Coffee by app

Within the life span of many of us, buying a cup of coffee was once easy.  "Black or white, Mac?" the guy at the counter asked.  Or maybe you poured your own milk.  He poured the black stuff into a mug, you handed him a nickel, and the deal was done.  (If you wanted a doughnut along with your coffee, that would cost you another nickel.)

Nowadays, getting coffee is a major production.  And, of course, a latte or a cappuccino -- essentially, again, coffee with milk -- will set you back nearly four dollars.

But it's the time waiting that kills me.  First, the time in line.  Watching while each person ahead of you specifies, after some waffling, the precise configuration of the coffee on which he insists.  The kind of milk (soy? almond? cow? cow nonfat? or 2 percent?), and the various flavor additives (mocha?  with a hint of cinnamon?  laced with caramel?).  The discussions become intense, until I want to yell "Are you ordering a coffee or negotiating for purchase of the damn franchise?"

After the purchase has been negotiated, and purchase money agreement signed, you cool your heels for a frustrating length of time while other orders are being slowly filled.  Because espresso drinks aren't just poured out of a machine.  No sir. Not in a decent coffee shop.  Not in a Starbucks.  A lot of human input goes into the preparation of each drink, and it takes time to get that little heart shape to appear just right on top of the beverage.

But yes.  We are a different people today.  We don't order wine in a restaurant by response to "red or white?"  We don't gulp a hot cup of black java, filtering out the grounds with our teeth.  We spend more time at our epicurean pleasures, much more time, but there certainly is a pay-off in quality.

But, as I say, I have retained my sense of being a busy man from pre-retirement days.  I can't stand to dawdle, waiting long minutes to be served.

Now, as many of you know, Starbucks has an app you can load on your phone.  I loaded it, maybe a year ago, intending to try it out.  I just never got around to it.  Probably awfully complicated, I thought.

Bad mistake. The app is not difficult to use.  It takes you through the modern complexities of ordering a cup of coffee (and whatever sweets you require to go with your coffee) step by step.  I know, because I finally gave it a try a week ago. 

I was out walking, about ten minutes from a Starbucks in University Village that I occasionally visit, and decided that this would be a good time to try the app.  The only real problem, not serious, was making sure that I told the app which Starbucks outlet I planned to visit.  (I'm a guy who once used his phone to order tickets to a movie showing at AMC's theater in Dallas.)   But once I located the correct franchise, ordering was easy.  The app asked me a couple of times if I really wanted to do what I said I did, giving me confidence that the app understood the frailties of mortal men. 

I clicked the "Order" button, and was assured that in 7 to 12 minutes my order would be ready.  I arrived at Starbucks, walked in, and there it was -- my tall, non-fat latte!  Just as ordered.  With my name on it.  I picked it up, unchallenged, and found myself a seat.

As I posted jubilantly on Facebook, I was blown away.  No waiting.  No shuffling my feet.  Just walk in and pick it up!  I felt that a whole new way of living life had opened up to me.  My Facebook post received a number of good-humored approvals from young secretaries who had been ordering coffee on their phones for most of their short lives.

My only problem is how fun it was.  I've ordered a Starbucks coffee virtually every day since that first glorious try.  It's not just the time saved.  There is something amazingly fun about ordering on my phone, and finding my order ready.  The same sort of pleasure I had as a ten-year-old, playing with the levers and buttons on the transformer of my new electric train, and watching my powerful little locomotive respond to my directions.

Sure, I feel silly.  And juvenile.  But I don't mind telling you that, until the novelty hopefully wears off, my only problem will be avoiding ordering coffee several times a day. 

Sit on the floor

If you were a good singer, you were a "canary."  Mediocre singer?  A "bluebird."  If you couldn't carry a tune, you were a pitiful "crow."  Canaries sat near the back of our circle of chairs, bluebirds up closer where the teacher could keep an eye on them.  The crows sat on the floor.

These were the rules in first grade,  during our half-hour music period.  A meritocracy, preparing us for the horrors of college applications, I suppose. 

But there was a twist.  If a canary or bluebird misbehaved, he was temporarily demoted to a crow.  He sat on the floor among the riffraff.  We learned the lesson well.  Being a bad singer and a bad person were equivalent.  Some of us were born to endless night, but others sometimes descended to those same Stygian depths through their own misbehavior.

I often think of this little parable when I observe the quirks of American society.  I think of it now as I watch our national debate on immigration.

