyes require, the focused brain at work can stop only for a minute, if at all.

The focus I speak of manifests itself in surprising ways: a dirty dry-erase board with a mysterious “Daruma” written on the top left corner; a messy desk nearly smothered by half-empty coffee cups and Gatorade bottles; conference papers spilling out of paper grocery bags and onto the floor. It was intoxicating. I imagined myself standing in a still life: “Genius at work”. I was lucky that the genius stood there with me, but had he been somewhere else, I would, by the contents of the room itself, have been bathing in the aura of genius.

His is not the only office I have seen that paints a passionate, concentrated mind at work – my lovely professor, the Nabokov expert, has a similar workspace. Every shelf crammed with books (all with creased spines indicating they have been read and reread) and every inch of flat surface covered with papers both his and his students; mine, the product of hours and hours of sporadic, half-hearted research, floating lightly on top, weighted down only by the ink and paper rather than solid ideas. In both offices, dust coats certain areas, but it does not matter – the true activity takes place in their skulls.

Contrast those still lifes with another of my room: consistently spotless; my desk, my closet, even the bottommost drawers of either, everything neat as a pin. Never an item out of place; the only thing on the floor are the legs of my furniture and a rug, which, if wrinkled or flipped, immediately straightened and righted. This is not only the sign of a budding (or full grown) obsessive compulsive, but also a dead giveaway for an unfocused, wandering mind. The brain that can’t focus must generate the illusion of being able to do so by making the physical environment seem orderly.

A decade ago, I was the same way, my symptoms in some ways more acute. My aunt asked me, after marveling at my various systems of organization, why I felt compelled to keep everything so neat. I thought for a long while, mulling over a suitable response before settling on a fact: I was, at least to my young self, quite “messy” inside. I understood my need to clean and wipe and stack and fold as an outlet to some inner rumblings – the confusion that comes with being as optimistic as I was, yet also painfully self-aware of potential limitations.

I wanted too many things, pursued too many interests, swam in a million shallow pools so that I would never have to get my hair wet. By keeping my room neat and my belongings pristine (for some reason, I was never one of those kids who wore out the soles of her shoes or came home with muddied, torn clothing – even after long afternoons spent in trees) was a precaution – I was creating a safe haven for my body to return to in case the clutter of my mind somehow reared its head and emerged. It’s the root of my many evils, this desire for superficial perfection, and rather than promote productivity or creativity, it constrains, corrupts, and desiccates whatever streams I might have flowing within so that I cannot write or read or do anything worthwhile without fretting that my clothes are not in order or that my desk drawers are not perfectly partitioned off. Staples here, paper clips there, empty stationery for letters I will never write, here.

I am getting better. Better at letting little things go here and there (people are now allowed to sit on my bed) and no longer worrying about letting papers pile up or books topple… but even these little allowances seemed forced, as though I am testing myself to see how long I can go before I reach out to straighten, no, completely reorganize everything in one long, dusty afternoon. But I am learning. I am learning to apply these methods of organization to my mental state. And I am writing. It is hard for me, but I do it.

As we strolled through campus, I asked Ben if every morning he walked to his office.

“I do,” he said, “I drive sometimes too, because I do get lazy, but I like to walk. It takes me roughly thirty minutes to get to my office and in a way, the walk saves me time.”

I nodded, about to say something about not having to go to the gym, but he continued.

“I like to use that time to process my thoughts. It’s a good time to think and organize. I can’t really do that effectively when I’m driving.”

So this was his reason – a far cry from mine, which had everything to do with the body and nothing to do with the mind. This was before he showed me his office, and already I was in awe. Later, we stepped out of his office and into Hoover Tower, a Stanford landmark which, I was pleased to see, was less aesthetically pleasing than Berkeley’s Campanile – but the view was pleasant, despite the greyness of the sky and the chill of the wind.

I remarked how lovely it was to see matching Spanish tile roofs. “So orderly here,” I said, “Unlike Berkeley, where the buildings don’t match.”

He looked at me for a minute, “Really? I like that the buildings in Berkeley don’t match.”

