I like to think that I’m the sort of person who, if you make the same complaint about me for a quarter of a century, I’ll listen thoughtfully to what you have to say, take your opinion into consideration and maybe do something about it. Even if I’m married to you.
Thus it was that, the other day, I found myself thinking long and hard about a constant refrain that I hear whenever I bring in the three Sunday newspapers and turn to the section that is universally acknowledged to be the most important, the most trenchant, and the source of the best that has been thought and said, to steal a line from Matthew Arnold, who wasn’t using it anyway: the comics.
Matthew Arnold: Dude–easy on the mousse!
The charge is that this somehow reveals a lack of maturity on my part, a fundamental unseriousness of mind. It’s one that, for an unserious person, I take very seriously, so much so that the other day I sought out my fellow product of a Catholic elementary education, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, or as we used to call him on the playground, simply “Goya.”
As boys, we both suffered from ear trouble, and as young men we were both unsuccessful artists, a policy which I have continued into late middle age–and beyond as Buzz Lightyear might say. Goya, on the other hand, failed to win a prize in a competition at Parma in his twenties, but shortly thereafter he received a commission to decorate a vaulted ceiling in the Nuestra Senora del Pilar, Saragossa’s new cathedral, and never looked back. He became the top sacred decorator in his province–sort of the Andy Warhol of Aragon churches.
“Whadda you think,” I asked as I poured him a glass of jerez. “Am I . . .”
“Are you what?” he asked when I hesitated.
“Immature?” I gulped.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he said as he sipped the fortified wine of his native country. “Do you have any honey roasted peanuts?”
I got up to get him some, then returned to the table. “Other people think it’s a bad thing,” I said as I sat down. “And all because I like cartoons.”
“Don’t you just love F Minus?” he said as he gulped down a handful of nuts.
“Yeah–I cut out the one about the lab mice who start performing ‘Hamlet’ when they’re given an experimental drug.”
“That’s a classic. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Naw. When I stopped doing churches, my first commission was painting cartoons for the Royal Tapestry Manufactory.”
“Get outta town!”
Goya tapestry cartoon
“You get outta town. There’s nothing wrong with cartoons. Say–you want to hear my favorite joke about church decorators?”
“Sure.”
“Okay–so the Pope hires Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, and he’s getting a little nervous.”
“Why?”
“Well, the work’s taking a long time, Michelangelo’s over budget, labor and materials are adding up. So the Pope figures–I’ll stop by one day and drop a few subtle hints.”
“Unh-huh.”
“So the Pope walks in, real casual-like, and Michelangelo’s cleaning his brushes at the end of the day. The Pope looks around and sees that the work is nowhere near finished, so he counts to ten, trying to stay calm. Finally he says ‘Hey Mike–how’s it going?’ And Michelangelo looks up and says “Pretty good, I just gotta finish the ceiling.”
Ba-da-bing. I barely stopped myself from spraying sherry all over him, but I renewed my line of questioning. “How about . . . stupid teenage movies like Napoleon Dynamite?”
Goya looked off into the middle distance, and I could tell he was trying to conjure up one of the movie’s many memorable lines. “Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills–you know, like nunchuk skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills.”
“As famous in its own way, as the Cary Grant line in Notorious . . .”
“For what it’s worth she’s telling the truth,” he said, effortlessly slipping into Grant’s cool monotone. “I knew her before you and I loved her before you . . . I just wasn’t as lucky as you.”
“That’s the one. But seriously . . .”
“If we’re going to get serious,” he said, “you should seriously consider spending more money when you buy jerez, my friend.”
“Easy for you to say, you who owns a company that offers beans, rice, nectars, seasonings and authentic Spanish, Mexican and Hispanic specialties sold in bodegas across America.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said as he sipped my cheap sherry with a wince. “My great-great-grandfather gave the business to the other side of the family. I’m one of the creative Goyas.”
“Oh–sorry. So you don’t think a persistent tendency to think like a child–contra St. Paul–into adulthood is so bad?”
“Old proverb: We don’t stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing.”
Dawn broke on Marblehead for me. “Wow–that is so . . . deep. Is that Spanish, like ‘Living well is the best revenge’ and ‘Que sera, sera’?”
“Naw, I read it on the tag of a Salada tea bag,” he said, reaching for more nuts. “You should study my most famous print.”
“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters?”
“On the nosey. You know, you people in the knowledge industries, you burn your brains out all day, every day, understanding things and explaining things ’til your grey matter cries out for a little . . . craziness, a little nonsense.”
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
“So . . . there’s nothing particularly wrong with me?” I asked hopefully.
“I didn’t say that,” he said, a bit offended that I’d put words in his mouth. “We were just talking about cartoons.”
Sometimes I am amazed at the people you have known in your life. So, how old are you exactly? So funny!