Leitmotifs in New York

Central Park

As a teenager, when I first began listening to classical music, I far preferred bombast to subtlety. Themes from Wagner were therefore high on my list of preferences, including, of course, the overture to Tannhäuser.  But opera was still an unknown land, and these stirring themes were largely divorced in my mind from the operas for which they were written.

I had the opportunity this past weekend, during a brief visit to New York, to attend the Metropolitan Opera's performance of Tannhäuser. While Wagner might have devised a more compelling illustration of the conflict between sacred and profane love than a minstrel's inability to choose between enjoyment of eternal subterranean orgies with Venus on the one hand, and high-minded and musically uplifting raptures with the Blessed Virgin on the other -- still it was an impressive, memorable, and certainly musically stirring experience. 

The opera's various musical themes, including that of my beloved overture, kept running through my mind for the rest of the weekend.

That evening was topped off, after 4½ hours of musical exaltation, by my discovery that my alma mater's football team was ahead by 17 points at half time on the West Coast.  A more contemporary contrast between the sacred and the profane, perhaps.  But I grab happiness wherever I can find it.

Prospect Park, Brooklyn

I make these quickie jaunts to New York fairly frequently.  I've seen most of the major tourist destinations, but I now enjoy just immersing myself for a few days in a world that is similar to the Northwest Corner's (as opposed to, say, Mumbai), but just different enough to be interesting. 

In a constant quest for affordable housing, I keep seeking hotels ever farther north, but still within my favorite part of the city, the Upper West Side.  I was up to W. 95th this time, an area of the Upper West Side that is only slightly less opulent than that twenty blocks farther downtown.  Same small, interesting shops, same busy sidewalk life, same well-dressed, well-behaved children walking hand-in-hand with a parent on their way to school.  

Brooklyn Bridge
Pedestrian deck

Sunday, I walked from my hotel up to Columbia University.  I wandered around for a while in that attractive Ivy League school, its (for the most part) traditionally-styled architecture sequestered from the urban world about it by a fence with open (but guarded) gates . 

I then re-walked the High Line from the just-opened No. 7 subway stop at Hudson Yards (behind Penn Station) down to 14th Street in Chelsea.  The High Line's landscaping is growing ever more mature and attractive, but the crowds of tourists are becoming ever more oppressive as it becomes a "must-see" destination.  And the on-going construction around the High Line -- in what had been a somewhat derelict post-industrial area of town -- is truly amazing, illustrating how public works of this sort can attract private investment in surrounding residential and office construction.

I spent a couple of hours at the Metropolitan Museum, in the 19th and 20th century paintings area. Later, I did my traditional tramping about and photography in Central Park, and did similar walking and clicking in a return visit to Brooklyn's equally beautiful Prospect Park.  I didn't walk across the Brooklyn bridge this time, but I did stroll out as far as the tower on the Manhattan end of the bridge to take a couple of photos.

In addition to all of this walking, I plowed a substantial amount of money into the MTA subway system, enjoying not only the convenient travel but my observations of my fellow passengers -- "a million stories waiting to be told."  You may recall my review a few years ago of Lowboy, a novel about a schizophrenic teenager who essentially lived on the New York subway, learning all of its moods and secrets intimately.  Hey, I could do that.  You don't have to be crazy to love traveling hither and yon through the subway's labyrinthine tunnels.

I don't think.

Eastern European nationalism

Day by day, heart-breaking images of Syrian refugees appear in the newspapers.  Syrian families pour into Europe, reminding us of those photos of immigrant hordes who once passed through Ellis Island.

Why can't today's Europe make room for them, we ask, just as we once made room for refugees from yesterday's Europe?  We understand, of course, that we had (and still have) enormous empty spaces, compared to Europe's far greater population density.  We also are silenced by the noisy opposition expressed by so many Americans to the relatively lesser inflow of Latin American migrants across our own southern border.

But I suspect that Europe has another reason, besides lack of room, for resisting the entry of large numbers of immigrants, especially immigrants pouring in through southeastern and eastern Europe. 

The United States is a nation founded on certain principles:  first, its geographic separation and its fought-for political independence from Britain, and second, self-governance as a democratic republic.  Even in 1776, we were not ethnically homogeneous.  We didn't see ourselves, at least consciously, as a homeland in the western hemisphere for people of British ancestry.

But European nations are all about ethnicity.  Each country's distinct language, customs, religion and/or "blood" are the reasons each nation exists.  A century ago, eastern and southeastern Europe were governed by two cosmopolitan empires -- the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman.  Each granted varying amounts of autonomy to different nations within its empire, but subject to the ultimate sovereignty of the emperor or sultan. 

Beginning at least with the Greek war of independence in 1821, subject nationalities struggled to govern themselves, free of tribute to an imperial government.  "Nationalism" increasingly became the ascendant ideology throughout the nineteenth century, and led eventually to the assassination of an imperial archduke by a Serbian nationalist -- and the beginning of World War I.  At least five of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points dealt with recognition of national sovereignty along ethnic lines.

Yugoslavia was the last entity in Europe to attempt to bridge ethnicities -- and even its ethnicities were all Slavic.  Yugoslavia's breakup in the early 1990s, along with the independence of the three Baltic states, finally accomplished the goal of nation states of single ethnicity throughout the region.

We may not feel that creation of such states is a particularly admirable goal, but -- especially among the more recently created states -- it is a goal for which they had long strived.  Diluting their ethnically uniform populations now with the influx of a large number of new Syrian residents may seem to undo in part that accomplishment.

It's notable that the European nations most certain of their long-time and well-established ethnic unity and sovereignty -- France and Germany -- have been those most willing to accept new residents from Syria.

