Of commas and primitive plumbing

This blog deeply regrets the oversight Wednesday of a national occasion for celebration. I am speaking of National Punctuation Day. It just shows how busy our lives are these days that we would not take time out to at least mention such an occasion, particularly one that is so intimately connected to editing. Of course, at work we celebrated. We hung up a collection of comic strips about punctuation ("Honey, we just can't keep every stray comma you bring home"). We also went around talking in exclamation points all day!!! Yes, we really whooped it up. And you thought punctuation was boring.

Before we leave that topic, I would like to call for a moment of silence to honor all the fallen, misplaced, and abused commas, periods, question marks, exclamation marks, quotation marks, colons, semi-colons, quarter-colons, etc., those hard-working pillars of our language. Let us use this occasion to vow to restore them to their proper place in our communications.

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!;

And now for today's topic, which is only slightly less on the public radar than proper punctuation: outhouses.

There is a movement in our neighborhood, which is a historic district, to preserve part of our past by restoring an old outhouse behind our row of houses. There are always difficulties involved in rehabilitating old buildings, and this one is no exception. For instance, I see one difficulty right off the bat.

a. To restore a structure, it is helpful if it first exists.
b. This outhouse does not currently exist, at least not in the location in which it is proposed to reside.

Now, I am all for restoration of things that link us to our past. I'm sure the people who lived here throughout the past 170 years would be thrilled to know that their homes have outlived them, and indeed have become somewhat fashionable, although they would no doubt think we are crazy to live in them when we could live somewhere that has straight walls, floors that do not slant 35 degrees, stairs that are not so steep that they propel you headlong toward the bottom, etc. But I'm also sure that, when modern plumbing finally came to this area -- which was, no joke, in the 1980s -- the residents at the time celebrated, in part, by taking an ax to the outhouses. At the dawn of the 21st century, they were finally moving into the 20th century!

But apparently some outhouses survived that attack, and now here we are, not all that much later, wanting to restore the area to its past shame by plopping an old outhouse from down the street in our backyard and fixing it up, no doubt much more attractively than it ever was when it was actually being used. While we're at it, maybe we should rip up all the pavement and restore the streets to their original dirt condition. With all the digging the power company has done on the streets lately, it might actually be an improvement.

Personally, I think the real reason for the Save the Outhouse project is that someone is getting a little paranoid about the economy, and figures that we should be prepared with emergency back-up facilities in case our water and electricity are shut off for some reason. Maybe it doesn't stop there. Is the outhouse merely a cover, the entrance into some as-yet-undisclosed bunker where we can all hide in case of disaster? In the future, will we celebrate our escape from a world in chaos by observing National Outhouse Day?

If so, I'll be sure to stash up some extra commas.