"Please. Enough with the cawing."

 

We get plenty of crows in my neighborhood.  I suppose they infest most Seattle neighborhoods.  I posted an essay back in 2018, describing the existence of a gigantic crows' roost in Bothell, at the north end of Lake Washington.  Every day, crows spread out from that roost to all parts of Seattle, seeking food and entertainment.

This morning, I was awakened from my daydreaming or reading or whatever I was doing by a clamor of crow-calls near the front of my house.  I ignored it for a while.  Crows flock together, and tend to get disturbed and/or excited by all sorts of things.  A stray piece of bubble gum on the street.  A small animal.  Years ago, they held an extremely loud crow funeral in front of my house for a dead compatriot whose body I found lying on the ground.

Crows are intelligent, and at times seem almost human.  For better or worse.

But today's uproar, though not quite as frenetic as that crow funeral, was very loud and showed no signs of easing off.  I looked out the window, and saw masses of crows circling my front yard, with others coming from around the neighborhood to join in the excitement.  They continued circling, but at first I couldn't see what their problem might be.  No dead or dying fellow crow.  No small morsel of food.  

I have a medium sized tree in the middle of the yard that they seemed to be circling, occasionally swerving closely to its bare branches. 

And then I saw it.  Or should I say "him"?  My black cat Castor had found a cozy spot to cuddle against the tree limbs, about half way to the top.  He was curled up, and seemingly unconcerned by the uproar he was causing.

I opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.  "Hey, hey, hey!" I exclaimed authoritatively.  Castor ignored me, of course, but, worse, so did the crows.  I guess I finally got on their nerves, however, because, gradually, by twos and threes, they began leaving the area, flying to other trees in the neighborhood.

Castor remained serene.  He made no attempt to jump into my arms, exclaiming, "Oh, master, thank you for saving me.  It was so horrible!"  My cats aren't exactly like that.

I went inside.  Fifteen minutes later, Castor ambled in through the cat door and suggested that a small snack might be in order.  The crows weren't mentioned, and I knew better than to ask.

My cats like to chew on small birds, but I doubt they'd attack a bird as large and gregarious as a crow.  Especially when they gather as a gang.  I do understand, however, that cats and crows sometimes get friendly enough to play together.  Or at least the crows play.

Why do crows and ravens like to harass other animals for no obvious benefit (biting at tails, especially in pairs)?

While it can be a form of territorial aggression, like many intelligent animals, crows and ravens play just for the fun of it.

--Quota

Castor was not upset by this form of "play."  But he was not amused.

So long, old pal

It's been seven weeks since I bought a "new" car.  "So what?" you ask.  People buy new cars all the time.  

But I had not bought a "new" car in 21 years.  And it had been a "new" car, the quotation marks meaning new for me, but well broken in by others.  It was a 1996 Toyota Corolla, and it had been driven by many people over its first five years, because it had been owned by a rental car company.

It served me well for the next 21 years.  But, like all of us, age takes its toll.  Its mileage was still low for its age, and its engine still worked well.  But problems were beginning to accumulate, and I had shown little interest in maintaining its cosmetic welfare.

So it was time.

I bought another "used car" -- I guess now we use the kinder term "previously owned car."  Another Corolla.  I bought it from a Toyota dealer, so it was spiffed up and looked totally new to my undiscerning eye.  Most important, I knew where to find all the various bells and whistles one needs to use while driving -- when it starts raining, for example, I don't have to fumble around trying to remember where the windshield wipers control is located.  

And my neighbors fully endorse my purchase.  Not having the old 1996 model parked in my driveway probably caused a leap in property values throughout the neighborhood.  Several neighbors have congratulated me, with joy in their eyes.

But still -- you develop a relationship over 21 years.  I didn't try to trade the old car in.  Not after having gotten an on-line estimate of its minimal trade-in value.  Instead, I donated it to a charity.  It's as dignified and respectful an end of our relationship as I could manage.

Still, if you've ever had to take an aged pet to the veterinarian for euthanasia, you know how I felt as I watched my old friend being loaded onto a tow truck.  We'd been through a lot, and it had performed well.  Its deficiencies in its old age were more a matter of my lack of care than of any inherent flaw in the car itself.  To continue my analogy, if you don't take your cat in for its annual shots, eventually your lack of "maintenance" is going to catch up with you.  And with the cat.

