Sacrificial trees

The University of Washington has one of the most beautiful, tree-shaded campuses in the nation. It came as a shock, therefore, as I strolled across campus today, to hear the harsh buzz of a chain saw. Suddenly, off to one side of me, I saw a tree wobble, collapse to the ground, and die. Closer investigation showed a number of neighboring trees also destined for immediate death.

Bit by bit, areas of the campus, once densely forested, have been cleared and built up as the university reaches out for ever more classrooms. Today's traumatic episode begins the construction of Paccar Hall. This new building for the business school is being built just north of Denny Hall, and just east of the new law school, on the southeast corner of Memorial Way and Stevens Way.

You can't stop progress, as they say. In this case the new construction does represent progress -- even at the cost of a few trees. Most of Paccar Hall will replace existing surface parking, and the cost of trees will be minimal. Once completed, a second adjacent building will replace Balmer Hall, an existing rather tacky 1950's building now serving the business school. The two new buildings will be joined together. Landscaping ultimately will no doubt restore the sacrificial trees.

The UW has unusually uniform and attractive "collegiate gothic" brick architecture. During the 1950's, one of the more lamentable eras in American architectural design, a few jarringly modern buildings were constructed. Besides Balmer Hall, these included the unfortunately named "Sieg Hall"(formerly called simply the General Engineering Building), and a central section of Suzzalo Library. This construction not only clashed with the rest of the campus, but was inherently unattractive even by the standards of the time.

During the last fifty years, however, the university has returned to brick construction that may lack the ornate detailing of the earlier buildings, but nevertheless blends attractively with the rest of the campus. (And within the last ten years, the school built a substantial addition to the old physics building that completely matched the gothic, castle-like appearance of the original, showing that the necessary skills to detail such buildings have not been lost.)

I hate to see even one tree fall to the ground, let alone a grove. But I'm pleased to live near a university that has shown as much care for the esthetic integrity of its campus, including trees and landscaping, as it has for the utility of its new construction. A friend, a graduate of Yale, visited me from out of town a few years ago. He expressed regret that his own alma mater had failed to show the same care in preserving an overall design to its campus.

So, I'm looking forward to seeing the new building as it rises. Together with the law school, it will present an impressive introduction to the campus through the main north entrance.

Going back to high school

A thirty-year-old mother attended her daughter's middle school in El Paso. She represented herself as being her own seventh grade daughter.  She got away with it for six periods, until in seventh period a teacher called her out.  She was masked, which had helped, but had removed the mask to eat lunch. Not even her older appearance had aroused suspicions. 

According to the El Paso Times, the mother was arrested on charges of criminal trespass and tampering with government records.  She was released on bond of $7,908.  She claims that she was just trying to prove how lax security is in public schools.  Hmm.  Ok.

The El Paso mother's exploit brings back memories.  I did something similar the summer after graduating from college and awaiting post-graduate work.  I'll confess it, only because I'm certain that the statute of limitations has run.

A friend from school, still an undergraduate, visited my home for a couple of weeks.  We were bored.  University classes would not begin for several weeks, but the local high schools were about to open.  My friend thought it would be cool to attend high school for a day.  I'll call him John.  (John went on to hold a surprisingly high position in the federal government, and probably would prefer that his real name not be used.)  I wasn't really interested.  Or rather, I was interested, but I was justifiably chicken.  John was never chicken.  Not always wise, but never chicken.  

John was very persuasive.  Eventually, I gave in.

We couldn't do it in my old high school -- teachers would recognize me immediately.  But we felt safe attending school in a neighboring town.  We dressed in what we considered to be then-popular high school clothes, which were already different from those we had worn four years earlier.  We stood outside the school and cased the joint.  I had attended games at this school, but had never actually been inside the academic building.  

We walked in.  Unlike the El Paso mom, we weren't wearing masks.  I prayed nothing would go wrong, although it never occurred to me that I might be charged with criminal trespass.

High schools are high schools, and once inside it all felt familiar.  Only four years earlier I'd been in high school, but four years might as well be a couple of decades when you're 22.  First day of school, and everyone was a bit confused.  We found that the first order of business was to be an all-school opening assembly.  We walked into the auditorium.  No one gave us a second look.  High school kids come in all shapes, sizes, and apparent levels of maturity, and we both looked young for our age.

The assembly was boring of course, but my adrenaline level was high.  I didn't get drowsy.  When it was over, everyone headed for their first period classes.   We didn't have schedules.  I don't think we had thought through to this stage.  The halls were beginning to empty.

John muttered, well, maybe we should leave?  Yes, yes, oh yes!  I thought.  And thanks, John, for being the person to suggest it. 

So my story peters out.  Sorry if I aroused higher expectations.  We left the high school behind to the high schoolers, hopped in the car, and gladly returned to our real lives as high school graduates and university students.  We learned nothing from our experience.  Absolutely nothing.  It added not one whit to my lifetime accumulated wisdom.  

Except, perhaps, that I'm not the sort of guy who is cut out to be a crook.  And that, unlike that odd woman in El Paso, you gotta know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em!  Especially when to fold 'em.

Joys of Adolescence

Fayetteville sounds like a nice place to live. It's a medium-sized town nestled in the Ozark Mountains, home of the University of Arkansas. Fayetteville's citizens enjoy an above average level of income and education. Wikipedia's photos reveal a leafy, quiet town, a nice blend of modern and traditional collegiate architecture. Fayetteville's been named one of Forbes Magazine's "Top 10 Best Places in America for Business and Careers."

Billy Wolfe, 15, lives in Fayetteville. He's a sophomore at the local high school. But Fayetteville is not one of the top towns in America for Billy. Kids don't like Billy. No one really knows why. But, I mean, they really don't like him. They beat him up. Regularly. For fun. For years. Since he was 12.

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

It's sort of like that, I guess. They've knocked Billy out, unconscious. They've hit his face so hard that his braces were embedded in his cheek. His middle class parents have come to school to pick him up, and have had to watch him spitting out blood. They have a stack of photos showing the bruises and black eyes he's incurred over the years. When kids don't hit Billy, they call him names. They grab his text books and write things about him on the pages.

Last year, they got together and put up a Facebook page entitled "Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe." Pretty cool, huh? Kind of a bonding exercise for his classmates.

No, Billy isn't popular. He's scared of going to school. His stomach churns each morning. The school doesn't do much. Some teachers think, for unexplained reasons, that he brings it on himself. They just don't like the cut of his jib? Maybe it's because he has a reading disability? They've blamed him for starting the fights. A video of an unprovoked asssault by his classmates proved them wrong. His parents are suing some of his classmates, and may sue the school district.

Billy's story is told today in a feature article by Dan Barry in the New York Times. There are no easy answers to Billy's plight. As Barry points out, "schoolyard anthropology can be so nuanced." It's hard for adults to understand what goes through the immature heads of kids that age. But we know that a pack of wild animals will turn on one of its smaller or weaker members. They'll kill him, apparently for sport. The mothers of some species will themselves kill the runt of the litter. Why should we assume that a 14 or 15 year old kid has progressed much further along the road to civilization?.

But the question keeps gnawing at me: where were the teachers?

I should have been a prime target for bullying. I was usually the smallest kid in the class, the little imp who holds the sign in the front row of his class photo. I had weird interests, I wore glasses, I couldn't thow a ball from second base all the way to home plate. But, luckily, I was never bullied. Nothing more than the occasional snarl and shove that the alpha-males use to remind the betas just which is which. I escaped bullying, probably, because I had an age-appropriate sense of humor that I aimed often at myself, because I couldn't care less where I stood in the social heirarchy or how popular I was, and because my abilities in school and my bizarre interests somehow aroused more fascination than contempt in my fellow students. Maybe I was just inexplicably lucky.

