Raccoon returns

It's been five years since I last complained about neighborhood raccoons.  For a period back then, it had become a nightly problem -- how to let the cats leave the house without inviting non-resident cats and other small mammals (i.e., raccoons) in.  Then, the problem seemed to solve itself and go away.

One outraged raccoon was caught in a cage-trap set for an opossum that had been loitering around my roofline.  The coon barely fit into the small cage.  The pest control man came and hauled him away -- I think his plan was to release the raccoon into the wild.  When last seen, while being carried out to the truck, the raccoon was screaming imprecations at me and making obscene gestures.

Since then, a long period of peace.  Deceptive peace, it turns out.

Tuesday morning, I discovered signs in my kitchen that a raccoon had been checking things out.  There was nothing to eat -- I move the cat's food dish to my upstairs bedroom at night -- but the water dish had been drained, leaving a muddy residue in the bottom. Suspicious raccoon-shaped footprints covered my kitchen shelves.

Last night, I was awakened about 1 a.m. by growls from my cat and the sound of food being chewed rapidly.  The raccoon was in my bedroom, chowing down at high speed.  I chased him downstairs and out the door.  My cats -- who used to work themselves into a fury over such incursions -- have become more mellow in their later years, more accepting of the oddities life throws at them.  I read for a half hour to make sure all remained calm, and then turned the lights out again.  I had just drifted off when the sound of food being consumed less genteelly than is my cats' wont woke me up again. 

I sealed the cat door for the rest of the night.

The average raccoon lives only two or three years in the wild, so I doubt it was the same raccoon that was trapped earlier,  returning for vengeance.  But he seemed to know exactly where to find food waiting for him.

Unfortunately, I leave tomorrow for two weeks in England.  My cat-care person comes by only once a day.  I presumably will have to leave the cats locked inside, 24 hours a day.  I'll tell the care provider to wait a few days and then re-open the cat door and see whether the masked marauder has moved on to greener pastures.  As it were.  Or more accessible chow.

Learning the law

Old Condon Hall

You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush; you leave thinking like a lawyer.
--The Paper Chase (1973) (lecture by Prof. Kingsfield)

I recently judged yet another moot court competition at the University of Washington Law School.  The competition was held in William H. Gates Hall -- named after Bill Gates's father, and the home of the law school since it was constructed in 2003.

Gates is a large, modern, efficient-feeling building.  Well designed for turning out modern, efficient attorneys for tomorrow's world.  It wasn't the building where I attended law school.  It isn't my kind of law school building.

My law school class was the last to attend all three years (with the exception of the final quarter) in the original Condon Hall -- named after the first law school dean -- part of the Upper Campus quadrangle complex.  Nothing was efficient or modern about Condon.  Its College Tudor exterior matched the well-worn, wood-paneled rooms within.  Its library stacks, accessible only to students and faculty, covered many floors, and -- in the basement -- burrowed their way beneath the history department's adjoining Smith Hall.

I loved the library from my first day in law school -- a large rectangular reading room, all walls lined with wood cabinet bookcases, filled with the volumes of the West Reporter System, all volumes in matching bindings, containing every reported appellate decision ever handed down in the United States.  I lived in that reading room and, once on the law review staff in my second year, I lived in the stacks as well.  On some weekend evenings, I was the only person using the library -- the room darkened except for the table on which I was working.

Law school today prepares students to be practicing attorneys.  Such practical knowledge was not totally ignored when I was in law school, but law school  prepared students primarily to understand and feel themselves a part of the Anglo-American legal system and traditions, handed down and developing for centuries, dating back to the Norman Conquest.

How to practice law -- how to find the courthouse, as we joked -- was something we would learn after graduation.  It would be taught to us by our benevolent law firm employers, at our employers' expense.  Or it would be learned through trial and error as solo practitioners, at our clients' expense.  In either case, our humiliation in the courtroom would be part of the learning process.

I became a trial attorney -- a fairly decent one, in my humble opinion -- but while in law school I was immersed in the dusty but glorious world of ancient legal theories and the ever-growing accretion of judicial precedents.  I had found my dream world, even if my future work as an attorney relied mainly on the thought processes learned in law school -- how to think and approach factual problems, "thinking like a lawyer" -- and not so much on the substantive knowledge taught in class.