I don't view immigration, documented or undocumented, from an absolutist point of view.  I understand why it may be impossible, or at least undesirable, to simply open our borders -- to open them as we did in the nineteenth century, back when we were a land that was still, in part, an unpopulated wilderness.

But I see the other side as well.

We are a wealthy country.  Yes, we have poverty, but anyone who has visited the third world understands that even the poorest American would be a man of wealth in many societies.  And studies show that those of us who are most bitterly opposed to immigration are not among our poorest citizens.  Our poorest citizens are too busy just living from day to day to sit around writing diatribes on internet news sites.

We are wealthy, but our wealth is like the singing ability of my classroom's "canaries."  It comes to us by luck -- or, if you are so inclined, by grace.  We are Americans -- moreover, middle class Americans -- by birth or by a combination of luck and certain efforts by our ancestors.  Almost all of us are little versions of Donald Trump -- yes, we've worked to make ourselves middle class, but we started out with unearned capital  -- social background, education, and family wealth that we perhaps multiplied by our efforts.  If we aren't, like some, just living off the capital that we've received.

Our nation, too, enjoyed incredible luck by being formed in an empty and fertile land, a land our people occupied for many decades without worries of defense or economic competition -- simply because we were so geographically isolated during a time when travel and communication were slow and undependable.

We should be exceedingly thankful for the luck -- or grace -- that provided such great advantages to both our nation and to ourselves as individuals.  And many of us are.

But that thankfulness should include an ability to see that nothing differentiates us as a human being from a resident of the Congo or El Salvador or Bangladesh -- nothing other than good luck.  Those people have similar hopes and dreams of their own, modified only by their local experiences.  Each of them, like Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, could ask us his version of that unfortunate Jew's speech:

 Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

When we see a caravan of Central Americans heading toward our border -- filled not with bandits, murderers, and other desperadoes as President Trump pretends to believe, but with impoverished and persecuted men, women, and children -- how can we avoid imagining ourselves in their place?  How can we treat them -- people so much like ourselves -- as vermin to be eradicated lest they infect our own precious country.  How can we fail to appreciate that wave after wave of similarly impoverished peoples, including our own ancestors, once came to this country, themselves looking for relief from misery, both economic and political, and are now our fellow citizens?

Maybe we can't let them all in.  Maybe if we're too welcoming to the first wave, we'll soon be facing a clamor from the entire world for admission.  But if we turn any back, we should see them as they are, and feel compassion for their pain.  And even if  convinced that we cannot at this time receive them, we should feel guilt.

Because we were born to sweet delight, through no merit of our own.  And they were born to endless night, through no fault of theirs.  And we've done little or nothing to earn the right to judge their merits as future citizens, and we've done relatively little or nothing to help improve their lot in their own countries.

Because in real life, as opposed to first grade music classes, no one is born a crow.  We are all canaries.   But most canaries spend their lives sitting on the floor like crows, because certain privileged canaries insist there aren't enough chairs for them. Or pretend that they are treated like crows because they deserve to be crows. 

If we are short of chairs, we might build some more chairs, rather than walls.

And President Trump should be ashamed, deeply ashamed, at begging us to think otherwise, and for building his career on the prejudice of those of us who have been given so much, whether we realize it or not.

Daytime parahypnagogia

The summer I was 19, I worked in the laboratory of an aluminum plant, running various analyses required during various stages of aluminum production.   One of the analyses (for CaF₂) required me to wash a long row of filter papers -- maybe 15 to 20 -- where each filter was filled with a sample, and each filter was embedded in a funnel.  I washed each with a squeeze bottle.  After I finished, I waited until all the filters had drained, then washed them again.  I might repeat this process five to ten times.

It was not an exciting part of my day.  But at least one time, during a long stretch of washing filters in the middle of a tedious afternoon, something curious occurred.  I found myself listening to a conversation going on in my own mind.  Two people -- as I recall, a man and a woman -- were talking to each other.  I didn't know the speakers, and their conversation had nothing to do, so far as I could tell,  with any event or even thought from my own life. 

It was like overhearing a conversation between strangers on a bus.  Or listening to a radio program.  It lasted no more than a minute.  I wasn't asleep.  I was standing, watching the draining filters, water bottle in hand.  There was no visual component.  I wasn't dreaming or hallucinating.   If asked, I would never have claimed that I had been listening to a real conversation.