But the old Corolla never criticized me.  It served me cheerfully and as well as its age and maintenance allowed.  It smiled bravely as I signed over the title documents, and the tow truck machinery pulled it up onto the back.

The driver was kind of a tough looking guy, and I didn't have the nerve to hug my old friend and kiss him goodbye.  But I know he appreciated that I would miss him,  I only hope they find a good new owner for him.  Maybe a teenager, with little money, but with all the enthusiasm of first car ownership, who will give him the care he now needs?

I hate to think of his becoming an involuntary organ donor.

Sephardic Judaism in Seattle

"Sephardic Jews" is a term that had echoed in my mind for a number of years, but it wasn't really until I read André Aciman's memoir, Out of Egypt, that I had developed a feeling for who these people were and -- to a lesser extent -- how they differed from the (to me) more familiar Ashkenazi Jews. 

Aciman grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, in a large, prosperous Sephardic Jewish family, a family well integrated into Alexandria society until they were expelled from Egypt by the nationalistic government when the boy was 14.

In his memoir, Aciman explains that Sephardic Jews were descendants of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.  They ended up in various parts of the Mediterranean, some in Italy, many throughout what was then the Ottoman Empire, which, at the time, included Egypt.  Their language was a form of Spanish, closer to fifteenth century Spanish -- called Ladino -- that had over time picked up bits of vocabulary and variations in pronunciation from the ethnic groups with whom they had associated, in the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere. 

I later learned more about the community of Sephardic Jews in the memoir of Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica.  Leon grew up in the Ottoman city of Salonica (today Thessaloniki, in Greece).  His memoir emphasizes the extent to which Salonica (like Alexandria) was a highly cosmopolitan city under the Ottomans, and how he grew up with close friends in all ethnic groups in the city.  His closest friend during his teen years was Shukri, an ethnic Turk.  Leon moved to the United States in his early 20s, as the less tolerant Greeks took over Salonica from the surprisingly tolerant Turks.  

After his move, Leon contrasted the vibrant acceptance of new ideas in America with the stagnant conservatism of Ottoman society.  But he also looked back with fondness on the closeness of friendships and the peace and quiet of his Ottoman childhood, the rituals of hospitality that were more than rituals.

I mention these two books as an introduction to my impressions of a lecture I attended last night at the University of Washington.  It was the third in a series presented by the History Department, focusing this year not on ancient or medieval history, but on various areas of interest in the history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.  Yesterday's lecture focused on the history of the Sephardic Jewish community in Seattle, and was delivered by an excellent speaker, Professor Devin E Naar, who received his history doctorate from Stanford in 2011.

In his hour and a half of allotted time, Dr. Naar discussed a number of topics related to the Jewish community -- emphasizing that Seattle has always had the second largest percentage of Sephardic Jews in its population of any American city, second only to New York.  His lecture was accompanied by his presentation of useful and persuasive visual displays on the screen behind him, including copies of early twentieth century articles from Jewish New York newspapers that had reported in detail problems and achievements of the growing Seattle Sephardic population. These articles demonstrate the close continuing relationship between the New York and Seattle Sephardic communities in those years.

A large portion of Dr. Naar's lecture related to the difficulties all Jews, but especially Sephardic Jews, had in immigrating to America and in obtaining citizenship once they had immigrated.  Jews in general were described as dangerous scum by some of the more extreme haters.  Beginning in the 1920s, up until 1964, America had a quota system designed to maintain through selective immigration the same proportion of ethnic groups as had existed in the late nineteenth century.  Thus British and Scandinavian citizens had a tremendous advantage over other groups in moving to this country.  Certain of today's politicians would have felt very comfortable with the arguments that were made about which ethnic groups were desirable, and which were not.  While Ashkenazi Jews could squeak through the immigration quota by describing themselves as Germans or French, Sephardic Jews -- despite their fifteenth century Spanish origin -- were often barred as "Turks" by immigration authorities.

