SQT 2-2-18 – On the Other Hand

"Seven QuickTakes" is hosted at "This Ain't the Lyceum."

1.     Number One Son now has not handed me weights during my workout, tried to feed me peas for lunch, and beat my breast during the penitential rite at Mass.  Nothing like an oldest child to keep his parents in line!  On the other hand, he flipped out when a latecomer to Mass did a full prostration next to our pew.  Apparently too much devotion is upsetting to the toddler mind?

2.     Fun money fact: If you have an IRA, you cannot transfer it to anyone else as long as you are alive.  No, not even your spouse.  No, not even if you’re unemployed.  No, not even if the account fees are slowly draining away your tiny balance so that it will be halfway evaporated by the time you can withdraw at age 59.  On the other hand, you can withdraw early and avoid the tax penalties if one of a few choice situations applies in your case.

3.     Dr. Seuss now lives in the drawer that we never open where the good silverware lives.  (Don’t ask me why we have good silverware; we haven’t used it yet because our ordinary silverware is pretty dang nice, and because I haven’t gotten around to ever washing the good silverware, ever, in three years of marriage.  #firstworldproblems)  It’s not that I am morally opposed to Dr. Seuss.  Nor am I actually opposed to anyone else reading Dr. Seuss while I’m around.  I’m just opposed to reading it myself.  I have no problems reading “I Am a Bunny” 2,347,891 times in an afternoon, but there’s just something about “Fox in Socks” that makes me want to curl up and die after the third repetition.  Part of it is probably the shortness of the lines and the similarity of the rhymes (see what I did there?), since ordinary Mother Goose is no problem for me.  Part of my repulsion, no doubt, is due to the ugly pictures.  (Really.  If they don’t corrode your soul on some level, maybe you ought to see a spiritual body mechanic about the damage that’s already been done.)  Whatever the reason, I’m not pretending it’s logically defensible.  As the Italian Mama says about her cooking, “You must feeeeeeeeel the love, Gino!  You no feeeeeeel it, you no coooook it.”

4.     On the other hand … It occurs to me that some people may feel that I am selfishly depriving my son of one of his chief joys in life, namelich, hearing Mama read “Fox in Socks” very fast with perfect diction and (depending on how insane she’s turned today) either the Boris and Natasha accent or the Julia Child voice.  Sorry, folks; I feel no guilt.  Here’s the thing about toddler desires: they’re pretty malleable, as long as you keep things out of sight.  Sometimes even if you don’t keep things out of sight.  A sixty-second snapshot of Number One Son’s brain this morning (expressed in whines, grunts, running, pointing, and the occasional “Pwee! pwee pwee pwee!”): I want … milk!  What?  No!!  I want … outside!!!!  Daddy, read book!!!! Mama, read book!  I like my stacking bowls.  Ice?!!!!  Is that my milk?!!! Outside?!!!!! OUTSIDE FOOLISH PARENTS!!!!!!!!  Oh, we’re going upstairs now??  OK.  Great!  My favorite place.

 *                    *                     *

Don’t feel too bad for him.  He’s just a little bipolar, like all toddlers.  And believe me, as long as he doesn’t know Dr. Seuss is in the drawer, he—and Mama—will be juuuuust fine.

5.     A little more fallout news from Hawaii: https://xkcd.com/1946/  (For those not familiar with XKCD, language and content warning—this installment is clean, but on the other hand there are plenty of others that are not.)

6.     It’s very sweet when all your high-energy sick child wants to do is lie in a blanket on your lap and babble at you.

7.     On the other hand, when said child tries to express his affection and gratitude by giving you open-mouthed kisses on the mouth …

"A Man Grimacing Grotesquely"

Source

Bonus take: Another place to find old free images!

Easements, Water Rights, and Eminent Domain

They are all rather old concepts, actually.  I forget exactly which part of the Torah it is (perhaps Leviticus?), but the Old Testament includes some rather strict provisions requiring landowners to leave “extras” in their fields for the poor, including a dramatic every seventh-year rest, in which no farming at all was permitted.  And the Romans too differentiated between the concepts of ownership, possession, and use of land:

The word dominium is primarily a legal term, corresponding to a fundamental concept in Roman law.  In that system it refer essentially to an absolute and exclusive right of ownership and control.  Property in this sense was, in Roman legal usage and practice, sharply distinguished from other modes in which land or some other object might be accessible to one individual or group rather than to another.  Such individuals or groups might, for instance, have acquired and so might enjoy the ‘usufruct’ (usufructus) of a piece of property; or they might enjoy the possession or occupation (possessio) of it.  No such situation, however, altered or modified the owner’s exclusive dominium in, or over, the property.

When, in the late eleventh and increasingly in the twelfth century, the study of Roman law revived and expanded in Latin Christendom, the concept of dominium became both crucial and problematic.  In a feudal society, of which the leading characteristic was the holding of lands by lords (domini), lordship was an absolutely basic fact of social life: dominium was therefore an essential concept in the juristic articulation of the social order.  The problem was that feudal relationships did not allow for any such absolute and exclusive right as Roman dominium implied.  The vassal or subtenant was regarded as having something more than mere usufruct or bar possession.  He too was in his way a dominus, and to allow for this it was necessary to devise ways in which dominium itself could be divided.  It was for this reason that the jurists of the twelfth century developed the notion of dominium utile, a form of lordship which still preserved in the hands of the overlord the ultimate dominium directum (the ‘eminent domain’ as it come to be called in some legal traditions) while assuring to his vassal a tenure that was a great deal more than precarious—dependent on the lord’s will or pleasure.  (Lordship, Kingship, and Empire, J.H. Burns, 18-19.)

My parents actually have the use of easement—a narrow strip of land along the edge of (and technically on) a neighbor’s property, which allows them access to an otherwise inaccessible road.  On the flip side, I do know people who have, unfortunately, lost property through eminent domain laws in favor of the state.  In both cases, however, as for the Israelites, the Romans, and the medieval jurists, distinctions emerge out of a concern to balance private property rights with the common good—never an easy and apparently a perpetual historical task, but one well worth engaging in.