Old Condon Hall provided the ideal ambience for learning the hoary traditions of the past and how to work within them.  New Gates Hall better motivates -- I suppose -- today's students to begin active participation in legal practice while still in law school.

The two approaches overlap to a considerable degree, and both were and are important.  But I loved and will never regret learning the law under the ancient Gothic arches -- both physical and metaphorical -- of old Condon Hall.

Something new

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
--Alexander Pope

"What in %$@! is this?"  First Loki, and then Muldoon, stare at the appalling structure, glancing at me briefly out of the corner of their eyes.  "Why would the old fool drag this piece of junk into our home?" exclaim my loving felines.

I flush with embarrassment.  Yet another small gift, another attempt to ingratiate myself -- another effort gone horribly awry.

Friday, I leave for two weeks of hiking in England.  So far as I know, the cats are not yet aware of my plans, although they have an uncanny ability to read my mind.  But I know that they'll be outraged at being left alone, with only a daily visit from a paid care provider.  Or -- if not outraged -- even worse, they will feel abandoned and forlorn.  So ... I thought I'd provide them something with which to amuse themselves while I was gone.  A kitty toy.  A play thing.

I consulted a pet store.  I ordered it specially made.  When I found, after it was constructed, that it was too big to bring home in my car, I even rented a van to transport it to my house.  I dragged it into a back room -- the very room from which I pen this report -- and positioned it as best I could.  It stands there now, off to one side.

I waited.

The cats drift in, separate but equal in their behavior.  They freeze.  "Something new!"  They look appalled.  They scan my eager face in an attempt to grasp the significance of this bizarre intrusion.  They drift quietly back out of the room.

Oh, they've come back several times since, because they like to keep track of my inscrutable behavior.  But they haven't given my gift another glance.  They tactfully tip toe past it, as though it weren't there, as though it weren't awkwardly defiling the austere interior design of the room.  Hoping I'll ignore their rejection, and will decide on my own to remove it from the house in the dead of the night.  "We'll just pretend this little incident never occurred, doesn't that sound best?"

They don't fool me.  If not tonight, tomorrow night.  I'll awake and hear hilarity downstairs -- cat-like shrieks and the sound of cat bodies bounding to the floor.  I won't even bother getting out of bed to see what's going on.  I'll know.  They'll be bouncing around on my gift like a couple of school boys on their mother's sofa.

But the next morning they'll be prim and circumspect.   They'll never confess to liking it. 

If they don't win, it's a shame

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,

I don't care if I never get back.

 

The Seattle Mariners completed a delightful four-game sweep -- i.e., they were swept -- against a mediocre Toronto team yesterday, and this evening they come home to face Oakland here at Safeco Field.  

 

I'll be there watching them, along with Pat, a friend from law school days.  Seattle is now nine games behind AL West division leader Houston.  Second from the bottom place in the division.  The only consolation being that Oakland is smack dab at the bottom, and a half game behind the Mariners.  That positioning may well change by the time I leave the ball park this evening.

 

Predicted temperature of 50 degrees, 50 percent chance of rain. Lovely.

A friend buys a couple of season tickets every year, chooses the games she wants to see, and then sells the rest of them to Facebook friends.  Pat and I have bought tickets for three or four games each season for years now.  "The triumph of hope over experience."  It's been a long time since the Ken Griffey era, and since Seattle won 116 games in 2001.    

 

Nevertheless, the Seattle Times greets every loss with stunned amazement, and every win as auguring a bright new era of post-season triumph and joy.

 

I don't really care.  I just enjoy the game.  Our seats are always in the same great location -- third deck immediately behind home plate.  We can call the balls and strikes better than the umpire can.  And we often do. 

 

But mostly, of course, I go to catch up on Pat's life -- recently retired, he and his wife just returned from a cruise from Australia, through Indonesia, and on to Malaysia.  And, of course, to indulge in "peanuts and Cracker Jack" -- or in my case, hot dogs and beer.