From a Seattleite's perspective, some of the most interesting parts of the lecture were descriptions of the areas of the city, block by block, where the Sephardic community had settled -- in a portion of the International District -- cheek to jowl with blocks occupied by other ethnic communities (Chinese, Blacks, Japanese, Ashkenazi Jews). All of these minority groups were barred from residing in much of the city through use of enforceable restrictive covenants in property deeds.  Despite these barriers, they nevertheless often became successful small businessmen, restaurant owners, and so forth, often owning well-known businesses to whose original owners' background we never give much thought.

Congratulations to Dr. Naar and to the History Department for presentation, in an all-too-short lecture, new insights into an unrecognized aspect of Seattle's history, and discussing some distressing issues, transcending Judaism, that still burden our political debates at present.  Next Wednesday's lecture will discuss Seattle's relationships with people from Russia and the USSR.

-------------------

Photo: Professor Naar

Italy: January dreaming

It was the adverbs that did me in.  The adverbs that caused me to flunk out of the Duolingo on-line Italian study program.  Not the meaning of the adverbs, but their positioning.

I had finally figured out anche ("also").  At least for Duolingo's purposes, just put it at the beginning of the sentence.  But it was spesso ("often") that gave me problems, and then sempre ("always") that finally did me in.  I couldn't remember whether to put it before or after the verb.  "I always work," or "I work always."  I'm pretty sure now it's the latter, but my mind kept boggling.  And still does. 

Actually, I didn't flunk out.  But I finally received enough demerits that I was told I'd have to pay to continue, or at least to continue with all the symbols of merit I had received to that point.  I'll  just start over -- not caring about my medals of merit -- and I'm sure they'll start me out at the place I left off.  Worrying once more about sempre.   

The fact I even signed up is remarkable.  I took three terms of Intensive Italian in college, two of them while in Italy itself.  It didn't stick.  It didn't stick despite all the visits I've made to Italy since college, including my visits to Lake Como the past three years.  One problem is that Italians are so fluent in English now.  At least, those Italians that I'm apt to talk to as a mindless American tourist.

But I love Italy, and am constantly drawn back.  As I've mentioned, I plan to return to Lake Como again this August.  I've been re-reading -- browsing through, mainly -- Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, her account of the efforts, by herself and her husband, to renovate as a summer home a dilapidated stone house outside Cortona in southern Tuscany, near the border with Umbria.

Of course, I'd never renovate a house myself.  Not after reading the months of work Frances and Ed put into their own project, as well as reading similar accounts by other expatriate writers, British and American.  I'm too lazy.  But if I had the money, I'd gladly pay workers to do all the work, while I moseyed around getting in their way.  If I had the money, I'd gladly buy a house -- such as the one I stay in each year at Lake Como -- that someone else had renovated, with modern wiring and plumbing, while preserving in its entirety its rustic charm.

My attitude is that suggested by my long-time motto: "Why buy a boat when you have friends who own a boat?"  Or "swimming pool."  Or "beach home."   

But I didn't sit down at my computer to point out my character flaws.  I just wanted to emphasize how much I like Italy -- as apparently do a large number of my fellow countrymen.  I like the scenery.  I like the history.  I like the people.  I like its architecture.

I love the food.  I love not only the food, but the Italian belief that eating is not just a consumption of necessary nutrients, but is almost a sacrament, a source of life's enjoyment worth lingering over.  And that it is also a social act, to be shared with friends and relatives.  As Frances marvels, eating outdoors with her husband, early in their ownership of their Italian property:

He piles the bread board with our cheeses, salami, peppers, and on our plates arranges our first course, the classic caprese: sliced tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, and a drizzle of oil.

... The cicadas yammer in the trees, that deeply heart-of-summer sound. The tomatoes are so intense we go silent as we taste them. Ed opens a celebratory bottle of prosecco and we settle down to recap the saga of buying and restoring the house. ... We dream on about other projects. The sun through the flowering trees bathes us in gold sifted light. "This isn't real; we've wandered into a Fellini film," I say.

Her husband replies that maybe Fellini hadn't really been all that creative.  Maybe all of Italian life actually resembled a Fellini film, and Fellini was just telling it as it is.

I wouldn't go that far.  But when I'm in Italy, and everything is going relatively smoothly, it seems almost too good to be true.  Is this real, I ask myself?  Life back home seems like a crazy madhouse, from the vantage point of an Italian lunch -- whether a feast, or simple rustic food.  Yes, things that work in America may not always work in Italy.  You may get irritated, just like you do at home.  But the irritation is over, and you move on.  You don't brood and simmer over it  until -- joined with other daily irritations -- it affects your entire personality.

