On Buck Lake

An annual herring festival: newyorker.com

An annual herring festival: newyorker.com.

Me First! Over Here! I'm Starving!

This picture is from the website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I saw no accompanying title or text that would tell me what bird these babies are. Perhaps swallows? Birders would know. Maybe the Lab of O did not want to insult its regular membership with something so obvious. I think I see what looks like a scissor tail; that's a clue. The coloring looks right. In the distant past I saw very young baby swallows in their mud nests and they opened their beaks just like the picture. I will stand corrected if need be. Look at how demanding they are. How strident. How seemingly outraged at the glacial pace of the poor overworked parent flying toward them. Faster!

A Hero of our Time - The New York Review of Books

A Hero of our Time - The New York Review of Books.

NYRblog - One-Term President? - The New York Review of Books

NYRblog - One-Term President? - The New York Review of Books.

The Inland Salt Waters of Cascadia–the Salish Sea

We live a mile up the hill from Admiralty Inlet, but we never said so and still don't. Growing up here I didn't even know there was an Admiralty Inlet, much less that it connected the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Puget Sound. We called the whole thing Puget Sound and let it go at that.

Now there's a new name for all of the waterways from Desolation Sound in British Columbia in the north to Budd Inlet down at Olympia, Washington in the south. It's the Salish Sea–an "over-arching term," says Knute Berger, rather like the Great Lakes.

The part of this newly named Salish Sea where we live–Admiralty Inlet–extends from Point Wilson just north of Port Townsend across to Admiralty Head on Whidbey Island down to the southern tip of that island with a line across to our side on the Kitsap Peninsula. Our own Point No Point, with its lighthouse, marks the entry to Puget Sound proper.

I like the new designation. No need to say any longer that I live in Puget Sound country. I live in the Salish Sea. No. On the Salish Sea. No. By the Salish Sea? Well, it doesn't work as well as I thought.

Why Doesn't the Cliché Just Go Away?

We have maligned the poor cliché long enough. If clichés are really littering our precious literary landscape, why then do we not simply shove them into the dustbin of history? Oh, oh, there's one. Another bit of trash to mar the language. Dustbin of history. Leon Trotsky telling off the Mensheviks during the Russian Revolution, 1917.

And speaking of dustbins, what about "bite the dust?" That's from Homer (or so says Wikipedia) and that alone should give it some standing. What are clichés anyway? How do they differ from idioms, proverbs, adages, or all those familiar sayings we don't tag as cliché?

I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. We know clichés when we see them, but the simple reason we won't get rid of them is that they work. A cliché immediately calls to mind in a word or two what several sentences might fail to convey. 

That said, at the end of the day, and between you and me, let me make it clear that we stand at the brink of a defining moment when all is said and done that—I'm getting carried away here—that, uh, don't tell me, I'm running out of clichés!

On Staying in Place

People moving from place to place these days number fewer than those who did so 50 years ago–even though the population was smaller then by well over a million. I haven't the exact figures at hand or even a source for this information, but it's a fact nonetheless. People aren't moving as much these days. Maybe it's the recession or maybe there's a stay-home movement. Maybe people are harking back to the days of family, church, clubs, and familiar things like neighbors gathering on the old front porch.

Interior Voice:  Porch? People did not gather on your front porch in ye old neighborly fashion when you were growing up. When people came to your front porch they hurried inside out of the rain. You grew up in Puget Sound country, remember, where the front porch was, quite sensibly, the place for guests to shake off their dripping raincoats and where the back porch was for muddy kids and wet dogs to get cleaned up.

Perhaps the new stay-where-you-are phenomenon signals an upcoming era of settling in and sticking around. Oddly enough and contrary to what actually happened, I think that's what the MOTH and I thought would be our lot when we were first married. 

Though we never said as much, I think we saw ourselves surrounded by the familiar. Things like family gatherings at big dining tables, picnics with homemade potato salad, piano playing, talk of baseball and work, exchanges of whispered gossip, golf games, Monopoly games, community clubs, walks, hikes, bikes, and–you won't believe this–kids growing up like we did, including being out of sight for most of the day, swimming in the lakes, tromping in the woods, beachcombing, jumping off the docks.

Interior Voice: This nostalgia thing is a bit overdrawn. Your own kids have reminded you that decades later they were out of sight most of the day, walking with chums to swim at Flat Rock, exploring the Varna neighborhood, the Lucinda Avenue neighborhood, the lagoon on campus, the cornfields off Annie Glidden….

There was a long stretch after the Second World War when it was typical of families to move time and again, just like we did. Critics regarded our nation as rootless, as coming apart at the seams, and as suffering from anomie. Bookshelves groaned with titles like Vance Packard's "A Nation of Strangers," (1972).

When was the last time we moved? To Buck Lake, here, twelve years ago–back to our home county and to my home ground. We came back far too late to be recognized as belonging. When we were building our cabin, one irate fellow (who lived a half mile away) stomped up the trail from the lake's edge and yelled accusingly: "Do you realize you're building on state land?!!"

Interior Voice: This community had free rein on this land all those years you were away. How can you still harp on this incident? That poor fellow really believed this was public land. That's what comes of leaving a place. You have a misplaced sense of placeness if you can't appreciate that.

The Habit of Command

A song has been running through my mind, and I've had enough of the tune, the marching rhythm, and the ambiguous words. Two silly lines go round and round. No further melody comes to mind; no further words surface. Maddening.

What's the matter with Father? He's all right!
What's it matter if Father's hair is white?

Okay, okay. Think. Why this song ? Why can't I wipe the tape? The father in this particular house has adult children who left home long ago. He appears to be quite all right. Come to think of it, he's always all right. Meaning, he's always all -- right.

Always right? Like Father Knows Best? Is that it? Well, if that's it, I can explain, and if the melody lingers on, I'll try something else.

The MOTH, as the eldest of six (the youngest was 18 years his junior), enjoyed the happy circumstance of being an only child for three whole years. Not only that, he was a beautiful child with a sunny disposition. Look at the old photos and you see an adorable and charming little blue-eyed towhead smiling at the camera.

Owing to another happy circumstance, his mother's sole job was to take care of him. This because he lived with his adoring parents in his grandmother's commodious house in Seattle. It was his good fortune that in this same house lived a maiden aunt and a bachelor uncle who managed, quite expertly, to help the household run smoothly. Nearby lived aunts and uncles and cousins who all doted on him as the baby in an extended family.

When the string of siblings all did finally arrive (they had of course moved by this time), he was practiced in calling the shots. The early years as the beloved and indulged first son instilled confidence. What was more natural than his easing into the directive mode?

Thus from childhood, as we can plainly see, began his lifelong habit of command. This is not to say that his younger siblings snapped to attention at his every whim any more than did his later colleagues or his own family, but merely to suggest that, like privileged families with servants to order around, he did get valuable practice in taking command, assuming responsibility, shouldering (or casting) blame, and being the decider. He also got used to being right.

Now will that silly song leave me be?

No Walking in the Wind

Yesterday was warm and rainy and good for walking. Today, not so good. I do not choose to walk in the wind.

