Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Geedunk and Geegaws

107 Geedunk and Geegaws Geedunk (gee'.dunk): 1. Navy word for junk food: candy, ice cream, potato chips. 2. Food or drink as souvenir: two liters of mediocre table red bought in a Monoprix in Paris, carried across two continents in a cardboard wine box with “bon vivant” on the sides, then found cheaper at the Piggly Wiggly in Tulsa. Geegaws (jee'.jaws): 1. Trinkets and baubles. 2. Useless souvenirs, often fragile or unwieldy, though not necessarily cheap: a porcelain figurine with tiny arms and hands, waving a feathered cavalier hat; a book in the size known as “double elephant folio”—50 inches high and heavier than a baby stroller—containing color plates of Monrovia. Mrs. Churm caught me gazing at old photos of bachelor adventures and sniffing the suntan lotion. Ignoring my hints that I use our air miles to fly to Nepal, she asked if I wanted to visit Frenchy, who was renting a condo on Snowshoe Mountain and building his log house a couple thousand feet below the lodge. “That would be great!”I said, then saw the look on her face and added,“I am on deadline for that magazine piece; this would give me time to finish. And I’ll bring you and the boys something nice.” “You don’t need to get me anything,” Mrs. Churm said, and I knew I’d better bring her something extraordinary. r A tale about geegaws: A friend wanted to see the Three Gorges before the deluge. Somewhere up the Yangtze, he, his wife, and fellow passengers 108 geedunk and geegaws debarked at a village market selling the usual teapots and brass bells and cans of Chinese soda. My friend spotted something unusual in the back of a stall; a girl said it was a poncho, used when her grandfather worked the fields. My friend looked at the ratty, rotting thing—apparently made of bark—and asked if it was for sale.The girl wanted a few bucks for it. “You are not buying that,” his wife said. Now it meant something, you see. “I think I will buy it,” he said. “If you try to buy that hideous thing I’ll go back to the boat alone,” she said. “See you back at the boat,” he said cheerfully. Before the transaction was finished the boat’s whistle blew, and a state senator from Minnesota, traveling free because his wife was the tour agent, bellowed that my friend should be left behind. But he got his poncho. His wife refused to sleep with it in their cabin, so he wrapped it lovingly in a garbage bag, stowed it in a locker in the steward’s galley, and checked on it in the night. He got trench foot on his hands from carrying the sweaty plastic through airports and endured vigorous probings by security agents because he couldn’t explain what he was clutching. On the airplane he put it in the overhead; his wife moaned that its proximity was going to make her vomit, until he began to feel queasy, too. Finally, he took it to their Chinese hotel’s business center, handed them his credit card, and said, “Ship it. I don’t care what it costs.” Two months later, when it got to their house, he figured out that, with exchange rates for its purchase, and special packaging and shipping fees, and the insurance he didn’t ask for, he’d paid, oh, a million dollars for it. His wife demanded to spend the same on herself as recompense for all she’d suffered, and he agreed, to make peace. The best part: Go visit them sometime. She’ll answer the door in a Mandarin dress, her hair pinned up with chopsticks, and ask if you’d like to see the really cool bark poncho they bought in China, which she hopes to have someone from the Art Institute appraise. He’ll pretend to be finding pictures from their trip and won’t say a word. Who says geegaws aren’t important? geedunk and geegaws 109 r With the semester over, I drove into a June sunrise, the trunk filled with books, rooster sauce, fish sauce, good wine, and better bourbon. Ohio was under construction, but West Virginia rewarded me with black cows grazing in lush grass up to their hocks on a hillside; the forested ridge behind them glowed with sun. A bit...