Panning for Moonlight

Salsa Girls

2009-10-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

Like teenagers who have left home for the first time, our tomatoes, in boxes spread throughout the office at the back of our detached garage, are maturing off the vine. Elizabeth barely saved them from a couple of wicked cold nights. We didn't get to the peppers, and they turned into long, discolored, mushy incarnations of their previously sassy selves (sassy ones pictured above). This means salsa season is over, because now if we wanted to make a batch, we would have to buy most of our ingredients from the grocery store, which as yet seems like an awful idea to me, as garden-fresh produce is still too fresh in my memory. But I can't complain. It was a good salsa year. We made a lot of salsa, and we ate a lot of salsa, and almost all of it was very good. It was a good salsa year in another way, too: we discovered that both of our daughters really like the stuff, even when it is of about medium spiciness.
I already knew that Sonora liked salsa, but Rowyn, in her short life, has been a little pickier than Sonora. So I feared our youngest daughter would shy away from this magnificent blend of tomatoes, onions, and peppers. But last August, I gave Rowyn a corn chip lightly dipped in a batch of fresh salsa. She sucked the light red juice off, and then held the empty chip up and said, "Mo, Mo" rather emphatically. So I dipped her chip again and again she licked it clean. Then we gave her a little cup of salsa, which she dipped dry. Finally, Elizabeth gave her the whole 5-quart glass bowl--there was maybe half a cup left in the bottom--but instead of just dipping more chips in, Rowyn heaved this heavy bowl up to her mouth and began drinking the salsa juice. And this wasn't some wussy batch of salsa, either; there were a couple of jalapenos and a few other sort-of-hot peppers in the mix. I was genuinely proud of Rowyn and Sonora. These are MY girls, I thought to myself.

When I say I was proud of them, I'm not exaggerating. I felt the same swelling in my chest when Rowyn gulped down the last of the salsa as when Sonora learned to ride a bike or when she hiked the whole 3.5 mile long Kamiak Butte trail without any assistance. I didn't know I felt so strongly about salsa until that moment, but now that I think about it, this saucy stuff has been with me my whole life. Even in the late 70s early 80s, a decade before most of the U.S. had discovered its now favorite condiment, my family and I were eating salsa. We would put it on tacos and enchiladas, dip corn chips, Frito's, Wheat Thins, saltine crackers, and vegetables in it, and yes, sometimes some of us would even drink a little bit of it.

Every summer my dad, with the help of my mom and some of the kids, would hack away at onions, tomatoes, and chillies. We would throw it all in a big pot and we would can it up, though it never tasted as good after being canned as before. In the winter, though, a can of that salsa tasted like a warm morning. Even my grandma liked to make salsa, though she favored a sweetened green salsa with a tomatillo/shredded zucchini base. Salsa was so important to my parents that they spent an unthinkable amount of time dicing and then drying heaps of salsa ingredients. Their thought was that they could give this as gifts to their children-who were by then mostly all grown up--because dried salsa would be more portable than canned and could be taken with a person in an emergency. That way, even if there was some natural or personal disaster, my parents' children wouldn't be without their salsa.

Perhaps one of the reasons Elizabeth and I get along so well with our in-laws has its roots in salsa, for hers is also a family of salsa connoisseurs. In fact, the recipe I use (with adaptations) comes from the family recipe book Elizabeth's mom put together for her kids several years ago. On more than one occasion, I've experienced a pleasant sense of home-ness while crammed in together with the sisters and Mom Porter in her kitchen chopping salsa vegetables together, and then again a few hours later when we devour together that whole gallon of salsa.

And I guess that is it, that is why I was so happy when I realized that not only Sonora but also Rowyn loves this stuff. It felt like a solid confirmation of heritage: I am my parents' son and my grandparents' grandkid. And these two little tomato-faced girls are ours, not just biologically, but, perhaps more importantly, they are our kids culturally. I won't be putting together bags of dried salsa for them, but when they leave home as young adults, I hope they take with them positive, strengthening associations of home. I hope that they will grow tomatoes and peppers and onions and chop them up together into a medley that will remind them that they belong.

Great Wife

2009-09-06T23:24:00.001-07:00

I just want to give a shout-out to Elizabeth for being super great this summer. When I came home from a youth activity with a snapped clavicle on the second day of my summer break, she had a TV tray all set up next to the living room recliner, where I was ordered by the doctor to sleep. On it were a bottle of water, pain medication, remote controls for the TV, etc., and some books and magazines. Several times each day, she would ask me if I needed anything, if I was doing okay. She would lovingly scold me when I would try to do things I shouldn't have been doing and patiently endured my high levels of "I'm broken, what should I do?" anxiety. In one such moment of high anxiety, she even helped me fashion a very uncomfortable figure 8 brace out of some climbing gear and a messenger bag strap.

