I was remiss to let May 30 pass without comment or commemoration. OK, I did have a hot meal that day.
It was 590 years ago, on May 30, that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. She was 19. Family lore says she was a distant relative, you know, the Jeanne d’Arc and D’Arconte somehow connected.
When he talked about it my father always quoted from a book his doctor owned that explained the relationship, but the doctor and my father died before I could get my hands on it.
In a Mark Twain novel about Joan, he presented her life through the memoirs of Louis de Conte. Oh, my father’s name was Louis D’Arconte.
OK, it’s a stretch, but so what. Most family lore is.
“Then she clearly understood/ if he was fire, O she must be wood,” Leonard Cohen wrote in his “love” song to Joan.
The most convincing argument to me was a story about my grandfather, who I lived with as a young boy until he died.
My grandfather never went to church, but he would have the parish priests over for Sunday dinner on occasion and give them money for the church before they left.
When they asked them why he never came to Mass, the story says he told them it was because of what the church did to Joan of Arc. Sort of a 500-hundred-year-old grudge held by a neighborhood barber in his 70s. I get it.
Saturday sermon
“Loving someone is like a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance.”
— Haruki Murakami
Feedback
Those strawberries from a “Smart” question the other Saturday drew a few deep observations on those little red things:
“Is a strawberry a fruit? Are the ‘seeds’ on the outside really pipins?” writes Dan W. “There is a fuzzy line that defines a berry, fruit and vegetable.”
He adds: “Strawberries were not what they were first called. They were known as strewberries, because of the ‘strewn about’ fashion in which they grew.”
“I find it difficult to understand the inner development of a strawberry,” writes Sandra L. “When you cut it open you can see all the tiny ‘umbilical cords’ that connect the seeds to the inner midline of the strawberry. The pulp of the berry is very soft and malleable as are those cords.
“How does the berry manage to grow bigger without those cords breaking or without the cords constricting portions of the strawberry into shapes other than its normal heart-shape?”
So you’re so smart …
Last week I bet you couldn’t tell me the names of three countries beginning with the letter “H.”
Sandra L., Doug W., Ron K., David B., Phil C., Kathy H., Colleen V., Helen A., Gail P., Patricia P. and Donna G. got it right: Haiti, Honduras, Hungary.
Several people said Holland, but we know there’s no such country. And I would have given you credit for the Holy See, but nobody suggested it.
One reader gave the right three countries and then added Nambia and Niger to the list. “I had something else on my mind when I mentioned Nambia, and Niger,” he wrote in a subsequent email to explain. “I had been working with various breeds of pheasant, and lost track of what I was researching.”
“Read your column every weekend,” wrote another. “Enjoy the weekly quizzes, hate your politics, but you keep me annoyed, entertained and questioning my principles.”
Now, I bet you can’t tell me, without looking it up, the name of the 94-year-old actress, singer and comedienne who died in 2017 after a career spanning nine decades. Hint: Remember “Hollywood Squares” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show”?
Columns for Kids
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Thanks. See you next week.