But Billy hasn't been so lucky.

I try to imagine what it must be like to drag myself out of bed every morning and wonder if I'll be lucky enough to attract only sneers all day, or whether I'll actually be physically injured. What's it like to know that friendships are impossible, to realize that even if someone should improbably find you likeable, it would be social suicide for him to be your friend? To be a poor reader, and therefore treated as unteachable by your teachers, in addition to facing the daily contempt of the entire student body? What would give meaning to your life? How would you force yourself to go through the motions of living each day?

Is it any surprise that suicide rates are very high for kids in this age bracket? Would anyone be surprised to read a headline one of these days, announcing to a baffled world that a Fayetteville student had gone berserk and murdered his fellow students, before turning the gun on himself?

In 2007, Washington enacted a statute requiring school districts to adopt programs that are designed to combat "harassment, intimidation, or bullying." RCW 28A.300.285. (Enactment was delayed for a year because conservatives were afraid the statute might be used to prevent kids from freely expressing strong distaste for their gay classmates.) Fayetteville appears to have had a similar program in place. It obviously hasn't helped Billy. Legal compulsion can go only so far when the teachers themselves have no apparent interest in protecting their students.

But even with the best of laws and the most enlightened of faculty, kids will bully other kids, even in towns that don't seem particularly backward, so long as they grow up believing that such behavior is fun and acceptable.

In the 21st century, we're no longer animals. Our human pack is partly civilized. We only occasionally kill our pack's most vulnerable cubs. More often, we just make them wish they had never been born.

Another death

On my 15th birthday, my aunt and uncle gave me a subscription to U.S. News & World Report. I know they thought it was an odd gift for a ninth grader, but it was a gift that I had specifically asked for. I was delighted. It was my very first subscription to an adult publication.

At the time, the magazine was very bland in appearance and loaded with facts and data. Not just no color pictures, but no pictures at all. If you wanted to know the forecasts of steel and coal production for the coming month, the value of pork belly futures and the ups and downs of the Dow Jones, U.S. News gave you that information. Its editorial stance was what was then considered strongly right wing -- pro-business, low taxes, strong military readiness and an assertive, anti-Communist foreign policy -- and, needless to say, no nonsense here at home. That was ok by me, an avid Republican in my high school years.

Although U.S. News was strongly conservative, its domestic conservatism was a stance supported by hard economic data and expressed as explicit support for Big Business (not as opposed to Main Street business, but with no particular interest in Main Street, either). Its editors would have found much of today's Republican oratory to be alarmingly bombastic and unacceptably populist. Laissez faire economics was the cornerstone of its domestic economic policy, as it is that of The Economist today. Unlike The Economist, however, U.S. News had no interest in discussing history, political theory, theoretical science, opera, literature, or music. Its articles certainly were not introduced by whimsical, ironic headlines.

It was not much interested in "nuance." Or humor.

U.S. News was a magazine a little less exclusively focused on business than, say, Business Week, but it was aimed at the same audience -- heavy-set businessmen with red faces and thick necks, men who smoked cigars, drank three martini lunches, and hadn't owned a pair of jeans since high school. Men who wouldn't be seen dead at the theater, unless dragged there by "the little woman."

At some point in my life, U.S. News gave way in my affections to Time and Newsweek, and then to other, more sophisticated publications. And the magazine itself changed radically, attempting in recent years to gain subscribers by becoming more similar to Time and Newsweek. But I've always had a special place in my heart for the publication that gave me my first insights into the adult world of politics, economics, and business.

U.S. News & World Report ceases publication next month. Requiescat in Pace, I say, although its earlier editors would have responded to that expression of good wishes with a growled "Huh?"

Jesse at Davis

The detested, evil dragon of my student days was, of course, the hydra-headed University of California, my hatred reaching its peak each November during the Big Game against Berkeley. But one does grow up, one matures, and one finally comes to realize that the State of California has created probably the best public university system in the nation.

I once overheard a Cal undergrad telling a friend, while walking out of Berkeley's stadium in Strawberry Canyon, "We have a love-hate relationship with Stanford. But with USC, it's entirely a hate-hate relationship." And yeah, I guess that's how it looks from the Cardinal side as well. Mutual fear and loathing of USC, along with mutual academic (if not athletic) respect, does have a way of bonding old rivals together.

Cal and UCLA are the UC system's two representatives in the Pac-10, and everyone knows who they are. But the other eight schools are also highly selective, and also provide an excellent education. Jesse attends UC Davis, eleven miles west of Sacramento, a branch that consistenly rates as one of the best schools in the University of California system (and the eleventh best public university in the entire United States, according to U.S. News & World Reports). Average high school GPA for entering freshman is 3.94.

On Sunday, I visited Jesse for the first time at the off-campus Davis apartment that he shares with his two roommates. He took me on a grand tour of the campus by bicycle (in 97-degree weather), including a ride through and around the beautiful waterway and arboretum that bisect the campus. Biking is a mode of transportation for which the school has become nationally famous -- both the university and the city of Davis are served by an excellent system of bike trails. When you have a 5,500-acre campus -- over eight square miles -- from most of which motor traffic is barred, hoofing it is not always the most sensible way to get from one class to the next.

One reason the campus is so huge is its history as an agricultural college. Davis was selected as the site of the University of California's "University Farm" in 1908, and became the site of one branch of its College of Agriculture in 1922. (At that time, the University itself was still located exclusively in Berkeley.) One symbol of the school remains a water tower, bearing the school logo, that looms over the campus. The athletic teams are called the "Aggies," and UC Davis has long been known for having one of the only two schools of veterinary medicine on the West Coast.

Agriculture remains an important focus of the school -- with the cultivation of grapes and the making of wine of obvious importance to the economy of Northern California -- but the campus has been a general campus of the UC system ever since 1959, and offers studies in the humanities and sciences, engineering and nursing, and includes respected graduate schools of law, medicine, and business.

Jesse, I should note, has no academic interest in wine, irrigation, engineering or business adminstration. As proof that UC Davis has grown far beyond its more practical roots, he will graduate (probably after one more semester) in medieval history, an excellent major with absolutely no practical application, a major that he shares with his proud uncle. There are those of us who dream of seeing Jesse next move on to law school, but as always he will choose his own path, in his own way, and at his own time.

Meanwhile, together with 30,000 other students, he continues to thrive on a beautiful campus and to receive a fine education from the University of California.

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Photos: Top, the arboretum; middle, old postcard of early "University Farm" agricultural buildings; bottom, water tower.

Little Men

Tony in acting class

When the evening temperature in Seattle hovers at an uncomfortable 90 degrees, there's nothing like a 7 p.m. movie in an air conditioned movie theater to improve one's mood.  Especially when the movie's shown in a luxury class Sundance theater.

And so, after reading rave reviews, I went to see Ira Sach's film Little Men.  Read the reviews yourself.  The New York Times, the New Yorker -- and a 96 percent favorable critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  I'll just add my cheers.

Briefly, the story takes place in a gentrifying area of Brooklyn, where Brian (a "not that successful" actor) and Kathy (a psychologist) have inherited a building with a residence upstairs and a business downstairs.  The downstairs is occupied by a dress shop run by a friendly, hardworking, but taciturn seamstress and proprietor, an immigrant from Chile, played absolutely magnificently by Pauline García.  Brian discovers that his father had been renting the shop to her for years at a rent far below market.  He and his family move to the Brooklyn building from Manhattan.  They intend to put the rental back on a rational business footing.