These may be merely the ravings of a guy who's tired of January and dreams of the warmth of the Mediterranean world, the Italian sun, a guy who's never actually experienced Italy in winter.  But I don't care.  I'm hungry for "intense" tomatoes.  I want to pass a bottle of prosecco around the dinner table.

I long for yammering cicadas!

I'll be back to Lake Como in August.  If it's too hot, as it may well be in August, I may long for the cool, moist zephyrs of January in Seattle.  That's human nature, right?

Maybe not.  Meanwhile, I need to remember where to place my Italian adverbs.  Sempre!

Cold days in Seattle

 

This lovely photo (photo credit: Seattle Times) was taken a couple of blocks from my house, in the Arboretum.  The skating rink is normally a quiet, woodsy pond occupied by ducks swimming about in a placid and proprietary manner.

The past few days have been cold in Seattle.  Lows around 13 degrees (minus 11º C.).  Highs not exceeding 32 degrees (0º C.).  And it will remain cold for several more days, although the high may creep up a degree or two above freezing tomorrow afternoon.  Some of the coldest weather on record for a January.

It's not that we're California.  We generally get some snow most years, sometimes up to a foot (30 cm) of snow.  I've taken pictures of snowy scenes about my neighborhood, some taken in this same Arboretum.  See, for example, Another February snowfall, which documented eight inches of Seattle snow as recently as 2021.  (Photograph below-right, taken in the Arboretum.)

What we rarely get, however, is ice.  I mean, sure, we see puddles freeze over.  But we rarely see ice thick enough for kids to be playing hockey on.  I can think of only once in my lifetime that ice on a lake (down near sea level) was deep enough to warrant crowds of people walking, skating, and otherwise frolicking on it.  And that was in the mid 1950s.

Hockey in the Arboretum!  Where did they even come up with hockey sticks?  Indoor rinks, probably.  It looks like the sort of scene we see in comic strips or paintings, showing "typical" American fun, or that we read about in books (Hans Brinker!).  It ain't Seattle.  But, this year at least, it is Seattle.  

So enjoy it, kids.  It may be a while until you can skate again in the Arboretum.  With global warming, maybe the last time.  But it's great to see it while we have it.

Tragedy in Houston

Hail! Hail! to Michigan

The champions of the West.

Yeah.  Well. 

The idea of the Michigan Wolverines being the champions of "the West" seems a little bizarre, to those of us in the Northwest Corner.  Or I suspect to anyone living west of the Mississippi.  A bit like Spokane's Gonzaga one day claiming to be champions of "the East."

But let's not quibble.  As of tonight, they are the champions of American college football.

They won decisively, 34-13, against our local Huskies.  Huskies who in game after game had shown themselves able to beat the odds -- literally -- and to pull themselves out of scoring holes in the final minutes of close games.  Not this time.  They were behind Michigan the entire game, start to finish.

I sadly admit it.  Tonight, at least, Michigan was the better team.  Their win wasn't a fluke.

Washington isn't my undergrad school, but it is something of an adopted school -- both because I live several blocks south of its campus, and because I received from it both a graduate degree and a law degree.  In all sports essentially a fair-weather fan, I rooted for the Huskies most of this season, awestruck by their ability to pull wins out of seemingly sure losses.  Sort of "anti-couging" their games, as it were.

But beyond my personal attachments to the school, I rooted for the Huskies because they represented the Pac-12 in its last hurrah before it committed conference suicide.  I grew up watching the nine-team Pacific Coast Conference mutate into the Pac-5, then the Pac-8, then the Pac-10, and finally the Pac-12.  It was the conference of the West Coast, despite those later questionable additions of the two Arizona schools, and then the even more questionable addition of Utah and Colorado.  

In my fantasies, at least, the Pacific Coast conference valued academic performance more than most other conferences, and tried to hold on to the archaic belief that college football games were played by ordinary students who merely had athletic interests and abilities.  Students who played football as recreation, in the same way as lawyers and businessmen might play squash or golf.

Let's all have a good laugh, before I continue.