The day calls to mind a verse from Czeslaw Milosz that he attributes (I think) to one Theodore Bujnicki, claiming (or so it seems) that it is the only poem that fellow ever wrote, or, rather "Dictated--because it is not the skill of the hand/That writes poetry, but water, trees,/And the sky...".

LITHUANIA. Land of persistent bad weather,
Torn by winds as the shore cliffs are,
Damaged by centuries and gods,
Draw swords from the sky's white sheaths,
Pour down hail, let it strike in abundance,
Give us pathos and put fire in our mouths!

Silence!

Have You Looked at Your Toes Lately?

My Norwegian cousins have now left the country, leaving their gifts of books, maps, flags, wool mittens, pewter pins, cheese -- and the best cheese slicer in existence. Looking through a book on Trondheim, I found myself sensing once again that the Norwegian mind was basically of a practical bent, of having an empirical tendency, a grounded way of thinking.

Grounded is the wrong word for a country of mariners, but nonetheless, besides ships on the seas and fish in the markets, I think of high mountain pastures, carded wool, knitted socks.

No reason to think this way especially. The arts are always emphasized, and sometimes I do think of Edvard Grieg, Henrik Ipsen, Edvard Munch. It's just that in matters of fact and value, I think of my own ancestors as more focused on facts. 

When it comes to speculation and fantasy, I harbor the notion that it was those souls captured from the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere -- the unfortunates hauled back by the Vikings -- who shaped the more romantic influences of the culture on the rocky coasts of Norway. Did not the Vikings bring back something besides loot?

This is all based on the fact that my second toe is shorter than my big toe. Certain genes crossing the Hellespont and all that.

The Cake Mistake

Carefully following the directions (I've been known to do otherwise), I baked a  Swedish Nut Cake according to Marlys's recipe, carefully cutting an oblong piece of tan-colored parchment paper to fit the bottom of a 9 by 13-inch baking pan. Out of the oven, I carefully turned the cake upside down onto a cooling rack while I carefully followed the directions for the cream cheese frosting. After the cake was cool enough, I applied the frosting to what was now the top of the sheet cake and then left the scene to wait for the frosting to set up a bit before I cut the cake into sections for the freezer.

Returning, I took up the knife and began to cut through the cake. It was oddly resistant but I persisted and succeeded, finally, in coming up with the six sections. I wrapped five sections in foil and then picking up the sixth I saw a tiny piece of what looked like cake crust protruding at one corner. I tried picking it off, but it didn't budge. I tugged at it, but it refused to move. I looked at it more carefully. It was parchment paper. Yes, and I had frosted over all 9 by 13 of it.

Books I Didn't Buy

Instead of clicking onto Amazon.com and ordering two books that I simply had to have, I checked the impulse. Pause when tempted, I told myself. Better yet, do more than pause.

The books in question were reviewed in the NYBR by Steven Mithen and sounded exactly like the kind of books I usually order (and then leave on the shelf, unread). The title of the review was "Freedom Through Cooking," which caught my attention, but it was the titles of the books that drew me in:   

    Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, Basic Books, 309 pp., $26.95    

    Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language by Dean Falk, Basic Books, 240 pp., $26.95

I read the review. Fascinating, thought I.

For centuries people have glorified the exploits of the clever men from the Stone Age and onwards who wielded their inventive tools, who slayed dragons (and each other), and who reaped the just rewards of superior power in the physical world.

How gratifying it would be to see turnabout as fair play: how men, especially, would now be called upon to bestow some credit on those Stone Age women who, through cooking and childrearing, "provided the causes and conditions for the evolution of large brains and language." How astonishing it would be to see women's work taken seriously -- as central, even, to evolutionary progress.

Maybe the books will come out in paperback one day. Wonder if I'll still be interested.

"Ah, neighbourhood, neighbourhood, dead and buried art thou with Robin Hood." -- Thomas Nashe, 1592

As I walked back down East Hill toward our entry porch, I saw two men in black suits advancing toward me like soldiers in step. Or, rather, like expressionless mannequins in a department store window or maybe IBM look-alikes from another era.

Recognizing their mission, and, as well, determined to accept no leaflets, I waved a cheery hello as they approached. The elder and obvious leader of the suits introduced the younger as Sidney and then himself as James. We were immediately on a first-name basis.

They halted their steps short of the railing, and I short of the stepping stones, and, having established the distance, we stood this ground for the next few minutes of our politely sparring conversation.

I asked, knowing they knew I knew, "And your mission this sunny morning?"

James replied, "We stopped by to ask if you are reading your Bible and if you are attending church every Sunday. As you know, we live in sinful times. Certainly you remember a time when we were a God-fearing people. A time of faithful, churchgoing communities. When children were well mannered. When adults were generous and kind to their neighbors. Nowadays...." [He went on to list some of our sordid moral shortcomings.]

"I see things a bit differently," I said, mildly. "Don't we usually look to a past that was golden? But really, was the past that great -- do you think, Sidney?" Sidney, who looked to me like a serious, studious Jamaican -- and all the darker for his starched white collor -- lowered his gaze and waited for Leader James to reply.

In the pause that followed I addressed Sidney once again. "If I had to guess where you're from, I'd say Jamaica." Big bright smile. His family was indeed from Jamaica. I asked James where he was from and there followed a much longer answer involving several cities, towns, and states across the land.

Before James could recover his script, I volunteered that I did in fact read the Bible upon occasion -- a bit of Genesis here, Ecclesiastes there -- and that I attended church most Sundays as a Unitarian-Universalist.

Silence.

James nodded a solemn farewell. Wordlessly, the two black-suited men stepped back, literature intact, and took their leave. 

A Swamp by Any Other Name...

The MOTH (Man Of The House) is burning the brush pile that runs like a strangely mishapen caterpillar along the edge of the swamp. To start burning at one end of the caterpillar would be ill advised. The local fire department is clear: make a 3 x 4 rectangle of fire with a nearby adult supplied with a bucket of water -- plus a hose. We are in compliance if one is not fussy about our substituting a wide swamp for a narrow hose, especially since the swamp is right there and the hose doesn't reach.

A fire brigade would call a swamp a swamp, but even after they hear us say swamp, visitors avoid calling our swamp a swamp. The word has an air of the unpleasant. Skunk cabbage grows in the swamp.

Swamp conjures up those "ck" words. Muck out the swamp. Yuck. Perhaps it's the "ump" sound that does it. Pull your boot out of our swamp, ummph. It sucks. The mud sticks. Ick.

When we're overwhelmed with unpleasant toil (or soil), we say we're swamped.

Despite all this, we persist in calling our swamp a swamp. Urban types say wetlands. Polite types, bog. Others, marsh. So far no one has called our swamp a quagmire.

An Old Curmudgeon Has His Say

I've been a Gore Vidal fan ever since he wrote "Willawaw." He is now pretty much forgotten in this country, but the Europeans still like to hear his outrageous observations. Perhaps, like me, they like him better as an essayist than as a novelist.

Below are some excerpts from a recent "Times" article written by London interviewer Tim Teeman (whoever he is):

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.”

In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”...

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.” The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”...