The couple have a son, Jake, and the renter has a son Tony.  Both boys are 13.  Jake is an introverted aspiring artist; Tony is an extraverted aspiring actor.  They bond almost instantly into a touchingly close friendship.  The actors playing the boys are also outstanding -- playing their parts with a high degree of early adolescent energy, with humor, with deep sincerity, and ultimately with pathos. 

They dream of starting high school together at La Guardia high school, a highly selective public school near Lincoln Center specializing in the visual and performing arts.  After several halcyon weeks together, however, zooming around Brooklyn on scooter and skates, their parents begin trying to pull them apart as relations over a new lease quickly become strained.

All the adults act reasonably from their own points of view.  The parents of both boys are loving and proud parents.  But the devastating effect of their business quarrel on the two boys is low on their set of concerns, certainly far lower than their concern over the amount of rent. 

The end is predictable.  We see Jake, a year older, alone, painting at La Guardia.  Tony has disappeared, presumably slipping with his mother into a poorer neighborhood with less demanding rents.  Jake's eyes light up for a moment in an art museum when he spots Tony visiting with a group from school.

Tony doesn't see Jake. He walks away.

Ira Sach's direction is perfect.  The acting by all actors blew me away.  The photography of the adults, of the kids, of Brooklyn, is beautiful and striking.  Brian acts in a Chekhov play within the movie, and the movie itself has been described as "Chekhovian." I hope the subtlety of the script and of the acting doesn't doom it with today's public.

I left the theater pensive, sad, but pleased with my investment of a couple of cool hours in overheated Seattle.
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(8-26-16) The film was shown in Seattle for seven days at one theater. It then disappeared, most likely to reappear eventually in the world of Netflix. My hopes for its popularity have been apparently dashed.

Source Code

The author was a small, skinny kid with a squeaky voice.  He found it hard to relate to other kids, and felt more comfortable with adults.  He didn't seem to be really bullied, but was simply ignored by his classmates.  He, in turn, tended to ignore them, aside from a close group of friends with whom he went on long mountain backpacking trips, when as young as 13, without adult supervision.

He had a close relationship with a loving family, a family of high achievers who were concerned by their son's somewhat isolated behavior, but who gave him a large degree of freedom.  He developed interests that other kids simply didn't have, and he delved deeply into them.  

By fifth or sixth grade, he realized that he could attract interest and a certain degree of acceptance from his peers by becoming the class clown.

Gosh, I thought.  He sounds a bit like me when I was  his age.  But this lad was Bill Gates, who, together with his high school friend Paul Allen, became the founder of Microsoft.  I'm afraid the resemblance between his life and mine diverged at a fairly early stage, but the early resemblance was enough to keep me turning the pages avidly.

In his autobiography, Source Code: My Beginnings, Bill describes his life in colorful detail from the time he was an infant growing up in Seattle, through his grade school years at View Ridge and Laurelhurst elementary schools, and then -- from seventh grade on -- at Seattle's prestigious Lakeside School.  Looking back, it's easy to conclude that his experiences at Lakeside had a greater impact on his future life -- both professionally and personally -- than did his undergraduate years at Harvard.

His brilliance, especially but not exclusively in math, was evidenced early on.  As was his ability to focus exhaustively on one subject at a time.  In elementary school:

I got interested in penguins and could have told you how long an Adelle can hold its breath underwater (six minutes) or how tall an Emperor can grow (4.3 feet).  For a while rockets and bridges captivated me.

In fifth grade, the teacher asked each student to pick a state to profile.  Others picked California or Florida or Hawaii.  For some reason, Bill picked Delaware.

I inhaled everything I could find on Delaware.  I trolled the stacks at the library, dug out Delaware: A Guide to the First State, and books on Delaware's history, the state's role in the Underground Railroad.  I wrote to the state of Delaware for brochures on tourism and history.

He studied the Indian history of the state and wrote "fictitious accounts of the lives of a Delawarean oyster fisherman and a granite miner."  He analyzed in some detail the DuPont company, Delaware's largest corporation -- including a description of the chemistry of polymerization.

By the time I was done, I had generated 177 pages on little Delaware. ... The class jester wasn't expected to turn in a tome. ... My teacher loved it.

I loved reading about it.  This was the sort of a intellectual triumph I would have loved to have generated as a fifth grader, presenting it proudly to the teacher in front of the entire class.  But who does that in fifth grade?

Well, Bill Gates did.

When he was a sophomore at Lakeside, the school acquired a teletype machine allowing its employees and students to use, through a telephone connection, purchased time on a mainframe computer in California.  Shortly before this, he had met the guy who became his best friend (but who died tragically in a climbing accident two years later) -- a boy as intelligent and as intense as Bill.  Both of them were fascinated by the use of computers, and the found other Lakeside friends with similar interests, including the slightly older Paul Allen, who shared his interests. 

Soon, computing consumed his consciousness, at the very time when early forms of personal computers were becoming available for private use.   To be accessible to the average user, those PCs required software, and it was the development of software to which Bill and his friends turned their attention.   Luckily, Lakeside was the kind of school where teachers weren't threatened by a student's brilliance, but went out of their way to encourage them., even remaining very flexible about class attendance.  Bill's budding abilities at coding -- and really, at that point, almost everyone's ability at coding was somewhat rudimentary -- enabled him, while still a sophomore, to do free lance consulting work for a couple of local companies.  

One of those companies was located on Roosevelt, in the U-District adjacent to the University of Washington.  Bill was soon sneaking out of his bedroom window at night , taking a bus into the U-District, and working all night long on coding -- arriving home in time for a couple of hours sleep before going to school.

The last 75 percent of the book takes Bill from Lakeside, to Harvard -- where he dropped out -- and on to his and Alllen's founding of a small software business called Micro-Soft.  The rest is history, and the book presents that history up until Bill Gates was about 40 years old.  A sequel is expected.

To me, as can be gleaned from the above, Bill's early life was the most fascinating part of the book, especially because he is very open about his probably falling somewhere on the autism scale (but never formally diagnosed, I gather), and because the locale was here in Seattle.  But his post-university years, although dealing with technical computer coding problems and creation of a business, is clearly and entertainingly presented.  It was even easy for a non-computer buff like myself to follow.

A Traveller's Life

I first discovered Eric Newby in 2011, when I read his exciting, and often hilarious, climbing adventure, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.  After ten years as a women's dress buyer for a London fashion house, he telegraphed a diplomat friend in Brazil, "CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?"  And leaving the world of London fashion, he set out to climb the allegedly unclimbable, 19,000-foot Mir Samir in Afghanistan.  He had absolutely no climbing experience.   The pair came within 900 feet of succeeding.

Who was this guy, I wondered?

I later read another of his books, The Last Grain Race, in which he describes how, as the recent graduate of a tony London "public" (prep) school, he signed on as an apprentice sailor on a Finnish sailing vessel carrying grain from Australia to Britain.  His first day, while still dressed in street clothes, he was ordered to climb the rigging to the top of the mast.

Again I wondered, who was this guy?

I have a better picture of the lad now, after reading his 1982 collection of reflections, A Traveller's Life.  In 35 chapters, he discusses and reflects on the travels of his active life.  But he explains, in an Introduction, that he broadly defines "travels" to include any experience outside his home -- beginning with his birth, moving along to his boyhood explorations with his mother of Harrod's department store, and his experiences on his own as a school boy.

