I'm Like America-- I'm Back!

Jeepers that wasn't easy. But after a hiatus, I have my logggin, I have control, I have The World At Home.

And yes, Thommy made me do it.

INDIAN SUMMER

We do not always have Indian Summer in Maine. Some years the summer ends gradually, sliding into the coolness of fall and fairly quickly into the coldness that leads to the deep freeze of winter. Some years there is nothing gradual about the transition-- it's lovely one week, and the next week the bottom has fallen out completely and we're scrambling to stay warm. This year, it is classic Indian Summer-- a cold spell, with a hard frost in much of the state, a meteorological alarm bell ringing so loudly that everyone can hear it clearly followed by a "sorry, that was just a test" message, and temperatures back up a couple of days later kissing the 80's, temperatures we hadn't seen for more than a month, and not just one day, but day after day after day of, "wait, I guess I don't need a jacket" puzzlement, because it's fairly late in September and we *did* have the cold snap-- didn't we? It is a blessing and a joy, all the more so because one cannot simply expect it to come. Without being rare, it is not common. It happens and when it does it is a pleasant surprise, a sort of bonus, extra time to get ready for the impending hunkering. And we are pleased and we smile and we are grateful.

OBLITERATING JACKSON

Andrew Jackson. Fifty Years ago we heard about what a great and clever President he was. Now he's in the doghouse. Trail of Tears anyone? Not really mentioned when we were in grammar school was Jackson's animosity toward native Americans, nor the high priority their relocation was in his presidential administration. No one is one thing. But this is pretty high on the Unforgivable Scale. Given that the government-- yours and mine-- is so reluctant to address the imbalance in representation in US currency (currently it's Old White Guys Seven, Everyone Else Zero) it is up to us to try to fix things. You can get a nice little stamp for around twenty bucks, and some nice Japanese ink, and obliterate Andy, one double sawbuck at a time.

The Fan. The fan had been sitting next to my spot at the dining table where my computer lived most of the summer, and over time, it got slower and slower and slower, finally, even on the highest setting, just sort of growling, but not actually turning, let alone fanning. Rachel had mentioned that there was an electronics pick up at her office coming up, and they would take anything of the sort that was broken and I said aha, I'll get rid of it that way. But when I went to actually unplug the thing and carry it out I was seized by a fit of irritation. It *shouldn't* be broken, there was no *reason* why it should be broken. It's not as though it had any moving parts. Well, it did, actually, but not the sort of parts one expected to, you know, *break*. So I... tore it apart and cleaned all the bits and squirted in a bit of oil and tightened everything up again and....poof! Like topsy it goes. Quieter, too, than it did before. I don't know where this idea that I could fix things came from. I once showed up at my parents' house and my mother said, "hello my cassette player is broken, can you fix it?" just like that. Why would she expect I'd be able to repair such a thing? No matter, I took the machine apart, saw that a drive belt had broken, looked around and found a suitable rubber band and put it all back together and just as in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, there you go! Sure, I fixed it but again, why she expected me to be able to fix it and why I was*able* to fix it, I do not know. Innate mechanical aptitude? From where? I grew up in a house with a pair of pliers, a standard screwdriver, and a hammer. We were not builders, we were not tinkerers, we did not repair things.. The closest we any of us ever got to fiddling with the guts of anything was when we changed typewriter ribbons, which it seemed we needed to do frequently because the one thing we did do was write, and given our handwriting, that meant typing. Anyway, the fan is fixed. You should hear it-- it's like a sleeping cat, snoring more gently than does my own cat, she who you can hear in the next room....

COVER IT UP

Towel Power. That's the ticket-- it's something we use all the time when cooking, to keep things that finish at different times hot, so that when you get everything on the table it's not just the last thing that's warm, with everything else in various stages of cooling. Putting a thick wooden cutting board on the bottom, and layering a whole lot of kitchen towels will keep the vegetables or potatoes or pasta hot, while the whatever-else-there-is finishes up. Radiation and convection go to work as soon as you put an uncovered pot on the table. Radiation and convection are.... the enemy. You can keep both at bay with a slew of towels. Try it, you'll see.

BASIL. SO MUCH BASIL

I generally make pesto once a year. I suppose I could make it any time, really, but for me there's a pesto season, and it comes at the end of summer, or the beginning of fall. Either a friend will have a massive basil overrun, or if not then I can head to the Italian specialty grocery store in Portland, where a "bunch" of basil will be huge and beautiful and cheap. I can also pick up the shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and pine nuts I'll need. The work, of course, is all in the basil-- taking the leaves off the stems. So many leaves. I made my pesto this year in two batches, because the store didn't have enough basil when we got it the first time, but each go round was about seven bunches, which produced around a pound of leaves. I've gotten faster at getting the leaves off the stalks and stems, but I'm also more interested in washing the leaves to get rid of a greater portion of grit, and I've started blanching the basil because it keeps the color a prettier bright green rather than letting it go a less appetizing brownish green. The blanching is also the last-chance for grit to fall to the bottom of a pot of water. Some people might think making five or six pounds of pesto is too tedious, but it's actually a great pleasure. One works at one's own pace-- there are no clocks or deadlines, and the result-- between 60 and 90 ounce and a quarter frozen cubes in the upstairs fridge and the basement freezer-- means that with no notice at all, pasta-and-pesto is always an option.

READY, AGAIN

In late February of 1980, I found myself outside in the freezing, windy, darkness of the heart of winter, chipping ice and snow off a pile of green firewood to try to get something, anything, to feed our fairly large wood stove, a stove that if we were able to give it anything meaningful in the way of fuel, would be able to keep us toasty warm. We were in our early twenties and learning by doing. This is the same method terrible parents use to teach their children to swim-- they toss them in the water and yell, "good luck!" Of course, we had done this to ourselves and had no one else to blame. Lesson learned, for the last thirty-some years I have kept three winters' worth of firewood on hand, in the basement. We'd use a couple of cords over the winter, and replace them the next year-- to be burned three winters later. This was a fairly good system, but over the course of three decades, a fair amount of debris, detritus, sawdust, bark, and shards of wood accumulated in the basement floor. This was undesirable for a number of reasons, not least of which it all absorbed and held moisture. You'd rather not have all that moisture just hanging around, there is no advantage, and some reasons to discourage it. So for the first time since the 1980s, I left my wood run out, so I could get to the basement floor. The floor was then cleaned up, first by William, who filled bag after bag after bag with the dibblings, and then by Chloe, the Hired Hand. She was able to finish what he had made a good start of, and then jigsawed together a slew pallets that I had gathered and brought to the estate, and wrestled into the basement with the help of Martin some time before. Once accomplished, Chloe pitched five and a half cords of wood in the basement, through a new hatch I'd built with Dave, my friend and carpenter, and then she started stacking. And stacking. And stacking. So much stacking-- with the half a cord of wood Rachel and I had already chivvied into the basement, she stacked about five and a half cords, roughly 700 cubic feet of (heavy, mostly green) wood, leaving me just about half a cord to finish the job. I'll get the last bit done soon, and then we'll be back on track, and after three years we'll once again be burning three-year-old wood every heating season.

SALMON HASH

Locked away for several years because an old ISP vanished in a puff of consolidation, I am what passes for pleased these days to announce that The World At Home is back. And it's going to stay back because I am going to have a brass plaque with the login information bolted to my forehead (I don't really approve of tattoos so this seems to be the next best option. Apropos of nothing whatsoever, I am including a photograph of a recent breakfast, salmon hash, just to prove the technology (that I can send a photo from my phone through a program that shows up on my computer where I can copy it and then save it, to be recalled as needed.) but in case you're wondering, here's how to make it: First, bake more potatoes than you need. Depending on the crowd at dinner, I generally bake either five pounds or ten pounds of russet potatoes. A fair bit is meant to be eaten at dinner, and a fair bit left over. Leftover baked potatoes are essential for making hash browns. I probably bake potatoes more on the Weber Grill than in the oven, and in case you are wondering, the target internal temperature for baked potatoes is 200F.

So there you have your cold, baked, potatoes. Get them out of the fridge and put your largest cast iron frying pan on the stove, with the gas on a sort of medium level. Peel the potatoes (always peel the potatoes. Unpeeled potatoes tell the people you're feeding them to that you don't really like them all that much) and dice rather small. You're looking for surface area. A quarter inch dice is probably too small, 3/8ths is fine, half is okay but getting a bit big. A mix is fine. Don't obsess. Speed is a good thing here, because your skillet is getting hotter. You should finish chopping the potatoes just a few seconds before the frying pan gets too hot. Add butter. Not oil, not margarine, and not too little butter. You have a big pile of potatoes, so you need a reasonable quotient of butter. If you think it might be too little, it is too little. There really isn't any such thing as too much. The butter sizzles and melts, and the moment it's all melted, you add the potatoes and spread them evenly across the surface of the pan. Then you turn the heat *up* and step back. It's hard. You *want* to flip the potatoes around, but you mustn't. The object is to get the surface of the potatoes crispy and, oh yeah, brown. So Leave Them Be. Eventually you'll sense that they are ready to be turned. It's cast iron-- they won't stick. Cast iron IS nonstick. Turn them over, and knock the heat down a bit. Remember, they're already cooked, this is all about surface quality. The more crispy--but not burnt-- surface, the better. Somewhere along the way, you have sprinkled freshly grated salt (not very fine, please!) and sweet, smoked, Spanish, paprika. If you want to add chopped corned beef or chopped, grilled, salmon, stir it in near the last-- it's already cooked, and you're not trying to alter the surface. You just want it mixed in and hot.

