Foibles

Brown Sugar Crumble, Hazelnut Cream, Blueberry Cobbler, Mocha. I picked Brown Sugar Crumble and eagerly popped the top of the Keurig machine. There would rest a cartridge from the last person who’d used the device, either myself or, more likely, my husband Dave. Zing! It was a Brown Sugar Crumble, too. I had achieved my good luck for the day.

This silly habit livens up my mornings. Some might call it a foible, which is the term for the weakest part of a sword blade and has come to mean also “a minor weakness or peculiarity in someone’s character,” according to vocabulary.com. The Collins Dictionary agrees that foibles are considered “rather strange, foolish, or bad,” while the Cambridge English Dictionary reassures that the characteristic is, however, “seen as not important and not harming anyone.”

Peculiar but harmless—is that going to be my legacy?  At least I’ll have company. Dave was pottering about, fixing a snack, and I told him about my habit of checking for coffee pod continuity. He revealed that he does the same thing.

Isn’t it reassuring to realize that some foibles are shared? I do that too! is a pleasant surprise, a Zing. Not so satisfying when the reaction is a Ding: I never do that. Disclosing a foible is always a bit risky. If I’m driving at night and someone blinks their headlights at me, I don’t wait until they’re out of sight to turn mine on, as Dave does. And Dave—according to another recent, foible-related dialogue—doesn’t walk around our town’s streets trying to figure out how old they and the houses on them are. He chuckled, in fact, and suggested that I use my mad house-history skillz while we’re in Vienna. 

We’re leaving for Vienna soon; it’s this summer’s big adventure. None of the information I’ve absorbed about the streets and residences of Randolph will do me much good there. Our town is a mere 230 years old. Vienna’s official history dates to the first century A.D., when the Romans set up a military camp there and named it Vindobona, which camp became an official town (a municipium) in the year 212. The current layout of Vienna’s First District reflects the way that the Romans organized things. Eventually Vienna became a medieval trade center, and then the capital city of several empires (Holy Roman, Austrian and Austro-Hungarian), and then capital of the Republic of Austria. Over the last couple of millennia the city’s gobbled up surrounding towns, and as well it’s periodically rebuilt itself after various sieges, bombings, and occupations. Sometimes the rebuilding is done in an antique style so as to harmonize with what was destroyed. We’ll be wandering streets with Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Art Nouveau, brutalist, modernist, and neo-all-of-these constructions. “Older than us, probably,” I plan to tell Dave, if he asks about dates.

The architectural styles of Randolph aren’t nearly as varied. 230 is relatively ancient for an American town. Beyond trails that became the big roads, there’s not much officially left of the Cochato and Ponkapoag tribes, who called this area Cochaticquom. From 1793 through the Second World War Randolph’s inhabitants mostly subsistence-farmed and made shoes. There are still a few houses from before 1900, mostly on the old thoroughfares, some announcing their age on plaques next to the front door. The shoe business went bust in the 1990s, and highways were built, and the town became a Boston suburb. This required new streets and new houses. Subdivisions with tract housing were easy and affordable for builders and buyers. Slowly one thing became another thing, hard for its old self to recognize.

This spring I began looking up the construction dates of the neighborhoods as I walked them. I don’t know why I started; some rabbit holes just seem irresistible. Eventually I began to make my own guesses. Were the ranch houses with carports from the ‘60s? Mostly! Bungalows: ‘50s? Wrong! Mostly earlier than that. Split-levels: ‘70s, yup. Colonials with two-car garages: ‘90s. It’s built a sort of local history in my head, and I’ve had fun imagining what it was like on various streets when the homes were shiny and new.

My serial obsession with whens and whats. The compulsion to (over)share. Peculiarities or flaws? All that information puddling in my brain about writing instruments and maps and swans and holidays, does it really need to make its way onto paper? It’s got drawbacks, such as my disappointment when a pet theory proves wrong. Like my speculation that there had to be a scripture verse in some version of the Bible  prohibiting plaster lions and grottoed saints in the same garden. I couldn’t find any such verse, and it was a sad day, rather than the delight it should have been, when I happened on a yard with lions guarding a Bathtub Madonna.

This spring my silly brain has fastened on houses and my coffee compatibility rate, which is currently 68%. Vienna being famous for its coffee and its coffeehouses, I’ll be able to indulge these foibles simultaneously. I’m hoping that I come out of those coffeehouses with more Zings than Dings.