In the two years I’ve spent at Berkeley, I learned to find my pockets of neatness and order. There are certain houses I like to look at because the paint is not chipped, the windows are whole and clean and the lawns are not overgrown to the point of resembling a small jungle. I smile at these houses and wonder how they can stand to neighbor the more unsightly edifices. Walking to campus, I prefer the right side of my street to the left because the sidewalk is more even and the row of houses more favorable to me than the over grown students’ garden. Certain restaurants top my list not only because of the food, but because the tables, floors and bathrooms are clean and well-lit. I hate the smell of garbage, piss and shit (all of which occur in abundance in Berkeley) for the same reasons as everyone else does, and also because these odors transcend the membrane of my nostrils and threaten to sully my insides. The homeless, even though I feel for them, truly I do – I too, would talk to myself and yell obscenities – invade my vision. They remind me day after day of what I am not capable of cleaning.

I’ll end here, at the top of Hoover Tower, where it was strangely quiet despite the wind and a group of laughing Chinese families. I gazed out across the red tiled roofs, feeling happy and sad, composed yet on the brink of disintegration. Dear Ben with his gray hairs and kind smile that masked a gleaming mind and I with my shiny hair, my bright orange scarf – the first carefully brushed the second carefully selected – with my muddle of thoughts. A jumble of millions. The buildings with the matching roofs calmed me a bit. I stole a glance at Ben, who smiled at me. Tumble tumble crash crash. I wanted nothing more right then than to clean something.

‘Old Friends’

Betty2 Comments

When you write about love, people respond. I did a bit of writing a few mornings ago, in an uncharacteristically sentimental email (in Chinese!) to my mother, who is currently in Osaka, Japan, playing in a Ladies (euphemism for ‘old women’) Badminton Tournament. Now temper your surprise – she’s not a famous athlete; in fact, my father scoffed when she told him and I said, “Well, at least you can tour Japan after you lose.” This is in fact, what she plans to do with my father, aunt, uncle, and another retired couple. They will all skip the tournament and join her this Friday.

How quaint and cozy, the six of them will be, with their giant red Costco parkas and expensive digital cameras, which not one of them will know how to operate. They will bus around the sites, frame by the gorgeous flaming reds, oranges and yellows of the Japanese fall. A heartwarming group they’ll be, obvious old friends, fighting over dinner bills and buying things in the old fashioned Chinese way, with the belief that Japan is still a stalwart of quality goods that unknown to them, are often available for cheaper, abroad. I too, had planned to tag along – I am after all in my last semester, a final stretch of academia no one takes seriously. But my father was stern: “You’re in your last semester,” he said, his voice thick with disagreement.

“Exactly,” I said, “It doesn’t matter if I miss class. I can talk to my professors about it.”

“No, no. You’re a student. I think you should attend your classes.”

I gave up after a while. I’ve been to Japan many times in the past, and once for badminton too (though as a spectator, not a player) and shrugged off this lost opportunity.

As the saying goes, a door closes and somewhere, a window opens. (Or something more poetic). This semester, instead of jetting off to here and there and screwing up my attendance records, I’m appeasing myself by having friends come visit me and by taking small trips. And I do mean small: an hour south to Sunnyvale to see my cousins; a short flight north to Denver this coming Veteran’s Day to visit an old housemate; and another trip south, to visit another set of cousins and an ‘old friend’.

So it was with these little trips in mind that I composed the email to my mother, who despite wanting me very much to graduate on time, also wanted me to accompany them to Japan. She likes traveling with me – many people do – it’s something I’ve learned, I do quite well. But alas, I woke this morning in Berkeley, California and she retired to bed in Osaka, Japan and there was nothing to do but write her.

“Dear Mom,”I wrote, and began telling her of my weekend plans (another old friend – a different kind – is staying a few nights. I am quite excited), and of next weekend’s plans to visit my cousin Ming Jie and her fiance Vikas in San Jose. I’ll spend Friday night with them and Saturday morning, be dropped at Stanford to meet with an ‘old friend’. This dogged insistence on calling him an ‘old friend’ arises from two truths: 1.) he is, in a categorical sense, an old friend. We are friends from home, first having met in elementary school, though the actual friendship did not commence until many years later, and 2.) While I would love to use his name, his character in the narrative I’m about to tell is a character familiar to us all. Man or woman each of us knows of such an ‘old friend.’