I NEED A BETTER SYSTEM

I should be writing here more often, especially as I gear up for what I hope will be a spate of productive writing. Or a productive spate of writing. But my alarm is limited to seven days, and what I need is a reminder every two or three weeks that I should write something here. They have these things called calendars, which are very clever, but they require one to remember to look at them-- how do you do that? The best thing I can do right now is to throw up a totally irrelevant but charming photo of The Young Master Himself. So I'll do that. Let's see if I can't manage to visit myself here a bit more often...

THREE QUARTERS OF A YEAR

Where does the time go? I could ask my friend who made me start this blog back when I was recovering from a surgery excursion my GP referred to as a "barbaric procedure." I could ask my cat. Either one would probably say something about time passing. During said time I have morphed into something both curious and common: a grandfather. Yet I remain everything I was before that: a husband, a father, an uncle, a brother-- all those and more remain unchanged, yet here I am, a grandfather for heaven's sake. Shouldn't I be older or wiser or more grandfatherly? What I am is the guy who watches this now-eight-month-old little girl (a girl? what do I know about baby girls? Well, enough I suppose. They seem to make feral noises, noises of the forest, both modern and primeval-- sometimes owl or monkey sounds, when hooting in triumph out the window over vanquished articles of clothing cast away. Sometimes the calls of forgotten dinosaurs roaring and growling in hunger or menace. Sometimes birds-- happy birds, chirpy birds, angry birds.

She eats like a dinosaur too. She is ravenous and messy. She leaves a trail of glistening gore in her wake: cucumber slime, cereal moosh,trails of noodle entrails. And she hoots while she eats, like some carnivore gloating over the vanquished foe she is internalizing. It is, of course, grand fun. There is hardly anything more fun than children, whether of the teency tincy sort or of the larger variety all themselves grown up with children of their own. There are so many marvelous quotations about the joys of children, the happiness of babies, and they are all true. Not that there aren't, you know, down times. But those are just the infrequent bitters with the sweets. And our Joon is a lovely, sweet, marvelous creature.

THE FAIR

We always have a good time at the fair. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it's hot, one year we like to froze-- I think we had to buy some Fair Clothes that year to keep our boy warm. This year the weather was great, everything was good. We were *at* the fair but not *in* the fair-- that could change next year.

SPRING FESTIVAL 2013

ON BEING SICK

So I took ill just a bit ago, and after a couple of days spent not getting any better I went to the emergency room of a hospital conveniently located clear across the town I currently inhabit, and there, being told that I was indeed doing poorly by any of several measures, I was admitted (which is a polite way of saying incarcerated) to said hospital for an undetermined length of time.
Eventually sprung from this rather expensive hoosegow, and with the passage of sufficient time feeling more like a person than a rank heap of putrid garbage, I started to put what would have been in bygone days pen to paper but which is now, what, black pixels to white, leading off with the claim that in more than six years spent in this happy land I had enjoyed nothing of the country’s medical hospitality until now.
Which, upon reflection, I realized was completely incorrect. Cataloguing the health-related visits to local hospitals I recalled damaged and contused limbs, infected digits, many hours spent enjoying the Chinese pastime of IV drip (the Chinese are very partial to IV administered antibiotics), visits from a doctor whose practice of medical massage would land him in jail in any civilized nation, a spell in a local clinic where I was told to take the six golf ball sized pills and dissolve them in a kettle of boiling water and drink the ensuing liquor over the course of three days (talk about putrid, after boiling the first ball it was discarded along with the unboiled Hell-balls.), and having a potion made from onion roots, brown sugar and ginger poured down my throat to cure a fever.  In other words, over the years spent on the Middle Kingdom, I have been, now and then, one sick puppy.
But that wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part was my initial belief that I had, in fact, never been sick in China until the present (exceedingly nasty) illness. How, I wondered, could I be operating under the impression that I had enjoyed six years of good health until the moment a couple of weeks ago when I was laid low by yon very aggressive infection? The short answer is I have no idea whatsoever. But if that was my first impression, when it came time to write a bit about the whole experience, that impression was really, really wrong. I find it curious, and I have no explanation for it. But it makes me wonder how much else that I know to be true is actually not quite so true.  It’s not as though the contrary information was hidden away and I had no access thereto. No, the realization that my initial belief was wrong was contradicted by nothing more than some reflection as I sat staring at the computer screen thinking, “No, wait....”. 
I am hoping that this odd phenomenon is limited to the Issue Of My Health In China, but I am leery of making that claim until I have had time and occasion to check and double check some other things that I, you know, *know*.  I’m not worried that I’ll find that the specific gravity of lead is not 11.4, or that the submersible Alvin was resident at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. No, those are facts, and I tend to be pretty good about the few facts (useless as they might be) that I know. But it’s the other stuff about me that I know, that’s what I’m worried that I might be wrong about. I’ll let you know if I turn up any evidence one way or the other. Meanwhile, here’s hoping that I am actually me.

THE NEW NEW WHATEVER

If this were January first I might say, I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to update this blog on a more regular basis. But it's not, it's March 21st, it's my birthday yet again, and it's been a year since I wrote here. That's okay, because there are only about seven people who even know this blog exists. I started it because Thommy made me-- it was after a nasty spot of surgery several years ago, and he thought it would help me to heal, or something. Maybe it did. As with so much of life, there is no control. Maybe that's why scientists choose to be scientists, because it gives them an opportunity to see how things might work out differently, they get to use a control. For most of us, though, there is no control. We just go on, linearly, and see what happens next.
In this case, what happened next is we went to China, and at a fairly inopportune time, I got sick, and had to spend several days in a semi-Chinese hospital. In one regard, it's pretty much like spending time in an American hospital: lousy. One feels like garbage and one wishes one didn't have any reason to be there. But as lousy experiences go, it was fine. Not how I'd planned to end my 56th year. But, there you go-- who would ever make such a plan?
Meanwhile, looking forward-- bunches of travel await, and tasks and writing and building... It should be a good year. I'll let you know in twelve months or so.

THE NEW WHATEVER

I don't know if 60 is the new 50 (would that make 18 the new 8?) but with the clock turning over yet again, this time landing on the double nickel (as we called the number back in the era when automotive speedometers stopped at 80 mph in a fairly fruitless effort to get us all to drive more slowly and save gasoline and throw off the yoke of foreign oil) it feels just fine to be me.
I think Mark Twain said something about how we live most of our lives inside ourselves, and knowing some people who seem to have hardly anything that could be called a life from the outside, I hope that he was right about them, but I quite enjoy the external life-- the boyos, the wife, our friends far (very far) and wide... More than any other technology, the internet has changed the world from what it was to what it is. And one of the things it seems to be is a place where a fellow slouching (reluctantly at times) into middle age can stay in fairly close touch with his world, however far it expands. Not to be redundant, but just to restate the essential truth: Life is still pretty good.

TIME

Thinking about time pretty much full time these days, as I'm doing the primary information-gathering, cud-chewing, random-note-jotting planning phase of what should ultimately be a set of five tremendously cool books which reduced to their essences are about capital t Time. The Day, The Week, The Month, The Season, The Year. Some of those are real, some are constructs. Even if you go smaller-- to hours and minutes and seconds-- you're still dealing mostly with created temporal constructs rather than reality. And knowing that makes a difference. People tend to think things are real, or even really very absolutely real. But it's not true. Thinking about time, and how little of it is real (only the day is real and it's a moving target for most of the people in the world, and the year is real but not perfectly real, just mostly.) leads to wondering what else is really real. Borders. They're real because we believe in them, but pretty much they aren't really real. We just call them real, and act as if they were real, but they're not really real. Only people have bought into the whole notion of borders as real. Birds don't acknowledge borders, and neither do bear or deer or mice, and neither does weather, or clouds of radioactive gases released when nuclear power plants are destroyed by nature, which itself recognizes no fixed borders. Once you start thinking down this road, you encounter lots of other things that aren't really real, but are treated as if they were real for what, I suppose for the sake of our convenience. And that's maybe not really a problem. But I think that realizing how much of what we think is really real is not real at all gives us, perhaps, a greater appreciation of those things that are really real. These words are real, I wrote them, you're reading them. But at the same time, there is a bit of unreality present as well. You can't touch these words, you can't fold them and put them in your pocket, not unless you print them and take the printed page and fold that up and put it in your pocket but even then, there is still a kind of semi-reality going on. The words, the words are actually more real than the printed page-- you can lose the page, give it away, recycle it, burn it-- but you haven't destroyed the words-- just the paper that held an image of the words. The words remain-- floating around in the back of your brain. You can't see them or touch them, but they're there all the same.
And so we regulate our lives by artificial constructs-- time, borders, rules, laws, ordinances-- these things are all helpful, but most of them are not really real. We're not living in some sort of externally imposed Matrix, save the version that we ourselves have created, by ourselves and for our own use, mostly out of thin air, conjured from the ether like a Chinese face changing magician.
We can't abandon all the artificial things that guide the way we live our lives, but knowing that those artificial things aren't real should, I believe, make us appreciate all the more those things that are, in fact, really real.

