I Knew I Was a Girl

I've written a couple of posts on this blog about Lee Quarnstrom, a friend dating back to first grade.  Lee, now retired, was a journalist and editor for many years in San Jose, and before that was a member of Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters."  He's written a well-received memoir, When I Was a Dynamiter!  

But Lee's wife of 21 or so years is also a writer, or rather a poet.  Chris grew up on the North Shore of Chicago, came out to California to attend U.S.C., and taught middle school in California for many years.  She has just published a collection of poems.  I have written a short, appreciative review of her poems for the Amazon website.  I decided, while so doing, that I, whose poetry credentials end with college freshman English, would be hard pressed to say much more about her poems beyond the fact that I loved reading them.  As I said on Amazon, these poems have been written over much of her lifetime, and discuss many subjects, many aspects of her life.

Therefore, I'll simply offer you a copy of the same review you would find on Amazon, should you care to look further into her writing.

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I Knew I Was a Girl is a collection of 101 short poems by an older woman, an older woman with a young woman's heart and voice. Christine Quarnstrom has subtitled her collection "A Memoir in Poetry," and the subtitle is exact and accurate. Her poems capture the joys and sorrows of a lifetime, from childhood, through adolescence, marriage, childbirth, divorce, and second marriage.

The tears shed by the 13-year-old who has been betrayed by her best friend.  The death of, and irrational sense of abandonment by, her father when she was 15.   Her first lovers.   Her long marriage with her first husband.  Her sense of wonder during childbirth and throughout the early lives of her five children.  The divorce, and her sense --  one shared by all parents -- of loss as her kids spread their wings and went off on their own.  The unexpected deaths of friends and former lovers as the years passed.    And, finally, and most striking, the joy and mutual devotion offered by her second (and present) marriage, to a man himself a writer.

Quarnstrom's love also extends fully to cats and dogs, furry beings whose lives are all too short -- and some of her most heartbreaking poems tell of the final illness and death of her pets.

Death and loss in many forms is a constant theme.  I was moved by the poem that described a visit by younger relatives to a lonely, dying great aunt, a poem that ended with these lines:

"We turn to leave
toss one last morsel
we'll be back on Friday,
we who are too busy living
can she remember?
If meals-on-wheels doesn't need us,
if our homework is done."

This is a woman's poetry, poetry that will resonate most strongly with other women of all ages.  I thought of my own sister, growing up in the shadow of two older brothers, and the hidden (and not so hidden) anger and frustration she must often have felt.  But the emotions are human emotions that will be understood and appreciated by men as well.

The collection also contains a section of poems devoted to current events, events as current as the title, "Shopping in the Year of Corona":  

"... the frantic 
crowd swoops down like a swarm of 
locusts, buzz-sawing through whole crops:
corn, wheat flour, fruit, and eggs; anything
greed can grab; ..."

Poetry well worth reading, and re-reading.

The Good Rain

"Here, in the corner attic of America, two hours' drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to."

 Timothy Egan, columnist for the New York Times and author of nine books, including A Pilgrimage to Eternity, which I reviewed in this blog last year, is a native and current resident of Seattle, and a graduate of the University of Washington.  His first book, The Good Rain (1990), is a history of the Pacific Northwest, and a set of strongly opinionated reflections on how we in the Northwest Corner live now, how we got here, and -- possibly -- where we're going.     

If you live in the Northwest, and especially Washington, much that's told in this book will be familiar.  Certainly, as he travels about the state, he visits and observes areas that are familiar to many.  Egan devotes his second chapter to Enchanted Valley in Olympic National Park -- which my brother and I unsuccessfully tried to reach hiking as teenagers, while on a bike tour of Southwest Washington, and which my nephew and I finally did reach some twenty years later, on our way to crossing Anderson Pass.  In the same chapter, he tells the story of the famous 1890 Press Expedition -- the first white men to cross the park north to south, from the Elwha watershed to the Quinault.  A friend and I did the same hike in the opposite direction, although it took us about four days rather than six months, and we didn't have to kill a bear and drink liquid bear blubber to stay alive.

Egan has a wonderful chapter about the life of the legendary climber Fred Beckey -- who he finally tracks down for an interview.  It's a chapter that alone is worth the price of the book.  Beckey was 65 when Egan met him -- a face lined and old, but a voice like a guy in his 20s.   He was 65, and he lived another 29 years. When Beckey died in 2017, the New York Times ran an obituary:

Friends called him a cantankerous cuss who hated talk about himself. He sped long distances in his old pink Thunderbird, screaming all night to stay awake at the wheel, and howled at tourists who gawked at his camps. On a mountain, he amazed fellow climbers with his uphill speed and stamina, even in his 80s.

Egan's travels take him to Seattle itself, to numerous Indian reservations, to Crater Lake in southern Oregon, and up and down the Columbia River.  He lets us ride with him across the Columbia River bar, into the ocean.  And we climb with Egan and his wife to the foot of a glacier on Mt. Rainier, as he commits the ashes of his grandfather to the headwaters of the White river.