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

A Towering Reform

Jonathan Chait in "The New Republic" writes the following:
So, it’s worth pointing out that, for all the flaws of the process, Obama appears to be on track to sign one of the towering social reforms in American history—the most important change in our social contract since at least 1965, or (I’d argue) even longer. Even the most conservative of the bills working its way through Congress would regulate the health insurance market to prevent the discriminatory practices that ruin the lives of the sick and make vulnerable workers fear to change jobs or strike out on their own. It would start to rationalize the practice of medicine and slow the explosive growth in costs that have gobbled up any growth in wages for many years. (The establishment of the Independent Medicare Advisory Commission, charged with targeting wasteful practices, would constitute a massive reform on its own.)

You Can Fool a Lot of People for a Long Time

Here are some entries from the 1989 book "They Never Said It" that I found in "The Economist." It's enough to give one pause about using quotations.

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson” (or anything like it). “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver” is a line from a play, not a quote from Hermann Goering. “Let them eat cake” began life in Rousseau’s “Confessions,” not the mouth of Marie-Antoinette. Voltaire never said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And there is no reason to think Abraham Lincoln ever said “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”—though it is evidently true that you can fool a lot of people for a long time with the aid of books. The quip “Too much checking on the facts has ruined many a good news story” has long been attributed to an American newspaper magnate, Roy Howard; needless to say, it appears to be an invention.

Green Heron Near Hood Canal

A Retold Tale of Retail

An excerpt from Harold Meyerson's article in "The American Propect" a couple days ago:

Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.

Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.

Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.

Decline and Fall

We recently looked at a Netflix DVD, "The Jewel in the Crown." In some 12 hours of screen time, we listened to one character after another instruct some servant or sepoy that England was both "mother and father" to this jewel of India.

The English actors portrayed their characters as true believers in the benefits of their long colonial rule of India -- England as a good mother and father. I never quite knew what was meant by that. Queen Victoria and Albert? The Anglican church? The church-related schools? The occupying military? All of it? Anyway, they did not question their position, except for the character of Sarah Layton, who exclaimed at one point, "Three hundred years!"

If the characters treated the subjugated Indians with a courteous contempt --and they certainly did -- they also made their superiority painfully clear to their fellow countrymen (and women) who were not of the "old school" or not of their class -- like the teachers and preachers and even the lesser regimental types. 

All through the movie -- which took place in the 1940s during the final years of  colonial rule -- the English way of life in India was under attack from all quarters and things were falling apart. The English soldiered on to hold up the side, but independence finally came for India in 1947 in the last scenes of the film.

I bring up this old TV series from the 1980s because it's one of my favorites: the characters (and the actors who play them) are fascinating (like the hateful Ronald Merrick). The story is intriguing in its meandering, and the scenes on location are worth the show. Too, it resonates. Something about the clash of cultures, East meets West, never the 'twain, empire, insurgencies, war, enemies, alliances. All that.

Anything Worth Doing...

"Anything worth doing is worth doing well" is a saying I have often twisted by saying that Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. I say it in all seriousness and am usually met with a flash of disapproval. How can I say such a thing? Well, look at it this way: Icarus also flew.

            Failing and Flying   

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake …

But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. …

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

                                                    -- Jack Gilbert

It's a Test I Failed

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. -- Dan Rather

I failed this test. I cannot not think of The Lone Ranger when I hear the William Tell Overture. Does this prove that I am not an intellectual snob? Not likely, because -- and I say this ruefully -- in some ways I most definitely am. I look down on certain kinds of music, publications, entertainments, architecture, dialects, authors, artists -- and all the while I realize that this tendency is pathetic. The very singers and songwriters I won't listen to will be worshiped in a future age. The comic strips I won't even glance at will be heralded as high art. The movies that I abhor will be glorified. On and on it will go and the likes of me will be mocked, laughed at, and scorned.

From Raw to Cooked? That's What Launched Us as Human?

John Brockman in "Edge" talks about Richard Wrangham's book:

Wrangham believes that humanity was launched by an ape learning to cook. In a burst of evolution around two million years ago, our species developed the family relations that make us such a peculiar kind of animal. Cooking made us women, men and lovers.

"We behave like our two closest relatives," Wrangham says. "Chimpanzees and bonobos, because in spite of first appearances, we face somewhat similar kinds of problems to each of those species. Cooking makes our behavior partly chimpanzee-like because it intensifies a chimpanzee-like division of labor. Self-domestication, on the other hand, makes us bonobo-like by selecting for a youthful psyche. In both cases human behavior echoes the biology of our cousins, though never exactly copying it."

One of Wrangham's central ideas is that we should cherish the parallels between humans and other great apes, because they help us to understand our own behavior. "For all our self consciousness, we humans continue to follow biological rules. Life is easier if we understand those rules. Recognition of the deep contradictions in humanity binds us to our past, and also lights our future."

Other themes to his thinking: "We still have much to learn; We should not be afraid of biology; Dichotomous thinking (e.g. biology vs. culture; women vs. men) is almost always unhelpful "Evolutionary anthropology has excessively neglected females."

— JB

RICHARD WRANGHAM is a professor of biology and anthropology at Harvard University who studies chimpanzees, and their behavior, in Uganda. His main interest is in the question of human evolution from a behavioral perspective. His most recent book is Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

They Dined on Mince and Slices of Quince, Which They Ate with a Runcible Spoon

The Owl and the Pussycat

 

I

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea     In a beautiful pea green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money,     Wrapped up in a five pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above,     And sang to a small guitar, 'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,       What a beautiful Pussy you are,           You are,           You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

II

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!     How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried:     But what shall we do for a ring?' They sailed away, for a year and a day,     To the land where the Bong-tree grows And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood     With a ring at the end of his nose,           His nose,           His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose.

III

'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling     Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.' So they took it away, and were married next day     By the Turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince, and slices of quince,     Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,     They danced by the light of the moon,           The moon,           The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.                                                 -- Edward Lear

A well written life is almost as rare as a well spent one. -- Thomas Carlyle

One reason I am not ever going to write an account of my childhood, adolescence, or any other of life's passages such as "leaving home," is that I would be guilty of bowdlerizing. No, bowdlerize isn't the right word. You bowdlerize when you cut out the indelicate parts of classic texts. Thomas Bowdler cleaned up Shakespeare and the Old Testament to make them more suitable for family viewing, so to speak.

The Shakespeare plays we read in high school were bowdlerized, as were our Bible stories in Sunday school. Prudish, perhaps, but understandable, at least for that time.

What I would do, probably, is just make up stuff -- like Parson Weems in his history of Washington (think cherry tree). I could write a celebratory family history and make extravagant claims about aristocrats, artists, adventurers, navigators, inventors or anything else that would elevate the ancestors. This tack works better with idealized people like the Founders Fathers, though, because immigrant stories of marvelous ancestors has long been a genre subject to well founded suspicion.

More likely, I would simply cast a rosy glow on the recent past and view everything through an agreeable lens. Make everybody irresistibly adorable. History, as they say, is a fable agreed upon. But who would agree with my life or my family's life as a fable? Me as Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm? Hardly. My family as the bucolic bunch in a rollicking tale like Chicken Every Sunday? Assuredly not.