FATHER'S DAY

Which would, more appropriately be Fathers' Day, looms. In our family, this is not a day generally observed as the Mother comes from a strict Jehovah's Witness background and frowns upon the observance of holidays generally and those deemed "artificial" especially. Prior to this union, my father and grandfather enjoyed this holiday, in a middling way, and I tried whenever possible to provide something in the way of at least a card or small gift. One year, I sent my father a bottle of Sam Adams beer, despite postal regulations to the contrary, and it was a present that he appreciated, keeping it for many years.
Conditioned by their mother's anti-holiday sentiment, my four sons don't register the holiday, and until they have fathers-in-law who do enjoy its observance, I don't expect them to change their ways. It's okay, as they are sometimes wont to say, it's okay that they don't. They are good boys, and I know they appreciate, at least in a vague way, the effort that their parents, together and separately, have put into raising them.
If there is anything special about Father's Day, it is that when it rolls around, I give some degree of consideration to my father and my maternal grandfather and their attitudes towards their children, and I try to learn from their missteps as well as from their successes. In my nominally adult life, I have been many things, worn many hats. I've been a boss, an employee, a builder, a mechanic, a writer, an editor, a husband, a son, and so many more things that to try to enumerate them all would lead to a truly long list. But it is the role of Da (Irish for, more or less, "daddy") that I have found most comfortable and most gratifying. There is a widely held belief that the fathers of the baby boomers were generally constrained from considering fathering their major occupation, that slot being reserved for their commercial occupation. By the time we were starting to participate in the creation of the ripple boom, there was supposedly a bit more looseness and freedom in this regard, but you couldn't prove it by counting fathers at the playgrounds I frequented unless "one" was a statistically significant increase.
I didn't care though, whether I was at the forefront of a trend, the tail end or simply a statistical outlier. Being a Da was my chosen occupation, and it is one that I have enjoyed for nearly a quarter century.
My hope is not that my sons will choose to follow in those footsteps, but rather that they will feel the freedom to take that path if that's what they want. Even now, fathering is not widely considered to be a "real" job, despite a growing acknowledgement that mothering is. If my boyos take away only that the care and raising of children is as much the right and responsibility of the male parent as the female, then I'll have done at least a somewhat decent job of raising them.

SAILING TO COLLEGE

There he goes, in just a few days, Number Two Son, the tallest of the lot, the rock climbing, debating, smile on his sleeve, besotted boy, driving the Volvo wagon he found on eBay five years ago– a steal at $900, and just a little over 300 thousand miles on the odo– filled with his books and a new computer and his four season down blanket, four years of books and challenge and fun laying before him, like so much carrot cake and spinach lasagna, tempting and fragrant. What could possibly be any better?
(August 18th, Brant Lake, NY)

LOU DOG

Eighteen years ago, we called our friends Dennis and Diane and asked them if they could watch Martin for an unstated period of time. We dropped him off, rushed to the hospital and began to hurry up and wait. There we found our much-admired doctor was out of state and her patients were being seen to by a Neanderthal of the worst type. At one point he became perilously close to having his nose punched. He escaped this fate, and after a very long period of time, the knives flashed, and out into the waiting arms of our pediatrician was placed a brand new Louis. It was a great day. Sometimes it's hard to connect the looming bespectacled carrot topped boyo with that wee bairn, but they are one and the same. We love them both very much.

UNDER THE ROOF

Floors get more attention than almost anything. Should they be oak or cherry or pine? Do we need a rug in this room, carpeting in that? How about tile for the entryway and bathroom? Bricks for the umbrarium? Maybe birch in the baby’s room would be nice...
And then they get cleaned. For those with BHG houses, everything is always clean. But for the clean challenged, it’s the floor that gets the attention. Someone’s coming over? Clean the floors: sweep, scrub, vacuum, mop, polish, wax. There, doesn’t that look nice? Everything else can be carted away and put in closets, the basement, the spare bedroom. Whew, we’re ready!
Walls get virtually no thought. There is the Great Hassle Over Color before painting, but then it’s settled, a color or colors are chosen and out come the brushes and rollers, or else real painters with their brushes and their rollers and their cool professional equipment.
The walls are painted once, and then they are left alone. Perhaps a painting or photograph arrives, and then Uncle Podger comes in to hang it. But that’s a short-term hue and cry, not oft repeated. Walls tend to either fill up, or else reach some sort of equilibrium level of art and memories, and then remain mostly static.
And what gets the least amount of thought, the least consideration, what portion of the house is almost totally ignored until some problem or calamity brings it to our attention? The ceiling. I’d say the lowly ceiling, except that ceilings are up, not down, and lowly suggests, well, low. But we all know what I mean– the undervalued, underappreciated, unnoticed elephant in any room is the room’s most important plane, its ceiling.
Alright, maybe not *the* most important plane, but very close, second only to the windows and their view. If there are no windows with views, then ceilings become numero uno. Ceilings make the room-- ceilings complete the job.
The whys and wherefores of ceilings have concerned me for more than thirty years. I’ve lived in houses where plaster ceilings failed in a manner that could only be called spectacular and catastrophic. When an entire plaster ceiling comes down, if one is anywhere in the building, one knows Something Has Happened, Probably Something Bad. Though a plaster ceiling might look like white mist up above, it is essentially a fairly thick layer of cement, suspended by thin bits of iron which have been slowly decaying since the day they were first driven into the wood above. And when enough of those tiny bits of iron reach the end of their useful lives, this thing called gravity, which the tiny iron bits have been fighting night and day, day and night for decades, claims victory at last, down comes the whole shebang in a tremendous, house-shaking, alarm-raising crash! It is an event which draws attention to the ceiling, in a big, big way.
There was a time when on paper I was studying politics and history and several other subjects, but a closer look would have found me looking up. I was reading not the tedious books assigned, but incredible books about how buildings were designed and constructed. Handiness with a pocketknife led me past locked doors to the attics and crawl spaces above some of the greatest lecture halls at Harvard University, halls designed by some of the best and brightest of architects.
In the following thirty years I’ve had occasion to design and build structures that have included, among other architectural features, ceilings. I’ve built rooms with ceilings both flat and cathedral, in heights ranging from around eight feet to more than sixteen. Some have been paneled with wood, others have been painted plaster. But always, the ceiling has been if not the main consideration, then certainly something close to it.
Now I’m coming up on the commencement of what might be my last project that involves a domestic ceiling– a second story addition that will allow me to magically transform one small bathroom into two larger bathrooms! And with nothing up my sleeves... Even before the first board has been ordered, the first hammer blow fallen, the first nail driven I can see the ceilings in both of these rooms, get a sense of the dimensionality they will bestow. Ceilings, above all (so to speak) create and define a volume. And I have high hopes for this construction... Stay tuned, there should be more.

PATIENCE

We think of patience, when we think of it at all, as being a characteristic that is either present or not, either manifest or absent. In much the same way we say a person is short or tall, thin or fat, young or old, we say a person is patient or that patience is missing within. I was thinking about patience as I looked at this photograph, and realized that this conception of patience was incorrect.
Looking away from the photo for a moment and back in time, I see my seventeen year old self deciding that I wished that fair grail, the heart’s desire of all seventeen year old boys – a roll top desk. Never mind that there wasn’t really room for one in my third floor attic room, that I didn’t have the money for one, and that moving one to the third floor would result in the death or disablement of anyone foolish enough to try to maneuver one up the twisting servants’ stairs to my room– I needed one.
Seventeen years, however, were to pass before the salubrious confluence of enough money, a proper space and a well-made example. And it’s now just been seventeen years that I’ve had my desk.
And yet, there is that boat. To make a short story shorter, we arrived at a lakeside cottage where we had been told there would be boats aplenty, and so had traveled boatless to this quiet corner of the Adirondacks, only to find that the boats by the dock were unsuitable in every regard possible. They were ugly, badly designed, heavy and uncomfortable, lacking in even the most rudimentary of boatly qualities. I stood this state of affairs for but one day, and then, despite my tools resting at home some hundreds of miles to the East, I dashed off to a lumberyard, purchasing wood and glue, paint and varnish, and returned to home base where I built in one day most of a boat. But even lacking its fore and after decks, the craft I made and the paddle for its propulsion, was better than the other nautical options available. After the paint and varnish had dried, I tossed it in the water, and paddled off into the shallows to watch the minnows and spin bugs, the ducks and drakes, the reeds and flowers. Homely, perhaps, but otherwise, all one could want in a little gunkholer.
So here is the question– is a person who can wait seventeen years to buy a particular kind of desk but who can’t stand to suffer a set of misbegotten bastard boats for a mere week patient or not? We are the same person, this waiter-for-a-desk and this builder-of-an-instant-boat. I find this a conundrum. But whether sitting at my desk, or paddling in a small boat built with my own hands, I have still not found an answer....

