For the gamers among you, there is a new periodical on your horizon: Senet, a name borrowed from an ancient Egyptian board game, often found in tombs, for the deceased to enjoy wiling away their eternal hours in the afterlife. I acquired a couple issues and am more than a little intimidated. With a little more courage, I’ll send a letter-to-the-editor, seeking some guidance on the notion of adapting Agincourt as a board game.

My track record for engaging strangers in this Project is a mixed bag; most “solicitations” have gone unanswered. At least no one has replied with suggestions for institutionalization. Yet. I hope.

There’s an old greeting card box, probably older than me, which is filled with family photographs; it may be in the roll-top desk. I know they are family because I recognize two or three people. But certainly not because there are any names pencilled on the backs. Why would anyone do so foolish a thing? “Everyone knows that’s Aunt Toodie” — until everyone who knew Aunt Toodie is dead.

I suppose that explains the number of unidentified “real photo” postcards on the auction site that dare not speak its name. Nameless faces, faces that at one time had meant so much to others or they’d never have been photographed, are a waste of perfectly good visage. So I buy them — often at $3–$5 each — and sketch the lives they might have lived in a small Iowa community a hundred years ago. Some are fleshed out more than others; many are just a name — so far.

And don’t claim better things to do with my time. This is a far higher calling than some I could mention.

HOBART

It came to me this morning that this young man is Hobart; no surname or family yet. But there is a disconcertedness on Hobie’s face that belies his young age. Clearly this photo op was an interruption in his otherwise purposeful day.

Addendum [05 July 2021]: A hasty scan of the Who’s Who will tell you a lot about the curator here: that he is a well-past-middle-age White guy doomed to populate Agincourt with persons not unlike himself. Mea culpa. So, yes, I was drawn to this disconsolate little fellow, perhaps because he reminds me of myself. It then remains for me to fabricate a family for little Hobart.

“Hobart” as a given name is German, related to “Hubert”. Identifying its central European origin, a searched a list of surnames and their meaning — pretty subjective stuff, I realize. I tried several of them just for the sound and settled on a few with one or two syllables, ultimately choosing Koch (“cook”) for two reasons: 1) there was a well-known architect from Milwaukee named Koch, and 2) it is pronounced at least three ways: cook, coke, cotch. I’m going with “coke”. Now to generate some parents, siblings, and a plausible emigration story.

“Schadenfreude: when simple envy isn’t enough.”

During the Cold War, there was the joke about the English speaker (by which I mean American english) feeling superior to the Russian who did not have a word for peaceful coexistence in his Russian vocabulary, and had had to borrow “detente”. The humor lies in the truth that neither does American English; though we use the French detente — not so much since the C.W. is past — for that same deficiency in our own tongue. And so it is, I suppose with Schadenfreude.¹

It is made up of two German words: Schaden, which means “harm” or “damage,” and Freude, which means “joy.” Hence Schadenfreude is the phenomenon of taking joy or satisfaction from the bad fortune of another. A self-satisfied sort of “Told ya so!” As I’m not an etymologist, the distinctions between schadenfreude and karma are subtle. But what of schadenfreude in Agincourt?

¹ Why did this remind me of Dankmar Adler, onetime partner of architect Louis Sullivan? Adler’s mother had died in childbirth and, so, was given the name Dankmar, meaning “sweet sorrow”. How sad to be reminded each day of the circumstance of your birth. And the painful joy it had brought to another.

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