I do have some examples of family history, some models to go by, but it's a toss-up as to their veracity. My mother wrote an account of emigrating to the USA that could have been titled, with a nod to V.S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival." And the account of my father's emigration to this country was an "as told to" story (as told to my mother ) and somehow reminds me of Emily Dickinson's poem, "Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant."

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind. --

There's an old Soviet joke about revisionism. When the Soviets had a change of leadership and the history books were rewritten, the wags would say, "The trouble with history is that you just can't tell what's going to happen yesterday."

"Earthworms do it," says Steward Brand

Steward Brand, in "Edge" [in part]:

Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate keeps heating up. So it's a global issue, a global phenomenon. It doesn't happen in just one area. The planetary perspective now is not just aesthetic. It's not just perspective. It's actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized solutions that involves forms of governance we don't have yet. It involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don't usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the environmental movement stand in the way of that.

STEWART BRAND is cofounder and co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation.

More Nonsense Poems for August. This from Alice in Wonderland

Twas Brillig

Twas Brillig
And the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe

Second Chorus

Twas Brillig
And the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe

Nothing Happens in August -- Knock on Wood

During the dog days of August, nothing much happens by way of earth-shaking news. People are at the beach, on the road, visiting family, or whatever, but they are not much interested in news. Nothing's happening.

The president is away from the White House, Congress has fled, and news people are digging into their files for stuff that got left behind till now -- stories featuring animals, refugees, scoundrels, heroes, and dumbed-down versions of the financial crises and health care proposals.

But wait! Look at history.

World War I started in August of 1914. (Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by a Serb in June, and in early August one European country after another declared war.)

World War II ended in August of 1945. (We dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that was that.)

Hurricane Katrina happened in August of 2005. (It hit southeast Louisiana on Monday, August 29 and caused death and destruction.)

Stuff happens in August. Keep your ear to the ground.

Another Poem for August

After the August Rains     
                            by Tom Sexton

Early that morning before the traffic began
I heard autumn's geese high above the house.
The strawberries I gathered from our our garden
were the last ones not spoiled by rain.
Beyond the kitchen window, a rain-drunk moon
tangled in our neighbor's cottonwood.
That moon will never know what it is to wake
one morning with loneliness nesting in its heart.

Today is the first time the wind is from the north.
The tundra below Kesugi Ridge is smoky red
and there are small waterfalls in the marsh
when we go there to look for cloudberries.
Nothing, so we gather a last handful of monks-
hood to place by the window in our cabin.
I split birch for kindling and put some in the stove.
Tonight it will be dark enough to see the moon.

August. This is The Silly Season. Time for Edward Lear

I

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,   In a Sieve they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,   In a Sieve they went to sea! And when the Sieve turned round and round, And every one cried, 'You'll all be drowned!' They called aloud, 'Our Sieve ain't big, But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!   In a Sieve we'll go to sea!'       Far and few, far and few,             Are the lands where the Jumblies live;       Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,             And they went to sea in a Sieve.

II

They sailed away in a Sieve, they did, In a Sieve they sailed so fast,   With only a beautiful pea-green veil Tied with a riband by way of a sail,   To a small tobacco-pipe mast; And every one said, who saw them go, 'O won't they be soon upset, you know! For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long, And happen what may, it's extremely wrong   In a Sieve to sail so fast!'       Far and few, far and few,             Are the lands where the Jumblies live;       Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,             And they went to sea in a Sieve.

III

The water it soon came in, it did,   The water it soon came in; So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet In a pinky paper all folded neat,   And they fastened it down with a pin. And they passed the night in a crockery-jar, And each of them said, 'How wise we are! Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long, Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,   While round in our Sieve we spin!'       Far and few, far and few,             Are the lands where the Jumblies live;       Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,             And they went to sea in a Sieve.

IV

And all night long they sailed away;   And when the sun went down, They whistled and warbled a moony song To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,   In the shade of the mountains brown. 'O Timballo! How happy we are, When we live in a Sieve and a crockery-jar, And all night long in the moonlight pale, We sail away with a pea-green sail,   In the shade of the mountains brown!'       Far and few, far and few,             Are the lands where the Jumblies live;       Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,             And they went to sea in a Sieve.

V

They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,   To a land all covered with trees, And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart, And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,   And a hive of silvery Bees. And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws, And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws, And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,   And no end of Stilton Cheese.       Far and few, far and few,             Are the lands where the Jumblies live;       Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,             And they went to sea in a Sieve.

VI

And in twenty years they all came back,   In twenty years or more, And every one said, 'How tall they've grown! For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,   And the hills of the Chankly Bore!' And they drank their health, and gave them a feast Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast; And every one said, 'If we only live, We too will go to sea in a Sieve,---   To the hills of the Chankly Bore!'       Far and few, far and few,             Are the lands where the Jumblies live;       Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,             And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Dogs: the Elite (and the Lowly but Lovable Others)

Who does not know that Border Collies are the smartest dogs ever? Or that Poodles come next, followed by German Shepherds?  It did surprise me to see Golden Retrievers rated fourth but only because our long-ago dog Cory was (unfairly) labeled as a dimwit. In seventh place, a very popular dog: the Labrador Retriever.

And what about the dog we have now -- the lovable, cute, irrepressible Tibetan Terrier known as Magnus the Magnificent? I don't know. I did not look at the whole list and would rather not. He would probably be found somewhat far down the list. My chair is likely more trainable than Mag; with minimal effort my chair goes up and down and swings around whilst all that Mag can do is bark.

Bulldogs were near the bottom of the list at 108. Tibetan Terriers were not included in that lowest group at least. 

The smartest dogs are not necessarily the most popular ones. The Beagle, for instance, rates high in popularity -- and has for a long time -- but was seventh from the bottom in intelligence. Poor Mag is just fair to middlin', I guess, not popular, not smart.

Smart dogs know as many as 250 words. Our friend Semantha's guide dog, Cessna, a Black Lab, has mastered an impressive array of words, signs, and signals. She knows, for instance, the word "elevator." 

If you need a guide dog, don't get a Tibetan Terrier. You wouldn't get one, anyway; only a very few breeds get chosen for the canine version of Harvard: guide-dog school.

The Absorbing Soul-wasting Struggle with Worldly Annoyances

The title is part of a George Eliot quotation written in a "comment" on a recent post I wrote about my annoyance with the Kindle that clicked audibly when the reader "turned" a page or looked up a word. To quote the whole passage:

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

I do not include myself among "those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life." I claim intellectual interests, nothing more. The intellectual life? Hardly, unless you count dusting and damp mopping.

So, forgetting that part, what annoyances do you suppose George Eliot struggled with that would equal or even come close to the teeth-gnashing vexations of today like the click of the Kindle? Provincial British life in the 19th century was surely quiet.

But look again at that quotation. She says "worldly annoyances," not minor irritations.

George Eliot struggled against her "annoyance" with the large part of the British public that shunned her -- and also with the family members who disowned her -- rejections that ended, no surprise, when she earned fame and riches from the sale of her novels. As a wealthy women, her defiance of social convention seemed somehow more acceptable. (She lived for many years -- and quite happily, too -- with George Henry Lewes in an unofficial marriage while he was long separated but still married to the unfaithful Agnes.) 