I took the usual mandatory course in Washington State history as a ninth grader, and much of the history Egan offers brings back half-forgotten memories of those lessons.  But the history is told more vividly than anything my ninth grade teacher was able to achieve.  More importantly, our ninth grade texts presented what the British would call a Whig version of history -- where all the events of the past led majestically to what is now the best of all possible worlds.  Egan casts a colder eye on our history.  Marcus Whitman, by his own lights, may have been a "kindly saint and hero," as  portrayed in ninth grade history.  But the Indians saw his Presbyterian fervor to "civilize" them otherwise, which explains the tomahawk that ultimately split his skull. 

Although Egan clearly loves the Northwest, there is much that dismays him, much that distresses him.  In The Good Rain, he introduces us to Theodore Winthrop, a recent Yale graduate, who toured the Northwest in 1853.  Unlike most Americans, Winthrop was not interested in the timber, or fishing, or the furs available for exploitation.  A couple of posts ago, I discussed Philip Marsden's belief that a people's character is shaped in part by its physical environment, and of the importance of this "sense of place."  Winthrop felt that the eastern states had lost their own sense of place, and that their lives had become money-grubbing -- meaner and less imaginative.  He saw the chance for something new and different in the Pacific Northwest:

Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. These Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss -- where every breath is a draught of vivid life -- these Oregon people carrying to a newer and grander New England of the West a full growth of the American idea -- will elaborate new systems of thought and life.

Throughout the book, Egan measures what he sees in 1990 against these extravagant hopes by Winthrop.  Not surprisingly, he is dismayed.

Dismayed by the leveling of the Northwest forests, dismayed by clearcutting.  Dismayed by the destruction of the greatest salmon fishery in the world.  Dismayed by the Army Corps of Engineers and their obsession with damming every bit of every free-flowing river.  Dismayed by the hunting to near extinction of fur bearing animals. 

These silk mammals [sea otters], up to five feet in length and with the disposition of a toddler just after a long nap, were easily clubbed, smiling right up  until the moment their skulls were smashed.

Dismayed by the betrayal, time after time, of the Indians -- reducing them from living their traditional free lives to a state of abject poverty and spiritual emptiness, huddled on ghetto-like reservations. 

The story of our Northwest Corner's history is a story of cruelty and greed.  Rather than living harmoniously with the beauties of nature, as Winthrop had hoped, we treated the most attractive area of America as a treasure chest of riches to be plundered -- old growth trees, fish, and furs --all to be "harvested," not just for our own use, but sent overseas to eager Asian buyers.  The beneficiaries of this exploitation, more often than not, were large Eastern companies whose owners never set foot in the Northwest.

We've largely run out of timber and fish.  Egan is well aware of the devastation visited on those small towns throughout the Northwest that depended on those resources.  He talks to bitter men who have seen themselves and their families left behind.  He talks to Indians, who are beyond bitterness.

At the same time, Egan sees some hope in the new industries of tourism and computer technology.  He visits thriving vineyards near Yakima, the source of some some of the best wines produced in the nation..

Aside from the human instinct of greed, many of our problems stem from rapidly increased population -- locally and globally.  When I was a kid, Washington's population was 2.4 million.  When Egan wrote his book in 1990, it had jumped to 4.8 million.  Today, thirty years later, it is 7.6 million.  

Even Egan's limited optimism seems dated today.  Tourism clogs the scenic areas.  Visiting the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area requires advance reservations -- if you can get them.  Amazon and Microsoft have remade Seattle -- in some ways for the better, but their arrival has brought its own problems, including housing that is now unaffordable for many people whose parents once lived here comfortably.  

Away from Seattle and the counties bordering Puget Sound, Washington is a different state.  Once prosperous towns populated by solidly middle class citizens have lost their industries and their commercial centers.  Their citizens are often poorly educated, often unemployed, often addicted to drugs and alcohol.    

The first settlers in Seattle named it "New York Alki," using Chinook jargon to express the hope that we'd someday become the New York of the West Coast.  Be careful what you wish for.

"Hey, losers!"

What? Are you gonna cry now?
 Cry, cry for me crybaby!
 Cry!

 

 Nine days until the election.

 The election we've all been waiting for.  For four years.  The election that  will bring our nightmare to an end.  The election that will drive   the   monster from the White House.

 We've looked forward so long to the election that we now dread its arrival.  All our hopes have been pinned on Trump's losing.  What if he wins?

This week's issue of The Economist says that its modeling gives Biden a 92 percent chance of winning.  Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight gives him an 87 percent chance.  All the polls predict, by varying degrees of certainty, a Biden win.

And yet, I have a hollow feeling in the bottom of my stomach.  A Facebook friend writes "We are Democrats!  Anxiety is our middle name!"  Which is true, of course.  Not for us the traditional pre-Trump Republican complacency of settling back with a good cigar and a snifter of brandy, awaiting the inevitable victory.