That afternoon in the laboratory was the first time I recall that odd experience, but it's happened many times since then.  Right up until the present.  It's never traumatic or upsetting.  I'm not dizzy or confused when it's over.  The closest I can come to describing the experience is that it's a bit like daydreaming, except that I do not intentionally produce or direct the "conversation," and the subject being discussed might as well be from outer space.  What the "speakers" are talking about seems to have no relationship to any experiences of my own.

I learned today that this experience has a name.  It's a form of hypnagogia.  It's sometimes called "daytime parahypnagogia" to differentiate it from other forms of hypnagogia, which usually are associated with stages of the sleep process.  It's been described as

the spontaneous intrusion of a flash image or dreamlike thought or insight into one's waking consciousness. DPH is typically encountered when one is "tired, bored, suffering from attention fatigue, and/or engaged in a passive activity." The exact nature of the waking dream may be forgotten even though the individual remembers having had such an experience.   Gustelle and Oliveira define DPH as "dissociative, trance-like, [...] but, unlike a daydream, [...] not self-directed ….

--Wikipedia

Wikipedia describes the experience as a "waking dream," but I'm always fully aware of my surroundings -- for example, I know I'm running a calcium fluoride analysis -- and I never believe, as one does in a genuine dream, that the conversation is real -- except insofar as one feels that a radio drama (back when such existed) really existed, even knowing it was performed in a studio.  I've compared it to daydreaming, because you can daydream in depth about tomorrow's activities while performing an activity that doesn't require much concentration.

Being the person I am, I of course like to assume that my susceptibility to daytime parahypnagogia suggests great creativity on my part.  Obviously, I suspect, I have untouched talents for writing fiction, because my mind is constructing fictional conversations about unusual (for me) topics almost against my will.  There is genius in that skull of mine, just dying to burst out and amaze the world with Tolstoy-esque literary expression.

Alas, there are no studies that suggest that my little plays in one act represent such talent any more than do a boy's dreams of baseball heroics mark a future World Series star.   But it does show that in even the dullest of us there are hidden activities going on inside our minds that leak out only on rare occasions.

I've never heard anyone else brag or complain about having similar "intrusions" into their waking consciousness, so it may well be fairly uncommon.  Since I've already bragged -- if that's the proper term -- back in November 2014 of having numeral synesthesia, there are cynics who may now choose to take my claim of daytime parahypnagogias with a grain of salt.  Yeah, right, you're "exceptional," as so many have pointed out to me.

Based on a teenage experience -- which I'll save for some future time -- I firmly believed for most of my life that I was a latent epileptic.  I therefore carefully avoided looking at  flashing strobe lights.  Then, one of a number of medical tests performed nine years ago firmly established that I had no susceptibility whatsoever to epilepsy.

This was quite a blow, as you can imagine, to my quest for uniqueness.  It would be too bad if my pretensions to both synesthesia and parahynagogia should be similarly stripped from me.  But I feel confident they will not.

Frost is on the pumpkin

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

 September is always a pleasant time in the Northwest Corner.  Sometimes, even early October.  But the transition from the warmth of summer to the rains of autumn generally is fairly rapid.  Lines scribbled by an Indiana poet -- and rapturous descriptions of New England  -- give us the impression that Autumn with a "Capital A" is a bigger deal in other parts of our country.

Folks come to the Northwest for many reasons, but not generally to take tours admiring the changing colors of our autumn foliage.

Seattle Prep runners

But this year's been different.  We've had very little rain for weeks -- just enough to turn our lawns green once more.  Day after day we have had sunny days and chilly nights.  In the last week or two, each day has begun overcast or foggy, but with the sun appearing and blue sky emerging after noon.

University of Washington campus

With the recent improvements in the neighboring Arboretum, I've walked far more often in that park this year than in the past.  And how shall I put it?  I've been ravished by the splendor of the colors in the trees and shrubbery of the Arboretum this year.  Has it been this way every year?  Have I just not been observant?

Reflections and lily pads

I don't think so.  I think this has been an unusual year, with respect to our weather, and it has brought out unusually brilliant colors -- which of course look all the better against a background of atypically (for Seattle) blue sky.

In fact, nothing I saw in the Boston area a couple of weeks ago could compare.  Admittedly, however, they were still enjoying hot weather, and their autumn changes were only beginning.

But nothing lasts forever.  Overcast skies are predicted all day tomorrow and Wednesday, with the seasonal rains beginning on Thursday.  Just enough precip to drive any lingering Californians back home to their beaches, palm trees, and cactuses.

Return to paradise

Denny's house in Chiang Mai
October 2017 

My sister Kathy has been in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for the past week -- part of a two-month stay, visiting her son Denny and granddaughter Maury.  I will be flying out of Seattle to join them, just thirty days from today.

