Another year

So 2014 drags itself to a pathetic close. What kind of year was it?  Not much to write home about.

Not as bad, perhaps, as 1814, when the British burned the White House.  The Republicans never quite achieved that level of  malevolence.  Nor as bad as 1914, when the combined stupidity of the "civilized nations" managed to result in a war that ended civilization for the middle class as it had until then existed.

But it wasn't a great year.  Climate change and increased volatility of weather.  Vladimir Putin -- the leader of a nuclear power whose judgment, if not mental stability, seems more and more in question.  Ever increasing partisanship and gridlock here at home.  Ever increasing chaos and hatred overseas, especially in the Middle East.  Terrorism, no longer just an extreme statement of deeply felt political beliefs, but a pursuit that some individuals seem to enjoy for its own sake.  Airline crashes and other disasters, natural or accidental.

I can't see any trends of improvement as I look forward to 2015 -- but then I'm not sure things will be worse, either. 

At least the Seahawks are in the NFL playoffs, and, of course, that's really all that matters, right?

While the world seemed in bad shape in 2014, my own life was very enjoyable.  Trips to Africa and to Hawaii with family.  A visit to Laos to visit my great niece and her mom.  Excellent health (knock on wood!).  A piano to play, books to read, and a blog to write. 

The disconnect between personal happiness and world dysfunction is disturbing, when I think about it.  How many Roman citizens were leading happy, rewarding lives while the barbarians -- largely ignored -- were at the gate?  How many Virginians worried about the success of the tobacco crop while the British were burning Washington?  How many bright English kids were excited about starting university studies at Oxford and Cambridge as the war began that would send them all to their deaths in the trenches?

Worth thinking about, but there's nothing wrong in looking forward with a dash of optimism, as well.  Let's hope 2015 will see the world as a happier place than we anticipate on its Eve. 

Happy New Year!

"When I Was a Dynamiter"

Me at 14, visiting Lee in Wilmette.
Oddly, I can't find a photo
of Lee himself. 

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, does anyone?
--"Stand By Me" (narrator)

If we're lucky -- whether boy or girl, rich or poor -- we had one or two friends as kids with whom we were so close that we took our friendship for granted.  Sometimes we keep these friends for a lifetime.  More often, however, we move apart or drift apart as years go by.  Years later, we look back and wonder whatever happened to good old so-and-so.

If in your declining years, your childhood friend writes a memoir that reawakens distant memories, you're doubly lucky. And even luckier if the memoir illuminates not only your friend's personal life, but also the life of his entire generation and of his country.

My friend's name was Lee Quarnstrom, and his memoir, available from Amazon, is entitled When I Was a Dynamiter.  To briefly summarize, Lee was an early member of Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters," a friend and confidant of beatniks such as Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, a tramp, a wanderer, an editor of Hustler magazine, a buddy of Hustler owner Larry Flynt and of journalist Hunter S. Thompson.  And, in later years, a reporter, a columnist, and an editor for the San Jose Mercury News.

Lee's book is described in fuller detail on the Amazon website, and in readers' enthusiastic reviews on that website (including my own).  If you have any interest in America in the 1960s, and/or in the fascinating folks who lived during that era -- I urge you to buy the book, or download it on Kindle.

As I did myself, in part for those very reasons.  But reading the book also brought back happy memories of my own childhood. 

Lee and I met in first grade, and shared the same classroom every year through fourth grade, after which he transferred to a newly-opened parochial school.  Because we lived just a few blocks from each other, however, we continued to see each other almost daily.  In sixth grade, his family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and later to Wilmette, Illinois.  They returned to his home town each summer, however, and Lee and I spent much of each summer hanging out together.  When we were 14, I traveled to Wilmette and spent three weeks with his family, a dramatic episode in my own life that reinforced my already strong inclinations toward becoming a compulsive traveler. 

We took each other's family for granted.  We were in and out of each other's house, ate each other's food (I don't recall his mother's being the cook from hell described in his book), and treated each other's parents as the pleasant but vaguely irrelevant individuals that they were.  His dad was city editor of our local newspaper, county coroner, and two-time unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress.  I was fully aware of all this, but not impressed.  He was just Lee's father, a guy with an inexplicable fascination for heavy-weight boxing matches.

We visited for the last time as kids at the age of 15, the summer following ninth grade, when he spent a couple of weeks at my house, before and after attending Y Camp at the base of then-still-intact Mt. St. Helens, followed by our taking the train and ferry together to Mud Bay in Bremerton where his family was staying with relatives.  I enjoyed our visit, but as I look back I can see the first intimations of diverging lives -- the first time it had occurred to me that he was an extravert and a social adventurer, while I was an introvert with a much more cautious personality.