But this time, it's more than that.  We still live in shock from 2016.  When an equally assured victory turned to ashes on Election Night.  Despite all the polls to the contrary.  (Although to be fair, the polls had been turning sour during the final two weeks before the election.)

But 2016 robbed us of our confidence that we could rely on polls and other traditional means of predicting results.  It's less the fallibility of the polls that worry us.  It's Trump himself.  Lying in wait.  Scowling, smirking, sneering.  Kicking all traditions of civility away, deriding them as the crutches of "losers."  Watching the Democrats approach, innocent, trusting, like Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest.  Like little Ralphie on his way home from school, in A Christmas Story.

Until he sees Scut Farkus, the consummate bully -- leaping out in front of him!  

"Not so fast, losers!  Trump shouts.  Look, I've won again!  I'll always win!  You'll always lose!  Hahahahaha!!"   

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

(A quotations Trump somehow remembers fondly from his otherwise useless English course at Fordham.)

I see it over and over, as the 2016 nightmare replays itself in my mind.  Because, as another Facebook friend noted, we're all now suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Maybe.  It's at least nice to have a name for it.

I think it's time for me to take another nice long walk.  I'll try to avoid talking to myself too obviously -- I hate to draw stares.  

Rising Ground

"Only by knowing our surroundings, being aware of topography and the past, can we live what Heidegger deems an authentic existence."

In my mandatory freshman Western Civilization course, we studied how the rugged and irregular geography of the Greek peninsula and islands formed not only the nature of government in classical times, but the character of the ancient Greek people themselves.  Archeologists today might call this the primacy of "place."  

In his Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (2014), Philip Marsden concludes that much of British history, and especially pre-history, cannot be understood apart from the geographical surroundings in which it occurred.  He argues, moreover, that since the Renaissance, we have increasingly lost our sense of "place," and have treated all spaces as equivalent, ignoring not only the geography, but the history peculiar to every locale.

 Hence, the monotonous uniformity of our shopping malls and suburbs, functional spaces divorced from the very distinct geographical areas in which they have been created.

Philip Marsden grew up in Somerset, a county not far north of Cornwall.  In the first chapter of Rising Ground, he tells of his boyhood adventures climbing about the Mendip hills, and exploring caves.  One such cave, Aveline's Hole, was later found to have contained the oldest known human remains in Britain -- dating back to about 8400 B.C.  There is evidence that the cave may have been used as a burial place -- for unknown mystical reasons related to its location -- thousands of years before that.  

...far back in the ninth millennium BC, the site may have been used because it was already considered old.  The astonishment we feel at people performing these rites so long ago might simply be a version of what they felt.

These early experiences led Marsden to thoughts about the importance of "place."  As an adult, he and his wife remodeled a farmhouse on the shore of Ruan Creek, a tidal tributary of the upper River Fal, north of Falmouth.  He discovered that the farmhouse lay on the medieval site of the estate of a wealthy Norman family.  He uncovered a small piece of an ancient chapel, which suggested to him that "place" was determined not only by the physical landmarks that surrounded it,  but also by the people who had lived and died on the same land, and had, in turn, been affected by the same landmarks.

Once his house's renovation was completed, Marsden decided to explore not only the near area, but Cornwall in general.  He began with Bodmin Moor, near the border with Devon, and its many Neolithic monuments; he then visited Tintagel on the north Cornwall coast and Glastonbury (of King Arthur fame) in Somerset.

In a later section of the book, he describes in detail his exploration, by rather strenuous off-path hiking, of the entire area of Ruan Creek and the River Fal, ending finally at Falmouth. From Falmouth, he hiked westward to Porthleven -- a port on the opposite, western side of the Lizard peninsula.  A year ago, I hiked eastward, from Porthleven to Falmouth, but on the well-traveled coastal hiking route, a route that took me out onto the Lizard-- the southernmost point in England.  Marsden, as usual, took a more adventurous overland route.

In the mid-morning I lost the path.  I doubled back, took a short cut and it ended the way it usually does -- crawling through a hedge, unpicking brambles from my hair.  I tumbled  out of the thicket and into an open field.  I brushed myself down.  An old Massey tractor on the far side was topping docks.  In its cab sat an elderly man in clear-rimmed glasses.

As chance would have it -- for Marsden at least -- the old farmer was an Oxford graduate, a gentleman who had led classes in Cornish and was at the time reading a fifth volume of Byron's letters and journals.  He had ended up a farmer because he had inherited the farm -- what choice did he have?

Each of Marsden's rambles, described in physical detail, is also an occasion not only for meeting local residents, but for discussing interesting people in Cornwall's history, people who give Cornwall its character -- its sense of "place" -- as much as do the peaks and tors and the Neolithic monuments.