I have no solution to the Syrian refugee problem.  No one seems to have a solution.  But a feeling for the history of eastern Europe should help us understand fears and emotions of the region's citizens and rulers.  Eastern Europeans are no less caring or empathetic than we in the West; they don't resist helping the suffering Syrians simply out of cruelty or lack of charity.

Now she is six

When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five,
I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever. 

Maury at 2 weeks

My eldest great niece, Maury, turned six this week.  It hardly seems possible that it's been six years since I posted my first greetings to her, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson's greetings to his godchild.  Or that -- in that blink of an eye -- she has covered almost half the distance from birth to teenager.

If I greeted her birth with words from R.L.S., it seems even more fitting to celebrate her Sixth Birthday with Milne's poem, "The End," from his book of children's poetry, Now We Are Six.  The poem marks "the end" of Milne's book, but only the beginning of Maury's exciting life to come.

Golden autumn

Autumn -- in our poetic tradition -- generally symbolizes waning, aging, ending, a premonition of death.

And yet it's so beautiful.  A beauty not always shared by our own waning and aging human bodies.

I mulled over these thoughts this afternoon while making my daily four-mile walk through and around the University of Washington campus.  We've had a warm year, here in the Northwest Corner, and the warmth has continued into the fall.  A day of rain now and then, finally, but the "rainy season," as we know it in these parts, still hasn't begun.

It was sunny, as I left the house shortly after 3 p.m.  Not the blazing sun we have at that time in summer, but a golden sun filtered through additional layers of atmosphere.  But sunny, nonetheless.  The sky was blue, the sun was gold, and the shadows were already lengthening in mid-afternoon.

I wore a t-shirt and a light sweater, because my phone told me it would be in the mid-50s outside.  But the sun was still warm, and when not in shade I felt a bit overdressed.  Some folks on campus were wearing coats and jackets they probably had grabbed before leaving home in the chilly morning; others were wearing shorts and t-shirts.

The light was golden.  Autumn flowers -- I always forget how many flowers bloom in autumn -- colored the landscape.  Horse chestnuts (buckeyes if you're from the wrong part of the country) rolled underfoot, reminding me of childhood wars and battles.  Leaves on some trees were just beginning to change yellow, pink, red.  The air was crisp, even as the sun was warm -- that same peculiar combination of temperatures one experiences at high altitude. 

The campus was crowded with students.  These days, students' faces display seriousness of purpose combined with displays of quiet friendliness among themselves.  Observing them makes me happy, relieved that whatever future lies ahead probably will be in good hands.

As I often do, I stopped at the coffee shop just inside the front door of Suzzallo library, and ordered a coffee and muffin.  Kids packed the room, drinking coffee, talking, and poring over electronic gadgets in what -- back in my day -- was, as I recall, a "reserve book room" where students were granted short-term checkouts for certain books assigned in classes.  Books to be read in a hushed atmosphere.  In those days, I would have found it incredible that coffee drinking would be not only permitted, but enabled -- on the first floor of Suzzallo. 

After a half hour, I resumed my walk, circling through the dormitory areas on the eastern side of campus, looping back to Suzzallo, and then toward home through the recently renovated Rainier Vista. 

The campus has changed much since I first began graduate school -- but in many ways it has remained remarkably the same.  I enjoyed it in the spring time of my life, and enjoy it even more, perhaps, now in the fall.  I arrived home feeling happy with school, happy with the students, happy with myself -- and happy with the beauty of Seattle in Autumn.

Oliver Sacks, a month before his death this past August, recalled the story of a friend who had gone out for a walk one beautiful day with Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright (Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, et al.) -- that same cheerful fellow who directed that his tombstone should be "any colour, so long as it's grey."   Sacks's friend casually asked, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?”

Beckett replied, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.” 

I love the story, but I'm totally with Oliver's friend.  Today, I realized, wasn't an autumn day for worrying about waning or aging.  It was an autumn day that made me supremely grateful to be alive. 

Flying high

Being manipulated by advertisers to buy something I don't really need is nothing new.  At least for me.

But I'm only now getting used to being so manipulated, knowing exactly how I'm being manipulated, accepting the manipulation -- and enjoying it.

Like most airlines, Alaska Airlines has an "MVP" status for flyers who accumulate a certain number of miles on Alaska and on partner airlines with which Alaska has some sort of treaty arrangements.  In recent years, this has been no problem for me.  I travel overseas at least once a year, which in itself -- together with the domestic flying I have to do just to keep in touch with family members -- has given me the necessary miles without my thinking much about it.

In 2014, for example, I traveled round trip from Seattle to Johannesburg on Air France -- an Alaska partner -- which alone gave me nearly all the miles I needed, and at a surprisingly low cost.

That -- and many trips by others like mine -- may have been the final straw.  The airlines are getting wise.  MVP status was intended as a special anointing for their valued business clients -- not a freebie handed out to moochers who used the internet to find low-cost, high-mileage flights for their once-a-year vacations.

As a result,  most of the major airlines have begun awarding elite status based on amount of cash spent rather than miles flown.  Alaska hasn't done that.  Yet.  But its partner airlines are allowing Alaska mileage plan members  only "partial credit" for flights bought at bargain rates.

This year, I flew to London on British Air, and to Beijing on Delta.  Until this year, those two round trips probably would have pushed me into MVP status easily.  But not this year.  British Air gave me only one-fourth of my actual miles flown, and Delta gave me only one-half.  As a result, as 2015 comes to an end, I'm scrambling around for enough miles to continue MVP status next year.

After adding up all the qualifying miles I've earned this year, and those anticipated for my remaining travel, I discover that I'll still fall 610 miles short.  What to do?  If only I needed a one-way trip between Seattle and Oakland -- a frequent destination of mine -- I told myself -- I'd be over the top.