When Americans think of Thailand, I suspect they either think of fascinating but chaotic Bangkok, or -- perhaps if young -- they dream of joining hedonistic pleasures and wild parties on one of the Thai isles.  But Chiang Mai is in the north of the country, the largest city in the north. 

If Bangkok is thought of as Los Angeles, Chiang Mai would be Spokane.  But a Spokane with a long history, for many years the capital of a powerful kingdom totally separate from Siam to the south.  The city is modern, but the modernity is merely a convenient logistical overlay over the historical monuments, religious sites, and continuing traditional life.

This will be my fourth visit to Chiang Mai.  I visited it in 2003 and 2007, when the city was a base for organized hiking trips in northern Thailand in 2003, and in Laos and Cambodia, in 2007.  I enjoyed those visits, but they were brief and my attention was focused on the adventures that lay ahead.

I had no idea that my nephew Denny -- who accompanied me on the 2007 trip -- would ever end up, not only as a resident of Chiang Mai, but as a sixth grade teacher at a Chiang Mai international school.  But so he did, and so he is.  So my third visit -- exactly a year ago -- combined a gathering with Denny and other relatives visiting from California, with family side trips to Bali and to Siem Reap, Cambodia.

This year's visit will be less frenetic (although last year's didn't seem particularly "frenetic" either).  Denny still rents the same very pleasant house on the semi-rural outskirts of Chiang Mai.  My sister is renting a house, one she located on-line, in the same area, a 30-minute bike ride from her son.  Last year, both Kathy and I, as well as a cousin, stayed at a mini-"resort" -- note the quotes, it was pretty primitive -- just a half-mile walk down a dirt road from Denny's house.  I probably will stay with Kathy, but may also spend a short time at that more convenient "resort."

Last year, several of us also stayed in the Old City for three nights, which provided some urban contrast to our pastoral life in the exurbs.  The Old City is, of course, the old city.  Fortified with a wall, and exactly square in configuration.  I walked the circuit of the walls last year, which is something I'd like to do again.  I may stay in the Old City for a few nights again this year -- last year, we found a great hotel, located across the street from one of the major temples.  It had nice rooms, and a front terrace where you could order drinks while watching the foot traffic.  The rates this year are about $60 per night, full breakfast included.  Look for a deal like that in Honolulu!

Kathy, Clinton, and I will spend my last four nights in Thailand at a location far to the south, at a  beach resort in Phuket -- this will also be my fourth visit to this particular resort, a series which began again with the same 2003 group hiking trip that took me to Chiang Mai.  Denny and his daughter will join us in Phuket for one night over the weekend -- I'm afraid work duties take priority over fun with relatives, even in Paradise!

Kathy and Clinton will fly back to Chiang Mai after the Phuket stay, but I'll, sadly, fly to Bangkok where I'll connect with a flight home.  From beautiful Thailand, I'll land some 28 hours later (including a long airport layover in Seoul) in Seattle on December 5, just in time to confront the onset of winter in the Northwest Corner.

Seeking our neighbors

Perhaps the priests are right: human beings were put on Earth by some creator God for His own inscrutable purposes, and the rest of the universe is merely background scenery.

--The Economist

For scientists, that is one possible solution -- the most unsatisfying solution from a scientific point of view -- for the answer to the Big Question.  Where Is Everybody?

The Milky Way galaxy, of which we are a part, consists of approximately 250 billion stars.  Those stars we see in the sky at night are a small fraction of the Milky Way's bounty.  But the Milky Way isn't the entire universe.  The entire observable universe is estimated to contain from 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies. 

The physical laws of nature, so far as we know, apply to all these stars, all these galaxies, in the same way as they apply to Earth.  Through natural processes, life evolved on Earth.  Earth no doubt was fortunate to have certain environmental qualities that helped life to evolve.  What are the odds that none of the billions of other galaxies, or the billions of stars within those galaxies, or the multitude of planets circling many of those stars had equally favorable qualities? 

Exactly.

As the famous physicist Enrico Fermi pointed out in 1950, the night sky must be filled with other civilizations.  And so, he asked, why don't we have any visitors?  Or, as The Economist points out, today we could ask with even greater incredulity, why don't our instruments pick up any signals indicating that someone's trying to communicate with us?  Or even random signals, like our own radio and TV stations emit, produced for the alien civilization's own internal purposes?