 

Go M's! 

Telling your story

I was at the post office, about to mail in my college application, when I remembered that I hadn't filled in my essay response to the question asking why I wanted to attend that university.  I walked over to the stand, picked up a pen secured against theft by a chain, and wrote something off the top of my head. 

Those days are long gone.  Today, the college essay is an art form.  College hopefuls pay large fees for seminars advising them how to compose the essay.  The less scrupulous hire ghost writers.

The New York Times each year asks for essays submitted as part of college applications that addressed "money, work, or social class."  Today's issue printed four of those essays, essays which I'm sure the newspaper ensured had actually been written by their student authors.  I am impressed not only by the formal excellence of their writing, but by the seriousness and sensitivity of the personal histories discussed, and each writer's self-awareness of how those histories have impacted their own lives and ambitions.  I would happily have read a much longer autobiographical article by each writer, expanding on his short application essay.

Zoë writes about what it was like to attend prep school at Andover on a full scholarship, after she had attended an ordinary public middle school.  She uses the contrast between the cheap laptop she was provided and the top-of-the line devices used by her much wealthier classmates as a symbol of the many class differences she encountered.  She sees how straddling both worlds has made her a person better able to function in varied environments.  "Maybe I'm culturally ambidextrous, as comfortable introducing a speaker on the stage of Andover's century-old chapel as getting my nose pierced in a tattoo parlor in New Haven."

Jonathan is the son of immigrants from Moldova.  He grew up accompanying his mother while she cleaned and vacuumed for a university professor.  He longed for the life led by the unseen professor's family: "the lightly crinkled New York Times sprawled on the kitchen table, the overturned, half-opened books in their overflowing personal library, the TV consistently left on the National Geographic channel."  He came to realize, enjoying their house while his mother worked, that one could work with one's mind as well as with one's body.  He is grateful for his mother's support: "It's her blue Hoover vacuums that hold up the framework of my life.  Someday, I hope my diploma can  hold up the framework of hers."

Caitlin's parents ran a bed and breakfast, and she became well aware that some guests were kind and others were unreasonable and demanding.  She admired her parents' ability to remain calm and gracious under great pressure, "capable of tolerating any type of cruelty with a smile."  She concludes,  based on her observations of her parents' relations with their paid guests, that "learning to serve people looks a lot like learning to trust them."

And Tillena split her time growing up between a mother who lived in a prosperous Flagstaff neighborhood and a father who lived on the Navajo reservation.  "I straddle the innocence of my youth and the mystery of my adult life.  That, too, is a precipice.  I know I must leap into adulthood and leave the balancing act of Flagstaff life behind.  Still, I belong at the place where opposites merge in a lumpy heap of beautiful contradictions.  I crave the experiences only found at the edge."

When I finally reached the university (to which I'd applied so cavalierly), I was assigned to honors English -- not on the basis of my scribbled application essay, certainly, but based on my SAT verbal score.  To my shock, I received a C minus on each of my first two English papers.  In part, I now realize, this was boot camp shock treatment for overconfident freshman.  But in part it was also because of something that my instructor carefully explained in writing on one of my papers.

He told me that my writing style was fine -- "felicitous," was his adjective -- but that I consistently fell back on vague and useless abstractions.  Write about what you really know, from your own experience, he told me.  Don't write about half-baked ideas you've picked up from reading books.

Each of the four students whose essays appeared in the Times clearly understood the importance of writing from your heart about those matters that have touched your heart.  Each told us about experiences that shaped his childhood, and each made a serious effort to draw conclusions about the future from those experiences.  As a result, their essays made favorable impacts on college admission officials.  As Barnard's dean of enrollment told the Times, "I wanted to have a conversation with her about it.  And I love leaving an essay like that, where you want to say, 'Let's keep talking.'"

When I wrote those first couple of English essays -- earning my C minus grades -- I'm sure I felt I simply had nothing interesting to say.  I wasn't the child of immigrants, I'd never lived on a reservation, I certainly had never attended a prep school.  I'd grown up in a very boring logging town in the Northwest Corner -- and my dad wasn't even a logger!  I'd gotten good grades.  I'd stayed out of trouble.  Nothing much exciting had ever happened to me.