I've read all her novels, "Middlemarch" twice. 

The Audible Click of Kindle 1

The person with whom I've been sleeping lately reads in bed. He has a Kindle. It clicks. Audibly. Maddeningly. He hasn't just had the Kindle lately, he's had it for months. He's an early adapter and proud of it. Loves the Kindle. Wouldn't be without it. Anywhere.

At one time, if I happened to be in the same room during the day with this Kindle fellow, I could cover the noise of the audible click by tapping the keys on my old-timey computer keyboard, the one with the raised keys, the typewriter-like action, and the softly clunking sound.

I no longer have that keyboard, but I miss it still, not only because it masked the Kindle click or because of any nostalgia for the din of the old Selectric typewriter, but simply because the old keyboard made a companionable noise, a lovely sound really, one that made you think you were actually working at something.

I'm still not well practiced on the newer, flat, silent keyboard I'm using now. These days if I'm hearing the Kindle click while the reader is prone on the sofa, I turn on the radio or TV for background noise until he naps. 

In bed at night I once solved the problem of the Kindle click by listening to a CD of John Milton's "Paradise Lost," all seven discs and 14 sides intoned by the droning voice of Ralph Cosham. At the end of that interminable epic of so-called "unsurpassed majesty," I settled for the click.

Friend and Foe

Listening to a video of Steven Pinker lecturing on human nature, I heard him cite a study that asked participants if they had ever imagined killing someone they disliked. Yes, they had, a good percentage of them (and, says Pinker, tongue in cheek, the rest were lying). In accord with that report I print the following poem by William Blake, who surely must have harbored a certain animus against someone to have written this.

A POISON TREE    
(by William Blake)

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,

Interior voice:  An apple bright? What is the apple doing here? Has it to do with Eve biting into the apple? Paradise Lost? A rich apple harvest? Not likely. Forget the apple. Read on.

And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine, 

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Interior voice: Well, I guess the apple was doom, but somehow I think Blake is too subtle for me.

This is Lunch? Is This All There Is?

Most men would never notice in the novels they read (by men, of course) that little mention is made of food, meals, menus, snacks, recipes, cooking, pots and pans, or leftovers, to say nothing of the disorder of the kitchen, clearing the table, and all the rest.

Women writers, on the other hand, are far more likely to clue us in on who their characters are by telling us about the what, where, and when of the food they eat. Iris Murdoch did this. So did Willa Cather. Anne Tyler, too, and many more.

In the book I'm reading, Margaret Drabble devotes a whole chapter to lunch! Each one of her main characters has lunch somewhere, and we find out a lot. Take just one character:

Who? Cliff Harper. Where? An English pub called Old Forge in the (probably) fictitious town of Northam. When? The spring of 1980. 

And what is Cliff having for lunch? Well, before we get to that, you must know that he thinks he is having a "light lunch, in comparison with the smarter one he would be obliged to buy for a client at the Post House Hotel the following day."

And what does Lillian, the waitress, bring him?

First off, a large plate of roast pork. Then something called "crackling." [Don't ask; I'm not looking it up.] Next comes the mashed potatoes. [For lunch?] The mashed potatoes are followed by roast potatoes [not a misprint] and, of course, gravy. We can't forget the vegetables now, can we? On comes the boiled cabbage and the "bright green frozen peas." [Cooked, I should hope.]

Ah, and what now? We have finally come to dessert. Cliff ends his meal with something called "treacle tart." With cream. Along with coffee. With cream.

I think we know something about Cliff.

The "Depth Dimension"

A friend of ours spoke the words (below) recently, words that were subsequently posted on the web. I copied and pasted a part of his talk here because I liked his exploration of the difference between spirituality and religion. 

While the speaker, Alan Miller, is a Unitarian, he is not a minister. He is, however, a retired professor of a university Department of Religion.

In introducing his topic, he asked us how often we had heard someone say something like "I'm not religious but I'm very spiritual."  And how often had we heard religious discussions centered on the question of belief. This is a part of what he said:

...People who have never entered a church share this Christian cultural assumption, that religion is all about belief. I have been struggling against this cultural bias most of my adult life, because I long ago became convinced that religion is not primarily about belief. ...

... So when spirituality is juxtaposed to religion there is more to it than matters of belief. Most often people seem to be making a distinction between certain feelings, experiences, a kind of orientation to life on the one hand, and, on the other, religion as a social institution: what is often referred to as organized religion. And organized religion, among other things, is what we are doing at this very moment. My goodness yes, we are organized: setup and takedown people scurrying here and there, snacks put out, coffee made, music chosen and practiced, sermons written, money collected, social outreach planned, children's religious education programmed, small groups scheduled, and never forget committee meetings — and lots of other things tended to. For myself, all these activities are both necessary and important; but critics of organized religion do have a point, namely, that the busyness of religion can and sometimes does obscure something more fundamental and far more precious. And spirituality is as good a name as any for that something. Indeed that something is or ought to be the essence, the driving force, the spirit, of organized religion. Ideally, if one approaches even the busyness of organized religion as a spiritual practice, spirituality and religion are not separated.

Let me be clear that by spirituality I do not mean to suggest that there is a kind of substance, called spirit, which is distinct from and stands over against matter. Nor is spirituality a code-word for "supernatural" as over against the natural. Both spirit and supernature are traditional ways of conceptualizing the spiritual; they are not the only ways of doings so, and they are not my ways. To me, everything is natural: but notice that nature can sometimes be experienced as extraordinary, special, mysterious, and awe-inspiring, as well as merely ordinary. So I want to use the term "spirituality" to mean experiential — which is I think what many people do mean by it: it is the experience, however momentary, of what theologian Paul Tillich called the "depth dimension" of human existence. Spiritual moments are those from which we derive adjectives like "sacred" and "holy." It may be seeing the glory of a sunset, or the majesty of a mountain, hearing the delightful song of a bird, giving birth to a child, or coping with the death of a loved one. It may be in hearing our joys and sorrows, in singing a particularly moving hymn, or the sublime blending of your voice with others in harmony. Characteristically, these experiences are largely unencumbered by elaborate belief systems, although they may and historically have given rise to many such systems.

I claim that these experiences are not merely powerful, nor merely generative of feelings; they are more specific than that. We often say that they "take us out of our selves," which is the literal meaning of the word, ecstasy. I claim that these experiences are moments when we feel powerfully connected to something far greater than ourselves, something of great, perhaps of ultimate worth. Further, these are moments in which we spontaneously take up a worshipful stance toward that something. Worship, remember, means to express and affirm what is of great worth. In such moments the connection may be so powerful that the usual separation between self and other dissolves.

That to me is spirituality at its most powerful. Further, such experiences point beyond themselves: they press for expression, for action. And that is where organized religion comes in again, because it directs and focuses that expression....

Shut Up, She Suggested

Robert Frost's poem, "A Minor Bird," sounds an irritable note, the very note I struck the other day in a far less poetic vein when I interrupted myself at the picnic table to yell at the birds all around us that were chirping, singing, chatting, drumming, calling, squeaking, and being just plain noisy.

I told them to shut up.