To make a boring and crazy story short, I've booked a December Amtrak trip down to Oakland, arriving in the morning, and flying home that same evening on Alaska.  That will give me my MVP status, and also fulfill my recent craving for a train trip somewhere, anywhere.

What do I get out of this legendary MVP status for which I work so hard?  Not much, really.  I just like the idea, really.  I do get first crack at a certain desirable section of the cabin reserved for MVP flyers (I choose seat 7A whenever possible).  I get early boarding.  I'm allowed to check two bags without paying a fee.  I occasionally get bumped up, at the last moment, into first class -- an always unexpected treat.  I'm yanked out of the sordid cattle car of the rear section into paradise.  Sort of a secular version of the Rapture, I guess.

It ain't much, but I fly fairly often, and just the early boarding -- together with my TSA Pre-check -- takes a lot of the stress out of the experience.  And even if it didn't?  Well, I guess I just enjoy the quest for MVP, a quest that engages my competitive instincts.  I enjoy it,  even though I know it's ridiculous.

Witches in Seattle

Charlie is 15 years old.  He lives a quiet, almost reclusive life just outside a small town in the California Sierra foothills.  He goes to school, he does his homework, he works hard helping Elizabeth, his young single mother, raise and harvest the vegetables that end up on their dinner table.  His family is poor and his social life is limited, but he feels reasonably happy and content.

Then one day, a large dog appears at the door and demands, in good English, "Give me the boy, Elizabeth."  Elizabeth refuses, a fight ensues, and mother and son flee north to Seattle.

Charlie -- understandably, in a state of shock -- quickly finds himself living with an aunt and uncle in a large, upper middle class home in West Seattle, near Alki point with views of the Sound and of the coming and going of the ferries.  He is enrolled in "Puget Academy," a private (fictitious) West Seattle school, where, although excruciatingly shy, he is quickly befriended by Diego, a popular student leader.

Within the first week or two of his arrival in Seattle, he discovers two upsetting facts about himself.  He may be gay.  And he is definitely a witch.

In The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight, Seattle native Jeff Jacobson has written an original and absorbing fantasy novel in a powerfully evoked Pacific Northwest setting.  Charlie learns that "the community" of witches exists everywhere, in every nation, and that he himself is a witch's son.  The community consists mainly of good men and women who simply want to live inconspicuously, keeping their powers to themselves, without bothering or being bothered by others. 

But, as in every group, there are bad apples who use their unusual abilities for evil, and who seek ways to increase their power at the expense of others.

Jacobson's writing is forceful and absorbing.  His main characters are well fleshed out -- not cardboard heroes and villains -- and his descriptions of the natural surroundings in the Northwest are vivid and help carry the plot.  The author himself may well be a "foodie," because meals are described in mouth-watering detail.

Similarities to the Harry Potter books are obvious.  But, to my mind, Jacobson's writing is richer and more sophisticated.  While the Harry Potter saga is a rollicking good adventure, it tends to be a bit cartoonish.  Jacobson's book, on the other hand, entices the reader into almost believing that witches could well exist.  And not only exist, but exist all around us, right here in Seattle -- in West Seattle, Madison Park, Seward Park, Belltown, and the Pike Place Market (all of which serve as locales for the book's action).

Charlie's romance with his school classmate --the relationship between Diego and Charlie teeters for some time between love and friendship -- is serious to the boys, and is treated seriously -- but described lightly and with restraint.  This is more an adventure story than a romance, and Charlie's eventual coming out seems to serve primarily as an occasion for Charlie, a novice witch, to demonstrate his willingness -- despite his shyness -- to be completely honest, honest with others, certainly, but especially honest with himself.

The plot seems to slow a bit around the half-way point, as Charlie is mastering the mumbo jumbo of how to be a witch.  But we do learn with some excitement during these sections how Charlie learns to fly on a broom (yes, despite cell phones, witches aren't entirely creatures of the 21st century). We are told of the aerodynamic qualities of different types of woods, the way in which the "ignition" spell must be recited (not just spoken, but "felt), how to go up and down, steer left and right, and how to handle the occasional air pocket. 

A nighttime training flight by Charlie and his aunt out over Elliot Bay and the Sound, with a quiet broom landing for a picnic on Blake Island, appears breathtakingly idyllic.  I don't recall Harry Potter's quidditch lessons being described as lovingly, or in such realistic detail.

The final quarter of the novel races forward faster and faster, as Charlie and his adult friends within the witch "community" face life and death dangers to themselves, to other witches and their children, and to earth itself.  Charlie is forced to overcome not only his shyness, but his own normal teenage angst, angst that feeds upon and enhances psychic confusion from his encounters with his own newly awakened witchcraft powers and his ability to sense the evil in the minds of his enemies.  The plot reaches a temporary resolution at the novel's conclusion, but the scene has clearly been set for a sequel already being written.

This YA book is appropriate for any kid in middle school or older -- especially for those who find themselves tongue-tied with shyness, or who suspect they might be gay.  Or, of course, for those kids who wonder if they might be witches.  Also appropriate for all you adults who secretly read and loved your children's Harry Potter books whenever the kids were away from the house.

It's that bloody moon

"And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come."
--Joel 2:30-31

Tonight marks the occurrence of the "Blood Moon" -- a combination of a normal total lunar eclipse and a "supermoon" (i.e., when the moon is at the nearest point to earth in its elliptical orbit).  Pretty cool, although I wasn't able to spot it low on the horizon from where I live, being surrounded by trees, street lights, and other obstacles.  As I write this (at 8:45 p.m., PDT), the moon appears as a crescent, as I view it as it leaves eclipse mode and rises in the eastern sky.