They are of the opposite sex and significant because at heart, you hold (not ‘held’, this sort of thing cannot dissipate, not even in death), a special place for them. Count them on one hand – because a person really can only have so many ‘old friends’ and think about them for a minute. Who are they? Where did you meet? What was your first conversation? And most importantly, why them? Why her? Why him?

For my fingers’ sake, I’ll call him and all the rest Ben – an umbrella name for all my past ‘old friends’. I met Ben in the fourth grade upon admission into the Gifted and Talented Education program. Yes. I was and occasionally, still am. Ben was two years older, a sixth grader with floppy hair, big tennis shoes, and a penchant for too-big striped polo shirts that amplified his rail thin arms and neck. Now, acknowledging the lust I have for my professor who dresses in a similar fashion, I can see that Ben was an early, miniature version of my professor. Superficially, I liked Ben because he was kind. I knew this even without speaking to him for the year we were at the same school. he played easily with the “popular” kids in our GATE class and always smiled at whoever smiled to him. My memory is poor, but I do recall quite clearly liking Ben from afar and watching him from the corner of my eye on the field during recess or in class, grinning to myself as he eagerly raised his hand to answer some question or other. I do not remember speaking to him.

Early on, I developed the habit of not speaking to the object of my affections, and this might also have something to do with Ben. He was ‘smart’ in every sense of the word and while I too, was educated under that label, I could feel my intellect (whatever intellect one has in the fourth grade), paling in comparison. I knew nothing of academic grandeur, college was a decade away, but I was keen to the fact that Ben had reaped plenty of awards in the academic decathlon and that our teachers, my treasured Mrs. Mann and Mrs. Carter, saw him as a vessel of potential and me as a talkative nuisance with a poor head for numbers.

I did not pursue Ben. In the fourth grade, my main occupation was the impossible task of finding a close knit circle of girlfriends. I was included, then pushed out, then included, and pushed out again from the gyrating vortex of schoolyard cliques, but through it all I kept Ben in the corner of my eye and in my heart’s pocket. Summer arrived and Ben moved on to middle school and, just as I escaped elementary school (miraculously intact) to embark on my own middle school voyage, he took flight once again for high school, just down the street. He left in his wake, a bevy of impressed teachers, all of whom I had failed to impress in my awkward, ill-focused battle through fifth, sixth and middle school. Despite the proximity of our schools and the veritable hamlet they stood in, we would not cross paths again until I was a freshman and he a junior in high school.

Regardless of how poor one’s memory may be in the grand scheme of things, I remember that meeting as clearly as I know my mother’s face. I was lost. Thinking high school the biggest campus on planet earth, I was trying to make my way to one class or another, a ratty schedule in hand when I saw him coming from around a corner of blue lockers. Though he had been absent from my life for four full years, in spirit he had continued to grow and develop in my heart’s pocket. Several inches taller with even knobbier knees and lankier arms, he leaned slightly forward wearing a faded polo shirt, cargo shorts, and tennis shoes – the same outfit he favored in elementary school, only larger – his hair was still floppy, his face still kind. His dimensions had changed, but he was still Ben – the boy I had known and secretly admired in elementary school.

If what I had felt for him in the fourth grade was admiration, then his reappearance in my ninth grader’s vision ignited and imploded that admiration. Never had admiration roared so close to love’s burning edge and a moment later, nearly toppled into the fire when, not stopping to think whether he would remember me I called out, “BEN!”

My being lost was forgotten; I had found someone in the serendipitous way one does when one isn’t even looking and this made me bold. And Ben, my lovely Ben, in his easy way and his god-given photographic memory (for this is the only reason I can attribute to his remembering), smiled and said, “Betty! Hey!”