I realize how little of Cornwall I saw in 2019, limited as I was to hiking the scenic coast from St. Ives to Falmouth.  I didn't touch the great interior of the county at all.  But Marsden describes areas more familiar to me in his book's third section, describing the Penwith peninsula, between Penzance and St. Ives, which extends to a point at Lands End.  

The Penwith peninsula is to Cornwall what Cornwall is to the rest of England -- a loosely connected appendage stuffed with the residue of a thousand stories and mythical projections.  Every rock, every hill and cliff has its tales, lore and sprites.  The peninsula has a mood all its own.

Or, as he quotes Katherine Mansfield:  "It's not really a nice place.  It is so full of huge stones."  And I felt I struggled over every one of those stones on my hike last year.

Rising Ground is a guide of sorts to selected areas of Cornwall -- from the haunted moorlands, to the  banks of tidal rivers silted and passable only at high tides, to the well-touristed coast.  It provides short biographies to Cornish writers and scholars.  It gives a humorous account of Marsden's own struggles to renovate a derelict farmhouse, making it his family home.  And it gives a picture of a writer who has an ability to meet and draw out stories from the many people he meets, but who also has a craving for solitary hiking, for camping alone on desolate moors, for sailing in barely navigable waters, for touching and caressing, in the chilly moonlight, standing stones erected by unknowable people who lived their lives out many millennia ago.

Always, he asks himself what thoughts passed through the minds of these ancient peoples as they lived out their lives, lives that were in some basic ways little different from our own?  How were their lives affected by the same physical landmarks we see before us today?  He wonders at the

...urge that drove our Neolithic ancestors to arrange the moorstone into circles at the Hurlers, to build the wall around the tor -- the same questions that tease us now: what law, what force, what patterns exist in the vastness of space?  And always behind the questions, the doubt, the depth-sounder beam probing the emptiness for something solid, the fear that there might be none of these things at all.

Philip Marsden is an adventurer, a careful observer, a story teller.  And an excellent writer.

It all began in Spoffkinland

Charles G. Henderson (1900-1933) was one of Britain's amazing eccentrics, people who combined great intelligence with unusual interests.  But for his early death from heart disease, he might well have become a much better known historian than he is at present.

Henderson was a native of Cornwell -- where  I hiked with friends a year ago -- and from his earliest years he was fascinated by all things Cornish.  As a boy of ten with a camera, he decided to photograph every church in the county -- a task which he completed within a year, then developing and printing the photos himself, and binding them in a book entitled Cornish Churches.   Between the ages of 12 and 17, he described in handwritten detail, in some 1,500 pages, the antiquities, churches, and monuments in western Cornwall.  Each of which he had personally visited and inspected.

Henderson was tireless, with an eye for detail.  I've been reading Philip Marsden's Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place -- a book I'll discuss in a later post -- where the author describes his digging into Henderson's documents and writings, and being totally amazed by his precocious dedication.  

Henderson's wide interests and attention to detail were recognized even at the time.  Marsden discusses how Henderson, at nineteen, on a train to Oxford where he was a student, fell into a casual conversation with Sir Robert Edgcumbe, who commented how odd it was that Oxford's New College was actually ancient.  Henderson agreed:  "Like Newquay, in existence since at least 1480 or before."  Sir Robert gave him a quick glance, and replied, "You must be Mr. Henderson."

What most appealed to me, I suppose, were not his amazing accomplishments as an adult, but his precocious play as a child.  I described several months ago the kingdom of "Mamba" that my brother and I created on our bedroom floor, when I was thirteen.  Henderson, at twelve, would have understood our enjoyment completely -- but he developed his own imaginary kingdom of the Spoffs that made Mamba look like the product of a kindergarten. (And he did it all without Dinky Toys!)   As Marsden describes it -- and I can't resist a long quotation:

Over several notebooks, the invented country is set out in its entirety.  Sections explain the government of the Spoffs under Ivan, the reforms of the Spoff King Charles II, the new capital  of Spoffkinville, the invasion of Spoffkinland by the kingdom of Katmandu, diagrams of medieval battles, intricate accounts of princely power struggles, the troubled relationship between crown and  parliament, a multi-branched royal family tree of the house of Livonia.  In the first book is the geography of Spoffkinland -- detailing the southern federal regions of Bosh, Dona Peulia and the State of Mosk, each with its own provinces listed, the chief towns and products, and a map of population density, average rainfall, cathedral cities and principal exports.  There is a grammar and lexicon of Spoff -- in red and white ink, explaining the conjugation of verbs, how to make plurals, rules of gender, relative pronouns, distributive and possessive adjectives -- pages and pages and pages.

A bound book was entitled, in gold letters, Spoffkin Graphic by C. G. Henderson, 1912.  Under the headline "Is War Starting?" hand-written newspapers contained stories reported on the growing conflict between the Spoffs of Spoffkinland and their neighbors in Franconia and Polonia.  The newspaper stories were accompanied by newspaper advertisements of the sort that we ourselves might have found in MAD Magazine:  

"Why buy ink when you can buy an ink plant?"