To anyone looking for a more traditional travel book, these early experiences might seem frustrating.  To me, they are the best part of the book, giving a first-hand picture of life in Britain, from a schoolboy's point of view, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Newby was born, in 1919, and reared in Barnes, a district in west London, bordering the south bank of the Thames.  Immediately to the north, on the other side of the river, is Hammersmith, which in turn is bordered on its north by Kensington.  At the time Newby was a child, Barnes was what he describes as a middle-middle class community.  Hammersmith was a rougher, working class area.  Newby, a day student, had to walk to St. Paul's school in Hammersmith (now relocated to Barnes), a nerve-wracking experience which may have given him a certain ability to confront hardship, as well as to deal with persons of other classes and nationalities.

The first three chapters paint a vivid picture of his Barnes environment at the time of his birth and boyhood, including visits to the Isle of Wight and, beginning when he was five, annual visits by motor car to the beach at Branscombe in South Devon.  He reminds us that until 1931, the speed limit in Britain was twenty miles per hour.  It was in Branscombe that he overheard a family "friend" comment to his aunt, "She didn't ought to 'ave 'ad 'im" -- a comment that seemed to still haunt him decades later.   En route to Branscombe, he recalls visiting Stonehenge, where there was only one human visitor -- and a lot of sheep.  The family''s drive from London  to Branscombe is described in great detail -- a fascinating read if you enjoy observing the changes that the years bring about.

Chapter Seven -- "Journeys Through Darkest Hammersmith" -- is the real start of Newby's adventures as a solo traveler through foreign and dangerous regions.  The daily travel required just to get to school and back, wearing St. Paul's odd school uniform and a mandatory bowler hat, carrying an umbrella in hand, and yet keeping his health and sanity intact was hair-raising.  He describes Hammersmith:

In such streets endless rows of little two-storeyed terrace houses, built of fog-blackened London brick, stood back to back, each with its outside privy, separated by little yards in which the occupiers sometimes kept rabbits or carrier pigeons, or if they were large enough turned into little gardens; the sort of London houses which, if they have survived, have become something their builders and occupiers never dreamed of, desirable residences in streets with names that now have an equally desirable period flavor.

Travel through Hammersmith (now gentrified)

engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger, and despair that some nineteenth-century travelers experience in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the central highlands of New Guinea.

Most of us remember similar feelings when confronted with certain neighborhoods (and their scary inhabitants) that were, objectively, far less threatening.

Newby had hopes of attending Oxford, but he failed the mathematics section of his graduation exams (later the O-levels), and his father decided he wasn't clever enough for university, and should go into business.  After eighteen months, he made the fateful decision to apprentice himself on the crew of the S/V Moshula, sailing to Australia.  He was still in many ways a school boy, now thrown in with a tough crew, none of whom spoke more than a few words of English.  He wrote long, brave letters home, each touchingly begun:  "Dear Mummy and Daddy."  But he did well, won the grudging respect of many -- not all -- of his shipmates, and was invited to sign on to the next sailing.  As he writes in the closing words of The Last Grain Race, he took one last look at the vessel, walked away, and never saw her again.

World War II had begun.  He joined the Navy, served as a demolitions expert in the Levant, was captured by the Italians in Sicily, was shifted around from one POW camp to another, transferred to a camp in Germany, and was finally liberated by American troops.  He then married a woman he had met in Italy, and returned to the London fashion industry as a buyer. 

His adventures as a buyer might well be interesting to those involved in the world of retail sales or women's fashion, but those chapters merely made me wonder how he could stand it as long as he did.  Finally, he sent the famous telegram to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1956 headed for Afghanistan.

The final half of the book describes his new career as a travel writer, and especially as a writer for the late lamented American magazine Holiday.  He sums up various trips rather briefly.  Many of these later descriptions seem little more than diary entries.  But it's difficult for a travel writer's life to be boring.  He includes sketches of experiences in India, the Scottish isles, a drive from Amman to Aqaba in Jordan, Kenya, the Orient Express,  Istanbul and the Pera Palace Hotel, a scary visit by him and his wife to Haiti, and a fascinating visit to St.Katharine's monastery on Mt. Sinai. 

He also devotes a couple of chapters to New York, including the "adventure" of walking up Broadway from the Battery to a point north of Columbia University.  Hey, I've done that.  It's not really an adventure, and, from his tone, I think Newby agreed.

He ends the book with a lament for the incursion of motorized tourism into every part of the world, on roads not built for the convenience of the local population.

They were made for tourists in motor cars who never got out of the their vehicles at all.  No one who lived in a remote place and enjoyed doing so was safe from the panoramic road. . By 1973 they had already destroyed the solitude of the high Apennines which I knew and loved so well.

Even worse will be the day, which has not yet come, when the desire to be alone has finally been extinguished from the human heart.

Who of us hasn't uneasily shared that concern?

Veni, vidi, relinquavi

If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).
--President Donald Trump (10-7-2019)

Translated into normal presidential language -- "If Turkey should respond to the withdrawal of American troops in an unacceptable manner, the American government will respond with severe economic sanctions."

Note the difference between warning about an American response, and Mr. Trump's characteristic talent for making it all about himself.  As though Turkey would be offending him personally, and he, in his infinite wisdom, would personally destroy the Turkish economy.  There are other disturbing aspects about the President's tweet today, but his repeated use of the pronoun "I" is what catches my eye.

L'etat c'est moi.

It's but the latest of recent bizarre statements from the President.  Claiming that the Speaker of the House was guilty of treason.  Calling for her "impeachment," as well as the "impeachment" of the chairman of the committee investigating Mr. Trump himself, and the "impeachment" of a senator from his own party.  Denouncing a teenage girl who has moved the world by campaigning against global warming.  And admitting that he committed what most would agree were impeachable offenses, but asserting they weren't.

The President is a graduate of Wharton Business School at Penn, although with grades that must remain forever secret.  Even if he barely graduated, he did graduate.  His ignorance of the Constitution and the political process seems strange, and his inability to work with people with ideas different from his own seems peculiar in a man educated in one of the best business schools in the nation.

Even if his peculiarities of spelling and grammar are part of the Twitter idiom, they seem odd in a person with at least a high school education who is trying to appeal to countrymen who speak more conventionally.

And Trump seems to be getting stranger and stranger as the threat of his impeachment increases.  It occurs to me that he may be cracking up, or breaking down, or falling apart.

But maybe not.  Maybe he's still planning ahead.  Maybe he realizes that, at this point, he can no longer avoid impeachment in the House, even if his loyalists in the Senate will refuse to convict him.  Maybe he doesn't want to be the third President in history to be impeached, especially on the basis not only of collusion with foreign powers, but on the less explicitly stated bases of incompetence, lack of leadership ability, traits showing weakness (or absence) of character, and serious personality disorders.

Maybe he wants to be persuaded to resign.  To resign not because of his guilt or stupidity, but because of an onset of mental illness, however temporary, over which he has no control, for which he has no personal blame.  After a period of rest and relaxation at Mar-a-Lago, and "treatment" by a friendly therapist, he can return to the business world, restored to vigor and mental health.  The world for which he was educated.  The art of the deal, deals among businessmen who respect each other.  The owner of great skyscrapers and well-plotted golf courses.  Casinos.  Resorts designed for the rich and tasteless.

Or, he could return to the work that really got him to where he is now.  Reality television.  Firing young people on national television who have risked just this very humiliation, in exchange for the hopes of fame and money.  The talent and love that he has carried with him to the presidency -- dismissing underlings with scorn and humiliation.

