Curmudgeon? Me?

Tina does say I’m becoming a bit, just a bit, curmudgeonly, though she acknowledges as much only when I seek her appraisal of something I’ve done or said that seems to me like it may suggest a bit of curmudgeonliness to others. For example, recently, I unsubscribed to the neighborhood email newsletter after weeks of not reading anything in which I seemed remotely interested. Many posts were by the same person who seems to “rescue” small wild animals in our neighborhood. Never mind that we live in the woods . . . where Darwinism is the law of the land.

Also recently, the neighbors all got together of a Sunday night with chairs and wine on a driveway nearby and I didn’t even know about it until Tina said, “That get-together is happening right now up at Nancy’s,” and I replied, “What get-together?” and then Tina recalled that I had unsubscribed to the neighborhood newsletter. “Does this make me a curmudgeon?” I asked and she acknowledged that, indeed, it did. She didn’t pause to think nor did she gaze at me reprovingly and certainly not consolingly. Just kept eating her dinner as if I’d asked something as mundane as, “Did you remember to put milk on the grocery list?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at her grilled chicken, glass of wine in hand.

“I just don’t want to read about every animal that so and so rescues on a seemingly daily basis,” I whined.

“Curmudgeon,” she said still without looking up from the dinner that I, in my loving spirit, had prepared for her, a dinner that included a Tarte Tatin made with tomatoes.

So . . . my curmudgeonliness, such as it is, may in fact be rational opposition to mindlessness. But, I must admit, that’s what all curmudgeons say.

By the way, the dictionary definition of a “curmudgeon” points to a “churlish,” “miserly,” even “avaricious person.” But that doesn’t seem to be the working definition, the common understanding, except for the “churlish” part. There is no accepted etymology of “curmudgeon,” which is good because I had wondered if it shared any provenance with “cudgel” or “truncheon,” or “bludgeon” and hoped not insofar as those three weapons seem far too brutal to be evoked by the relative harmlessness of a “curmudgeon” whose curmudgeonliness is routinely, and perhaps rightly, ignored instead of feared.