Buy the ANTI-CAT boot filled with lead."

So many kids -- not enough, I grant you, but many -- start out with whimsical senses of humor, intelligence, and single-minded determination, only to eventually settle for a tedious life in the suburbs.  Henderson was not such a disappointment.  From his early days creating Spoffkinland, he dug deeper and deeper into the world of Cornwall -- in all its aspects: geographical, geological,  historical, botanical, sociological -- and the documentary evidence,   He single-handedly saved a vast number of historical documents that modern families were throwing away after World War I:

Charles Henderson gathered about sixteen thousand documents: wills, covenants, leases, letters, tithe-deeds, grants, charters and bonds, pass-books, assignments, jointure statements, letters of attorney, probate of wills, marriage settlements, inventories, releases and surrenders, sales and mortgages and estate maps.

All of which are now stored in the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro.  These were documents Henderson gathered for what was intended to be his history of all the parishes of Cornwall.  Little doubt that he would have succeeded through sheer persistence and enthusiasm if he had lived a few more years.

Cornwall is almost exactly the same size as the combined areas of Washington's Cowlitz and Wahkiakum counties -- the area in which I grew up.  For an American, especially from the West, it's hard to imagine that so much historical material could exist in such a small county, enough to fully justify the life's work of not only Henderson, but many other eccentric geniuses.  Especially when, as Marsden makes clear, Cornwall was considered, until well into the twentieth century, an obscure corner of Britain, one that many well educated Englishmen of course knew about but had never visited.

But from such wild fields, unusual and beautiful flowers sometimes grow. 

Dem bones gonna walk around

Jack-o'-lanterns, black cats, witches, big orange moons, an occasional giant spider in a spider web.  Those are the Halloween decorations from my childhood that jump into my mind.  I looked up "1950s Halloween decorations" on Google just now, and their illustrations have confirmed my not-always-accurate memory.

Skeletons?  Maybe a few.  I remember wearing a child's skeleton costume one year.  But mainly -- as I say -- jack-o'-lanterns, black cats, witches, etc.

But today, Halloween 2020!  My extended neighborhood in Seattle has been totally inhabited by skeletons.  Ever since the beginning of October, if not earlier.  Fashionably dressed skeletons, like the couple from Seattle's North Capitol Hill pictured above. Humorous skeletons.  Skeletons sitting casually in chairs on nearby porches, perhaps with a cigar clasped between grinning teeth.  Skeletons emerging , half buried, out of flower gardens.  Gory skeletons.    

 Why now?  Why skeletons?  I associate skeletons, and portions thereof, with the medieval world.  St. Jerome, with a skull on his desk.  Artistically arranged bones in catacombs.  Memento mori in art works, reminding us that, in the middle of our happy frivolity, death is always waiting.

Who knows for sure, why now?  But if we look at art during plague years of the past, we see multitudes

Danse macabre

of skeletons.  Some are frighteningly realistic remains of dead bodies.  More frequently, however, they display a sardonic humor -- laughing at us panicked humans.  Look at us, they gesture.  This is how you're going to look tomorrow.  They wander about graveyards, carrying coffins in their arms.  They dance in a frenzied danse macabre.  They emerge from niches in the wall, struggling out of their burial garments.

They represent an effort by humanity, facing a grisly death, to visualize it in art; to better face it, perhaps, by portraying death as a sentient being.  To even whistle a bit in the dark by mocking death, while also mocking themselves for their helplessness.

Covid-19 isn't the bubonic plague.  But unlike our medieval forebears, for us death is a novelty.  We live in a time when death has been largely limited to the aged, a horror sheltered from the view of the rest of us within nursing homes and hospitals.  But Covid-19, like the plague, strikes down friends and relatives still in the prime of life.

Maybe all these Halloween skeletons represent our subconscious, primal response to the threat of an imminent, unexpected death, just as those items of plague art did centuries ago.  

Or maybe not.  Maybe all those skeletons just represent another Halloween fad that's gone viral.  So to speak.

Jumpers

 I've owned (been owned by) seven cats as an adult.  To wit:

Hippolyta ("Lyta")      1978-1998

Phaedra                        1978-1986

Theseus                        1986-2002

Loki                               2004-2018

Muldoon                      2004-2019

Castor                           2020-

Pollux                           2020-   

Lyta was the proto-kitten, the cat against which all future cats were to be measured.  My sister gave her to me for Christmas.  In a box.  In a box that I suspected contained a small appliance for my new house.  Until I opened the box's top, and a furry paw reached out.  

We bonded within seconds.  Lyta was the cat who never struggled against being picked up.  Who I could carry around the house absent-mindedly indefinitely, with no complaints.  Who, when someone knocked at the door, immediately jumped in a single bound, up to my shoulder so she could join me in greeting the guest.   Amazing cat.