Let's look into it.  Maybe we can make a deal.

Failed lives

Alan Hurwitz

Eight years ago yesterday, I wrote a post on this blog reviewing the novel Canada, by Richard Ford.  Canada was the story of Dell Parsons, a boy growing up in Great Falls, Montana.  His father, after a career in the Air Force, makes unsuccessful business attempts in Great Falls, and ends up owing money to some local Indians.  Not a lot of money, just $2,500.

His father and mother concoct a scheme to rob a bank of that amount in North Dakota, and then to blend into what they consider the vast anonymity of the Great Western Plains.  They are caught almost immediately, and sentenced to prison, where his mother commits suicide.  Dell was only 15, and is left without parents.  Looking back, at the age of 60, he concludes:

[B]ecause very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do it are destined for it, no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised. I find it impossible not to think this way, because the sense of tragedy would otherwise be overpowering to me. Though it's an odd thing to believe about your parents -- that all along they've been the kind of people criminals come from. It's like a miracle in reverse.

I thought of Canada yesterday, exactly eight years after I wrote about the novel in my blog, when I read an obituary for Alan Hurwitz in the New York Times.  Like Dell's father, Mr. Hurwitz served in the armed forces.  He then became a successful middle school teacher of English and social studies.  He became an adviser on desegregation for the Detroit public schools, and a member of a state task force studying school violence.

And then he became addicted to crack cocaine.  In a period of nine weeks in 1992, he robbed 18 banks in the Great Lakes area, and became renowned as the Zombie Bandit.  He was finally caught and spent the next twelve years in prison.   Several years after release, in 2008, he went on another rampage, robbing banks in Northern California and Oregon.  He was sentenced to another 17½ years in prison.

He died of Covid-19 in prison at the age of 79.  He left behind two daughters, two sons, eight grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.  Between the two prison terms, he told a Detroit newspaper that: "I was raised in the liberal Jewish tradition of justice, learning, and equality."

Dell's father did not have crack addiction to blame for his rash robbery, of course.  But he had a small debt which apparently loomed large in his eyes.  Too many lives have been ruined because of crack, but the ruin -- although petty theft is common --is not so often accompanied by two strings of bank robberies.

Dell Parsons, in the novel Canada, couldn't help but believe that some people are predestined to commit criminal acts -- they have a "criminal personality."

I've seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men -- homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement ... -- I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.  It's a theory of destiny and character I don't like or want to believe in.  But it's there in me like a hard understory.  I don't, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself:  There's my father.  My father is that man.  I used to know him.

Mr. Hurwitz never felt any remorse for the robberies.  "He hated banks," one of his daughters recalled, "and they were federally insured."  He was sorry for any trauma he caused the bank tellers, however.

Alan Hurwitz.  Successful teacher of junior high school kids.  A man who gave skillful advice to the Detroit schools on how to fight school segregation.   A man who helped study how to end school violence.

A man who robbed banks.

Shame

I grew up in a small town, up here in the Northwest Corner.  The fathers of most of my classmates worked at union labor in mills -- in mills producing lumber, paper, or aluminum. 

Many of my high school classmates -- especially those who remained in my home town -- have led lives that seem, to me, somewhat narrow and unadventurous.  And yet, as I read their own accounts every five years in reunion class books, I realize that they themselves find their lives to have been happy, satisfying, and warmly family-oriented.  Their self-respect is obvious.

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, arrived in high school nineteen years after me.  He also was born and reared in the Northwest Corner, in Yamhill, Oregon (only about 80 miles across the Columbia river from my own home town).  His column tomorrow is a tribute to one of his own classmates, Kevin Green, who died this month at the age of 54.

Nicholas served as his high school's student body president and newspaper editor, en route to a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa career, followed by a law degree from Magdalen College, Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship.  Kevin, like his dad, stayed in Yamhill, working at blue collar jobs. 

But, as is usually the case in small towns, the two boys knew each other well in high school.  They took vocational courses together.  They both belonged to Future Farmers of America.  And -- as shown in the photo -- they were teammates, running cross country together.

Unlike most of the guys from similar backgrounds who I knew in high school, things didn't go well for Kevin after graduation.  Those nineteen years had made a radical difference in small town life in the Northwest.  The union  labor jobs that ensured middle class lives for my classmates were drying up.  Kevin went from job to job, on a downward spiral, as one business after another closed, in and around Yamhill.  He became injured and was laid off.  His girl friend left him, taking their two sons with her.  His health deteriorated.

Some of his problems were exacerbated by his own poor decisions.  But most of us make our share of poor decisions.  Reading Kevin's story, it's obvious that the root cause was the changing economy of the  Northwest Corner -- and of the nation in general. 

It could have been worse.  Because of his physical disabilities, federal and state government provided various forms of financial assistance.  But government couldn't provide Kevin with self-respect.

Kristof's column essentially laments the lack of empathy by the well-off for the lives and problems faced by those left behind -- and that is a point well worth making, especially because it affects profoundly our nation's political decisions.  

But there's another problem I see, one that is systemic rather than personal.

Go to India.  Go to rural Africa.  Or South America.  You will find far more poverty, as we understand it, than you will in America.  And more poor health.  But -- and I don't mean to exaggerate --  among the poor who have at least enough to eat and a roof over their heads, you will find many people leading happier lives than you might, perhaps, find in Yamhill, Oregon.  And I think the reason is self-respect.

Because of our own history and, perhaps, our lingering Calvinist philosophy, Americans have done a wonderful job of making poverty a moral failing.  In our efforts to build an economy by laissez-faire economics, we have not been satisfied to reward "success" with money.  We have found it necessary also to punish those who can't, or won't, succeed financially by heaping scorn and shame upon them.  By denying them self-respect.  Maybe we don't even realize what we're doing, but we have countless little ways of humiliating those to whom we feel financially -- and thus morally -- superior.

And I don't know the answer.  Government programs can take the edge off poverty.  Jobs programs, if they worked as intended, would give back some self-respect to those who benefitted.  But I don't know how the government can help change the mindset of those of us who look down on fellow citizens -- and that's a change that needs somehow to be made.

Kevin died of various ailments, problems that stemmed back from his inability to work.  And his eventual inability to get even poor paying jobs stemmed from his various ailments.  And his sense of shame fed into both his inability to work and his failure to manage properly his own health.  He was caught up in a vicious circle, a vicious circle that is all too familiar to too many, in most parts of the country.

I have trouble diagnosing just what went wrong in that odyssey from sleek distance runner to his death at 54, but the lack of good jobs was central to it. Sure, Kevin made mistakes, but his dad had opportunities for good jobs that Kevin never had.

If Kevin's life were an isolated tragedy, it would be tragedy enough.  But it's not.  His life ended up as a life of desperation -- one that's repeated innumerable times across the face of one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.

Life with father

Fishing in the Northwest -- when the fishing was still good

It's hard to believe, but today would have been my father's 106th birthday.  He died just one week before turning 70.  His life was far shorter than it should have been, but a life well led.

He was an excellent tennis and handball player, a very good basketball player, and a tolerable softball player. (He hated that my main memory of the latter was of watching him kick a ground ball four or five times across the outfield trying to field it, while runs were scoring.)

He had two unathletic sons, whose idea of sports was playing laid-back games of HORSE in the driveway, and a daughter who loved horses. From reading novels and memoirs of guys with similar fathers, you'd expect to hear that he made our lives miserable, attempting to change us into competitive young versions of himself.  But he didn't.  He gave us an introduction to each sport, and let us decide whether we wanted to become proficient at it.  We didn't.  Now, looking back, I suspect it would have been worthwhile to have picked one fairly congenial sport and to have devoted the time and effort required to become at least reasonably competent at it.