Chagrined, I immediately felt, like Mr. Frost, that "there must be something wrong in wanting to silence any song." Here is his poem:

A Minor Bird

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

Robert Frost

I Always Have to Look up the Word Tartuffery

For awhile there I gave up reading Maureen Dowd in the NYT, not because David Denby identified her as snarky, at least not entirely, but because I was tired of polemics, having also given up reading an ace practitioner of that particular art, one Christopher Hitchens.

But now Ms. Dowd amuses me once again. Her column today started like this:

Like cats that have lost their whiskers, the Republicans seem off balance now that they have lost their talent for hypocrisy.

They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.

Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas’s false witness?... When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton?

Notice the word Tartuffery. I could get the meaning from the context as well as anyone else -- hypocrisy. But from whose pen did the character of Tartuffe come? What playwright, poet, novelist, or essayist made him up? From what play, what time period, what anything?

Turns out it was Tartuffe, Le, a five-act comedy by Molière performed in 1669 dealing with religious hypocrisy. Ms. Dowd would know something like that; she was an English major and attended a Catholic university where they tend to stress the classics in favor of cafeteria-style majors comprising electives drawn from pop culture.

Ms. Dowd went on to catalog more recent examples of hypocrisy among our elected officials of the Republican persuasion, who, as she says, flout "the principles they dictate." She ended with her usual zinger. All in all, a good read, especially for a person who, like me, is nodding all the way and conveniently forgetting all that snarky stuff she wrote about Al Gore, poor fellow, and, oh yes, Hillary Clinton.

They Found 50 Happily Married Couples?

Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee studied 50 happily married couples and placed the results into four categories they characterized as templates for lasting nuptial success.

Below, paraphrased and much condensed, are the four so-called templates. I must point out that the comments in parentheses are those of the writer of the article and not something I added.

The Romantic Marriage --  thrives on the spark of love that never dies. (Think of those affectionate 80-somethings in convalescent homes, still holding hands.)

The Rescue Marriage -- typified by co-dependent pairs (like the 70-something WASP couples who board cruise ships with luggage stocked with Lavoris bottles filled with gin).

The Traditional Marriage -- succeeds because the man works while the woman runs the home, a clear and valuable division of labor.

The Companionate Marriage -- the most common type of marriage today, one in which the two-career pair negotiate how to equally divide the housework, meal preparation, and parenting.

Are companionate marriages really the most common today? I've read that two careers or not women do most of the work at home. What about the people who have jobs rather than careers? Something tells me that in those households chores are seldom negotiated on an equal basis but are more likely simply understood. Years ago, a sign on Buck Lake Road read: Little Norway, where women work.

Sturm and Drang on a Big Musical Scale

Gustav Mahler has long been one of my favorite composers. How disconcerting, then, to hear that Mahler's music is "saturated with lachrymose melodies" and shot through with "dirgelike rhythms and ghastly, fatal oompahs...".  Really now, isn't that a bit rich? Ghastly? Dirgelike? Tearful?

This from David Schiff in The Nation. And he has more. The songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler, he says, "prophetically mourn the victims of twentieth-century catastrophes the composer died too soon to witness."

How was it that I so liked this music? Music so mournful that it practically foretold the holocaust and the killing fields of the past century, horrors the composer never even lived to see? (He died in 1911.)

The reason is simple. I didn't read the biographers or critics.

Without benefit of musical or historical knowledge, I just listened to the symphonies. I liked the way Mahler included every possible instrument in his compositions. Perhaps as both composer and conductor, he chose to hold the entire orchestra in the sway of his baton. I found his melodies intriguing, too, and I especially liked the triumphant, crashing crescendos that ended things. Really bracing stuff for an uncultured middle-brow.

According to Mr. Schiff, Mahler's music fits our ears today in ways that it did not before the world wars, depressions, and dictatorships of the 20th century. It seems that in Mahler's day -- before those catastrophic events -- his music did not especially please the European ear.

Mahler left Vienna to conduct the New York Philharmonic for several short seasons and was received with enthusiasm, but he never received the same acclaim in Europe, possibly because he was a Jew -- although he downplayed being a Jew and emphasized being a German. He was even baptized a Catholic and married a Christian, the much younger and purportedly glamorous Alma. About that, Mr. Schiff has this to say:

During the summer of 1910, while sketching a never-completed Tenth, Gustav learned that Alma, who was in a sanatorium convalescing from nervous exhaustion, was having an affair with another patient, the architect Walter Gropius. During the innovative but stressful New York musical season later that year, Gustav developed flulike symptoms stemming from an incurable infection. Death in America was unimaginable. The Mahlers returned to Vienna, and on May 18 the composer died.

I was surprised to learn that Mahler inspired latter-day composers from Alban Berg and Dmitri Shostakovitch to Benjamin Britten and Leonard Bernstein. Again, Mr. Schiff:

Because of...the Mahleresque tones of composers as different as Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schmidt, Anton Webern and Kurt Weill..., Mahler seems like a far more central figure than he was during his lifetime, when French composers dismissed him as German, Germans considered him to be Viennese and the Viennese either admired or detested him for being a Jew.

I checked back to see when I first became enamored of Mahler's music and found that it coincided with a time of storm and stress in my own life. Whether or not to uproot the family from Ellensburg to Anchorage put me on the horns of a dilemma. On which horn did I choose to be gored? The sturm and drang of Mahler's music fit my mood.

Buy Yard Fencing, Security Cameras for Monitoring, Really Big Vans, Insurance, and Alarm Systems! Help the Economy While You Keep Your Kids Safe!

On a warm, sunshiny day such as this -- living back here now on the same rural ground where I grew up -- I have to laugh. How was it, I ask myself, that our parents in those days allowed us kids the freedom to explore the wilderness? I am glad they did, but the question arises all the same.

Why did they not protect us from the scary and dangerous woods, trails, creeks, beaches, and waters for miles around? Why did they not save us from the kidnappers who lurked on our country roads and every street of our nearby towns and cities?

We could have been killed! We could have been mauled by wild animals! We could have been abducted! We could have drowned! We didn't even wear life preservers! Did we have careless parents?

Incredibly, we could, in the company of other kids, swim in Buck Lake, jump off piers into Puget Sound, and rent 16-foot inboards to motor to Whidbey Island. We could hike the highways. We could even take the ferry to Seattle and enjoy a matinee in the grandeur of the 5th Avenue Theater. Big parts of our lives were spent in a world without adults -- like kids in a Peanuts cartoon.

Even our own adult children exclaim over the freedom they had compared to the cosseted kids of today. Clearly, the era of free adventure is a thing of the past. The world is now viewed from inside a car as parents go so far as to escort school kids to the end of a short driveway to get on the bus.

Stranger danger! Kids are driven from house to house, from place to place, wondering all the while, perhaps, what's in between. According to government statistics, there is no more danger of abduction today than in the past. Signifying nothing and explaining even less.

The Lake on the Fourth

We don't have much of a celebration here on the Fourth, although we hear big booms [I heard one just then] at the park next door and the beach down the hill.