When I ditched her and went to Europe with some of my siblings and parents, she was happy I had the opportunity to travel and has never begrudged me the trip; she was just glad I brought home some German chocolate.

For my birthday, she asked me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted the family to go on a bike ride and have a picnic at the half way point. I wanted to see how my collarbone would fare while riding, and I have this dream of us being a family that does lots of biking together. She was glad to come along and even held back from mentioning that the time I had chosen was stupid because it bridged Rowyn's nap time. She was even mostly calm when Rowyn shrieked like a child possessed by a demon for the second half of the ride.

When I got my tonsillectomy, she again prepared the TV tray for me out by the recliner (I was supposed to sleep sitting up a little bit so that I wouldn't choke on my blood). But this time, in addition to the books and magazines, she also presented me with a fistfull of DVDs and a bouquet of hydrating/nourishing drinks. Throughout the week, she made several soups that were blended smooth so I could eat them. Not only was she able to make soups using produce from our garden, but they really were good, and all of them could be eaten warm or cold. And again, she stopped me from doing things that the doctor said could cause blood to start gushing in my throat.

I just wish I were better at taking care of her when she is down. I feel as if our relationship is pretty balanced in most ways, but she has got me completely beat in the area of taking care of people who are sick or hurt (and celebrating birthdays; she's really good at that, too, whereas I suck at it). My excuse is that I come from a family which has sort of a fend-for-yourself mentality. And that attitude seems to be pretty deeply ingrained in me. I'm usually extra helpful for a few hours after she has gotten hurt or fallen ill, and then I sort of drift off into a weird non-helpful mode. This ineptitude of mine is really frustrating to her, and, frankly, also to me.

It was very pleasant this summer to have someone anticipating my needs when I couldn't take care of myself. Some day, I hope, I will learn to do the same for her when she is in need.

-ectomy

2009-08-30T21:38:00.000-07:00

Up until a week ago, when I had my tonsils scooped out of my throat while I was unconscious, I was sort of proud of having really, really big tonsils. I would show them to people and they were virtually always impressed. "Wow," they would say. "Those really are big." I would nod and say something final, like "Yep. They've been big since I was a little kid."

When I was six, my family doc told me I had the tonsils of a thirteen-year-old. As a short, skinny "late bloomer"--I wrestled in the 75 pound weight class in eight grade and I only had to worry once about not making weight--I held onto those words well past my thirteenth birthday. When I was fourteen, I imagined I must have tonsils the size of someone in his twenties. This was consoling. I didn't really start growing toward my current height of 6' 2" until the summer before my senior year in high school. There wasn't much that was impressive about me: I was smaller than average, had below-average grades, didn't have any discernible musical talents, didn't have a car, didn't play on any of the sports teams, and wasn't stunningly attractive. I was "cute," in the way little brothers are cute. So, my tonsils were one of my only real assets, and I would show them off in times of insecurity.

Even into adulthood, my tonsils had remained an asset. Sometimes, if I liked someone and thought they were good friend material, I would tilt back my head, or, as the case may be, squat down frog-like and tilt back my head, and open my mouth and perform a sort of exaggerated, prolonged yawn while they inspected the large bulbs of lymph tissue at the back of my mouth. They would usually peer in cautiously, move their heads right and left pigeon-like, and then their eyes would widen, and they would say "Golly, those really are big."

But now they are gone. A lot of people get their tonsils out because of frequent infections, tonsillitis and the like, but I haven't had much trouble in that area. I used to get yearly bouts of strep throat, but that ended when I was about 19. For the most part, my tonsils treated me pretty well. We had a relationship of mutual respect. Except, of course, that they sort of obstructed my airway all the time, made it hard for me to swallow sometimes (and sometimes got food stuck in them that formed these funky-smelling little white balls that I would cough up about once a month--I called them "pearls," but Elizabeth didn't agree), made me snore with ever-increasingl intensity, and caused me to breathe badly while I slept. But I didn't really fault them for this. It wasn't like they were being malicious. They were just being their big selves. It's just that they were standing right in the doorway of a rather important passage.

So I went to my local family doc and asked him about them. He said, "Those are pretty big. They should come out." He didn't really hmm and haw about it like he does about most everything else. And then I went in for a consult with the Ear, Nose and Throat doc. He said, "You should probably have those removed. Having a tonsillectomy will likely help you snore less or not at all, and will probably make you breathe better at night." In the back of my mind, I kept asking myself Why, for the last three decades, when they look in my mouth and smash my tongue with a giant Popsicle stick, did other doctors not immediately exclaim, "Let's cut those things out of there!" But there was no use asking such a question now.