But she was given to me when she was only seven weeks old, and demanded my full attention the second I returned home from the office.  After a week, I realized she needed a peer for a friend. I went to the Seattle Animal Shelter, where I secured another kitten of the same age.  Phaedra.  Phaedra was a nice cat, but quiet, reserved, and played definite second fiddle to hyper-active Lyta.

Lyta -- as noted above -- was a jumper.  There was no spot in the house that she did not explore.  She pranced around my mantel and my piano top -- both crowded with small, useless objects -- with virtually never a false step, never disturbing any of the items.  She jumped to the top of built-in kitchen cabinets.  She jumped to the precarious spot atop curtain rods over the windows.  She jumped every day to my shoulder while I shaved  -- poor Phaedra tried to follow her example one morning, and ended up digging her claws into my back as she precariously hung on, able to jump no higher, while I screamed.

I substituted a rare bath for a shower one morning.  After I got out, Lyta jumped into what she thought was an empty bathtub.  She instantly jumped back out, hardly breaking the surface of the water.  Without apparently getting her paws wet.  Don't ask me how she did it.

Lyta was a small, wiry cat.  My later cats tended to be heavier and more ground-oriented.  Loki did have the body to be a jumper, but it wasn't his thing.  He jumped as high as the back of living room chairs, where he could sit in splendor, gazing out upon his domain.

Which brings me to Castor and Pollux, my now 16-week-old twin black kittens.  They both have small, wiry bodies -- they're still growing, of course, only five pounds now, but I can read their future -- and they are jumpers.  Definitely jumpers.  As much as Lyta?  We'll have to wait a few months to decide, but yes, maybe.

They aren't quite as closely bonded to me as Lyta, and they therefore don't routinely leap to my shoulder.  But they have her curiosity and willingness to take chances.  They are faster and more energetic than Lyta, maybe only because there are two of them, egging each other on.  And they're male.  You know how competitive boys can be.

I have a cat ladder, purchased several years ago for Loki and Muldoon who treated it as an ungainly piece of uninteresting furniture.  But these boys knew its potential uses the second they saw it.  They don't climb it, as I expected.  They take flying leaps at it, soaring to the top level, barely touching the lower steps on the way up.

Their most astonishing feat, however, occurs outside.  I have a spindly butterfly bush beside the rear deck.  They treat it as a jungle gym.  They climb it, of course, from the deck railing.  But wait, there's more.   From the ground, they dash toward the bush, take a leap up onto the bannister of the steps to the deck, barely making contact for the sake of propulsion, and then launching themselves at the bush.  Looking like nothing so much as Rocky the Flying Squirrel.  

They have no idea where on the bush they will land.  They just trust that there will be some small branch they can glom onto.  Which they do successfully, time after time.  

Thus today's photo, above.  

Grounded by the pandemic, my watching the antics of Castor and Pollux has all the appeal of going to the circus.  Back when we still had circuses.

Rainy day walking

Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain
Telling me just what a fool I've been
I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain
And let me be alone again.
--The Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain (1963)

It's been a dry summer in the Northwest Corner.  Not abnormally dry, not a drought.  But only occasional sprinkles.

But today, it rained pretty much all day.  Steadily.

So, I thought.  Do I go out for my usual four-mile walk?  Or do I curl up with a book, and let my kittens crawl all over me?

Right.  I went for a walk.  And I always forget how satisfying it is to walk in the rain.  Not a total deluge.  Not really like that photo.  I'm not a masochist.  But in a steady rain, wearing a light windbreaker over a t-shirt -- the temperature was in the high 50s -- and a baseball cap.

The sidewalks and streets had puddles, but the puddles were still small enough to walk around.  The walk seemed to go more quickly than usual; the rain had a refreshing, air conditioning effect.  And I ran across few people  -- we call them "vectors" during this time of Covid-19 --  out walking like myself.  So, I had no need to be continually on the outlook for other walkers approaching ahead or sneaking up from behind, alert like a prey in fear of predators.

Did I actually hum as I walked?  Possibly.  

My mind tends to wander all over the place when I hike or walk; it's like that pleasant state just before you drift off to sleep.  The brilliant thought occurred to me that this was a healthy time for walking -- that the rain was washing all the aerosol-bonded virus out of the air.  Is that true?  I've researched it since I got back, and don't see any definitive conclusions.  But since I ran into hardly any other walkers, it really made little difference.  

After about 90 minutes of walking -- this was my Sunday walk, up and down, over and around Capitol Hill -- I arrived home in good spirits.  Wet, but in good spirits.  I really hadn't noticed being wet while I was outside, but my windbreaker obviously needs new water proofing -- my t-shirt was pretty soggy.  My jeans were wet from my ankles nearly to my knees.  And my baseball cap?  Well, you can imagine.

Who cares?  As I've noted in past rain-related posts, my body isn't water-soluble.  Nor did I catch my death of cold.  And I arrived home just in time for a hot cup of coffee, before I slapped together something for dinner.