Whatever his private thoughts, however, he never expressed disappointment.  He knew we had other interests, which he respected.  I think he may have found each of us baffling at times, but he was proud of each of us for all the right reasons.


As a newspaper boy

His life was the sort of life that's no longer possible in America.  He was born in Chehalis, Washington, but lived in many areas of the Northwest Corner, both in cities and out in the sticks.  His father was a gyppo logger at times, an established sawmill operator and real estate investor at others.  His mother was highly social.  He was a good student -- his mother would have seen to that -- and headed off to college at Oregon State following high school.

His timing was bad.  He graduated from high school just as the Great Depression hit the country.  After only one year at Oregon State, the family's business collapsed and he had to leave school.  For much of the next decade, his main daily concern was finding part-time labor and getting enough to eat.

About the time he married my mom, he became employed as a simple laboratory assistant at an aluminum plant in my home town. He taught himself chemistry, and ended up as the plant's Chief Chemist, with a number of patents to his name. His expertise in certain aspects of aluminum production was in demand across the country, and he visited other plants owned by the company, sharing his thoughts and discoveries. He helped his company open a new aluminum plant in northeast Scotland.


With my brother and me

He was a man straddling a cultural divide in America -- with one foot in the rural logging economy of the early 20th century, and the other foot in the more sophisticated and increasingly technological economy of the 1950s and 60s.  He told great stories of his adventures as a child and young man -- which to me felt like adventures from the early years of the American Republic.  But he also appreciated the revolutionary changes taking place in American life following World War II, and understood  -- and strongly impressed on his kids -- the growing importance of an excellent education for our generation.   

The varied interests and personalities of his offspring both bewildered and delighted him.

His own interests derived partly from the more open years of his childhood -- he was a devoted fly fisherman until the streams became the playground of modern families in campers -- and partly from his own social and athletic interests.  He was the kind of guy who could spend an evening playing poker at the Elks or handball at the YMCA, and then come home, stretch out on the bed with his young sons, and keep them wide-eyed with stories from Greek and Roman history that he remembered from his own school days.

I wish now I'd told him more often how proud we all were of him. But I suspect he knew.

Decline and Fall

To most Americans, Evelyn Waugh is known, if he is known at all, as the author of Brideshead Revisited, a nostalgic look backwards from 1945 to an earlier, idyllic and idealized England as perceived through the lens of Oxford student life and the upper class world of one of the great country homes of England.

As I discussed in a post in 2008, the underlying theme of Brideshead, over which its portrayal of an opulent society was something of a golden gloss, was theological -- in fact, explicitly, Roman Catholic.  This religious aspect was downplayed to some extent by the excellent and popular PBS series and, later, by the less successful Hollywood film.

But before Brideshead, Waugh's reputation was of a rather smart satirist of contemporary life, politics and morals during the 1920s and 1930s.

For no particular reason, I've just finished reading his first novel, Decline and Fall, written in 1928.  Waugh's tone in that book is, I would say, humorously mordant -- and certainly neither nostalgic nor pious.

Decline and Fall is an account of, well, the decline and fall, of the feckless young Paul Pennyfeather.  Briefly, Paul -- a quiet and studious theology student at a fictional Oxford college -- finds himself surrounded one night by a mob of drunken students on campus who, for their own amusement, remove his pants, forcing him to run for cover.  He is apprehended and "sent down" -- expelled -- for public indecency.  Desperate to support himself, he takes a position as an instructor at a small Welsh "college" -- prep school -- of questionable academic reputation.

While there, he falls in love with the glamorous mother of one of his students, who, days before their planned marriage, sends him on a business mission to Marseilles.  Paul discovers all too late that his fiancée's "business" is ownership and management of an international chain of brothels.  He is arrested, and his best friend from Oxford actively prosecutes the case against him.  His story, because of his relationship with his famous and well-loved fiancée becomes a national sensation.  They throw the book at him as an example to others.  He is sentenced to years of hard labor in prison.

Paul's most notable character trait is his mildness.  When asked why he left Oxford, Paul repeatedly states, without amplification, that he was sent down for "indecent behavior."  Fortunately, this charge hardly disqualified him from teaching school.  As he was told during his interview:

Well, I shall not ask for details.  I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.

When arrested for unknowingly furthering a major prostitution ring, he admits guilt in order to protect his fiancée; when, while in prison, he is advised that the good lady plans to marry another man, he agrees that she is too fine a person to ever survive in prison.  He agrees not to  attempt to secure his own release by implicating her in any way.

In the hands of another writer, this story might conceivably have been presented as a rather shaky tragedy; for Waugh, on the other hand, it is all the grist of farce -- a mere framework on which to display the author's humors and prejudices and witty writing.

For example, look at how the English headmaster of Paul's Welsh prep school portrays the country in which he now finds himself:

From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people.  It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity.  Their sons and daughters mate freely with sheep but not with human kind except their own blood relations. 

The townspeople do nothing to rebut the headmaster's view of them as the British equivalent of stereotypical Kentucky hillbillies:

There was a baying and growling and yapping as of the jungle at moonrise, and presently he [a Welsh musician] came forward again with an obsequious, sidelong shuffle.

"Three pounds you pay us would you said indeed to at the sports play."

But the Welsh are only an incidental target of Waugh's scorn.  It is the English upper classes who are most ridiculed -- effectively if less broadly.  The Oxford "club" members who caused Paul's expulsion are portrayed in a manner that puts to shame the best efforts of American fraternity members on a warm Friday night:

It was a lovely evening.  They broke up Mr. Austen's grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending's cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr. Partridge's sheets, and threw the Matisse into his lavatory.  Mr. Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that.  Sir Alastair Digby Vaine-Trumpington felt quite ill with excitement, and was supported to bed by Lumsden of Strathdrummond.

Somehow, I suspect I'm giving my readers an impression that Decline and Fall is a thoroughly unpleasant book.  They will have to take my word for it that, in fact, it is a very funny book.  It would be even funnier if we today had a clearer picture of some of the excesses of British society that are being satirized -- but we certainly can catch the general drift.

Waugh, who could with some fairness be described as a reactionary snob, was asked in later years how he -- a Catholic convert -- could reconcile his chronic unpleasantness with his profession of Christianity.  His reply is famous:

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

To his credit, Waugh did make some effort in Decline and Fall -- after chronicling poor Paul Pennyfeather's steady decline and freefall throughout the entire novel -- to avoid total nastiness by cobbling together a "happy" ending in the final chapter.  After conveyance of tactfully presented bribes originating with his former fiancée, Paul is surreptitiously whisked out of prison, his death is feigned, and he slips off to Corfu to bide his time.  He returns with a mustache and re-enters Oxford as a freshman.  He doesn't even bother to change his name.

Not even the mustache was really necessary.  Paul Pennyfeather had been a mild student, and as such he returns.  No one much remembers him, or pays attention to his return.  He happily and mildly goes back to his religious studies.

One more year

"I am committed to earning my degree in architectural design from Stanford University and am on track to accomplish this at the completion of the spring quarter of 2012."
--Andrew Luck

Thus did the consensus first pick for the 2011 NFL draft give up an immediate guarantee estimated at up to $60 million today, choosing instead to stay in college, get his degree, and play one more year of college football.