The Economist article suggests other solutions besides the "unique creation" hypothesis of Genesis.  Maybe alien civilizations have taken a look at us and decided they prefer to leave us alone.  Or, as someone hypothesized not too long ago, maybe billions of civilizations have evolved, but each one, having reached approximately our level of technical advancement, committed unintentional suicide -- nuclear war, global warming, etc.

It's certainly unlikely that the third planet from our medium sized star is somehow the most advanced of all civilizations in the universe, and that we're just waiting for our little brothers to learn how to use radio waves.

The point of The Economist's article is  to publicize the conclusion of some astronomers at Penn State.  They say we just haven't looked hard enough, and that it's too early to say that we won't discover those little green men later. 

Maybe.  Or maybe "intelligent life" may be far more diverse than we expect -- a state of affairs that science fiction has explored for generations.  Maybe aliens are fairy-like creatures who become visible or invisible at will.  Maybe they have developed telepathy and teleportation, and have no need for the electronic signals our scanners are seeking.  In 1930, Olaf Stapledon wrote his sci fi masterpiece Last and First Men, presenting the various forms into which our own humanity might morph over the millennia. 

Maybe species, once they reach about our level, do not destroy themselves, but cease being interested in technological development, including space travel.  They control their populations and live simple but affluent lives filled with the joy of raising their own gardens and meeting friends at night at the pub for drinks.

When I was young, I would have had hopes that by now we would have either encountered friendly aliens, or we would have discovered why we hadn't or, perhaps, why we never would.  As the years pass, I've now become resigned to the heavy probability that within my lifetime we'll never know more about "Fermi's Paradox" than we do at present.  And I've become increasingly accepting of the realization that any such solution -- be it "unique creation" or "civilizations advanced to the level of telepathy" --  may still be fully consistent with the traditional Genesis account.

But I enjoy mulling over the possibilities, be they exciting or frightening, that may confront future generations.  Which, I guess, is why we find science fiction so alluring.

Gonna read it tomorrow!

I own far more books than I could possibly read over the course of my remaining life, yet every month I add a few dozen more to my shelves.
--Kevin Mims, NYT Book Review

My nephew Denny dropped by my house during the summer.  He's a high school English teacher, temporarily teaching sixth grade in Thailand where his daughter attends school.  He and his daughter were back in the States to receive the adoration of adoring relatives.

Naturally, his attention was drawn to my bookcases.  He had lived with me for a year or two, long ago, as a student, so he was hardly surprised that I had a lot of books.  But now, as a professional, he eyed the titles with a trained eye.  He kept asking me, with a gleam in his eye, "Well, have you read this one?"

I all too frequently admitted that I had not yet read it, but was saving it to read in my old age.  Denny and his mother glanced meaningfully at each other.

I was pleased to read Mr. Mims's essay in this morning's New York Times, an essay devoted to the proposition that a bookcase full of unread books "isn't a sign of failure or ignorance, [but rather] a badge of honor."  A book collection, Mims continues, is a representation of a person's mind.  When you stop buying new books, it indicates that you have become satisfied that anything you don't know now isn't worth knowing.  It suggests a person so old that he couldn't care less about further intellectual growth.

 Over a life time, I've bought a large number of books -- perhaps not the three thousand that Mims claims for himself, but many.  I've also belonged to a British "fine edition" club which has tempted me for the past 38 years to buy regularly beautifully bound books at reasonable prices -- classics, histories, obscure travel writings, and even more obscure diaries by eighteenth and nineteenth century English country folk discussing the progress of their gardens and the despicable behavior of their neighbors down the road. 

Many of these books I've read in their entirety, I hasten to assure you.  Some I've read in part -- either because they're the sort of book you only expect to read parts of, or because works such as  Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Churchill's biography of his ancestor Marlborough, Macauley's History of England, and Hume's "ditto," are all beautifully bound sets and well worth dabbling in but -- a big "but" -- life is short and these multi-volume sets are long.

And then there are the many books that one starts in on -- for example, anything by Thackeray -- and finally decides with disappointment that he just isn't that sort of reader.  Nope, not a Thackeray kind of guy.

But finally, there is a large group of books that you bought with enthusiasm, fully intend to read, but just haven't got around to yet.  Some of these I've actually read, long after their purchase, and reviewed in this blog.  Mims also points to this kind of book, and notes that the Japanese have a word for it -- tsundoku, meaning a stack of books you've bought but haven't yet read.  I love the word, and would use it often if I knew how to pronounce it.  For years I've had a tsundoku piled on a table in my living room, the titles occasionally changing.  But slowly.