Old photographs show this community having picnics at the lake at "Uncle's place" or down at the beach. Either way, long tables were set up to hold the piles of fried chicken and the great bowls of potato salad along with the containers of vanilla ice cream kept cold in dry ice. Baseball games, three-legged races, sparklers and strings of little "ladyfingers" fire crackers -- all very old fashioned.

At that time we had not heard that, historically, nothing had happened on July 4. We had not heard that no one had signed the Declaration of Independence on that day. Now, of course, we are more fully informed, but it doesn't make a whit of difference. The Fourth is the Fourth.

Here is what John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail in a letter delivered to her on July 3, 1776, wherein he predicts that July 2 will be the day for celebration:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival…It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

Sit !!

Every morning I walk up East Hill and stand in front of the metal gate of the courtyard corral that pens the bird dogs, Audie and Evie. They are required to sit on the courtyard pavers a short distance from the gate so that I can open it and stand aside before they blast through it.

For the days, weeks, and months of this routine, those two dogs have obeyed the command to sit. Though fairly bursting with pent up energy, they sit, so eager are they to race out to freedom.

That is, until yesterday when, unaccountably, Audie refused to sit.

Since Evie had followed the expected routine, I let her out. Audie, the recalcitrant, was barred. I turned my back on her, waiting for obedience. Meanwhile, she was tossing an acorn in the morning sunshine and also tossing out a taunt: You're not the boss. I walked back down the hill.

An hour later I returned and, again, commanded her to sit, saying, I am the boss, and you are the dog.

Immediately alert, she said: That's not parallel, boss and dog.

Like you've been reading Gregory Bateson?

She stood still, gave me her bland stare, and ignoring my question, said: To be parallel, you would be a member of the Homo-sapiens family and I, a member of the Canidae family. She remained standing and appeared to go to sleep. I walked back down the hill.

When I returned more than an hour later and repeated the word Sit, Audie continued the impasse by insisting that sitting should be a personal decision. To her surprise, I agreed that, just possibly, the command to sit was somewhat pointless. However, I continued, perhaps we could agree on one true thing -- that without discipline there could be no real freedom, only license.

Audie sat. I opened the gate.

Food, Water, and Shelter; It's All for the Birds

Here at Buck Lake we never needed to make a yard design on paper for the necessary food, water, and shelter that would make our yard attractive to birds. I use the word "yard" advisedly -- "acreage" is more like it. {Never needed to design and plan? Of course not. We live in the country.}

We never needed to draw a map of our property to mark out places for things like bird baths, nesting boxes, or bird feeders. {You're forgetting something: we had to withdraw the bird feeders when those raccoons kept outsmarting us, like the one that crawled out on the cedar limb and hauled up the feeder hand over hand.}

We never needed to design a bird garden or plan for nursery plants to simulate a natural environment. {Again, you are forgetting something, like mentioning that you have done your level best to obliterate this natural environment, impossible though this has been to accomplish.}

What do birds need to survive? Food, water, and shelter.

Food?  We have bushes: salmonberry, thimbleberry, blackberry, elderberry, and blackcap. Plus we have spruces for seeds, red cedars for winter fruit, crab apples, dogwoods, and nearby apple and cherry trees. {I hate to keep bringing these things up, but have you seen any of those berry bushes around here lately?}  Also, we have old hollow and dead trees, ideal for the tunneling insects that provide food for hungry chickadees, woodpeckers, and nuthatches.

Water?  We have the lake and the swamp and they're good not only for water but for the midges and smidges and mites and smites (okay, I made that up) that provide dinner for swallows. Actually, mostly mosquitoes, which are great for bats, too. [Where are you now, Nagging Interior Voice?]

Shelter?  We have a profusion of dense thickets for nesting. Huge brush piles --  protection from predators. Tall conifers at lake's edge -- good perches for eagles and blue herons. Snags that hang out over the water -- diving boards for kingfishers.

This is a paradise for birds! 

{Aren't you forgetting something? The fly in the ointment or should I say flies? Like the dogs, bird dogs no less, that harass the ducks by day? And the hunter of hunters, the cat, a tortoise shell no less, that prowls for songbirds by night?}

Hey! I'm trying to look on the bright side here and quite frankly I've had it with your snide comments at every turn. Just remember, the only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault-finders. So there.

Compensatory Cash Flow

Compensatory cash flow refers to money you can spend because you have refrained from splurging on something you really wanted and have thereby "saved" that very sum.

Having saved a considerable sum just recently, I am now prepared to empty my pockets on some stuff I don't really need but do really want. They are as follows:

Oh-oh, wait a minute. What about my motto? I could chance it that you would never remember such a thing, but then again I would not like to be caught out. I made the mistake of publishing the motto, or words to live by if you will, in this space. It's no excuse, but I would have thought better of printing such a thing had I not been suffering at the time from a case of superiority complex worsened by an attitude of holier-than-thou.

The motto went like this: Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are.

The first line is key. Want what you have. Well, what I did not have was a microwave oven. The price of a Sharp combination microwave-convection oven like Phyllis's was about six hundred dollars plus tax, the cost of delivery, and the cost of installing something that would involve the not insignificant labor of a carpenter and electrician.

When I changed my mind about the microwave, I figured I had saved a thousand dollars.

Aha! Now I could buy a robe of light cotton just right for summer and a micro-fleece "cozy cuddler" just right for winter to say nothing of hiring a logger to slay humongous holly trees with a chain saw and a "landshaper" to level acres of scrub brush with an industrial-size weed whacker and... 

 ...but that's as far as I got before it was time to make dinner. By the time I got back to the list, the compensatory cash idea had pretty much vanished. No surprise really. It was fraught. With fragility, problems, unreality. I liked it, though, as far as it went.  

Thoughts Unrelated to Father's Day, Except Possibly Obliquely

My father thought Wall Street was the enemy, at least that's what I thought I heard him saying. He never explained what Wall Street did and probably didn't know.

Much later I studied stuff implying that the enemy was not big money, big government, or big corporations. No no no. The enemy was inside us, not an oppressive outside force acting on us in some implacable way. Inside? Yes, like in our ways of being or our belief systems. And there was more.

It seems that, unknowingly and unwittingly, we just naturally reproduced whatever this possibly insidious enemy was. The so-called enemy could be, for instance, the culture of poverty. It could be, for some of us, our restricted use of language. It could be our belief in hierarchy in general and male superiority in particular. Whatever.

The point of this theory was that we reproduced these actions and beliefs generation after generation -- thus implying that we were hapless puppets trapped in an over-arching system of over-weening power. And why this cycle? We had internalized it all from the cradle on up until, once again, it was reproduced.

Few of us could go along with this puppet view of life. After all, as Americans we believed in individualism. Our intentions were our own, our choices our own. We lived with the consequences of our decisions. We had agency. We could act. We could change things. Trapped? No no no.

Nowadays I make more allowance for the glacial pace of social change and for the limitation of personal power, but I still think that we effect change through our individual actions and I still resist the notion of us as mere puppets.

Certainly we (the editorial we) effect technological change at near lightning speed, but as for changing our moral behavior, I should think we'd have to say that change or progress is surely slower than slow in that sphere -- if we make any changes at all. Granted, we no longer burn cats in the public square for entertainment, to say nothing about burning people at the stake for heresy.