Fireworks! One-sided fireworks! My grin came close to ecstatic, maniacal – it didn’t matter – he knew who I was! He remembered my name! As he came closer however, my smile lessened; I realized I had nothing to follow my greeting with. After all, I had never said anything to him before.

‘Old friends’ are often instant friends. And Ben, even better at it than I, let me ramble on with my questions as though we had been best friends before. I took our concurrent year at GATE as a launching point and asked him questions to which the answers were obvious. What was he doing here? At school, like me. How was he? In one piece, apparently. How did he like it? He liked it very much. He was a junior now, which to me, meant we had two precious years together on the same campus before he left for the great black void of college. Finally in all my blathering I couldn’t bear it anymore and pointed out what seemed to me, the greatest discrepancy at our meeting:

“Ben,” I said, “I can’t believe you remember me!”

“Of course I remember you!” Kindness, kindness. And from that day on, we became old friends.

For those of you who understand the social intricacies of high school, nomadic freshmen (as I was that first year), did not hang out with nerdy juniors, who evidently, ate lunch in the Biology classroom. But as the year progressed I came to know Ben’s haunts, – he adored and was adored by the biology teacher, whom I detested for his yellow teeth and balding head, marks of a bitter man, not quite middle-aged, who had relinquished himself to teaching high school Biology after having failed the MCATs. But as much as I disliked the man, he was famous amongst the college bound (myself, at that time, included) for “knowing his stuff” and for being the most sought after teacher for letters of recommendation and approval in general. Girls did not swoon beneath his gaze, but nearly did when he awarded them A’s.

I’m not certain if Ben has outgrown his “respect” for Mr. H, but perhaps Ben was just returning a favor. To the sixteen year old Ben, Mr. H was powerful and recognized Ben as a prodigy, a boy capable of accomplishing great things with just his brain. Mr. H, with a quality I do appreciate, made class lively with discussions about everything from politics to what horrendous outfits we paraded ourselves in. He never shied from lambasting his students for not caring enough about their education (once calling to everyone’s attention that I was falling asleep) or for lauding those who did.

“Ben ______” he said one afternoon, “Do you guys know Ben _____?” Several of my classmates nodded and I sat up. He immediately earned my full attention. “Ben _____ is the smartest guy I have ever met and what makes him a really impressive,” he paused, glaring at some of the other “smart” kids in the class, “What makes Ben _____ really impressive is that Ben _____ is not lazy. He is curious. He studies, even though he doesn’t have to, and he works hard. He asks questions, he moves forward and will continue to move forward because he really does want to know.” He paused, knowing that there were many of us hoping we’d be the subject of a similar lecture some day, “You guys just wait. You’ll read about Ben _____ in the papers someday. I guarantee it.”

Not enough time has passed for Ben to make it into the papers, but time did pass – he graduated, yet again, to college and I stayed at my high school for two more years, picking up another Ben (for another story) along the way…but the candles that never burn can never be put out, and so I thought about the first Ben from time to time, wondering what mark he was making on this small world, and wondering if I would ever run into him again.

Less than two years later I too was a high school graduate, lounging around my uncle’s house in Taipei wondering what to do. The world stretched out before me in a long, languid heat – I had only to enjoy the summer, a most difficult task. What does one do in another country? Use the computer, of course – I signed on, as I always did, to AIM, the preferred mode of communication during those days, and saw Ben’s screen name boasting an interesting update: He was in Taiwan, studying at a technology research center less than an hours’ drive away. Emboldened by this God-given coincidence, I messaged him in GIANT CAPITAL LETTERS, lest my enthusiasm at being on the same tiny island (what were the chances?) as he was escaped him.

He was friendly, as I knew he would be, and as though it were the most natural thing in the world, we arranged to “hang out.” He brought along two of his research partners and a girl they had met on the subway who turned out to be excellent company, and I brought along two cousins and my brother – it didn’t occur to me then, but I had essentially orchestrated a meeting of strangers – but is this not the strange essence of chemistry backed by history? Ben and I went way back, and now we had finally caught up in the present – Taiwan was new to him and I did my best to show him what I thought were the very best things about Taipei: shopping malls, food halls, night markets, and movie theaters – half of that list can be found quite easily in America, but to share them with a startlingly homogeneous group of people can be an exhilarating experience. We ate, shopped and even watched “The Last Samurai” as one giant group, and still I managed to learn more about Ben than I could have ever hoped, and what’s more, I got to examine him up close.