But nothing of that troubled our friendship between 5 and 15.  The wonder of childhood is the ability to spend hours happily without -- as you look back -- being able to recall what you'd been doing.  We were both excellent students -- top two kids in our class -- and we were both obsessively verbal.  And so we talked -- a lot.  We played endless games of Monopoly, with innovative rules of our own devising.  We traded with each other, as his memoir reminds me, from our vast collections of comics ("funny books"). We developed stamp collections that we treated as competing empires, but empires that maintained trade relations with each other . 

Neither of us had any interest in team sports, a lack of interest that by fourth grade or so would have thrust us both out of boyhood society, but for our redeeming qualities.  Such as -- of course -- our mutually outlandish senses of humor.

Lee spent our older years together trying to convert me to his own religious faith, while at the same time -- I now learn from his memoir -- he was already drifting away into indifference at best.  But as Scott Fitzgerald reminds us: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."  Ironically, he may have planted the religious seeds that took root in my own mind several years later.

We wrote each other, occasionally, following that fifteenth summer.  At the end of our junior year, we learned, to our surprise, that we had both been selected chief editor of our respective high school newspapers.  Journalism ultimately became Lee's career.  I eventually became an attorney, but journalism probably had a lasting effect on the way I think and -- sometimes -- the way I write.  I saw him once while in college, and received a few letters from him over the years.  He once sent me a column he had published in the Mercury News, re-publishing a column his dad had allowed him to write in third grade for the Longview Daily News.  The column included his youthful observations of my own third grade peculiarities. He named names.

Lee and I met in person for the first time in years about six years ago.  We've kept in touch virtually every week -- the wonders of email!  -- ever since.  He's still smart; he's still funny; he's still nuts.  I had good taste as a kid in my choice of friends.

Memories of seventh grade past

Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and fillet gumbo
'Cause tonight I'm gonna see my ma cher amio
Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-o
Son of a gun we'll have big fun on the bayou.

I've just emerged from the shower, and am in the midst of preparing for my Christmas trip to Southern California, where I'll get together with my brother's family, including my niece and 4-year-old great niece. 

But while showering, I found the melody and some of the words to "Jambalaya" going through my brain, and then, as often happens in the shower, on my lips.  It took me back to seventh grade, when "Jambalaya" was one of the first "pop tunes" to which I recall really listening.  I had been only vaguely conscious of popular songs in sixth grade, and by eighth grade my interest was already fading.

But in seventh grade, in a new school surrounded by a different socio-economic mix of classmates, I felt -- probably for the first time -- the need to "fit in," the force of peer pressure.  I insisted that I needed to own more sweaters, in the then-popular pastel colors.  And they had to be "Columbia Knit" sweaters -- the only acceptable brand name -- because other guys greeted you by grabbing the back of the sweater and flipping it over to check out the manufacturer. 

Similarly, I listened obsessively to the radio, because all the talk every Monday was of the latest line-up of the Top Ten tunes of the week.  The official listing -- as eagerly anticipated as today's AP rankings of college football teams -- was announced to the nation on "Lucky Lager Dance Time" -- which could be received in the isolated Northwest Corner only by carefully dialing in powerful KFBK in Sacramento.

Your mother was crying
Your father was crying
And I was crying too ...

And I was close to crying myself, listening to Patti Page sing "I Went to Your Wedding."  At my first seventh grade dance, boys and girls who already knew what was what were dancing a bouncy swing dance called the shag to a modern rendition of "Glow Worm" -- probably unaware that their grandparents had courted to the same song.  I, on the other hand, was still falling all over myself trying to master a slow two-step.

Don't let the stars get in your eyes
Don't let the moon break your heart
Love blooms at night
In daylight, it dies.

By eighth grade, the "typical teenager" stars in my firmament were fading.  My stolid Scandinavian confidence in my own geeky interests and pursuits was becoming re-established, and by the dawn of ninth grade my craving to conform -- although never completely dead -- was clearly moribund.  It was fun to have a short experience of being a true teenager, or at least appearing as one, as "true teenagers" were then viewed.  Luckily, it was a phase I passed through quickly.

Vaya con dios, my darling
Vaya con dios, my love.

Lift up your voices

Until about my fifteenth birthday, I could sing soprano.

I suppose it's not so amazing that I could sing soprano as it is that I could sing.  In my first year or so of piano lessons, I was required to count as I played -- "one-and two-and three-it-is-a four-and."  I couldn't keep myself from singing the count, at a very high pitch, along with the music.  My teacher looked pained, as though he had a splitting headache.  He warned me that I would ruin my voice.

He was right.  But not until I turned 15.