But the excitement, according to some, is yet to come.

Irvin Baxter, well known philosopher and theologian of "Endtime Ministries" of Plano, Texas, notes that tonight's occurrence marks the fourth "blood moon" in the past four years, a coincidence that constitutes a "tetrad."  These tetrads suggest big events in the offing.  Baxter believes this one precedes the signing of a peace agreement between Palestine and Israel.

I don't need to tell you that such a treaty would be a certain indication that only Seven Years remained until Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.  Which would mean the end of the New York Stock Exchange and the World Cup Soccer matches, among other disturbances to our daily lives.

Tetrads are only minimally rare.  We had one in 1982, and will have another in 2033.  In cosmic terms,  or even biblical terms, those are fairly short periods of time.  Although it's true that bad things occasionally happened to the Jewish people at roughly the time of past tetrads -- the Spanish Inquisition, the Six Day War -- that coincidence doesn't sound too amazing, and it leaves a lot of tetrads occurring when not much exciting happened.  That would include, of course, the most recent 1982 tetrad.

NASA assures us that nothing in the natural order seems to threaten life on earth in the next decades.  The Church of Latter Day Saints denies that the current tetrad means anything.  Pope Francis leaves America seeming cheerful and unconcerned.  The Bible itself seems fairly clear that only God knows the hour and the day when Christ returns (Matt. 24:36), and that He will come "unexpectedly as a thief in the night." (I Thess. 5:2)

All this should be reassuring.  Or if not reassuring in the larger sense, at least reassuring with respect to tonight's "blood moon."

But Baxter and others seem to feel that although only God may know the time of the Second Coming, he has slyly inserted a few clues in portions of the Bible for the benefit of canny and crafty scholars like Irvin Baxter.  In other words, God has inscrutably leaked secret information under the guise of "a usually reliable source."

Perhaps the heavens will indeed soon fall.  But I'm not losing any sleep tonight over the prospect.  The heavens will fall for each of us as individuals, I suspect, long before the Final Catastrophe wipes away the old earth on which we live.
----------------------------------
P.S. It's now 9:10 p.m., and the moon appears as though a mouse had just taken a small nibble off one side of its round disk of green cheese.  It's bloody days are over, for now, and it shines down upon us mortals with its usual silvery radiance. 

Coast to Coast trail -- part 2

Kirkby Stephen is a small, picturesque village in eastern Cumbria (neé Westmorland), snuggled down at the base of the Pennine mountains -- the range that bisects England from north to south.

Perspicacious readers of this blog -- which surely includes you all -- will recall that Kirkby Stephen was the eastern terminus of my hike in May, as I marched resolutely from the Irish Sea, up and down across the high fells of the Lake District, and thence over the rolling hills of Westmorland. 

I'm pleased to announce that I will complete the Coast to Coast hike next July, returning to Kirkby Stephen as our starting point.  Rather than hike alone this time, I'll be joined by five members of my family, including my six-year-old niece Maury.  I completed our bookings yesterday, and all has been confirmed.  The company through which I arrange the hike is -- even as we speak -- booking the ten nights' accommodations that will be required to put up our motley Yankee crew as we traverse the Sceptered Isle..

We will hike a total of 112 miles in nine days of hiking.  I've arranged for us to have a rest day in the market town of Richmond after the third day of hiking, and an extra day once we reach the North Sea, at the picturesque coastal village of Robin Hood's Bay.

Our first day's hike will lead us out of Westmorland ("Cumbria," if you insist), over the Pennines and into Yorkshire.  From that point on, we will be hiking through the Yorkshire Dales and over the North Yorkshire Moors.  All just names to me now, but places that will be fixed indelibly in my mind by the time the hike has been completed.

Actually, Yorkshire will not be totally new to me.  I was a callow lad of 21, off by myself between terms of study in Italy, when I rented a bike in York for a week, and biked a loop around northern Yorkshire.  At one point, I found myself out on the moors -- the same moors we will cross next July -- as night fell, with no accommodations in sight.  I rolled off the road, curled up in a ball, and slept my way fitfully through a rather chilly night.  Luckily, it was June 21, the shortest night of the year.  I eventually made it to the coastal resort town of Scarborough, where I stayed in a youth hostel. (Several shillings a night -- less than a dollar in those uninflated days)

This ancient history is vaguely relevant, because Robin Hood's Bay is a bit north of Scarborough, and -- our trip at an end -- we will need to take a bus to Scarborough where we will find our closest access to the British railway system for our return to London.

How will young Maury hike those 110 miles, you may well ask?  Well, she probably won't.  Her parents plan to take turns each day traveling with her by bus to the next night's lodging or -- if the area is not served by buses -- begging a ride from the van that carries our bags while we hike happily with only a daypack to burden us.  Maury's parents assure me that finding their way will be an adventure, and that neither of them will mind missing certain days of the hike.

July is a long time in the future, but it's fun to make these arrangements now, and ponder the experience far in advance.  If the first half of the Coast to Coast was any indication, it will be a highly enjoyable and memorable experience for us all.

Poltergeists

Poltergeists make up the principal type of spontaneous material manifestation.
--"Pup Dog" in Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip  (his only line of dialogue other than "wurf! wurf!")

If my lawn had not grown to scandalous heights, I would never have dreamed of mowing it in September.  But it had, and I did.  Dreamed of mowing it, that is.

As I may have mentioned, in these parts we don't water our lawns in summer.  By July they grow brownish -- let's say beige -- and stop growing.  No growing, no mowing.  Sometimes the rains come late enough in the fall that the lawns turn green, but otherwise put off growing until spring.  But this year, no.  My lawn was definitely getting out of hand.