There is something alarming about seeing an admired person up close. The danger of placing someone up on a pedestal becomes apparent when you are allowed to step up to the pedestal, or if the admired person voluntarily comes down. Ben, not knowing he had been placed on a pedestal, remained where he was. I seized the opportunity (the island was my stepladder) and I climbed with my magnifying glass to peer more closely at the bones and flesh that made him who he was and, tilting the glass a certain way, tried too, to peer into his soul.

He slouched a bit more than I would have liked, and during some of the film’s more violent scenes, flinched more than I think a man should flinch (I’m not one for a sensitive nature, being rather insensitive myself), but overwhelmingly the portrait I had painted was quite close to the original. Ben in the flesh, through and through, was just as I had imagined and hoped and desired. And he was kind.

The summer ended and that was the last I ever saw him in the flesh. After, life continued – he finished his research in Taiwan and returned to the states a few weeks after I had already departed for New York. Perhaps then I shut him out – or thought nothing of it because what was there to think? We had a good time – nothing too personal or romantic – and we left on a high note. He had seen my favorite place outside of Orange County, my second life and met important members of the family (all of whom thought Ben the bee’s knees) and it was all so easy. That meeting reinforced for me the knowledge I had already possessed of him, and being more reasonable than I have been in a long time, I tucked the information away along with the fond memories and went on with my own life. We kept in touch – or rather, I sporadically wrote long emails to him from various places in the world and in each one blathered on and on about whatever interested me that particular day, and each time, rather promptly, he would reply in a rather dry (Ben is not a writer) but earnest way, what he was up to. He graduated from college. Was accepted to a prestigious graduate school. Was working on this and that (computer jargon I have no hopes of ever understanding). He envied my travels, reminisced about the summer in Taiwan (saying more than once that it was the happiest two months of his life) and, like small tap to my cheek, let me know that he was dating someone.

One year, two years, three years four – and now, it has been a total of 6.5 years since that summer in Taiwan – he is still with his girlfriend and I am still in college… But other people, their relationships, their work, other people move so fast. But a few weeks ago I messaged him, a short, friendly message asking him generically, how he was doing.

I did not expect much of a response but he replied quickly and I, sensing an opening window, arranged to meet him for lunch next week. Breaking the rules? No, no, the girlfriend is still very much in the picture, along with wedding bells and babies and silicon valley success (Acuras, tennis lessons, birthday dinners in the city). No. by now, we are ‘old friends,’ in my book at least. I’m driven by curiosity – sin enough in itself, an old blind poet once said – and I want to know what forces caused me to take notice of him at the young age of nine and to never forget him, his floppy hair, his slouched shoulders, his calculator brain and his kind, crooked smile. His name. Every time I think it, it is thus: We are old friends now.

I wrote this to my mother, though with less expression, unnecessary because the subject itself is tinged with a muted sadness. There is no regret; I was never in a position to create regret, but sadness, yes.

My mother wrote back two days later:

“Dear Betty,

Thank you for taking the time to write me such a wonderful long email. I am doing fine in Japan. I leave tomorrow to tour the country with your father…I have to return to the tournament now, but I wanted to say: Don’t waver, don’t rush. One day, my darling daughter will find her knight in shining armor.

Love Mom”

Some Cheever to Start the Day

BettyLeave a comment

When he died, he was buried at Norwell Center cemetery in Massachusetts, about fifteen miles from where he was born. He came full circle after spending his life trying to escape his hometown.

In 1940, he wrote:

“Nothing seems as genuine and vital to me as the life of the family I have left. Living in New York I’ve seen people grow old and buildings torn down, I’ve seen women cry and funeral processions but when I try to recall the way people live and die I think of my mother and my father and the people who live on our street.”