I guess I felt I really didn't have a story to tell. But everyone has a story to tell.  Writing is an exercise in making that story as interesting to others as it is -- secretly, perhaps -- to yourself.  My mom, like Jonathan's, also vacuumed.  It just took me a while to appreciate that even such simple activities -- when seen as having had an impact on your emotions and on your life -- can be made interesting.

My later English papers got higher grades than C minus.

The dog in the night

And they sang 'You're asleep! There is no board-fence,
And never a Goblin with green-glass eyes!--
'Tis only a vision the mind invents
After a supper of cold mince-pies".
--James Whitcomb Riley

I woke up last night, in the wee hours of the morning.  The cats were stirring and rearranging themselves on my bed.  My cats and I have negotiated certain agreements -- they have agreed to lie wherever they choose on my bed and I, on my part, will attempt to lie in such a way as not to disturb them.

I gradually realized, however, that not just the cats and I were in the darkened room.  And no, it wasn't the somewhat usual mouse.  Nor was it -- as related in an earlier post -- a bat.  There was a large mammal in the inky background -- it seemed like a St. Bernard dog, but more formless, almost like a small bear.

The room was very dark, with just a little filtered light from the exterior, so all I could see was the vague shape of the animal.  It wasn't threatening me.  It was making no noise.  It was just moving around in the background, some distance from the bed.  I wasn't exactly frightened -- I was more puzzled.  The cats remained restless, but not freaked out -- and my cats generally freak out at anything new that's as large as a moth.  The monster kept moving around the bed. 

Suddenly, it leaped over the bed, from one side to the other.  Soundlessly.  Gracefully, or as gracefully as a bear-like dog could comport itself.  Far enough toward the foot of the bed that it didn't come close to touching me.

Well, that was weird.  And then my vision of cats and dog alike was blotted out by a fog-like cloud of feathers or dust or odd particles that swooshed and swirled across my vision, moving as though somehow alive.  It died out after a few seconds, and the cats and dog were again barely detectable.

I honestly couldn't figure out what was going on, but I decided to get to the bottom of it.  The switch for the overhead light was just a few steps from my bed.  I'd just get up and ....  But I couldn't move, or at least I couldn't move enough.  I was weighted down, as though I were covered by a huge number of blankets.  But I wasn't.  I could clearly feel that I was covered only by the single blanket I had gone to bed with.

The mysterious black cloud swirled about me one or two more times, its intentions -- and it seemed to have conscious intent -- unknown.

The dog was edging toward the door.  That made me furious.  "I'm going to miss out seeing this dog in the light, just because I'm too weak or too lazy to get up and flip the switch."  That's what I told myself, in pretty much exactly those words.  I was struggling with every ounce of my strength. 

The dog was out in the hall by now, and I heard him go down the stairs.  Finally, my legs began functioning, and I was able to reach the light switch.  The cats were gone.  My struggles with the blanket had apparently been too irritating for my faithless felines.  And of course there was no huge hound to be seen.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post in this blog entitled "Petrified."  I explained the phenomenon of "sleep paralysis." The victim awakes, finding himself caught in a state between the awareness of being awake and the muscular paralysis of REM sleep.  It can be terrifying, or humorous, or -- as it usually is with me -- just immensely exhausting and frustrating. 

Even after I finally got the blasted light turned on and I was fully awake, it took a moment or two to convince myself that there had been no giant dog, no animated, swirling mass of black feathers.  It was all the result of yet another encounter between my wakened vision and my still dreaming brain.

I'd still like to see that dog. The cats suggest they would just as soon not.

Friendship

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Sáenz, is a young adult novel about two middle class Mexican-American teenagers living in El Paso, Texas.  It has won numerous awards, and is on the reading lists of many high schools.  The book is well written, its extensive use of dialogue (both spoken and interior) believable and realistic. It is a moving story about growing up in the 1980s, and, especially, about the saving power of friendship.