So yesterday, I dragged the mower out of the garage, filled it with gas, and pulled the cord.  Or tried to.  It wouldn't start.  This wasn't one of those irritating first mows of the year when you repeatedly pull the cord all the way out, and the motor refuses to turn over.  This was something I've never experienced before.  The cord pulled about four inches and then stopped cold.  Nothing I could do would persuade it to pull out farther, whether I coaxed it slowly and gently, or yanked it with all the fury that I was beginning to feel.

I turned the mower upside down to see if the blade was stuck?  No.  I opened any available apertures to check for problems.  Nothing.

I reconciled myself to buying a new mower.  I dragged the infuriating machine back into the garage, changed back into civilian, non-mowing clothes, and watched the Seahawks.

The Seahawks lost, but that's another story.

By the time that the Packer green and gold was dancing for joy all over my TV screen, it was time for bed.  I went upstairs, began getting undressed, unbuckled my belt -- and the belt fell  apart.  The buckle fell off.  On a fairly new and still attractive belt.  Inspection showed that a tiny screw connecting the buckle to a metal plate that covered the end of the belt was severed.  The belt was useless.

Note to self:  Buy new belt.  Wear shorts tomorrow until mission accomplished.

Seconds later, I climbed into bed with a portion of the Sunday paper I hadn't yet read.  I leaned back on my pillow.  The backboard collapsed against the wall.  What the .....!!!!  A tiny screw (you see a common thread here?), connecting the headboard to the upright post, was severed.  It was irreparable, although fortunately the collapse had no effect on my immediate ability to sleep in the bed.

Let's review the bidding.  Within a few hours:

1.  Lawn mower unexpectedly and inexplicably can't be started.

2.  Tiny screw is severed, making belt unusable.

3.  Tiny screw is severed, forcing me to buy a new bed frame.

Odd coincidence, you may say, but of course merely a coincidence.  I hear you chuckle at my paranoia, my superstition even?

Perhaps you recall that, almost exactly three years ago,  I related how my house cleaner quit.  The scheduler working for the service that provided her advised me that she claimed my house was haunted.  I scoffed.  The scheduler laughed with me, nervously, and informed me that another house cleaner had quit a couple of years earlier, also claiming to be alarmed by "paranormal events" happening in my house. 

I hardly took any of this seriously, except for perhaps that first night at about 2 a.m.. when I awoke and lay in bed wondering if -- as the latest cleaning woman had suggested to her employer -- I had never noticed ghostly presences in my house because I wasn't "sensitive" enough, because I simply wasn't paying attention to what was happening under my very nose -- my insensitive nose.  I sincerely hoped, at 2 a.m., that -- should this be true -- I would continue blissfully unaware in my insensitivity.

So.  I claim nothing.  I don't believe in poltergeists.  I don't think I do.  According to someone, presumably an expert, named Gordon Randall Garrrett, "The poltergeist phenomenon is usually spectacular and is nearly always associated with teen-age neurotics."

I'm neither a teenager nor a neurotic.

Shut up!

I've got to buy a new lawn mower.

Take the bus -- leave the driving to us!

Gabriel Campanerio, Seattle Times

Progress!  Yesterday, the demolition crew made short work of Seattle's downtown Greyhound bus depot at 8th and Stewart, clearing an entire block for construction of a new hotel.  The mission-styled depot, with Spanish tiled roof, had stared listlessly at the street, vacant and boarded up, for about a year, awaiting its obvious fate. 

Greyhound has left its downtown location and moved south to a new depot, near the football and baseball stadiums.

I can't say that I have a lot of nostalgic memories centered on the Seattle depot.  While in grad and law school, I did take the bus a number of times south to my home town, but the train service was better and more enjoyable.  The depot -- like Greyhound depots virtually everywhere in recent years (decades) -- was a bit scary.  It was filled with people looking for the cheapest way to travel, and with others who looked as though they had no destination -- in life or in travel -- and had just come in out of the cold. 

Although I won't really miss the Seattle depot, I do have nostalgic memories from undergraduate days of bussing by Greyhound between my home in Southwest Washington and San Francisco.  Again, I probably took the train more often, but the bus was cheaper, and in some ways more interesting.

Because my travel always fell during school breaks, the buses were filled with fellow students also going home for the holidays.  Their company made bus travel more sociable, and certainly more comfortable psychologically.  We stopped for breaks every two or three hours; I have vivid memories of waking up as we pulled into Redding or Medford in the middle of the night.  Medford at about 2 a.m. had a dreamlike quality as we staggered off the bus into a nearly empty station -- a few locals hanging around listlessly, as though waiting for a long-delayed Portland stagecoach to come through.  In fact, most stations had a café called a "Post House," a name that did call to mind earlier forms of horse-drawn transportation, but where you could now buy a less romantic burger and coke.

Maybe because the trip by bus took longer than that by train, it seemed to awaken stronger emotions -- especially when I was still a homesick freshman: a gradually intensifying sense of joy as the palm trees and the flat agricultural lands of the Sacramento valley were left behind and the highway crossed the forested Siskiyous into the green world of Oregon; a feeling of gloom returning the other direction, as the miles between myself and my family increased.

After leaving school, I still took the bus occasionally.  I recall, sometime in my twenties, sitting in the San Francisco bus depot, waiting for some friends I was visiting to pick me up.  I think that was the first time I realized how depressing a bus depot could really be -- not the dull architecture so much as the feelings of hopelessness I could read in the faces of the crowds sitting about me.  When one of my friends finally arrived, cheerful and full of greetings, I perhaps only imagined a sense of resentment in my gloomy fellow depot-mates -- as though a bright angel had descended into hell and assured me, in full view of the damned, that a mistake had been made and that his chariot awaited to carry me off to salvation.