So, as of next fall, Washington joins Michigan in the Big Ten, and the Pac-12, now reduced to two members, probably fades away into the mists of history.  At least the UW joins the Big Ten, not certain other conferences I could snarkily name.  I've always believed that the Big Ten was a midwestern brother of the Pac-12 -- not just because their two champions met annually in the Rose Bowl, but because the Big Ten was composed of schools with equally high academic reputations.

And Michigan's academic reputation was (and is) near the top of the Big Ten.  So we lost to a team from a school I respect for reasons other than football prowess.  

My own undergraduate school has slunk off to the Atlantic Coast Conference -- despite our campus's being located a few short miles from the Pacific Ocean.  Aside from the geographical absurdity of its new affiliation, in my opinionated opinion it will be hanging out with a fairly shady group of schools (Duke and a couple of others excepted), like an innocent child whose parents have lost money and have moved to a more dangerous neighborhood -- but what do I know?  Who knows what goes on back there on the Atlantic coast?  I guess I'll learn some of the answers in coming football seasons.

So, I'm sad about tonight's loss to Michigan, and I'm sad about the dissolution of the Pac-12.  The football seasons to come will have their interesting moments, I'm sure, but overall I suspect that everything is falling apart.  The television industry has a talent for ruining everything to which it turns its mercenary attention.

Sort of the anti-Midas touch.  The death of the Pac-12 is but the latest example.

Listen to the whistle

From the wide Pacific Ocean

To the broad Atlantic shore

From sunny California

To ice-bound Labrador

She's mighty tall and handsome

She's loved by one and all

She's the hobo's accommodation,

the Wabash Cannonball.

It was cold, and it was wet, and it was drizzling.  I was out for a walk after lunch, trying to work the kinks out of a newly arthritic knee, and enjoying completely a damp (but not pouring rain) day in January.  It's a Northwest Corner kind of love -- you have to live here to appreciate it.

Off in the distance came the wail of a train whistle.  I'm nowhere near railroad tracks, so far as I know, and the sound came from the direction of Seattle's King Street Amtrak station, several miles away.  The mournful sound of a train's whistle seems almost designed to complement dark skies and drizzling rain.  I was happy, in that sad way that Scandinavians in the Northwest tend to be happy.

And I was reminded that I'm only about five weeks from my train ride to Chicago.  A train ride, from various starting points, that has become another of my winter "traditions" over the past three years.

Assiduous readers of this blog will recall that I traveled to Chicago from San Francisco on the "California Zephyr" in 2022, and from Los Angeles on the "Southwest Chief" last year. This year, I'll be hopping the "Empire Builder" here in Seattle, a 48-hour ride to Chicago.

I'll be "riding the rails" in a comfortable roomette on the Empire Builder, which seems somewhat decadent compared with a "hobo's accommodation" on the Wabash Cannonball.  But comfort aside, I suspect much of the emotional charge is similar -- the sense that you're traveling great distances, night and day, and that, once on that train, you have no control over where it stops or the route it takes.  In fact, you have no responsibilities at all -- you simply gaze out the window, read a book, meditate on the mysteries of life and your place within it.

Of course, unlike a hobo, you also look forward to three meals a day in the diner, and maybe an aperitif before dinner!

Unlike the past two years, I won't be returning to Seattle by airline as soon as I arrive in Chicago.  A couple of friends will be traveling up from their home in West Lafayette, Indiana, to greet me upon arrival.  By chance, I'll be in Chicago in the midst of a city-wide theater festival, and we plan to take in a show or two, while catching up and exploring Chicago so far as possible in that city's ungodly winter weather. 

This will be my third ride on the Empire Builder.  I rode it to Chicago when I was 14 years  old, on my way to a three-week stay with a former elementary school classmate whose family had abandoned the Northwest.  I reveled in my adult-like independence, even while gladly welcoming being taken under the wing of my friend's family upon arrival.  My second ride was just fourteen years ago, the first section of a train odyssey to Boston, heading to a nephew's wedding on the Maine coast.

I am so ready to roll!  I feel like stepping out the door into the gathering dusk and listening again for that lonesome, distant cry of a train's whistle.  Empire Builder?     Wabash Cannonball?    Whatever!

Listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar

As she glides along the woodland, o'er the hills and by the shore

Hear the mighty rush of the engine, hear the lonesome hobo's call

As you travel across the country on the Wabash Cannonball