Mims concludes his essay with the smug observation that,

The sight of a book you haven't read can remind you that there are many things you've yet to learn.  And the sight of a partially read book can remind you that reading is an activity that you hope never to come to the end of.

Smug or not, I fully agree.
   

Dreams dying in Las Cruces

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a Mexican-American novelist, poet, and author of books for young children.  He is best known to the general public as a writer of Young Adult fiction.  I've read five of his books, and reviewed two of them on this blog.  One of those I've read was marketed as adult fiction, and the other four as YA.  I conclude that the publisher arbitrarily decides the category -- the author, at least Sáenz, doesn't sit down to write a "YA novel" or an "adult novel" in the same way he decides to write a children's book.

In August, I spent a couple of days in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for a relative's wedding.  I liked the town.  I liked the mixture of Anglo and Mexican-American cultures, and the sense I had that assimilation had gone as far as it had.  In my vaguely oblivious way, I felt as comfortable surrounded by Las Cruces Hispanics as I do in Seattle in a room full of Asians. 

Sáenz was born near Las Cruces and graduated from Las Cruces high school in 1972.  He received his B.A. from a Catholic seminary in Denver, studied philosophy and theology in Belgium, and was ordained a priest.  For reasons unknown to me, he left the priesthood after several years, and has since focused on writing.  He attended Stanford on a Stegner fellowship, entered the Stanford Ph.D. program for a couple of years, and then accepted a teaching position in the Bilingual Creative Writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he has taught ever since.

Every writer to some degree writes about his own experiences, but those books by Sáenz that I've read have all seemed unusually autobiographical.  Their stories are told from the point of view of a Mexican-American teenaged boy who is smart and sensitive, but lacks self-confidence.  He is street-wise.  Although usually bookish, he isn't afraid to fight with his fists -- in some stories he is bewildered and upset by his propensity to fight.  Although not "religious," the protagonist is strongly affected by his Catholic background and admires those of his older relatives who are devout.  The books themselves subtly encourage a system of Christian values, as opposed to devotion to any form of orthodoxy.

I just finished reading one of his earlier YA novels, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood, published in 2004.  "Hollywood" isn't the downtown Las Cruces that I saw in August.  It is -- or at least was in 1968 when the story takes place -- an impoverished barrio on the east side of town.  Unlike the middle class Mexican-American teenagers whose stories were told in some of his other books, the Hollywood kids come from families that are just getting by.  They speak English, but with a lot of Spanish phrases and slang thrown in.

The segregation of Hispanic from Anglo students is marked in this story, as it is in most of Sáenz's other novels.  The segregation results less from Anglo hostility, at least overt and intentional, than from the feelings of inferiority felt by the Mexican-Americans.  (Why are Anglo kids considered brilliant when they learn to speak Spanish well, Sammy wonders?  But we get no credit at all for speaking both English and Spanish well.)

In the early chapters, Sammy is in love with Juliana, a bright but tough-minded young woman.  They eventually make love in a defining moment of Sammy's life.  Shortly thereafter, Juliana's father kills her and her six siblings as a way of showing his wife who's boss.  For the rest of the book, Juliana is not a living character but a center of longing and sorrow, an unattainable ideal of happiness, in Sammy's soul.

At least two appealing girls Sammy's age are in love with him, but he considers them friends, even sisters.  They aren't Juliana.

This book is marketed to young people in grades 9 to 12.  Kids today must be a lot tougher-minded than we were at that age.  The story of Sammy and his friends is a story of wasted time and wasted lives.  It's a story about all the dangers and temptations -- sex, drugs, drinking, fighting -- of the barrio.

As high school graduation approaches, and passes, the little band of Sammy's friends begins breaking up.  Two boys are drafted and sent to Vietnam, where one is quickly killed.  One boy's family moves to California, after a local scandal, where he ends up attending UCLA.  One of the girls who loved Sammy leaves town with a Jewish boy who had been accepted by their clique.   Everyone promises to write, to keep in touch.  No one does.

An elderly neighborhood woman who had offered Sammy tough (very tough) love as he grew up, and whom he had learned to love in return, dies.

All through high school, Sammy has been obsessed with the idea of going away to college -- a rare dream in his milieu -- and of escaping the dead-end lives of Hollywood.  He works like crazy to get the grades necessary, despite the mocking of his friends (they name him "the Librarian") and the contempt and dislike of his Anglo teachers.  (If anyone who taught in Las Cruces high school in 1968 reads this book, he should feel ashamed.)  He applies to eight colleges.  He is accepted at all of them, including his dream school of Berkeley.