FIVE BIG ONES

It's been five years since this blog began, five years since the very substantial slice and dice which some believed would availeth nought, and yet, here indeed we are. Cause for quiet rejoicing, and gratitude for such serendipity and luck and grace that has brought us to this day. It is hard, of course, to treat every day as a blessing, especially those which seem to consist entirely of plans gone agley, words misspoke, machines stubbornly reluctant, food burnt or spoiled, tears, frustration, resentment and misery of one sort or another. Yet, perhaps by these smaller trials, reminders in miniature of those greater and substantial challenges, it becomes easier to treat those other days, which are far more plentiful, more enjoyable and more in keeping with our hearts' desires, with the respect and thanks so greatly deserved.

THE GREAT WALL OF ZHONG GUAN CUN

We've been here a week and are finally getting used to the time change. Everything else we are already pretty much used to-- finding signs of constant change, evidence of improvements in daily life (which come in both good and bad flavors) and unexpected weather. We thought it would be cold and miserable and it's been a lot better than that.
Across the street from our apartment here, there used to be a fence with a gate that led to, among other things, the boys' barber. Then there used to be a brick wall and some large (this is, after all, China) planters. Then there were a number of small shops and then there weren't. Then the planters vanished and the sidewalk became extremely wide. And now we return to find the brick wall which had replaced the old fence has been replaced by a wall about eight or nine feet tall and a city block long. In stone, or a really good imitation and carved in clear (modern) Chinese telling us... Well I haven't figured that out yet. I'll get a friend to help me translate.
It's a nice wall, very pretty, and the old planters were sometimes well tended and sometimes not, so the wall and the wider sidewalk marks both a change and an improvement (of the good sort) but it is something of a mystery. Why here? Why now? I suspect the Unseen Hand of Olympic Beautification. After all, this is a city where you can find "Olympic Math" and "Olympic English" classes. The only surprising thing is that I haven't seen "Olympic Chocolate Bars" and "Olympic Sports Drink". But I'll keep looking-- that, or something else just as probable, might be waiting for me just around the next corner.

HOME STRETCH

Unless the Sky Falls, in one week we shall have a momentous election result which should have the salubrious effect of bringing the excesses of the last eight years of federal lawlessness to an abrupt end. And, it is hoped, we shall see something of The Second Son, the one who has spent, in addition to the time he spends at school and with friends and sleeping in, between 25 and 40 hours a week working for the Democrats. Driving, calling, organizing, campaigning. I hope he doesn't suffer Post Election Let Down, but we'd be glad to see more of him about the house.
But we're seeing a little less of Number One Son, who has just finished his yurt, and so is now spending his nights in the back yard, at one with the nomads and the itinerant. Well, sure, fine, whatever.
And we're also bearing down on Halloween, which coming on a Friday, will be especially sweet-- no homework looming for the next day. The pizza will be ordered, the trick or treaters will come, and the weather forecaster types are predicting cool but decent air for the night. Fingers crossed that they get it right....

TELEPORTION

I was cleaning the kitchen table-- not a trivial matter when you consider it hasn't been excavated in weeks, and it's around 40 square feet of surface-- and came upon a bamboo tea caddy. Wondering whether anything was in it, I unscrewed the top, and spilled out some dark, crisp woody tea leaves. I stuck my nose in, and sniffed and
Was instantly transported to a remoter than remote Laotian village in January about five years ago. It was cold in the morning, and damp and grey. The roosters had been making steady racket since maybe 3:30, and sleep had been a challenge. In a raised pole hut with no walls, just a railing to keep the family's small children from accidentally falling to the ground below, the night time temperature was probably in the low 40s. A bunch of villagers and the village head man had caroused past midnight, the floor under the sleeping bag was hard, and animals both domestic and wild seemed to be trying out for some sort of animal noise competition.
So when morning officially came and the fire was started and some water boiled, we were all ready for tea. Stiff, chilled and groggy, we huddled around the fire and made tea, a dark and smoky brew, Green Parrot Brand, imported from Vietnam but ubiquitous in Laos (and something we had never encountered while actually in Vietnam itself). There is tea, and then there is TEA and this stuff is the latter. Just the thing to get one's engine started on a chilly morning in the jungle a long way from anywhere...
And then I was back in my kitchen, looking down at the tea and shaking my head and it was Maine and it was now. And, I thought, it was just about time for a nice pot of tea...

July 19th, Post Game Ice Cream

The Ticking Time Bomb Comes Home

Agley is how Number One Son's plans might have been said to have ganged, but I don't think even he feels that way. Yes, it's true that in June, the mortar board and gown had seemingly just been doffed when he headed west to The East, there to seek, if not his fortune, at least a job in the Middle Kingdom, at to dwell there at least for a while, perhaps a year or so. But though there were several small successes and some adventures of the pretty cool sort, pushing and shoving came to pass, largely from The Visa People, and rather than dance madly around the robins, he packed his kit back and headed home, where he landed with all wheels touching down at the same time, a soft landing and a welcome back, and to stay for a while again he is here once more, and there is general gladness and tranquility.
Then again, there is the urgent need upon him to built the yurt (or ger, as he would (admittedly more accurately) insist upon calling it) in the back forty, but this burden can be born and endured, and it is to be hoped that the thing is a success. Time, that great tattletale, shall tell.
Meanwhile, the calendar hints that Fall is fell once more, and the Soccer Schedule confirms the fact, as we sit in our folding chairs in the cold, drizzle and damp, watching Sons Two, Three and Four sally forth and back over sodden fields, all the while attempting to chivy the defenseless leather orb past the unfortunate goalie of the hostile opponents.
If one thought about it too much, one might think, "Wait, if this is Fall, Winter might be coming soon!" and shiver in anticipation and think about thoughts of preparation. Luckily, no one has time for such things, we're all too busy keeping up with today, which is fain upon us....

Broken Down On The Internet Superhighway

My computer is sitting, in pieces, on some guy's desk in Vermont, where it's been sitting for two months, as of today. First, it took ages to figure out what the problem was-- intermittent being an aspect of a condition not lending itself to swift diagnosis. Then, after turning the machine on and off more than 20 times, and running diagnostic programs for hours, a teensy tincey itsy bitsy problem was discovered all the way down in the innermost recesses of the mainboard. Which was then extracted and shipped off to the fatherless trolls who manufactured it incorrectly in the first place, and who have taken enough time to build 496 six mainbaords blindfolded at the bottom of a disused water well to manage to still not have the board fixed.
So I'm sitting here, at the mercy of an unfamiliar computer, and unfamiliar keyboard, trying to remember passwords that are saved in a hard drive hundreds of miles away being the very example, the Platonic Ideal of a patient person.
"Boy, this doctor is taking a long time. Is he always this late?"
"Why do you think we call you people in the waiting room 'patients'?"
Right.

JUNE FOURTH

In the life, now more than five decades run and still ticking, there have been a few bad patches. One was the afternoon when a classmate, for a laugh, pushed me over in a bit of tall grass in Chicago. Unbeknownst to us all, there was a broken bottle bottom in the grass, and when the right arm met the glass, all chances for a career as a concert pianist vanished. So too, could have my life: severed were the flexor carpi ulnaris, the flexor digitorum profundus and the ulnar nerve. Unsevered was the ulnar artery, less than half an inch away from the knife sharp edge, which cut, could have spilled enough of life's blood out in jig time to effectively and quickly bring an end to the life under consideration. As it was, the muscles and other bits that sort of fell out when I looked to see what happened were exciting enough, but remembering my first aid lesson (one lesson) I shoved it all back in, applied direct pressure to the wound and placed a call to my home, where both parents happened to be. A considerable amount of racing around, doctor exams, and prolonged surgery followed, and a few days later I was back in school, my arm in a cast that was to be my companion for a year.
All a great bummer, one might think, but from that injury came one unexpected benefit that would, I think, have never come my way otherwise. A friendship, now nearly forty years old, my longest and dearest.
It's not the sort of trade an ordinary person would make if asked: great pain, tremendous anxiety and discomfort for a protracted length of time, permanent if minor disability, inconvenience upon inconvenience for years-- all against the promise of a new friend, one you didn't know, really hardly knew anything about.
And yet, looking back, one can see that it would have been foolish in the extreme, a wasted opportunity of unimaginable magnitude to have chosen not to make the trade.
But for a small, slight boy of 12, it's just as well that the matter wasn't put to him for consideration-- he might well have chosen the wrong path. Having the choice never placed before him leaves, at least, the possibility open he might have chosen correctly. We'll never know.
All we'll never know for certain is that the silver lining of that friendship is worth more than all the disadvantages of the injury, seven times over and perhaps even seven times seven. It's one of the defining characteristics of that boy, now somewhat older, hardly any wiser if wiser at all. But ever, ever grateful to the witless classmate who set in motion those particular wheels of fate.