I've been told that Greyhound service has become substantially more upscale in recent years -- actually enjoyable to ride.  I rarely see Greyhound buses anymore, but when I do see them, they appear sleek and comfortable.  I'm tempted to check out the new Seattle bus station, and see how it looks.

I'll be less interested in how modern the building appears than in watching the people waiting in the depot, in seeing whether their eyes still display the hopelessness and despair that I recall from that experience in San Francisco.

Berkeley 2015

As noted in a post last spring, the University of California had offered my great niece admission to its freshman class in the College of Natural Resources.  Maya accepted that offer, and began classes a couple of weeks ago.

On Sunday, while visiting with family in Sonoma, I traveled to Berkeley -- together with Maya's mother, step father, and younger sister -- to see how Maya was doing.  I can only assume that she's doing fine in her classes -- we didn't talk much about class work, so early in the term -- but it's amply apparent that she has fit in admirably with her classmates and dorm mates, and with the entire Berkeley zeitgeist.

I'd been on the Berkeley campus several times in the past, but each time while caught up in a great hysteria over an afternoon's football game.  I didn't see much farther than the stadium.   "Cal" was a word that formed nothing but half of the phrase "Beat Cal," so far as my undergraduate self was concerned.  And, perhaps, even some of my older selves.

But now, as an older, wiser human being, less prone to wild hormonal swings and with fewer pronounced tendencies to see all things -- including the merits of every college but my own -- in Manichean terms of black and white, evil and virtue, I'm happy to report that I found the Berkeley campus to be quite handsome, both in its natural beauty and in its monumental architecture.  And that -- even more surprising -- I found Cal students -- at least those members of the Cal student body I had the pleasure of meeting -- to be quite charming and seemingly highly intelligent.

Who'd a thunk it?

We visited Maya's floor of her dorm, a floor occupied by both men and women.  I knew all about, and was expecting, this bi-gender living arrangement, but it contrasted vividly with my own memories of women's dorms that served as closely guarded fortified castles -- castles that permitted male presence only under highly restrictive conditions and for severely limited periods of time, castles whose drawbridges were raised nightly at a relatively early hour -- preventing both entrance and egress.

Nowadays, guys and girls share communal rest rooms, brushing their teeth nightly, side by side:  An activity that would have been hard to envision, back in days when it would have been equally hard to
imagine women eating dinner -- or wanting to -- side by side with men in the same dining hall.  ("Dining halls" are now something of a misnomer; dorm residents today eat all over campus in pleasant buildings that look like public cafeterias, open from the street.)

Not only have the dorms changed, but so has the zeitgeist.  I went to school just as student unrest was becoming the defining characteristic of American universities -- and it was the Berkeley campus that was leading the charge.  Now?  Well, Maya and her classmates had a class assignment to organize a protest, and, apparently, to document their achievement.  They pounced on the crisis presented by California's current severe drought, and organized a (tiny) protest against the watering of lawns.  My family was drafted to swell the number of participants that were to appear in photographs of this somewhat smallish demonstration.

But I'm now proud to say that I did not go through life without participating in a Berkeley student protest.

I enjoyed the day's visit immensely, liked the campus, was happy to see Maya so happy.  And I was gratified to realize how smoothly I could make, for a day, the mental transition back to being an undergraduate -- assisted by the tactful willingness of Maya's friends to feign belief that we fell into an age grouping only a few years beyond graduation.

And the best part of our "return to campus" was of course this: When Maya finally told us that she really had to finish schoolwork for her next day's classes -- we simply hugged goodbye, jumped into our car, and returned to our adult lives, adult lives free of burning midnight oil and of nagging guilt over still unwritten essays..

View Master

Today is the day that Queen Elizabeth became the longest reigning monarch in British history, surpassing even the amazingly long reign of Queen Victoria. 

I was regaling my Facebook readers with news of this anniversary, noting that, as a lad, I had collected View-Master reels of scenes from her magnificent 1953 coronation.  As I did so, it occurred to me that most of my audience probably had no idea what a "View-Master" was.  I duly noted this sad fact in my post, and told them -- in so many words -- that, for purposes of my subject, if they had no idea what I was talking about, it really wasn't worth explaining. This disclaimer applies to so much of what I say on Facebook that it was accepted without comment.

But I was hit by twin waves of nostalgia and curiosity -- whatever happened to the ubiquitous View-Master?

As the photos suggest, the View-Master was a device designed to give the viewer stereoscopic images.  The "reel" or disc, when slipped into the viewer, gave each of your eyes a slightly different view of the subject -- just as your eyes view objects in real life -- and your brain combined the two images into a three-dimensional image.  Each reel contained fourteen photographic slides, which produced seven 3-D images, one following another as the reel was turned by clicking a lever.

The viewer was so simple to operate, and the reels so easy to load, that the device was ideal for children.  But, at least in those halcyon days when I owned my viewer, View-Masters were also quite popular with adults -- not just for the stereoscopic effect but for the scenic subject matter: color slide film for cameras and slide projectors did exist by that time, but was not widely owned or used.

View-Master reels made good, inexpensive gifts for both adults and children.  I owned many reels of national parks -- which also could be purchased at gift shop souvenir counters in the parks themselves.  I had a number of reels showing scenes from fairy tales and Disney movies.  I believe View-Master gave me my introduction to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  And, of course, there was Queen Elizabeth's coronation. 

After several years of post World War I development, View-Master was acquired and marketed by Sawyer's, Inc. -- the nation's leading producer of picture post cards -- and introduced to the public at the New York World's Fair in 1939.  Its golden years appear to have been during the 1950s -- the very time that I  owned mine and was mulling over the elaborate rituals in Westminster Abbey.