Near the end of that summer following high school graduation, his dad is involved in a serious auto accident and loses his leg.  He is unable to work.  There's no one to look after Sammy's younger sister, who he loves and who worships him.  He sends Berkeley his regrets, and enrolls in the local community college.

When I hung up the phone, I cried too. I cried for René and for Pifas.  I cried for my dad's leg.  I cried for never having gotten to go to a school I worked my damned Mexican ass off to get into.  I cried for my mother.  I cried for Juliana.

His dad died soon afterward of a stroke. 

Throughout high school, Sammy had been the only kid in his group of friends who had the ambition to escape Hollywood, to achieve something in the Anglo world, to graduate from a university.  Instead, he ends up the only one who remains in Hollywood after all his friends have either died or left town.

Sáenz seems to remind us, without being explicit, that although Sammy's life seems tragic, he has been true to himself and to his values throughout.  He still has a full life ahead of him.  Starting out in a community college isn't the end of the world.

But still.  Don't read the last half of the book while on an airline flight.  The flight attendants will look at you strangely when they see tears running down your cheeks.

If I could be anybody just for a day, I'd be Jesus Christ, that's who I'd be. I'd go to all the graves. I would stand there. I would close my eyes and lift my arms. I'd be Jesus Christ -- I'd stand in front of the graves of all the people I loved. And I'd raise them back to life.

All of them.

And after they were all alive again, I'd hug them and kiss them and never let them go.  And I would be happy.  I would be the happiest man in all the world.

Seven Gables

 

As kids, we played a rummy-like card game called "Authors."  Do you remember it?  The game required a special deck, with four cards devoted to each of several (usually eleven to thirteen) famous authors. 

The authors were those that young Americans were apt to know, predominantly American, but some British as well.  The four cards devoted to each author each contained the name of one of the author's books.  The book names were for didactic purposes only -- they played no part in the game.

I remember well that one of the authors was Nathaniel Hawthorne.  And one of his books was The House of the Seven Gables.  I've read some of Hawthorne's work -- The Scarlet Letter as both a student and an adult.  The Marble Faun, which I remember only vaguely as being set in Italy.  A number of his many short stories.  But Seven Gables?  I started it once, and I got bogged down.  I was more interested in the house than in the story.    

Which leads me to my four-day visit to Boston, from which I returned late last night.  Boston once more greeted me with rain on arrival, but quickly changed to sunny days in the upper 70s and low 80s.  And so Tuesday seemed like a good day to hop the Red Line from my inn near Harvard, change to the Green Line at Park Street, and end up at North Station.  Whence a half hour commuter train ride ended up in Salem -- home of seventeenth century Puritans, the famous witch trials, and the real, actual, house of the seven gables.

Salem was the greatest port in North America for a number of years, and the house is located on the waterfront.  It's a short walk from the train station (unless you combine over-reliance on your phone's GPS with daydreaming and lack of common sense, in which case you add another three or four miles). 

The house is as atmospheric as a romantic like me could ever hope for, although now enclosed in a compound, together with a few other famous Salem houses that were moved here to avoid destruction, including Hawthorne's childhood home.  To enter the enclosure, and see the house's interior, I paid $16, which includes a guided tour (well worth the fee) of the house.

I can't tell you much about the novel, since I haven't read it, but I can quote from Wikipedia:

The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft.

But I can tell you that the house itself -- while not too similar to a Hollywood haunted house, or to something occupied by the Addams Family -- is strange enough in appearance that I can see how it inspired Hawthorne.

The house was built in 1667 by Capt. John Turner, and was occupied by him, his son, and his grandson, the latter of whom lost the house and the family fortune to bankruptcy.  Capt. Turner's original house was quite small, but the house grew as his fortune grew.  The guide showed us building block models of  how various sections of the house were added, and at times subtracted.  His son made the house more elegant, adding early Georgian features to the interior.  At its largest, it had 17 rooms occupying over 8,000 square feet. 

After the Turner bankruptcy, the house was obtained by the Ingersoll family, who were cousins of Hawthorne.  The Ingersolls "modernized" the house, removing four of the gables.  Hawthorne lived as a roomer for over a year in the house, before being evicted (according to the guide) for non-payment of rent.  The house had only three gables while he lived in it, but his cousin Susannah Ingersoll talked to him frequently about the house's history and its former appearance.