The Cascades weren't describing me in their little ballad..  The rain didn't tell me I was a fool.  It reminded me how beautiful the streets, sidewalks, and parks of Seattle can be, wet or dry, rain or shine.  Sometimes, even more beautiful in the rain than in the sun.  

Life can be good, folks.  Even in the Age of Covid-19. 

Taking his marbles and going home

Twenty-four days until the election.  It seems like the campaign just began -- some four years ago.  

We were to have  three pre-election debates between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden.  The first one, held on September 30, was an astonishing display of arrogant and unseemly behavior by the president, resulting in a further dip in his poll ratings.  His subsequent contracting of Covid-19, the disease that, on February 27, he had predicted would just go away:

“It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

caused a further decline in his polling, probably because of uncertainty as to whether he would survive, or at least be able to function, until even the end of his first term.

The second debate was scheduled for October 15.  At least purportedly because the president might still be contagious, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that the the second debate would be handled virtually, with the two contenders and the moderator being in separate locations.  I'll always wonder if the Commission simply had no stomach for another fiasco similar to the first debate.

In the first debate, Trump ignored the rules regarding the times allotted to each candidate, extending his own comments far beyond the cut-off time, while the moderator ineffectually  attempted to stop him, and talking loudly over Biden during Biden's allotted time.  As the moderator finally brought the debate to a close, giving the Commission's thanks to the sponsoring institutions, Trump was still yelling his arguments in the background.

Trump exploded and refused to participate when the Commission stated that the two would not be in the same room next Thursday.  He argues that the Commission is biased, and is attempting to "protect" Biden from having to face Trump in person.  The debate has been canceled.

What is the president actually saying?  He is saying that he has no interest in a debate -- meaning a formal argument with each side presenting its argument with agreed time restraints, and the other side given the opportunity for rebuttal.  A "debate" to Trump is an opportunity for him to show that he is louder, ruder, and more uncouth -- and thus more "manly" in the eyes of certain elements of his base -- than the calmer, more relaxed Mr. Biden.  Trump has no interest in even the minimally intellectual discussion that debates in the past  have provided.  

By analogy, as a high school student, he would have approached an interscholastic wrestling match as though it were professional wrestling -- entering the ring dressed in a garish robe, screaming insults at his opponent and the referees, prancing around the ring,  jumping out of the ring and into the audience at times, and soaking up the cheers of his adoring supporters.

Trump has turned his four years in office into a circus.  He has done nothing worth bragging about to any audience other than his already committed "base," and so he offers instead a low form of entertainment.  If he can't do that, he won't do anything.  He doesn't know anything else to do.

His refusal to meet Biden on separate cameras and attempt to discuss the issues dividing the two parties is no loss to America or the voting public.  I'm happy to see the debate canceled.  Unless, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, he suddenly awakens to a new vision of himself and of his presidency, I'll shed no tears if the third and final debate is canceled as well.

The president is a pathetic, insecure, childish, and emotionally needy 74-year-old.  I'd feel some compassion for him if he hadn't caused so much damage to our country and to its citizens over the past four years.

Homeland Elegies

Ayad Akhtar's parents were immigrants.  From Pakistan.  They didn't fit the Ellis Island stereotype: both his mother and his father had medical degrees from a Pakistani university, and his father had become one of America's premier experts in a certain area of cardiology.  

Ayad himself was born in New York, and grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee.  His father was an atheist, but many of his relatives -- including the many family members still living back in Pakistan -- were devout Muslims.  Ayad graduated from Brown University.  As an adult, Ayad became a renowned playwright, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013.

Ayad is the narrator in the novel Homeland Elegies.  He is also the author of the novel.  All of the facts stated above are true -- true of both the author and the novel's narrator.  Akhtar calls his book a novel, but it is written as a fictionalized memoir, or, more precisely, a fictionalized collection of essays.  Without researching outside the book, I have no way of knowing how many of the events related are fictional and how many are autobiographical.  

It probably makes no difference.  As André Aciman has stated, while admitting that he had invented some events and emotions that he described in detail in his memoir Back to Egypt: "this fiction grounded me in a way the truth could never have done.  This, to use Aristotle's word, is how I should have felt..."  Whether the stories Akhtar tells are true or invented is irrelevant to the greater truths Akhtar attempts to tells us; his questionable "veracity" is of interest only, perhaps, to those intimates of the author who know the truth already.  Akhtar has at least called his book a novel -- not a memoir.

Homeland Elegies -- note the plural -- is a series of meditations, from various perspectives, of what it means to be a person of Muslim background, living in America.  He discusses the obvious problems, especially after 9/11, of having his fellow citizens consider him another murderous damn Arab.  He describes the lives his parents and their parents had lived in Pakistan, and he takes us with him on visits to his parents' homeland.  We learn of the increasing despair of Pakistanis as their nation becomes increasingly consumed by violence, and as its youth grow up eager for battle.  As his Pakistani uncle explains:

The human being is a battling creature, beta.  That will never change.  To pretend otherwise is to delude ourselves.  We fight as a way to make meaning of our lives.  That is why protecting the citizens against war is always a recipe for long-term disintegration.  The nation must be brought into the military mind-set.