THE GROANING BOARD

The Boy is graduated, which makes me think, each time I hear the word, of graduated beakers from high school chemistry class. And not only graduated, he is home. So too is his maternal grandmother. And his Philosophy guru, a frequently ungruntled professor from Connecticut here for a visit.
So today, at the grocery store, as the cashier rang up the sixteen artichokes, and the 14 ears of corn, the woman ahead of me, gathering her purchases-- a bottle of wine and some sort of smoked sausage and a box of crackers-- asked me what all that was for... I assured here that there was nothing odd or amiss, just that we were a large family-- I think I used the word enormous, in fact.
But in truth, we're not that enormous-- just six, and a couple of visiting relations. Eight people hardly makes a throng, but it's true that at meal time the cooking is not the same as it would be for a single person or a couple....
Tomorrow we have the artichokes and the corn-- and grilled chicken too. Is it summer? At least at dinner time Friday it will be.

FLASHBACK: THE GRADUATE- JANUARY 2007

Ah, to be young and taking a trip, a fairly long, fairly slow trip, riding an ancient, decrepit Soviet motorcycle from Hanoi to Saigon in January-- what could possibly be better than that? Well, doing it for school credit. That was icing on the cake.
Brunhilda, that was the name of the machine from Minsk, didn't let the boyo down too often, and when she did, she was fairly quickly cajoled back into a semblance of functionality, which was about all she could muster, even at the top of her game.
The boy made it safely back, which is what we cared most about, and said he had a great time, which may be what he cared most about, so we were all happy with the result. Oh, and he did get credit, so I guess his professor was happy as well.

G-DAY

May 25th, 2008. That's when Number One Son, he of the red hair, the Moxie Master, the Great Outdoorsboy, that's when he graduates from college, a great achievement for him, and a disorienting one for his Da. After all, how can a boyo only six years old be graduating from college? It just doesn't compute. But wow, what a thing!

The Holy Din

When a senior in high school, the oldest boyo of the household started to have his tribe over on a regular basis. They would congregate in the living room, and slumped about like neglected and wilted plants, they would watch a movie. Or they would gather in the kitchen and together make the most incredible mess and chaos while they cooked, and then retire to the dining room to eat and drink and hold forth and make merry. This was music to the parental ears.
Now the second boyo, a junior in high school, has taken to similar pursuits. In his case, the casual mention that he has invited six of his gang over, "maybe to make something to eat and watch a dvd or something" prompts the pater of the parents to head to the kitchen, and nearly as quickly as thinking of it, make a pilaf in the largest available Dutch oven. Thanks to the good people half a world away, there is ample variety of instant curries to heat and serve, and at 7:00 the house fills with large teenagers-- half of them girls (unusual in such a boy household, to have more than the one girl) and they take plates and heap them with rice and sauce and in moments the dining table has ten people at its borders, eating and joking, telling stories and poking fun, laughing and calling for more nuts, more sauce, more rice....
Dinner done, they regroup in the living room, but plans to see a second rate dvd are pushed aside as a couple of enthusiastic girls clamor for Cranium, and so they all, even including the youngest brother, play the laugh-inducing game and the house is filled with din and tumult.
And the parents give thanks for the noise and din and wish only that it could be never ending...

THE RAIN IN MAINE

We have a small, nondescript house, what's called "a camp" on a pond in central Maine. It was built with a total and complete lack of any architectural elements whatsoever. In fact, it's incredible the building exists at all, given that it is 100% devoid of any style at all. Its existence is a mystery.
One feature of this structure is a totally inappropriate nearly flat roof made of nearly nothing. Old and featureless, the roof has virtually no slope to it. It's an invitation to collapse from snow, so far avoided, and leaks, which have not been avoided.
I asked, "what should I bring back from home today?" Among the list of "a few things", including drills, dacron, epoxy, bread, rice, brushes, chips and sundry, she said to bring the old, mostly empty can of roofing tar, the idea being to attack some of the leaks in the roof.
Had we brought the tar earlier in the week, when the weather was fine, it might have been of use. But with the skies opening up moments after I arrived, and the forecast predicting steady rain for more than a week, the opportunity to make use of its leak-preventing properties will be delayed until we're actually not here.
Ah well. I suppose a few leaks here and there are better than goveling on the roof with black goop that will get all over everything and won't actually do squat to prevent leaks.

JULY? JULY?

How can it be July already? This is intolerable. I wasn't even done with March, and now it's July?

TWENTY SIX AND A HALF MARTIAN YEARS AND CHANGE

This whole turning fifty thing is a little weird. It happens on an individual basis but it also happens, when it happens, to lots of the victim's friends. Hardly a surprise, right? Most people in your sixth grade class were your age, most people in your year when you were a freshman were your age and most people you graduated from college with were about your age too. So most of your grammar school, high school and college friends are still about your age. And even those who time and distance have rendered less close than they once were all sort of pop up on the Turning Fifty Horizon just about the same time you do. Funny, how that works.
Well, turning fifty might be a fine time for navel gazing, deep introspection, reflection, and words of great wisdom to be thought up and written down. Unfortunately, there's also the just-another-day aspect to it, and so I still have work to do on my friend's book, editing to do on my book (all these blessed editors to keep happy, don't you know..), laundry to be done, children to be ferried to Sunday School (why is it called Sunday School if it falls on a Wednesday? Please, please don't ask me.) and then later ferried home, dinner to make, dishes to wash, home work to oversee and poof, one's 50th Birthday has whizzed by like so many other of one's first 18,250 days.
On we go.

HEAT WAVE

In Maine we get, some years, what we call a "January thaw", a few days of real, not merely comparative, warmth. This year we didn't have a January thaw-- we didn't need one either. On the heels of the warmest December on record, we had more of the same, for several weeks. The first week of January found me outside fiddling with the engine of one of our cars wearing a t-shirt. January? What January?
But late January, winter came, and the temperatures fell to seasonal levels-- it was cold during the day, and colder still at night. Still, the ground was pretty much bare, unless you count an inch or two of discouraged snow.
Finally, the second week of February, Real Winter came to Maine. A storm larger than Pennsylvania blew in from the Southeast bringing with it a basket of Official Warnings-- We had a Flood Warning, A Winter Storm Watch, A Winter Storm Warning and finally A Blizzard Warning along with A Coastal Flooding Warning. The clear skies clouded over, the sun took a powder, and long about midnight, the first flakes fell, like stray confetti blown in from a distant ticker tape parade. Then more, and more still. By early morning there was more than six inches of new powdery snow everywhere and everything was closed-- the schools, a lot of offices, meetings canceled and the snow fell on.
In the afternoon the snow slowed, then stopped altogether. By then, we'd had a foot or so, no big deal really, just enough to be able to qualify as a real snow. But then it started to sleet-- damp hail fell, coating the scraped streets, the brushed windshields, the few brave or foolish pedestrians plodding along undeterred. The sleet grew stronger, the wind picked up, and the temperatures started to fall. In the light of street lamps, the sleet began to give way to snow again, and then, as though to make sure that on this day of precipitation that the meteorological variety show was complete, thunder rolled over the house. "Was that thunder," I asked my wife. "That was thunder," she said.
Thursday came, blinding. The sun shone down on around a foot and a half of bright, bright snow. The storm had passed early enough for the plows to make the roads clear enough for the school busses to roll, so the children had to be content with just their one Snow Day. People continued the digging they had begun the day before, the mail arrived only a little late, and garbage and recycling trucks rumbled by, their clankings and bangings muffled by the sound absorbing snow all around.
Friday seemed as though this was how it had always been-- the roads were cleared, the sidewalks too, it was sunny and business as usual. People went to the store and got ready for the weekend. School wrapped up ahead of February Vacation, and some families left town for a week down South-- Somewhere Warm.
But the day after, for those who stayed behind, Somewhere Warm came here to pay a call. The temperature rose, and rose some more-- and as the temperature vaulted past freezing, the streets began to grow dark with snowmelt from the curb. Coats were unfastened, then removed altogether. Children wearing nothing more than sweats threw snowballs at one another. The lines at the car washes grew longer and longer as the grime and salt were sluiced off and disappeared down the drain. The sun rose higher in a cloudless sky, the winds stayed away and someone said, "This thaw, it's six weeks late. Is this global warming?"
"No," was the reply. "This is just a one day heat wave."
"Heat wave, huh. Well, it's good enough for February..."