Thus inspired, Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, recreating in the novel his understanding of the appearance of the house in its heyday.  The house's real hero was Caroline Emmerton (simply "Caroline" to the house's fans), who bought the house in 1908, intending it to become a museum, and largely restored it to its eighteenth century grandeur.  She rebuilt the portions of the house that the Ingersolls had removed, including all seven gables. 

Also, inspired by a feature in the Hawthorne novel (again, I haven't read the novel, so I'm relying on my guide's word), she built a secret stairway that never had actually existed in the real house.  The guide opened a small "closet" door on the first floor, which revealed an incredibly narrow and steep spiral, brick staircase, built into and/or around the central brick chimney, that totally by-passed the second floor and ended up in the attic.  We were warned not to attempt it if we suffered from claustrophobia, but all 17 members of our not-all-that-young-or-fit guide group gasped and giggled their way to the top.   Eventually.  Another guy and I admitted to each other that we would love to build something similar in our own house.

Not only has the house itself been restored to the high point of its occupancy by the Turners, but insofar as possible it has been furnished with antiques acquired from or donated by other museums and owners of ancient homes in New England.  I'm not an antiques fancier, but the furniture and household goods items were fascinating to look at.

Will I try once again to read The House of the Seven Gables?  I'm not sure.  The book itself might be anticlimactic after wandering through the eponymous house.  My time might be better spent building a hidden staircase in my own home.

"Let's all be friends now, ok?"

"A good judge, like a good umpire, cannot act as a partisan. ... If you are playing the Yankees, you don't want the umpires to show up wearing pinstripes."
--Brett Kavanaugh (2015)

"I said a few things I should not have said."
--Brett Kavanaugh (2018)

Unfortunately, it's often hard to un-ring a bell. Especially when you have profited mightily from the ringing.

The Goblin

I was the kind of kid who read every book about "outer space" in the children's section of the library.  Now, since the American space program landed men on the moon and has sent unmanned vehicles far beyond the orbit of Pluto, I'm not so sure that dreaming of the planets is still a boyhood  obsession.  Somewhere along the line, dinosaurs seem to have filled the void.

But for me, it was planets.  By the time I was nine or ten, I knew the major characteristics of every planet, and its number of known moons (far fewer than are known now).  I loved the names of the planets, each the name of a Roman god.  Including Pluto, before Pluto was demoted to a "dwarf planet."

Ah, but if I had learned of a planet -- yes, even a dwarf planet -- named "The Goblin," I would have been delirious with joy.  A planet named not after an ancient classical god, but named after a Germanic (Middle High German kobold) demon, and so named because it was discovered around Halloween.

He's a bashful little goblin.  The closest he comes to Earth is 2 1/2 times farther out than the orbit of Pluto.  He then proceeds way, way out there -- sixty times as far as Pluto is from the Sun.  According to an article in The Guardian, The Goblin takes 40,000 years to make a single elongated orbit around our Sun.  Forty thousand years ago, our Homo sapiens ancestors began arriving in Europe from Africa, and discovered they needed to figure out how to handle the Neanderthal problem.  

Hypothetical inhabitants of The Goblin would thus see a lot of history march past before they were even one year old.  But the history would be limited in geographical scope, since The Goblin has a radius of only about 300 km (186 miles). 

The Goblin now joins two other dwarf planets that also circle the Sun far beyond Pluto's orbit.  It was discovered by astronomers using a telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, who have been looking, so far unsuccessfully, for a giant planet, bigger than Earth, that seems to affect the orbit of all three dwarf planets.  They refer to this mysterious, and still invisible, planet as Planet Nine (sorry again, Pluto).

My own suspicion is that Planet Nine is actually a giant space station, designed to absorb rather than reflect all light and other radiation, making use of this radiation as an energy source for Planet Nine's inhabitants.  Yes, exactly, like the hollowed out asteroid occupied by the "buggers" in Ender's Game.  

My theory of an alien outpost explains the source of  the much reported UFOs, the nighttime abductions of humans by alien beings, and quite probably the Greek, Roman, Nordic, and Hindu gods who played such a major role in the early years of many civilizations.  Also, as a practical joke by said aliens, it may explain the appearance and presidency of Donald Trump.

Whatever.  When talking to an astronomer seated next to you on a plane, you can now talk seriously to him about these late developments.  He'll know what you mean when you ask about The Goblin.  But if you want to really impress him, use The Goblin's formal name -- 2015 TG387.

Got it?  Good.  Keep an eye open for aliens after you douse the lights tonight.