The message boards have been blazing all afternoon. A few commentators congratulated Luck on his decision. Many found his decision incomprehensible -- "you go to college to gain a skill so you can make money, and you're risking a fortune. If you really love architecture, why not grab the money and go back to school later?" "Doesn't Stanford teach you basic economics?"

And a large number of even more rabid commentators foamed at the mouth over a matter that had virtually no impact on their own lives. They appeared outraged by a decision that they sensed questioned their most hallowed belief -- that making a pile of bucks was the essence of life itself. They attacked Luck's intelligence, his father's wisdom, his coach's advice. One messsage board writer even said he hoped Luck would sustain an injury next year, to prove the foolishness of today's decision.

Luck had promised to carefully consider all the pros and cons of his choice. The money involved, the uncertainty over the future of the NFL's compensation system, and his probable draft by the Carolina Panthers -- each undoubtedly played a part in his decision-making. But his father, himself a university athletic director and former NFL quarterback, undoubtedly had the best insight into Andrew Luck's final decision:

Luck’s father, Oliver, said his son wanted to complete his degree in architectural design, a rigorous major in the college of engineering. Luck also felt, his father said, the tug of finishing his career with the players whom he entered school with.

“He wants to finish with those guys,” Oliver Luck said in a phone interview. “It’s a great group of players. That was by far the most important factor.”

Oliver Luck was listening to radio hosts criticize the decision on the radio Thursday and recalled the psychological test in which people perceive different things in inkblots.

“It’s a Rorschach test for people’s values system,” he said of the decision.
--New York Times (Pete Thamel)

No one would have criticized Luck if he had turned pro. But his critics are evaluating his decision as a business decision by a business. Instead, it was a life decision by a young man setting out in life. The choice he finally made reflects credit on himself, on his family, on his team and teammates, and on his school.

Once was enough

So many bright, young, hopeful faces! 

As I walked across campus this morning -- one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation -- I luxuriated in the relatively calm and relaxed ambiance of the summer quarter.  Plenty of summer college students, but in nowhere near the numbers seen during the normal academic year.

More noticeable than enrolled students were their even younger peers, kids gathered in groups, or walking with parents, or out on their own -- singly or in pairs.  They're recognizable, even apart from their obvious youth, by the excitement and curiosity on their faces. 

Who are they, I wonder?  Most, perhaps, are newly admitted students, already visiting the U Dub to get oriented for fall quarter.  Some may be the happy beneficiaries of "thick envelopes" from several colleges -- doing a little comparison shopping before making a decision.  Many are still younger -- high school or even middle school students -- brought by parents or as part of school groups.

Do I envy them?  Of course.  I envy them the way I envy a traveler I see setting out on a new journey.  So many experiences lie ahead; so many interesting things to learn.  And, of course, I envy their unthinking confidence that a nearly infinite number of days and years lie ahead of them, time to accomplish all their dreams, time to waste if they choose, with infinite time still to spare.

Would I trade places with them?  A difficult question, because I recognize how their apparent bliss can deceive.  Recall what it was like to be 18 years old.  Or 22.  Yes, you had the entire world open before you, and seemingly limitless time to work your will upon that world.  But what was it you wanted to do?  And how did you go about doing it?

I struggled with these questions longer than most, but they are questions most of us struggled with to some extent.  The curse of having heard teachers, year after year, speak of your "great potential."  But potential to do what?  How does an 18-year-old assert the self-control necessary to focus on a single objective, when he can't decide whether the objective is worth the effort required to attain it.  Or whether he, whatever his perceived "great potential," has the actual ability to attain it.

Especially, now that he finds himself in college and surrounded by clever classmates, most of  whom also have "great potential."

My fear -- and I suspect most of my classmates' fear -- was that I would totally fail to live up to that "great potential" -- in the eyes of others or, even worse, in my own eyes.  I was haunted by the words of Holden Caulfield's teacher, in Catcher in the Rye:

“I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. . . Are you listening to me?"

"Yes."

You could tell he was trying to concentrate and all.

"It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know. But do you know what I'm driving at, at all?”

Oh, Holden knew what he was driving at, all right, and so did I.  He was attempting to draw a picture of the secular hell of wasted lives, the hell to which young guys who didn't live up to their "great potential" were presumably assigned.

I know better now.  That hell exists, all right, but a little indecision and fumbling around at the age of 20 doesn't suffice for perdition.  There are second acts in American lives -- sometimes third and fourth acts, as well -- despite what F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us.  You can explain that to a college-aged student, and he may understand you, and he may even agree.  But he agrees with you theoretically; he agrees with you insofar as what you say applies to others.  For himself, if he is the worried sort I seem to have been, he foresees only a One Act Play, one chance to get it right.  He may grant himself an extra year or two beyond 22, but if his career isn't well on its way by the age of 25 -- he sees himself flipping paper clips across an office at best, or more likely living unemployed in his parents' basement -- or in a cardboard box.

So, no.  I've been there once.  That was enough.  When we say we wish we were 20 again, we mean we wish we had young bodies and many years lying ahead.  But we assume that we would know then, in that second childhood, everything that we know now.  That we would know we were about to make the right decisions and enjoy reasonably successful careers and lives.  You give me all that, and sure, I'd go back and do it again. 

I wouldn't dread the hours of study, the writing of long term papers, the studying for tests, the tolerance of intolerable roommates.  Those were the easy costs; now they sound almost fun.  But it's the psychological stresses resulting from an almost existential fear and uncertainty and self-doubt that I'm not willing to experience again.  When I consider those particular stresses, I agree with singer Maurice Chevalier when he sings:  "I'm so glad I'm not young anymore."

Dying small towns

Heading south on I-5, I can reach the Columbia river in about two hours. Once I reach the Columbia, I've also reached the town where I was born, grew up, and graduated from high school.

To a kid, it was a wonderful town. I assumed all towns of its size -- then, around 25,000 -- were pretty much the same. Looking back now, I realize that in many ways it more closely resembled a mill town in Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvania than it did small towns in California or suburbs in other states.

In fact, it was a mill town. The economy was based on the two largest (reputedly) lumber mills in the world, a locally owned paper mill, an aluminum reduction plant, and a large port . The local mill workers were 100 percent unionized. Most boys went to work for the mills right out of high school, at the age of 18. Wages were great -- so great that you had to really want to go to college before you'd break free of the town and do so -- and employment was steady.

The town was prosperous. Workers' income supported a large commercial downtown, consisting almost entirely of locally owned and managed businesses. The daily newspaper, although biased toward local business interests, was well written and competed successfully with Portland and Seattle dailies. Unlike most mill towns in the Midwest, moreover, the town was (and still is, for that matter) attractive, with nicely maintained houses on tree-lined streets and excellent parks. The schools were also physically attractive, and I always assumed that they were providing me an excellent education -- a belief that I never seriously questioned until I went away to college and competed with students from Eastern prep schools and large suburban high schools.

I tell you all of this only incidentally out of nostalgia for my childhood. Primarily, it's my response to an article that I encountered this week in the on-line version of my hometown's newspaper -- a paper no longer locally-owned, but still apparently well written and well edited. The article described the desperate straits in which the city now finds itself.

One of the two large lumber mills is closed, and the other has drastically reduced its employment. Easily accessible timber is harder to come by, and the cost of union labor makes local lumber less competitive with that from other areas. The aluminum plant, dependent on cheap hydroelectric power, is shut down. The power is no longer so cheap -- or at least apparently not cheap enough to justify the transport of bauxite ore from far off sources such as Jamaica -- and the market for aluminum has weakened. The paper mill has cut its employment. Other smaller manufacturers have closed down, for one reason or another.