View-Master was sold to another company in 1966, a purchaser which subsequently marketed the viewer and reels primarily as children's toys.  The views of scenery and National Parks were largely replaced by images from TV shows and cartoons. 

So what finally happened to View-Master?  Why did it disappear?  The answer is that it didn't.  It's still around.  In fact, according to Wikipedia, 2015 is the year View-Master goes digital.  Instead of viewing tiny slides set in a cardboard reel, the viewer will scan plastic cards with his smart phone.  In some way, a 3-D image will then be revealed.

Don't understand it?  Well, neither do I.  But you soon will have a chance to figure it out: the new digital View-Master is scheduled to go on sale next month (October).

When I find myself yearning for the good old non-digital View-Master with scenic views of the Grand Canyon and the Matterhorn -- together with the occasional coronation -- I remind myself that what I'm really yearning for are the good old days of being 12 or 13 again.  It's an easy mistake to make, and one quite common among those of us past the first blush of youth.  It's rarely fatal.

Summer's end

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Yesterday was Labor Day, and tomorrow Seattle kids begin wending their way back to the classroom.  Every kid who has ever lived, I suspect, has exclaimed -- "Summer's over?  Already?  We hardly did anything!  Why did we waste so much time doing nothing?"

Of course, all that "doing nothing," from an adult's perspective, is what makes a child's summer seem so wondrous, so magical.  But that's not the point of today's lecture.

Analogizing life to a season, or to a year of seasons, is a cliché.  But it's become a cliché because it's an analogy that comes to mind so spontaneously, and because it expresses our emotions so perfectly. 

We begin every summer full of plans and hope.  We accomplish, perhaps, a few of those plans, perhaps traveling for a couple of weeks.  But we spend most of the summer shopping, mowing the lawn, driving the kids to camp, fixing meals, and -- of course -- going to work.  And suddenly the nights are chillier, the leaves are turning, summer is over and -- looking back -- we can hardly recall how our days were passed.

A week ago, Tim Kreider wrote a piece for the New York Times which expressed and expanded upon this commonly-felt frustration.   He had planned to spend the summer in Iceland, a visit he'd been hoping to make and repeatedly putting off for years.  "The summer looked as wide open and shimmering with possibility as the summers of childhood."  He didn't, of course.  One obstacle after another seemed to spring up in his path.  And now, the summer was over and he looked back with -- as he put it -- a sense of "desolation."

It wasn't just that he had delayed Iceland for another year.  Iceland was -- again, as he puts it -- but one exterior sign of an inward "existential panic."

... [I]f you're a procrastinator and a ditherer like me you can manage to sustain until well into midlife the delusion that you might yet get around to doing all the things you meant to do ....  But at some point you start to suspect that you might not end up doing that stuff after all, and have to consider the possibility that the life you have right now might pretty much be it.

And we aren't just talking about last summer, he reminds us.  As he feels at summer's end, he no doubt will also someday feel lying in a hospital bed, sensing the life drain from his body.  Nothing will change.

I'll probably still be evading the same truth I'm evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I chose.  And my dissatisfactions with it are really with my own character, with my hesitation and timidity.

Mr. Krieder speaks for all of us -- at least for most of us -- doesn't he?  In June, I was excited as we approached the solstice, the days increasingly long and warm and sunny.  Summer seemed to stretch ahead far into the horizon of time, so much time to do so many things. 

I did have a couple of wonderful hiking trips, and during those trips time slowed down dramatically; so much occurred each day that a day on trek was felt as a week or more of normal, daily life.  But most of the summer, I was not trekking.  I was sitting around the house -- reading, playing with the computer, walking well-worn walks around my neighborhood.  Time passed.

And now, it's the day after Labor Day.  And as summer passed, so, metaphorically, we all draw ever closer to the Labor Day of our entire lives.

We envy a child's ability to do nothing all summer, and enjoy it.  Analogously, I suppose we should value our own lives not just for life's great events -- the travel, the marriages, the births, the job promotions -- but also for the quiet nothingness of our daily lives.  "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans," wrote a guy named Allen Saunders in -- where else? -- Reader's Digest (later absorbed into lyrics by John Lennon).  We see the truth in that, but something tells us, and has told centuries of poets before us, that a life filled with forgettable days has been a life wasted.

As Lucy told Charlie Brown, "I don't want any Downs! I just want Ups and Ups and Ups and Ups."

Macbeth, himself no ditherer or procrastinator, became King of Scotland.  But even he, his life seemingly filled with sound and fury, fully understood that sound and fury weren't enough;  life still crept by, day by day, and ended in a tomb.

"Life sucks, and then you die."  Shakespeare just expanded on the thought, and expressed it more eloquently.

Encyclopedic memories

We were as excited as when we'd bought our new car,
and it, too, weighed a ton, ... 

Thus begins a poem -- a hymn almost -- that relives a family's joyful purchase over fifty years ago.  The poem, by Jane Shore and appearing in this week's New Yorker, is entitled, simply, "Encyclopaedia Britannica." 

The poet reminds us that before Wikipedia, before the Internet, there was the encyclopedia -- a publication -- printed and illustrated on tangible paper -- that, at its most expansive, attempted to summarize and explain all knowledge of any importance.

The poem brings to mind, prosaically and less poetically, my own fond memories of the World Book Encyclopedia.