Ari is 15 years old, the son of a kind but silent father who suffers from PTSD resulting from his active service in Vietnam, and a mother who teaches high school.  Ari lives inside his own head.  He speaks only when necessary.  He is bright, but he acts tough and street-wise.  He avoids others.  He has no real enemies, but he also has no friends. 

He is at a community pool -- alone, of course, and floating, because he can't swim --when another boy his age, Dante, approaches and tells him "I can teach you how to swim."  Dante's father is an English professor.  Dante is as open and optimistic as Ari is gloomy and closed off. He loves to read, to write -- and to talk.  About anything and everything.  The boys gradually become friends, despite every warning signal in Ari's brain telling him never to trust or open himself up to any human being outside his own family.

A year later, Dante has been hospitalized after being brutally assaulted by strangers.  Dante's folks -- who by now consider Ari part of their own family -- talk to Ari at the hospital, hoping that Ari will continue to stand by Dante, will continue to be his friend.  Ari tries to open up a bit with his friend's folks:

I looked at Mrs. Quintana and I looked at Sam.  "Dante's my friend."  I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one.  Until Dante.  I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys.  I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever.  And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around.  I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me.  I wanted to tell them so  many things and yet I didn't have the words.  So I just stupidly repeated myself.  "Dante's my friend."

Everyone -- especially teenagers -- needs a friend. How their friendship affects the lives of both boys makes a story worth reading.

From all accounts, this book is highly popular among young people -- at least among those who read books.  I suggest that adults -- especially parents -- might also want to give it a read.
-----------------------------

Benjamin Sáenz was raised on a small farm near Mesilla, New Mexico. He graduated from Las Cruces High School in 1972. That fall, he entered St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado, where he received a BA degree in humanities and philosophy in 1977. He studied theology at the University of Louvain in Leuven, Belgium from 1977 to 1981. He was a priest for a few years in El Paso, Texas before leaving the order.

In 1985, he returned to school, and studied English and creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso where he earned an MA degree in creative writing. He then spent a year at the University of Iowa as a PhD student in American literature. A year later, he was awarded a Stegner Fellowship. While at Stanford University under the guidance of Denise Levertov, he completed his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust, which won an American Book Award in 1992. He entered the PhD program at Stanford and continued his studies for two more years. Before completing his PhD, he moved back to the border and began teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso in the bilingual MFA program.
--Wikipedia

Allegorical sun and rain

Green Lake Park today
(before the storm)

Rainiest winter in Seattle since 1895 (when someone first started keeping records).  It was a cold, wet fall.  A cold, wet winter.  And it's been a cold, wet spring. 

Not Arctic cold.  Not a Minnesota winter.  Just cold.  And wet.

And then yesterday, the air miraculously warmed to near-70.  Thoughts of spring hiking danced in my head.  I woke, half-planning to do my annual climb of Mount Si -- my traditional warm-up for the hiking season.  I had breakfast, and studied carefully the weather app on my phone.  Temperatures in the low to mid 70s, it said.  But rain beginning in mid-afternoon, and rain tomorrow.

I could do it.  I could get an early start, drive to North Bend (above which Mt. Si towers), and be up the trail and down again before the rain arrived.  Maybe.  Or maybe not.  I hesitated.  I hesitated too long. 

Maybe next week, I told myself. 

As penance for my laziness, I determined to do at least a long walk.  Longer than my daily four-mile loop around the University campus.  I donned shorts (first time this season!), and a t-shirt (ditto!) and walked out the door.

I reached the campus, continued north through Frat Row to Ravenna, and headed west to Green Lake.  By the time I reached Green Lake, I was feeling great.  After a quick latte (hey, I never claimed to be Daniel Boone!), I wandered through a neighborhood north of the lake, looking for a house that I almost once bought.  (I think I found it.)  Then, back to the lake.

When Seattle wants to be beautiful -- when it fully embraces Springtime -- when the sun is shining and the flowers are blooming and the leaves are nearly all out -- when all goes well, you wonder why you ever bother traveling anywhere else.  And so it was today.