Within a few months, not only did my voice deepen, but my range dropped to about half an octave.  Where it has remained to this very day.  Now, when forced into group singing, I chant the words in a monotone, as softly as possible, hoping to annoy my neighbors as little as possible.

I so ruminate over the sad history of my voice, because I've been recalling how much I enjoyed singing at school concerts at this time of year when I was in fifth and sixth grades.  We were divided, as I recall, into soprano, second soprano, and alto.  Participation in these concerts was nothing we auditioned for.  We all sang, our entire class, canaries and crows alike, both in school assemblies and in a public performance for the entertainment and joy of our proud parents. 

I enjoyed every song we sang, and I don't recall ever worrying about staying in tune.  (What I felt and what the chorus director might have felt may have differed, of course.)  By seventh grade, however, "chorus" was a separate class composed of kids with a special talent for -- or at least interest in -- singing, and my days of public warbling were over.  We non-chorus and non-orchestra dolts continued to have "general music" classes through eighth grade, in which we sang together for our own amusement, but we were not allowed to threaten outside audiences with our efforts.

Our fifth and sixth grade Christmas concerts included both secular and sacred seasonal songs.  By "sacred," I certainly don't mean Bach and Handel, but traditional carols, of a sort familiar even in a logging town.  And by secular, I mean "Rudolph" and Jolly Old Saint Nicholas."  No one ever distinguished between the two categories.  We kids certainly didn't.  The songs were all just "Christmas music." 

Now, of course, I doubt whether public schools are permitted to offer explicitly "Christmas" concerts.  A quick Yahoo search doesn't result in any such concerts, at least as presented to the general public, by the Seattle public schools.  The far greater religious diversity of today's population probably makes the offering of any such concert problematic.

But Christmas choral music by kids lives on, at a very high quality, in the Northwest Boys Choir, which offers a "Festival of Carols and Lessons" each year at this time.  Performances are given at a number of area churches, leading up to a couple of performances at St. Mark's Cathedral, and, finally, at Benaroya Hall downtown.  I haven't attended this year, but have occasionally in years past.  The experience is breathtaking, and only faintly similar to my fondest memories of our fifth and sixth grade concerts.

The "Festival" is based on Anglican services at King's College, Cambridge.  Boys alternate giving seasonal readings from scripture, and singing traditional English carols.  As I recall, the service takes place in a darkened church or auditorium, lit by candles.  Attending the performance is an excellent way to get into the "Christmas spirit," and I can't understand why I haven't gone this year.

Most of us will never possess as adults the purity of tone and range of pitch we had when we were 12 or 13, but the "Festival" gives us a chance to relive that experience vicariously, as well as to appreciate listening, as adults, to beautiful seasonal music sung to very high standards.

Rage against the machine

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." (Orange Catholic Bible)
--Frank Herbert, "Dune"

The interconnectedness of events is often surprising.  Last month, I wrote a post ("A bad idea abandoned") about the removal of the final reminders of a "bad idea" -- the once-proposed R. H. Thompson freeway.  The freeway was to have paralleled I-5 on the east side of Seattle. For the past month, construction workers have been removing access ramps between east-west State Route 520 and a freeway that was never built.

Today, I read a disconcerting article in the New York Times discussing the manner in which automation results, and will continue to result, in ever-increasing unemployment, unemployment that appears structural, not cyclical.  Fewer and fewer jobs exist that can't now be, or won't soon be, handled as well or better by a computer.  For the first time in modern history, technological advances may create a permanent, rather than temporary, decrease in the number of human workers required by society. 

How will we handle a world in which wealth is increasing, but a smaller and smaller percentage of the population are wage earners?

Interesting and important questions, but where did I find an "interconnectedness"?

Science fiction writer Frank Herbert presented, in his Dune series of books, a civilization that had adapted to a form of Luddite revolution -- the "Butlerian jihad" -- thousands of years earlier.  A religion had evolved out of that jihad, based largely on the commandment barring artificial intelligence quoted above. 

Frank Herbert -- one of our own Northwest Corner writers, residing in Port Townsend, Washington -- named the jihad after a fictional historical character in his story.  But he adopted the name "Butler" after one of his own real life buddies, an attorney from Stanwood named Frank Butler. 

And what did attorney Butler do that inspired Herbert to use his name?  Correct!  Before becoming an attorney, Butler was a community organizer who  helped set in motion the popular revolt that eventually led to the cancellation, in 1970, of the R. H. Thompson freeway.

Frank Butler is still very much alive according to Bar Association records, and still practicing law in Stanwood.  He thus has a dual claim to the attention of history -- (1) a moving force in prevention of a freeway that would have marred a large portion of residential Seattle, and (2) as a consequence, the inspiration for Dune's eponymous "Butlerian jihad." 