WE ARE ALL THURSDAY

I have always felt that there is nothing like a little distance to provide a better view of just about anything. This is certainly as true, I believe, of American holidays as it is of anything else.
We live, part of the time, far, far away from where we usually live the rest of the time. And now and again I find myself explaining one aspect or another of the more well known American holidays to those unfamiliar with the same.
Recently, as I was explaining a number of US holidays to a cabdriver, I came upon the hidden obvious, which is that Thanksgiving is the most American of our holidays. Christmas, despite the assumptions which abound here to the contrary, is not an American holiday, though I think Americans are probably among the best at taking it to a place that could safely be considered beyond excess.
The Fourth of July is indubitably American, yet its observance is all over the place, with some going out for barbecues and fireworks, others indulging in jambalaya, some running off to the beach while others head for baseball fields. Some parade, others watch parades and others wouldn't be caught within a mile of a parade.
But Thanksgiving, now here is a holiday which is essentially observed by everyone in the same way. Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but they are surely the fewest in number, and generally perpetrated by those who object on principle to doing what everyone else is doing. But aside from those Pre Decembrist Scrooges, we all spend the day in the kitchen, often with extended family or friends, peeling and boiling and baking, cousins reunited, children making a racket from one end of the house to the other, the house nearly bursting from the contained smells of cranberry bread and turkey and stuffing and all the other things that everyone makes in the overworked kitchens.
We sit down, ten or fifteen or twenty or twenty-five (Rachel says things get unwieldy if the numbers go much over twenty, so twenty-five is our usual person ceiling) at a table laden from one end to the other with dishes of such familiarity that there are simply no questions-- just requests, beginning always with "Would you please pass me..."
It's the busiest holiday, it's the holiday which brings the most people home from away, it's a true uniter, cutting across the divides between the red and the blue, the classes, the cultures, the philosophies and the religions. It helps to remind us of who we are, and what it means to be American, because it reminds of where we came from, which is away, and to be grateful for what we have and to remember what we owe.

WHO *READS* THIS STUFF? YOU?

It turns out that there is a whole world out there full of people blogging their hands into carpal tunnel Hell. There are popular blogs, important blogs, blogs that make money, blogs sold by one outfit to another...
I had no clue. Where have I been?
This blog is the opposite of all of that. It makes no money, it's hardly popular, certainly not important, and virtually no one knows it exists. Not that you're no one, but in terms of readers, in the aggregate, you are way, way under the radar.
This blog does not advertise, no one who molds public opinion reads it on a daily basis (a good thing too, as I certainly don't modify it on a daily basis) and I can't imagine why anyone who didn't know some member of our tribe would have the slightest interest in its content.
This blog is written for you, you very few, who have been alerted to its existence. You are a more elite band than even the US Senate, which has been called the World's Most Exclusive Club, as they number a hundred and you do not.
I find it mystifying why anyone who didn't know someone would bother with reading his or her blog. It's painful enough reading anything on a computer screen, and for me, at least, the payoff has to be pretty good.
I hope for you the payoff is worth it. But if it weren't, you wouldn't be reading this, so it must be. And I am grateful for that.

Sons Three and Four, Beijing Botanical Gardens 2006 

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

First off, you should know I really loathe that song. But it came to mind as I sat watching my oldest boy teach his college roommate how to swim. You would think that everyone who is 20 years old could swim, but no. Ivan is 6'4"’ of lanky Bulgarian and can’t swim three feet. He has an unpronounceable last name, his English is excellent, and to make his life more complicated, he is taking the next semester abroad, in Scotland, where I understand English hasn’t been spoken for centuries. His girlfriend is the shortest Swede I have ever seen, and with luck, she’ll get up to Scotland to see him before she heads to Mongolia for a few months as part of her year long Watson fellowship to study migration. She’ll be in Mongolia when Martin is in China, and he plans to go visit her when he goes to Ulan Batur to buy several yurts to ship back to the US.
Rachel’s colleague K. is in Bulgaria at the moment, studying something that the Bulgarian government isn’t so hot for her to study, so she’s been having visa problems. She had to go from Bulgaria to Bosnia to the Dominican Republic to Florida to D.C. to receive her visa in person, and then reverse the route. It took about two weeks altogether, and now she is in Bulgaria, where she is still enduring governmental hassles.
The day before yesterday, I was chatting with a neighbor whose work takes him to Suzhou twice a year, and though I have been to several cities nearby, I have not yet actually made it to Suzhou, which I had understood to be a very lovely city, an understanding which he confirmed. Martin came over and I noticed he was wearing a Laotian t-shirt that I didn’t recognize. I said I didn’t remember getting that the last time we were in Laos and he said that a classmate of his had given it to him, because his father had brought it back for him from Laos but it was too small for him. This discussion served to remind us both that we needed to write to our pal in northeast Thailand.
The last time we saw Nick, we took a pal of mine from Beijing into Laos. Unusually among Chinese, she frequently makes the opportunity to got traveling to less than ordinary destinations to take photos. In October, our family and hers will be going to Inner Mongolia for a few days to check out the grasslands, the yurts, the sheep– and take some pictures.
My mother in law is due back from three weeks in Israel today, where she has been helping my sister in law’s family move to a new house. She hasn’t been easy to keep track of the last nine months or so, but neither has her Daughter Number One, who has been to Canada twice, North Carolina, Chicago, and several other places conferring and confabulating about this and that since last August.
And last summer, when she traveled to China for a pair of conferences, one down south and one out west, our friend Dana from Chicago was in Scotland, thinking of France. I don’t understand what it is about Scotland that draws so many people there. We have friends who spent their honeymoon bicycling there, mostly uphill and mostly in the rain, and we have two other friends who are bound and determined to actually get married there. At least this time there has been no talk of bicycles.
Even though it’s mostly just to China, the youngest two boys have worn out their passports, and need to have more pages added. With friends on four continents, when they ask how far it is to such-and-such a place, what they actually mean is how long does it take to get there.
Finally, there is our Ayi, who at 71 is the most-traveled member of her family, here in America for the sixth or seventh time. She’s seen quite a number of places in the US, and has been to several places in Canada as well. Sitting on the porch overlooking Sheepscot Pond, she confesses that she is lucky that she has children and us who can take care of her in what she calls old age. She’s still a ways from old age as far as I can tell– Her oldest siblings are in their 80s and she has another just under. I can’t imagine that as a young girl in Shanghai in the 1930s she ever dreamed that she would be a regular traveler to Maine.
But then again, in the 1960s, as a young boy, I never imagined I’d be a regular traveler to Beijing. Huh.

MAINE MONSOON

We got back from China to find Maine in flood. Luckily for us, the floods were south of us, but still-- flooding in May? Hardly usual. Regardless, to make a long, damp story short, it rained the entire month of May. A new record.
Come June, we figured, alright, enough's enough, surely it would stop. Well, Shirley or not, it didn't. Today's the 15th, and this was the third rain-free day of the month. The grass is higher than the corn-- corn, after all, can't be planted in mud, the grass was already there, and no one has been able to mow the sodden lawns all year.
Meanwhile, the Powers That Be decided, suddenly, after years of dithering, and public comment which was ignored wholesale, to replace the storm drains and sewers and repave our entire street. So, from end to end, the street has been a mudpit for weeks, filled with chuckholes, rocks, piles or dirt and sand, big trucks, earthmovers and steamrollers, which I am sorry to say, no longer seem to use steam-- just very loud mufflerless engines.
If it continues to not rain for any appreciable length of time, we might be able to begin Our Summer, which would be a Good Thing, as the kids are out of school as of noon tomorrow.
Let The Games Begin. Praise The Lord And Pass The Umbrellas...

WE ARE ALL USHER

It is noon. It is grey. It's hard to tell if the damp excretions of the sky are sleet mixed with rain, or rain mixed with sleet. The beautiful golden, orange and brick leaves of the maple and birch are all gone, sodden heaps in back yards and compost piles, and only a few stubborn long brown oak leaves hang, bat-like, from the last holdouts along the streets. It is Fall, and there is nothing to be done about it.
Fall is really two seasons here in Maine. First come those crisp days and cool nights, the leaves changing color and taking their time about falling. These are still days when one can paint, or clean out the car, or do yard work or play ball without the weather being any kind of obstacle. That's the nice Fall.
Then comes Fall: Part Two. Like the middle volume of Tolkien's trilogy, also with the word Two prominently displayed, it is a heavy time, a thing of gloom. It's Mahler, it's Mussorgsky, telling us that Things Are Not Good, and Worse Is Yet To Come. It's an old humorless pastor, bearded and hopeless, telling the uneasy congregation that their number is almost up, and they had better get their affairs in order. This part of Fall features pane-rattling winds, those first bone-chilling damp breezes, reminders of tasks left undone until it is Too Late, and hints of Greater Misery To Come.
Great.
But for all its minor key histrionics, Fall: Part Two is in its own way a reprieve-- there is still time to get the snow tires on, to throw some wood in the basement, to caulk some leaking window frames, to find the boots and coats and mittens and scarves, to put an ice scraper in each car, to run some dry gas through the car before the first hard freeze, to find the snow shovels and roof rakes and bags of hardened salt (oh well) and buckets of sand.
So we try to get our acts together and we try to prepare, and we hunker and we wait, not really remembering that Winter, when it comes, will not be as bad as all that, and that the blinding snow in its own way is cheering and refreshing.