Galileo was spared the stake, was he not? That was a change, maybe even moral progress. I think, though, that he had to recant and say something about the sun orbiting the earth after all. I could be wrong about Galileo; he may have hedged a bit by employing his sophisticated use of language, a use granted him by virtue, so to speak, of reproduction, biological and cultural, mostly the latter.

Without Going Through the Brains of Either

You've heard this lament about the lecture system before, but shop worn or not, it seems true enough. The whole statement usually goes something like: The lecture is a procedure by which the teacher's notes pass to the students' notes without entering the brains of either.

It's the industrial model of teaching masses of students, and since we've long had masses of students and limited means, what else, really, was there to do? The professor might just as well have announced: I have the knowledge, and you don't. So write this down, memorize it, and repeat it back to me on the exam.

People cry Innovate! Be creative! Get with the 21st century! Right. So on the first day you walk down the aisle of the lecture hall, mount the steps, cross the stage, stop in front of the lectern and face 98 freshmen. Be creative.

Others cry Learning how to learn -- that's the key! If they learn how to learn, they've got it made! Yes, yes, how true. And we know about as much about how people learn (or want to learn) as we know about electricity.

I don't like thinking about all this and I wouldn't except that people are graduating, universities are running out of money, and pundits keep education in the news, eg., Bill Gates thinks about how to revolutionize education and President Obama talks about using "best practices" as models for the rest of the country.

Then there's Malcolm Gladwell. Ten thousand hours of focused practice, he says. That's not all it takes to be a super-high achiever, but it explains a lot in his view, more, say, than just high intelligence.

He's persuasive, but I put social class, a life of privilege, rich parents, and elite schooling higher on the list. While not dismissive of those things, he chooses to emphasize singularities like Bill Gates's proximity to and use of (like from 2:00 to 4:00 A.M.) the University of Washington's mainframe computer.

Mr. Gladwell's most recent book, "Outliers," joins his other super sellers. I haven't read his latest, much less "Blink" or "The Tipping Point," but I listened to an interview and have seen his picture. He looks quite young and has high, upstanding hair, very curly. That's pertinent, don't you think?

There are Times When Three Little Words are Not Enough

I learned in school that when you give a talk, all you needed to know were three little words: brevity, levity, and repetition. That's brevity, levity, and repetition.

This may no longer be the case. The president, who, we must allow is an eloquent speaker, follows a certain pattern, and, you too, according to Benjamin Sarlin, can follow that same pattern. You can, that is, if you want to study all 13 steps of his long essay entitled "Write-Your-Own Obama Speech." For a shorter version, here are a few tips. 

First, say how pleased you are to be speaking to your chosen audience. This is old stuff. Lots of people say things like how thrilled they are to be in this magnificent setting, place, village, city, nation, whatever.

The next steps are harder because they require that you have an almost unbelievable life story, something that would not come easily should you happen to be, for instance, a prep school kid who thinks underclass or lower class refers to freshmen. You have to say how absolutely stunned you are to be at the podium, follow that up with an authentic slice-of-life story that illustrates how unlikely it really is, and end with the only-in-America theme.

Skipping a couple steps, we come to the obligatory "homage to [the] Founding Fathers" or, failing that, a quotation from The Declaration of Independence, this followed by the expression of "regret at America's failures to live up to its founding principles."

You then takes both sides of a question, saying, for instance, "on the one hand...but on the other hand" and then urge your listeners "to find common ground." Follow this by, once again, pointing to your extraordinary background (good luck on that) with all its diversity.

After tamping down expectations, draw to a close with a "that said" proviso that speaks of not being "afraid to dream big." End by invoking God.

There you have it. That's how you might hurdle contested terrain and arrive at unity should you be called upon to speak to, say, the local school board or county commissioners. It might work a tad better if you are not a WASP, but trailer trash works and hard-scrabble farm is pretty good. Big city ghetto in a public housing high rise would, I think, work really well. You must achieve a certain standing to be asked to speak in the first place, of course. Therein lies the rub.

What to Tell Graduating Students?

Have you been asked by your high school to deliver the commencement address to this year's graduating class? Me neither. No surprise, David Brooks, the preeminent NYT columnist, has been asked to speak at his old high school, but, surprise, he seems quite genuinely to be stopped in his tracks, unable to come up with anything to say. He ponders some of the possibilities in a "conversation" with fellow columnist Gail Collins:

I could mention to them that high school mediocrity is no impediment to leading a happy life. I was an extraordinarily mediocre student. I did not graduate in the top third of my high school class. . . .  But I don’t think this message would go over well with the current faculty, or with the younger brothers and sisters in the audience — or at least their parents.

At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness. . . . 

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.

These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. . . . 

People like me are the problem. I should not be allowed to talk to young people on any momentous occasion. Therefore, I throw myself at your [Gail's] feet seeking wisdom I can share.

After a few paragraphs of good advice, Gail Collins ends by saying:

This obsession with picking the right college is the way people who could have gotten a scholarship to a state school find themselves graduating from Nifty University with $100,000 in student loans. Tell the students that the only two things certain as they move out into the world are that the future is unknowable and the loan payments unavoidable.

And don’t forget that reminder about sunscreen. More important than ever in this age of global warming.

I include her last sentence for the benefit of the Man of the House (the well known MOTH) who has recently returned from the dermatologist with burned-off spots all over his face. Don't forget the sunscreen.

On Getting it Wrong

The Economist knows. It reports that Canute was merely persuading his courtiers and not demonstrating his omnipotence when.... Wait a minute, let me backtrack. In a post some time ago, I told the story of Canute commanding the tides (except that I called him Knute, but never mind that). Here's the post, somewhat shortened:

When someone said another's behavior was as futile as Knute commanding the tides, I feigned understanding, chagrined that here again I was ignorant of a reference in our common culture. I looked it up. It was Canute, a supposed Nordic ruler like before the Viking Age. Whatever.

It seems that Canute had some exalted notion of his own power. He set up his throne on the beach and commanded the great tide as it rolled in to stop, adding, Do not get my feet wet!

Not surprisingly, the tide kept rolling in, and Canute, leaping backwards, said:

Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.

Then, so the story goes, he hung his gold crown on a crucifix and left it there.

And what did The Economist say? In a long listing of "solecisms" in its Style Guide, the venerable British periodical includes this item:

Canute's exercise on the seashore was designed to persuade his courtiers of what he knew to be true but they doubted, ie, that he was not omnipotent. Don't imply he was surprised to get his feet wet. [Emphasis mine]

OK, so I thought he was surprised to get his feet wet and thought himself omnipotent. I was wrong to imply such a thing.

BTW, you'd think The Economist could remind us of what "solecism" means; I always have to look it up: It means "bad style," a mistake that exposes the ignorance of the perpetrator. That's me, the perp.

Note: The Economist also lists "venerable" in its Style Guide and says it does not mean old. Okay, wrong again. As a preeminent British journal founded in the 1840s, it is definitely old; nevertheless, I would maintain that since it is also a worthy publication, it is still venerable in the latter sense. As a former subscriber to The Economist, I thought then and think still that its tone betrays a kind of English snobbery.