The attractive and prosperous town I grew up in now has over 16 percent of its households living below the poverty level. The typical level of education attained by residents makes it difficult for them to find employment in the new economy, and the sort of businesses that now thrive (at least in normal economic times) are not interested in locating in such an environment. The local high schools -- which probably were at least average for Washington when I attended, with virtually all entering students graduating -- are now rated mediocre at best. And only 55 percent of entering freshman graduate.

The downtown commercial area is dead. It was killed first by construction of a shopping mall outside the city, a fate suffered by many Main Streets in small towns across the nation. Now that mall itself is apparently in dire straits.

More depressing to me than the article itself was the tone of the on-line comments written by local residents. They display no optimism that the town will ever recover its former level of relative prosperity. The commentators see the town's work force, and their children, as undereducated and lacking the skills now sought by industry. The town does still contain a significant number of middle to upper middle class families (11 percent of households earn over $100,000); the children of these families will receive good college educations, but few of them will return after graduation.

The comment writers note (and statistics in the article substantiate) that the town is becoming increasingly polarized between a small affluent elite and a large majority of residents who are unemployed or just barely scraping by. The working middle class that formerly dominated the town and drove the local economy is gone.

Most of all, those commenting on the article see a lack of competence both in the local business community and in city government -- a lack of both the ability and the initiative to somehow lead the city into the 21st century. Whether justified or not, this perception itself is demoralizing to local residents. One commentator, writing on Monday, states:

We need to make this a place where people want to be. I have friends who come up from Oregon to go fishing here, but they stay in other cities, they don't even want to get a room here to fish! If this town is going to survive, it needs to be a destination, not just a gas stop along the way to something better.

Everyone sees the problems, but no one suggests plausible solutions. Maybe there are none.

I now realize that when I read about the desperation of citizens in Flint MI or Youngstown OH, I'm not just reading about remote economic disasters, 3,000 miles away. The same problems are endemic in small cities and towns throughout the country -- and not only in my own state, but in the very town where I spent a happy childhood.

We have a national problem, affecting significant parts of our nation, and we don't really know what to do about it.

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Photo above: My high school

Cellist

Five years ago, when this blog was still pushing its tender young shoots up from the soil, I wrote a rather silly post about Joshua Roman, the then 23-year-old principal cellist for the Seattle Symphony.  I noted that while most Symphony musicians seemed stiff and subdued while sitting on stage waiting for the conductor to appear, "Mr. Roman, on the other hand, looks like a high school student goofing off before class, waiting for the teacher to arrive."

I saw Roman perform again last night.  The white Afro was gone, the fidgeting and grinning were now under control, and he has aquired a pair of dark rimmed glasses that he kept shoving back up onto the bridge of his nose.  He no longer looks like a mischievous high school student.  At 28, he now looks like a relaxed college student.  He almost resembles a younger and slimmer version of another Seattle icon, Bill Gates. 

After two seasons with the Seattle Symphony, Roman has performed  as a soloist with numerous groups internationally.  But although an Oklahoma native, he obviously retains a soft place in his heart for us Northwesterners -- since 2007, he has served as Artistic Director for Seattle's Town Hall.

Town Hall is a former Christian Science church, modified for the presentation of lectures and musical performances.  It's a beautiful venue, within a short walking distance of the business district, but far enough up First Hill to be surrounded by tree-lined streets.  The larger of the two auditoriums, in which last night's performance was presented, has an audience capacity of about 1,500 (compared to nearly 2,500 in the Symphony's Benaroya Hall.

Roman played as part of a piano trio (piano, violin, cello). He stood before the crowd and gave a very relaxed and entertaining introduction to the program, also throwing in enticements and encouragement for us to come back and enjoy later performances (by other performers) during Town Hall's 2012-13 musical season.  The trio gave very moving performances of Beethoven's Trio in B-flat major and Schubert's Trio in E-flat major (originally scored for clarinet rather than violin), performances that were applauded ecstatically.  The trio also premiered a short contemporary work, Lonesome Roads by Dan Visconti, that was also well received.  Philistine that I am, I found it merely "interesting."  ("I know what I like, and I like what I know.")

For whatever  reason, I've come to enjoy chamber music more and more as I grow older.  Maybe I no longer need the adrenaline rush that results from  having a full symphonic orchestra come at me full tilt; or maybe my ear has just grown more attuned to the intimacy that listening to individual instruments playing in a small group permits.

At any rate, it was an excellent concert, and it's reassuring to watch Joshua Roman's career develop successfully over the years.  I look forward, obviously, to hearing him again.

Contractual cleaning

Like an increasingly large number of middle class citizens who are too busy, or too lazy, or too incompetent (or all of the above) to clean their own homes regularly, I have a housecleaner who comes in every two weeks and does it for me.

I've used the same contractor for years, a cleaning service that's provided me with an ever-changing cast of cleaners. Like secretaries, I've learned, housecleaners don't hang around that long. They get themselves married to affluent spouses, or go back to school, or move to Florida, or just get tired of what I suspect is a fairly unsatisfying job.

I've been using the same woman E. for about six months now. E. has been one of the best cleaners I've had in all the years that I've had cleaners. She even does (but don't tell anyone!) windows! And she's always been unusually careful to call ahead if she's had any change of plans.

But then, last week, E. didn't show up. She didn't call. The cleaning service was baffled -- she hadn't contacted them, either.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as good cooks go, she went.
--Saki

Yeah, it was pretty much like that, I guess.

Today, the cleaning service called and told me that they would be, once again, sending me a new cleaner. They've learned that E. has been soliciting homeowners for whom she's been cleaning. She apparently plans now to manage her own cleaning business, free of the need to pay a slice of her fees to the service provider. She's thus in violation of her contract with the service, a contract that contains some form of non-compete agreement. Not only is she now persona non grata with the service, they'll be deciding soon whether to sue her.

My sympathies are with E., of course, but I also see the service's point. (They're obviously concerned that I might hire E. independently myself -- they plan to charge me only half fee for my next cleaning, as compensation for my being "inconvenienced.") But if I did hire E., she might well be deemed my employee rather than an independent contractor. I might be liable for workers compensation and social security taxes; I might be subject to other employment law regulations. I'm sure that 99 percent of people who deal directly with their independent housecleaners never once consider such issues, but I'm the sort who does. I might want to run for President of the United States some day; I'd hate to have past violations of employment laws thrown in my face by my opponent.

Speaking not as an employment lawyer -- which I'm not -- but as a casual brooder over internet articles, I find that non-compete agreements are generally enforceable in Washington. They are considered valid if their prohibitions are no greater in extent than necessary to protect the business and good will of the employer. They must not be so great in duration and geographical scope that they prevent the worker from earning a living within a reasonable distance of her home. The judge obviously has to weigh conflicting interests in making decisions in these cases, doing so on a case by case basis.

I suspect that E. has, in fact, exposed herself to liability by soliciting present customers of her now-former employer. I doubt there are enough damages recoverable, however, to justify a lawsuit against her. A stern letter from the cleaning service's lawyer probably will scare her into backing off. Seattle provides a huge market for housecleaners, and I'm sure E. will be able to find folks for whom to work without violating her non-compete agreement.

E. was an excellent and personable worker. I wish her the best. I also understand the cleaning service's need to prevent workers from staying with them just long enough to develop marketable relationships with customers, and then walking off with those customers.

Meanwhile, my house -- uncleaned since before my trip to England -- is fast becoming engulfed in cat hair. Legal maneuvering aside, I'll just be happy to get someone in here who knows how to operate a vacuum cleaner!