Summer came. We sailed. We swam. We fished. Most of the time the fish were smarter than we were. Sometimes we were smarter than the fish. 

HIATUS

It was a long winter, but it's gone now. Mud Season has arrived with a vengeance in Maine, the ground is soggy, driveways wrinkle, yards quiver like over saturated sponges and many of the state's rivers have overflowed their banks. Rain, falling steadily for more than a week yields to bright sunshine and blue skies only for a day before sulky clouds are goaded back into place and the glum meteorologists say once again that it will rain for the foreseeable future. We are in New England, so this is a chilly monsoon
Work has accumulated in wait while we have been on the other side of the world. Of the eight members of the supposedly working fleet, only two were working upon our return. One awaited reregistration, another sported a mysteriously flat tire, a third had a case of Total Wiper Failure, which, given the current weather circumstances, rendered it useless.
One, thoughtlessly rammed by a speeding pickup truck in a snowstorm some months earlier was still unrepaired. A call to the automotive surgeon elicited excuses and promises. Another car, AWOL for more than a year was promised "soon". The 86 had mysteriously lost the capacity to produce the necessary electricity to run headlights and radio. Welcome home.
We arrived at 4 am, after delays for weather, delays for mechanical problems, delays for food. We arrived to find that although the water worked, we had only hot and cold cold running water-- the water heater had stopped working after a power failure. Oh, and the heat hadn't worked for several days. More welcome home.
In the ensuing few days since our return, the water heater has been cajoled into heating water, the furnace has been soothed and mollified, one additional car has been returned to working status, with the hope that another will join that happy brotherhood in the next week.

Pesto Change-o!

Pesto is one of those things that usually happen in summer. That's when the basil usually comes in, that's when cooking mode and gardening mode intersect most frequently, here at any rate. But this year the basil crop was unexceptional, to say the least, and all our modes were muted somewhat. So no summer pesto happened this year, and the pine nuts waited alone in the kitchen cupboard.

Then, two days ago, a fool's errand took me to Portland, and afterwards, mission unaccomplished, I thought, "Ah! Miccuci's!" So over I went to pick up some of their marvelous parmesan cheese, and glancing carelessly to one side of the cheese and olive counter I beheld a Sight! Basil! Big Basil! Basil Bunches! Big Basil Bunches! "It's a sign," I thought to myself. I bought all they had.

Home, The Wife said, "Ah, I see you were at Miccuci's". "Yes," I replied. "Pesto," she asked? "Yes, indeed," I replied!

Everyone who likes Pesto has an opinion of some kind or other about it. It shouldn't have too much garlic, it should be made with walnuts, it's okay to use parsley, it doesn't matter what kind of oil one uses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In the matter of Pesto, as with so many other matters, I view all views that diverge from mine as wrongheaded, incorrect, blasphemous and potentially damaging to our National Security.

Ingredientwise, Pesto is simple: one needs fresh basil, devoid of stems and stemlike material. One needs fresh, real, Italian parmesan cheese, of only the best quality. Extra virgin olive oil will do, and nothing else in the oil arena will suffice. Garlic must be freshly peeled, minced, and pressed, as well as plentiful. Pine nuts in sufficient quantity. A dash of salt and a bit of pepper are all that's required to finish things off.

Interestingly, in the matter of ratios, I feel it's all a matter of taste. What are you supposed to do, after all, weigh the basil, do a moisture analysis and calculate the amount of pure basil leaf? And what about the strength? Some basil is stronger and more basilesque than others-- so you'd have to multiply the amount of pure basil leaf by the Basil Strength Factor. As you can see, things could get ridiculous quite easily. So forget it. You put the basil in the food processor and process it, add a splash of oil, and more leaves, a bit more oil if needed until it's the right sort of consistency (there are no Consistency Police-- the Right Consistency is whatever the maker thinks is right) and then at some point add half the garlic (you can always add more, but it's hard to unadd garlic...) and then start with the shredded parm, more leaves, more parm, until all the leaves and cheese are in. Taste for garlicosity, and if it's lean, add the rest, if not, call it a day and put the rest of the garlic aside for later use. Drop in some salt-- it needs some, but not a lot, and a bit of pepper, but not too much. Then, finally, the pine nuts. For this batch-- which filled, by this time, about 2/3 of the food processor bowl-- I dumped in about five or six ounces, and processed only until all the nuts had vanished from atop the mixture. Then I added the rest, another five or six ounces, and processed until that, too, had vanished. This guarantees that the nuts will be chopped, but not disintegrated.

After that, you're good to go. I usually fill ice cube trays with the pesto, make cubes, pop them out when frozen and store in plastic bags in the freezer until needed. Today's batch came in around three and a half pounds, which will keep us in pesto for a goodly while. Perhaps all the way through until next summer, when our own basil comes in, and our gardening and cooking modes are both in good fettle and coincidence.

The Toilet In The Dining Room

These things start innocently enough. You, for example, go to the bathroom, you grab your luggage and you go to the airport at 3:30 in the morning to go to China for a month with a clutch of your offspring. A month passes, the dumplings and lamb skewers (and things you don't want to hear about) get eaten, the kids have their music lessons, the weather is great, piles of friends are visited, an array of unleaveable antiques made earlier this year are obtained and packed to bring home, and all the sudden it's time to fly back to the US of A.
The flight is smooth, but long, and in Chicago, the second flight is delayed, then delayed again, then postponed, and finally it is ready for boarding, and the last leg of the trip leaves you tired, wide-eyed and exhausted, the last passengers off the plane, 12 time zones from where the day began.
Your wife, who you are glad to see, packs the luggage in the car, what will fit that is, and arranges the rest on the roof of the car saying nothing more grumbly than "What *is* all this? You didn't have this many suitcases when you *went* to China.." The drive home is effortless and quiet and dark, the roadsides lined with all manner of political speech urging the driving populace to vote, vote, vote for this one or that. Half an hour later, and we are over the threshold of our American home, and baggage begins to fill the first floor.
Heading to the bathroom to get rid of some of the tea consumed en route, one hears the wife say, "Make sure the plastic bowl isn't knocked over," a sort of odd warning for someone heading to the loo.
Sure enough, though, there in the bathroom, under the toilet tank, there is a large plastic bowl, one generally used for popcorn or washing lettuce. (Hmm. That's odd,) one thinks and does what one does in the w.c. Flushing the toilet, one can't then help but notice that water does seem to be dripping, at a fairly good rate, into the large plastic bowl. (What the dickens???,) thinks the toilet flusher. A close examination reveals that water is shooting out the top of the toilet tank. "What the hell," one shouts, and lifting the toilet tank observes a stream of water being fired at the right rear upper corner of the toilet tank.
Quelling the spray, one leaves the bathroom, somewhat more sodden than one might have expected going into it, and asks, calmly, of one's wife, "What happened to the toilet?" "Oh, that, it broke." "Yes," we observe, "It did. How did that happen?" "I don't know." (She doesn't know,) one thinks. (She was the only one here and the toilet was working and now it's broken and she doesn't know how it happened. Better let this drop...)
Over the next few days, jerry-rigged repairs work then fail, or just fail outright, culminating in the Great Failure when one of Number Two Son's friends flushes and doesn't jiggled, flooding the entire bathroom.
That's it. It's off to the Big Box Store, a Replacement Toilet is acquired and lugged home, and the plumber is called to schedule a visit. But it turns out that the Plumber has raised Plumbering Rates while one wasn't looking, and now charges just barely less than one's osteopath, with a New Minimum fee that is actually more than a visit to said osteopath. For changing a toilet? Two screws, one wax ring, a replacement connection hose and maybe fifteen minutes' work? "We'll get back to you," we say.
A call of Bitter Complaint is made to Wife who says it doesn't sound like a lot to her to change a toilet, but sensing Great Outrage she gives permission for one to attempt a replacement. And after Some Plumbing Repairs to Install a Water Shutoff Valve (something that should have been done when the toilet was installed by the prior owners) the toilet is, with only a little muttering, removed!
However, its removal reveals just how tatty the floor has become over time, and a Decision to Replace The Floor is made, and so now the toilet remains in the dining room, waiting to be hauled away, while the floor is Dealt With.
Luckily, Thanksgiving Looms, and a better deadline one could not be asked for. Thus we ask for your kind wishes as we return to the task before us.