I began circling Green Lake at about 2 p.m. -- wondering, as I always do, why all these young people were out and able to disport themselves with such obvious pleasure during normal working hours.  This was a question that used to worry me considerably while I was part of the working force.  Now?  Meh.  I just accept it as a given, part of the background scenery -- no more to be questioned than to ask why ducks paddle so aimlessly around the lake.

The walk around the lake -- roughly three miles -- couldn't have been more beautiful, or the temperature and zephyr-like breezes more beguiling.  (Or my writing more cliché-ridden.)  The sun was warm, the air was comfortable, the human wildlife was, as always, varied and astounding.  I finished my loop, and noted that -- for once -- my phone's weather app probably was correct.  It was clouding up. 

By the time I made it back to the University District (after ten miles of hoofing it), the first drops were falling.  By the time a bus reached the nearest bus stop, the rain was falling in torrents.  The weather gods held off briefly to allow me to reach my house relatively drily from my bus stop, and then -- Donder und Blitzen!  The rain fell, the thunder roared, the cats cowered, the electric lights flickered, all pretense of the Birth of Springtime was cast aside.

And then it dawned on me.  Someone or something was angry.  Angry on behalf of millions of Americans whose health care Congressmen had blithely ignored today -- Congressmen less interested in the hardships of their constituents than in dotting the i's and crossing the t's of their nineteenth century ideologies, or in simply complying with the angry desires of their Accidental President.

Springtime is over in America, the weather gods hinted.  We gave you a taste of it, but storm clouds and angry deities lie ahead. 

Well, that's how it felt in the Northwest Corner, at least.  Where you live, the weather today may have been perfectly calm. 

Seeking Zanzibar

An email from a childhood friend, who has an excellent memory but also a tendency to fantasize, recently accused me of having gloated, in my childhood, over my collection of Zanzibar triangle-shaped postage stamps.  After a frantic search -- was my old stamp album lost? had it been stolen? -- I finally located it in an unexpected upstairs bookcase. 

The old stamp album!  When I was ten, my mother returned from a trip to Chicago, bearing this album and an envelope of 500 or so mixed postage stamps as a peace offering.  I spent days sorting out those hundreds of stamps from all nations, trying to figure out which country they were from.  Deutsch Post, Magyar kir Posta, Ceskoslovensko, Helvetia, Poczta Polska.  I hardly even knew where Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Poland were on the map -- let alone their names for themselves.  But I matched stamps with the blurry photographs in my album.

I learned a lot of geography, a lot of foreign currency denominations, and even some foreign language expressions before my eleventh birthday.

Looking back at that album today, copyright 1950, I see spaces for stamps from a lot of entities that had been almost forgotten even then.  Pre-unification German states.  British colonies.  "Italian East Africa."  Danzig.  Cyrenaica.  Angra. (?) Aguera. (??)  And one country -- Central Lithuania -- that merited a full page for quite a variety of stamps.  That last one stumped me even today, and I had to resort to Wikipedia.  Central Lithuania existed -- unrecognized by most countries and the League of Nations, but prolifically churning out postage stamps, between 1920 and 1922 -- as a sort of buffer between resurgent Poland and resurgent Lithuania. 

It's all there in my album.  The powerful and the weak, the nations that have lasted centuries and those that lasted but a few months (who but a kid who collected stamps remembers Tannu Tuva?).  The series of stamps with Hitler and the far more beautiful series with Pope Pius XII.  Stamp collecting was insidious, the way it educated young minds without their being aware of it -- sneakily inducing them to learn while loving it, without even recognizing that they were learning.

But Zanzibar?  Nope.  I never added a stamp to my album's Zanzibar section, never owned a Zanzibar stamp.  And Zanzibar doesn't seem to have been one of those progressive states that printed multi-colored stamps in odd shapes and sizes as enticements to young collectors.  (Such as San Marino?  Costa Rica?  French Somali Coast?  Even the Vatican?)  Zanzibar's stamps -- at least as illustrated in my album --all had bearded, grumpy-appearing heads, topped by fezes.  Zanzibar's sultans may already have suspected that the day was coming when they would be the subject of an acquisition and merger by enormous Tanganyika across the straits.

Never been to Zanzibar.  Never even seen any of its stamps.  But I'd jump at the chance to visit.