I'd always known of encyclopedias, of course, from the school library.  But until I was about 11, I had never dreamed of having my very own, within reach at all times -- ever available to solve all puzzles -- to enable us to replace, as Ms. Shore's verse reminds me, our accepted opinions with verifiable facts.  It was in that year that the salesman for the Book of Knowledge came door to door, displaying his sample volumes.  I was overwhelmed not only by the number of bound volumes in the set, but by the presence of a limited number of full-color plates.  (I recall specifically the page that showed samples of various precious stones in full color; colored illustrations and photos in those days, even in, say, the National Geographic magazine, were not common.) 

Please, please, please, I begged.  We have to buy it.

My dad hesitated, but finally said no.  We already had a set of the Book of Knowledge, he claimed -- his own set from his own childhood.  He'd dig it out of storage and give it to me.

And so he did, and I was grateful.  But it wasn't the same.  It was old, old in every way.  It was the 1923 edition -- the year in which, ironically, my dad was himself 11 years old.  It might as well, from my callow perspective, have been the 1823 edition. 

I was an inter-planetary travel devotee long before I turned eleven, and I was scandalized to see the distance between earth and various heavenly bodies illustrated by drawings that showed express trains barreling along on inter-planetary railway tracks.  This is how long it would take a train, going 60 mph, to reach Mars, the volume exclaimed.

Well, really! 

The issue simmered below the surface, until a few years later, a nice lady came to our door. I was now 15.  She was met by my mother, rather than by my father.  My mother agreed I needed a modern encyclopedia of my own..  The order was placed.  I have no idea how much it cost.  More, I'm sure, that we could afford.  But, I'm proud to say, my parents ranked education higher than they did many other discretionary indulgences.

A few weeks later, I came home from ninth grade to find an enormous box waiting for me in the living room.  My mother and I opened it together.  Each of the nineteen volumes -- in pebbly-grained red and blue bindings -- was carefully wrapped in paper.  Over a matter of hours, each volume was reverently unwrapped and given an initial inspection.  They met with my full approval, even though, looking back, many of the articles now seem rather rudimentary for the studious 15-year-old that I was -- or, at least, as I like to recall my being.  They certainly didn't match the level of the more erudite essays to be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as I was to learn in high school.  But they were mine.  I was ecstatic.
 
Jane Shore's poem concludes that her Britannica now

... resides
in a climate-controlled storage unit on River Road,
in the cartons I packed after my parents died:
...
between covers, warped and moldering,
its defunct contributors bulldozed under
for eternity, as in a family graveyard --

Well, that sucks!

I'm happy to reveal that my 1955 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, together with a number of subsequent annual supplements, now rests proudly on display within a few feet of my computer, in a dining room bookcase. (One shelf above my dad's Book of Knowledge.)  I often pull out a volume, either seeking a specific subject or simply browsing.  Yes, the material is dated, provincial, naïve -- and at times embarrassingly so.  The entry for "New York City" begins "New York City is probably the greatest city in the world."

I've grown much older, more complex in my thinking, and somewhat jaded, even cynical, as I compare myself now to myself as a boy of 15. But my World Book has not.  It still insists, it still reminds me, in a touchingly Whiggish, Macaulay-esque manner, that all of history had been but prelude to mid-20th century American civilization, and that we of 1955 were then living in the best of all possible worlds.

It's nice to be reminded of days when both America and I were so young and optimistic.

Bleeding ink

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

--Hemingway

 

I once advised a fellow blogger to write a post whenever he felt had something he felt compelled to say.  But not to write anything just for the sake of writing.

I offered this advice -- its soundness obvious --back when we were both writing a couple of times a week.  But he long ago abandoned his blog, and now ... well, if you check in on the Northwest Corner every so often, you've noted that I have written two posts in the last two months.  And neither was much more than a quick summary of a travel experience -- certainly nothing that required any real thought.

So what's up?  Am I just following my own advice? Do I write so little of late because I've stopped having anything to say? 

Part of my excuse is Facebook.  Ideas that used to result in a moderately long blog are now compressed into a short blurb on Facebook.  It's certainly easier.  And I get an instant indication of my readers' interest or lack thereof in what I had to say.  Instant gratification.  Or not.

But ideas on Facebook that require more than four sentences to convey run into a blank wall of indifference -- i.e., no one reads them -- which can be much more daunting than writing a blog, whose readership I can fondly imagine to lie in the thousands.  And even if I should get twenty "likes" on Facebook, I can't fool myself that I have said anything profound.

A more worrisome possible "excuse" is that because of advancing age or laziness or too many past posts -- I've run out of new ideas that might move me to write.  And yet, even within the past week my mind has been brooding over such issues as Donald Trump, the death of Oliver Sacks, the peculiar weather this year of the Northwest, readings I've been doing about Central Asia, the volatility of the stock market, the wisdom of Joan Didion, my nephew's new profession as a high school teacher, and the conflict between religious beliefs and one's duties as a governmental officer. 

Somehow, unfortunately, the national press seemed to have analyzed most of these subjects to death.  Why this should now concern me, when it never did in years past, I'm not sure.  Maybe I keep raising the bar for the quality of my writing -- which I suppose is admirable, but not if the bar's new height intimidates me into writing nothing at all.  After all, as I've discussed in earlier posts, I write primarily for myself -- to help clarify my own thinking.  I'm hardly a correspondent  for a newspaper or magazine, with a salary to earn and a reputation to maintain.

I seem to recall articles I've read about "writer's block."  The advice often given was that I should write anything -- anything at all, however trite or boring.  Just to get myself back into the habit of crystalizing thoughts and putting them to paper (or to blog, in my case). 

So consider this my trite and boring attempt at self-help.  Observe me on this first day of September, a new month and a new season, walking out of the vast literary desert of July and August into the promised land, into a land of milk and honey, into vast lush fields of literary fertility.  A come-back, the dawn of a new era of productive blogomania for the Northwest Corner. 

Well, we'll see.