Studs From Finland

It's not that cold in Maine, not really, not for this time of year. Highs for the weekend in the 50s and 60s, lows in the 40s, leaves still on more trees than not. But it's the threshold of November, and that means it's time to put on the snow tires. In places where it snows, and Maine is one such place, snow tires make good sense. All Season Tires are about as useful as One Size Fits All clothing. All season tires are equally bad in all seasons.
So now I have to go rooting around in the garage and the basement and the barn, looking for tires and then matching the right tires to the right car. Perhaps in my own 50s I shall be more organized, and all the tires will be in one place, and they'll all be labeled (White 1987 Wagon Left Front Summer Tire). But for now it's time to root around and prepare for the worst of winter, even as we prepare for Halloween and what should be a fairly nice next few weeks as we slide towards the shorter days of the year....

This is the wheel that was on the trailer when we went to take St Brendan out of the water for the season and put her on the trailer. It was then that William noticed the left trailer tire was low, and so I, seeing that he was right, took the cannister of air I happened to have in the back of the car and put some air in the tire.

This is what happened to the wheel when I tried to add a bit of air so that the tire would not be flat.... 

This is the new tire and wheel, after painting but before installation.

International Stitch Boy

My son's first stitch came on a sunny day in rural France, when at the age of two he fell off a bench at a museum and landed head first on the popped top of a can of soda. God Bless the French, I said at the time, as we were forced to go to a nearby hospital by the museum staff, and the whole procedure from start to finish set us back by about $12. The French Medical Establishment was a little behind the times, a tad hidebound and retro, as they insisted that his mother could accompany him into the stitching room, but not me. Despite the fact that his mother couldn't go with him because blood makes her faint, whereas I was willing to go hold his hand, they would not bend. So the first stitch was a solo event, free from parental influence and comfort. I must say that both the staff of the hospital and the bleeding and broken people in the Emergency Room were all very kind-- they pushed the ever so slightly bleeding boy to the head of the line, and shortly thereafter we could hear his wails from the Sewing Room.
His next stitch, around ten years later, was in Beijing. For some reason he saw fit to run full tilt into a head high iron bar about 40 minutes after his mother had left the country. Thus I not only had to whisk him to the nearest hospital-- within sight of our apartment door, but nearly a 15 minute walk away-- but had to bring along his younger brothers as well. So off we trooped, the oldest bleeding on the sidewalk as we went, and got to the Chinese hospital. Nearly deserted on the weekend, we walked down a long, long corridor to a window where I said my son was bleeding. The woman there pointed down the hall we had just navigated and said I had to go back and do something I didn't understand. So we all walked back down the hall, and found another window. My son is bleeding I announced. Five yuan I was told. I forked over the money-- less than a dollar in American currency, and was told to go back down the hall with a slip of paper the woman at the second window gave me. We trooped back down the long corridor to the first window, where the woman asked if we wanted internal or external medicine. I wasn't sure, so I repeated that my son was bleeding. Ah, she said, we should go upstairs. So up we all went, to the second floor, where we looked around, my son bleeding onto the floor-- a good way to find our way out of this maze I thought to myself-- until we found a woman in an office. She asked what we wanted and I said my son was bleeding and offered the slip of paper as proof. She said to wait here, and she would go look for a doctor. Presently, she came back with a young fellow in a much-splattered smock, reminiscent of the outer garb worn by butchers in the market where we bought most of our food. He's bleeding, I said, and offered the somewhat wrinkled, damp, smudged slip of paper as proof. He looked at the forehead in question and said, ah, we'll need to stitch that. Fine, I said, let's go. Unfortunately, that was impossible-- only bleeding people and doctors and nurses were allowed in the operating theatre, not parental assistants. I said he couldn't go by himself. He must. He couldn't. Discussion ensued. Ultimately it was decided that the stitchery would take place in an adjacent office. In we went, and the doctor got out needles and thread and cheerfully sewed up the dangling flap of skin. I thought we were all set, but no. More conversation the gist of which was that we had to go downstairs, down the long corridor, find another set of stairs, go back to the second floor and hand the people there a new piece of paper. This we did and when we handed the person at the other end of the trip the piece of paper, she bade the victim to drop his drawers and provide his posterior for a jab. He tried to negotiate for arm or thigh, but no soap. Into the derriere when the needle and we were done. Total bill for the stitch, the shot and the piece of mystery paper came to under four dollars.
Last night, a mere six years later or so, on the eve of departure for his first day of college, with packing essentially done, sleep calling and an early alarm buzzer waiting, this same fellow, now taller but in many significant ways still the same, decided that he needed a piece of string, and rather than go look, at 1:30 in the morning, for a scissors, or a knife or some other traditional string cutting tool, he decided to use the handy sabre saw.
This proved to be a less than sterling idea.
After an hour, in which the bandaged finger refused to stop bleeding, surrender was agreed upon and we went, he and I, in a driving rain, through the deserted streets of our small town, to the nearest hospital emergency room, a place with which I had some degree of familiarity from other past incidences involving blood. Registering at the desk proved to be amusing for some reason to the filler out of forms, and then a cause of some mirth for the nurse who provided the initial inspection, and resulted in bafflement and incredulity on the part of the doctor finally called in to patch things together. Straightforward and uncomfortable for the patient was this procedure, the clock now calling out the third hour past midnight, but a successful operation, four stitches in the end of the left index finger, and instructions to keep it dry for several days. These, his first American Stitches, will no doubt cost more than either those from China or France, and I'm sure they'll do just as well at holding him together.
He made it, by the way, off to college just six or seven hours after we got home, and his first day on campus seems to have gone well. If his stitch-interval pattern holds, he should manage to graduate in several years with no further additional sewing upon his body. For this and other evidence of Grace, we live in hope.

The Connelly Dynasty

Forget the Ming, Laugh at the Qing, The Connelly Dynasty is the one to watch.
Ever seen The Forbidden City? What the Emperor and his family had to put up with for living quarters? Drafty freezing dark caverns in the winter, hot, humid stifling ovens in the summer. Their Summer Palace? No phone, no internet, no microwave, no refrigerator. Marginally cooler than the residence a poky two-day ride away, but still beastly hot in the summer, and the little man-made lake a shallow breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Our Summer Palace? All the mod cons, the world at our fingertips through the magic of the internet, a short one-hour ride via Air Volvo to our Winter Palace, a lake that extends for miles north to south, no noisy servants, body guards, supplicants, advisors, assassins, groupies, generals... Just us, and on a day like today, a quiet lake with a lone kayaker in the distant distance, flocks of buzzing dragonflies, the gentle lapping of water against the dock and boats, a cool breeze vying with the warm sun. The Princes dispersed for the day, only the youngest, Prince William in residence until the evening. Blue skies, blue water, green trees, white sailboat, iced tea. Those old emperors never had it even close to this good....

My children have shown, collectively, an interest at various times in learning the flute, the violin, the trumpet, the French Horn, the violin, the mandolin and most recently, the guitar. Myself, I play the radio with a certain pannache, but other instruments remain a closed book. So it's nice when we have a Friend Resource who can aid and abet one of the boys in the study of their chosen instrument... 

Process, Goal And Dirty Fingernails

Many enterprises fall fairly clearly into two categories: things we do for the Process and things done in pursuit of a Goal. Washing dishes, doing the laundry, emptying the cat box, changing the oil in the car. All of those activities are, for me, in the Goal category. I don’t especially enjoy doing those things, but I like having clean clothes, eating off of clean plates, having the cats be able to go potty in one place and having the car run well and efficiently and not break.
On the other hand, watching a movie, playing a round of Sherlock on the computer, reading the latest Sue Grafton mystery and such are in the Process camp. One simply likes to do that sort of thing.
Yet I’ve lately come to identify a Muddled category– fooling around in the garden in on the one hand something obviously done for Goal reasons– The aim is to get the flowers to bloom, the tomato plants to thrive and produce tomatoes, the basil to grow and be turned in time into pesto. But I find as well that I enjoy the Process part too– throttling weeds, planting new lettuce seedlings, turning over the soil to increase the size of the garden so it may accommodate more flowers, more vegetables. Even watering everything is a pleasure, checking out the broad full leaves of the Red Swiss Chard, seeing newly sprouted flowers, the names on the seed packages already forgotten, gloating that the beans have been seeded so closely together that the plants themselves are choking out the weeds.
Always looking to the future for satisfaction and accomplishment is certainly a poor plan for maximizing happiness, as under that operational mode the future will never arrive. While giving no thought to the morrow, the next month, the following year would mean that the time would arrive to leave for China with plane tickets unbought, visas unobtained and the luggage unready. I imagine that it would be optimal to enjoy doing everything, taking pleasure in the washing of the dinner dishes, as well as the other tasks of day to day preparation and recovery, and to relish the long term preparation and planning at the same time.
If everything were gardening, that might just be possible.