His father despises this pessimistic view of human nature; Ayad quietly listens.

But this book is only incidentally concerned with despair in Pakistan, and the problems faced by Muslim immigrants in America.  Ayad struggles to understand a deeper problem in American society, a problem in addition to the problems that always alienate immigrants from their new  home -- religious intolerance, language differences, and poverty.  He senses a problem that has caused even the majority of native-born Americans to experience an ever deeper despair .  

This problem is an all-consuming materialism that pervades every aspect of American life -- and that is infiltrating all of Western culture.  Its roots are not new; Walt Whitman worried 150 years ago that America was "ensnared in a materialism from which it couldn't seem to escape."  But, Ayad was told by a friend, it has been accelerated by the anti-trust teachings of Judge Robert Bork, who taught that the only check on corporate power should be competition, and that achieving the resulting benefit to consumers was the only legitimate goal of anti-trust law.  He rejected using anti-trust law to protect employees who would be laid off in a merger or other businesses that would be destroyed when forced to compete with giant corporations.

The result was the hollowing out of small towns we have observed during the last few decades.

Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. ... Towns were poorer, which meant schools were poorer, too. Public education started to crumble. So did the roads and bridges. There were fewer landowners giving less money to an ever-dwindling number of churches and charities. Everywhere you went, people poured into big box stores to spend less on things they had less money to buy. ... Suicide was on the rise, and so were drugs, depression, anger. 

This describes my own small home town. "This country makes you a criminal for being poor," a family friend complains.   And it prepared the way for Donald Trump.

Most Americans couldn't cobble together a week's expenses in case of an emergency.  They had good reason to be scared and angry.  They felt betrayed and wanted to destroy something.   The national mood was Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, nihilistic -- and no one embodied all this better than Donald Trump.  Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy ..., but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we'd allowed ourselves to become.

Watching the movie It's a Wonderful Life on television, Ayad realizes that we had become exactly what the movie's hero had saved his home town Bedford Falls from becoming.  

Coincidentally, the same problem was addressed in the papal encyclical Fratelli tutti, released this week:

Some people are born into economically stable families, receive a fine education, grow up well nourished, or naturally possess great talent. They will certainly not need a proactive state; they need only claim their freedom. Yet the same rule clearly does not apply to a disabled person, to someone born in dire poverty, to those lacking a good education and with little access to adequate health care. If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons, and fraternity will remain just another vague ideal.

Throughout the novel, Ayad discusses his relationship with his brilliant, cardiologist father.  The father brought the family to America to take advantage of the greater opportunities that would be open to them.  He succeeded, and became more fervently American than most Americans.  The father met Donald Trump as a patient in 1993, and treated him for several years for heart irregularities that he felt might be more serious than they turned out to be.  He became a devoted fan of the future president.

By 2016, the father was having doubts about his hero and his run for the presidency.  The following year, he was sued for malpractice -- probably unfairly -- and the case was settled during trial by his insurer.  He began gambling and drinking, and his son eventually learned that his dad had lost millions, everything he had, and his property was under foreclosure.  Ayad's parents returned to Pakistan, where his father still owned some inherited land.  His American Social Security payments provided an adequate standard of living.  In earlier visits, the father had been sharply critical of Pakistan and the "backward" attitudes of his relatives.  But Ayad could tell that his father, now, had never been happier.  He told his son:.

"I had a good life there, so many good years.  I'm grateful to America.  It gave me you!  But I'm glad to be back in Pakistan, beta.  I'm glad to be home." 

And Ayad?  While he was giving a lecture at a small college, an upset member of the audience asked him why, since he was so critical of America, he didn't just leave. 

"This is where I've lived my whole life.  For better, for worse -- and it's always a bit of both -- I don't want to be anywhere else.  I've never even thought about it.  America is my home." 

For both Ayad and his father, one's "home" isn't necessarily the place with whose policies you agree or disagree.  It's ultimately where one's been reared and had his formative experiences.

Homeland Elegies is a complex book.  Akhtar provides a useful timeline at the outset, but the story is presented in eight chapters and a "coda."  Each chapter is, in a sense,  a separate story with a different topic.  The chapters fit together to provide a continuous narrative, although the narrative line seems at times lost in the details.  It's a sophisticated form of story-telling, but is rich in insights about Pakistan, about Islam, about an immigrant's joys and tragedies -- and above all, about our American civilization and where we seem to be heading. 

It's an absorbing book, and a sobering narrative.

------------------------------
My thanks to Little, Brown and Co. for a complimentary advance copy of this book.

The curtain approaches

“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

    --King Lear     

The history of the past four years would make the material for a great Shakespearean play.  And we may be drawing near its denouement.  

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

--King Lear 

A great Shakespearean play.  But I'm not the Shakespeare to write it.

You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.

           ― Goldie Hawn