Well done, Mr. Butler.
------------------------------------

Caution:  In researching this post, I have been unable to find any reference to Butler's campaign efforts against the R. H. Thompson, aside from a Wikipedia cite to an article in the Everett Herald in 2000.

All good doggies go to heaven

Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.
--Pope Francis

Pope Francis is learning the same sad lesson that American politicians have learned:  In an internet world, nothing is "off the record."  Words of consolation to a grieving child have stirred up world-wide theological controversy.  A lengthy article analyzing those eight (in English translation) words is at present the most e-mailed story out of the New York Times.

Animal lovers square off against theological conservatives, as well as against lovers of logic and just plain skeptics.  So if Rover goes to heaven, many ask, what about mosquitoes?  What about Ebola viruses?  Plants?  Do we all need to be vegetarians?  What if plants have souls, too -- must we starve to death?

Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular, historically has displayed an irrepressible urge to pronounce on matters that have not been revealed in revelation and that are not necessary for salvation -- based solely (no pun intended) on what, in the applicable century, was at that time considered sound logic.  (Check with Galileo on this topic.)

I hope this issue won't result in another such pronouncement.

Why does it matter whether dogs, cats, or protons go to heaven?  It matters no more -- and is less interesting -- than the question of whether intelligent life in a distant galaxy will end up there.  As for those NYT correspondents who say they don't want to go to heaven if they can't have their cat join them, as well as those who claim that heaven would be hell because of their allergy to cat hair -- just relax, ok?

Things are going to be different in heaven.  Assuming we meet the admission requirements, so will we.  Radically different.  My pastor once addressed an analogous question -- I think it was how a woman could put up with being married to more than one guy in heaven, when she had remarried after being widowed -- by saying, essentially: "Don't be an idiot.  No one knows what the afterlife will be like.  We will be living in a totally different plane of reality."  Christians simply have been advised that they'll like it.

Everyone who upsets himself on either side of the "dog in heaven" controversy should read science fiction.  Not because science fiction will give you any answers, but as a way of limbering up your imagination and helping you realize that the nature of ultimate reality -- to paraphrase a famous physicist -- may be not only stranger than you imagine, but stranger than you can imagine.

So, don't sweat it.  I'm convinced that all will work out for the best, whatever the "best" might be -- not just for us humans, but for dogs, mosquitoes, redwood trees, and viruses.

Even Ebola viruses. Assuming they've been good Ebola viruses.

The cranes are flying

In Seattle, today, not all is well behind the glossy surface. The shops are crowded with shoppers, but actual sales are reported to be unnervingly poor. Towering buildings are being erected by mobs of hard-hatted construction workers -- but, if you notice, no new construction has begun within the past six months, maybe even a year. The streets at lunch hour are packed with office workers, but each day the newspaper carries stories announcing new lay offs.
--Confused Ideas from the Northwest Corner (Dec. 8, 2008)

Yes, it was just six years ago tomorrow that I looked about me and contemplated the likelihood that we were entering a deflationary spiral, one that had already been anticipated by the virtual cessation of all downtown Seattle construction.  The lights, I felt, paraphrasing Sir Edward Grey, were going out all over Seattle.

By 2008, I should have fully internalized the lesson that I first formulated in my small brain back in college -- the lesson that things are rarely either as good or as bad as they seem at any given moment.

As I look around Seattle today -- and this has been true for the past year or two -- I see a virtual forest of building cranes.  The commercial building boom is most noticeable in the South Lake Union district, immediately north of the traditional downtown, but is evident throughout the entire downtown area, and up onto the heights of Capitol Hill.  South Lake Union's dynamism has been spurred largely by Amazon's continued expansion, with three entire blocks adjacent to the retail core being developed for the behemoth's world headquarters. 

But skyscrapers are springing up elsewhere, everywhere -- office buildings, hotels, condominium and apartment buildings.  Moreover, we are witnessing an impressive increase in retail stores and restaurants, opened by businessmen eager to support present and future workers, guests, and residents in these new buildings.

The New York Times published a full page travel article on Seattle last month, offering enthusiastic recommendations for restaurants that didn't exist a year or so ago.

I need to keep my mantra in mind -- it's never as good, as well as bad, as it seems.  Seattle and the Puget Sound area are booming, but much of Washington away from the Sound still suffers from a permanent loss of its traditional logging, fishing, and shipping industries.  And the nation as a whole still suffers from massive unemployment -- with many of the unemployed educationally unprepared for new jobs in the new technological economy.

But life is looking good for most of us in Seattle.  Caution about the future is always important, but so is enjoyment of life at the present. 

The lights have come back on, all over Seattle.  Merry Christmas!