In 1956, about his journal:

“I seem unable to read this journal for what it is, a means of refreshing my memory. I seem to look delightedly at myself in a glass. I think of it as something to be published and studied in libraries and this is not what I want at all.”

Off to class now.

Chinese Norman Rockwell

Betty1 Comment

Serpentine is not a color, but if I had to describe the color of my room, it is the word I would use. A few months ago I was in need of housing, which led me to find this room on Walnut St, painted a most unfortunate and baffling color. A quick tour of the other four rooms (already staked out by the time I saw the house) showed better aesthetic judgment on display – pale blue, bright yellow, lovely lilac, and peachy pink – but this room, the middle room, right across from the bathroom and with only one window, the owners had decided to paint green. A few years ago, I had a polo shirt of the same color and it complimented my skin tone in the summers when I was more tan, but when I tired of it I could fold it up and put it away in a drawer. You cannot do that with the walls of a room. You wake up to the green only to work in front of the green and when you sleep, the green creeps into your dreams and everything becomes tinged with it. When you wash your face in the morning you realize you take longer because you are unconsciously trying to wash the green off your skin.

It is not a calming forest green, or even a sickly hospital green, but a fiesta green (I suspect the paint was called “Fiesta Verde” or simply, “Fiesta!”). I have a red aluminum water bottle which I placed in a corner and now that corner looks like Christmas.

The rest of the house is fine – painted odd colors here and there, but clean, cozy and filled with nice girls, slightly younger but who, in their wide-windowed, lovely-colored rooms, lounge on their beds and read in the abundant sunlight with their ankles crossed in the air. I walk by their rooms on the way downstairs or to the bathroom (which has more natural light than my room) and see them basking as I did once…

“Enjoy your time there, young woman,” I think and head back to my dim green hole.

My point: I am still in love with my room on the third floor of the pale, peach house on Warring St.

It had three white walls and one pale green wall, (which I had frowned upon when I first moved in but now I pine for that pale green wall!) and three more windows than the average college student’s room (four!), which meant more sunlight streamed in than I knew what to do with. Mostly, I basked. I basked on my bed, in my chair, on my other chair (the Ikea Poang, if you must know), and occasionally, left the room for a glass of water or nourishment the sun could not provide. Mostly though, I could be found in my room either napping, reading, watching TV, or surfing the internet, the sun’s rays generously warming some otherwise cold extremity. My room had been, as I suspected, a balcony when the house was first built. The wood floor was not – an imitation, laid over the original outdoor stuff and walls built where once, there was railing. In the middle of my senior year one of the house’s original inhabitants – now a grown woman of sixty something – happened to be visiting the area and, walking by her old house, turned back into a curious child. She knocked on our front door.

Our house mother let her in and spoke loudly with her in the hall outside my room before finally peeking in to alert me that we had a visitor. The woman, consummately Berkeley despite having made her adult life on the east coast, shook her head in awe.

“This was a sun porch,” she said, her eyes misting with nostalgia, “I used to sleep out here during the summers and drink lemonade during the day. My favorite place in the whole house.”

I tried to imagine what she was describing, and I almost could – though it meant mentally erasing the frat boys next door as well as the freshman dormitories across the street.

“How wonderful,” I said, “And how strange that now I am living here.” I was suddenly reminded of the movie “If These Walls Could Talk” – a film about lesbians, if I remember correctly – but which essentially told the story of a house through the years. I tried to imagine the woman as a young girl, wearing a frayed tank top and faded shorts, sitting with her back to the wall and a book resting on her knees, (for she looked bookish), reading on the sun porch with a glass of lemonade at her feet. I wanted to paint it – a Chinese Norman Rockwell – and give it to her. But I couldn’t.

“Time flies,” the woman said, and our house mother took it as a cue to rattle off some cliche or other, beginning with her favorite, “Let me tell you…”

Before leaving she smiled at me, nodding at the open books on my desk as well as the air. She sensed it: an air of leisure, of a young woman in a room of her own, cherishing the peace and the sunshine and the warmth.

“Enjoy your time here,” she said. “I will,” I replied.

And I did. Oh how I did.