Because of my marvelously loud snoring, Elizabeth and I have been sleeping farther and farther apart. She was wearing earplugs, which helped, but I was waking the baby up and, even with Elizabeth wearing earplugs, my snoring was loud enough to keep her, and sometimes the baby, from going back to sleep. Besides wanting my wife not to rue the moment I entered the bedroom, I was also hoping that a tonsillectomy would help me sleep better, which would cause me to wake up with energy and vigor in the morning, which would in turn cause me to have more motivation, stamina, insight, and talent. So, I went in for the surgery.

Things went pretty well in the hospital. About seven different women in scrubs made rotating visits. I couldn't keep straight who was from the lab, who was from the pharmacy, who was just an assistant, who was my nurse now, who would be my nurse later, who would be my nurse during surgery, who was my nurse anesthetist who would be shoving a tube down my throat, etc. But they were all friendly and didn't mind that I had confused one for another and forgotten their names. Finally, one of these women pumped some stuff into my IV line and told me, "Teenagers love this stuff. They always ask me if it is for sale somewhere. But it's not for sale. For some reason, they just laugh and laugh and laugh." I asked her what this stuff was for and she said, "to help you feel okay about surgery." I thought that it was probably a little late not to be okay with surgery, but didn't tell her this. Instead, I let the artificial feeling of euphoria invade my body and enjoyed the gurney ride down the hallway, though I didn't feel any uncontrollable urges to giggle. I remember greeting my doc, all decked out in surgical scrubs, and then my pre-surgery memories stop.

When I came to, or rather, when my brain began coherently recording memories again after I came to, I was chatting it up in German with a nurse from Germany. She had been in the U.S. for the last twenty years, but I must have recognized her accent and we played get-to-know-you in German in the recovery room. When she departed she told me my German was good, which pleased me, but the ironic thing is that it couldn't have been that good because MY UVULA IS MISSING.

You see, to roll the German "R" properly, one needs to get the uvula and other loose soft-palate materials jumping around in the back of one's throat. It's not like the Spanish R, which is rolled with the tip of the tongue on the hard palate.

I made the discovery of the snipped uvula a couple of days after my surgery. My curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to see what this bundle of horrible pain looked like (this has been painful, very painful, and nauseating, but enough bellyaching), so, standing before a mirror, I gingerly spread my mouth wider and wider until I could see back there. Sure enough, my big, fluted, fleshy tonsils were gone, replaced by white scabs over inflamed red throat skin. But to my astonishment, the white scabs continued above my tonsil-holes, up along my soft palate right up to where my uvula used to hang. Now it just forms a rather shallow V.

I didn't realize it until then, but I was also sort of fond of my uvula. It fit. It dangled there between my giant tonsils sort of like the buddy who is always brought along as the third wheel because he is good at helping the conversation along at awkward moments. Actually, more often than not, it didn't hang freely, but was sort of stuck to one tonsil or the other. But my uvula was never a problem. I had never even thought of cutting it off; it looked so harmless and good-natured. And apparently, besides my uvula, my doctor felt like digging out some of my soft palate as well. Unexpectedly losing some extra skin while I was anesthetized was sort of shocking and a little dismaying.

In a way, I feel as if I've been circumcised again, and, once again, nobody asked me if that was okay. It's not okay, just so you know.

I've been doing a little research and, apparently, uvulectomies (a word I never knew existed) and trimming off a little extra soft palate tissue are often done to try to help people with sleep apnea. When I had my consult with the ENT doc, I mentioned that I stop breathing at regular intervals throughout the night and could possibly have sleep apnea, so maybe he took that as the green light. I'm not sure. I have an appointment with him in a couple of days and I'm going to ask.

But the damage is done. He's not going to sew anything back on (and I don't get to keep my tonsils in formaldehyde either--I had to sign a release saying I agree to this). Perhaps my new and improved mouth/throat will work wonders for me. Apparently I snore no more, not even a little bit, which keeps things peaceful in bed. I have yet to reap the rewards of extra energy, motivation, talent, and insight, but it's only been a week. Maybe those will come. And, after a few more times waking up to discover that I have not unexpectedly lost a little body part while I was unconscious, I'll probably feel safe again. And the pain will eventually go away.

I'm going to miss my tonsils, and my uvula, and my soft palate tissue, and I will have to find new ways to show my friends I love them and make myself feel special, but eventually, I am sure, I'll be glad to have had my elective tonsillectomy and my involuntary uvulectomy. It was all just useless tissue anyway, right?

Lee European Vacation

2009-08-02T05:43:00.001-07:00

So, at the end of last year, when my parents, siblings, sibling-in-law and I planned our final route for our European vacation , one of the concerns was that we were trying to go to too many places in the two weeks--the last two weeks of July--we had available. We had seven countries--Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria--on the agenda. When we got to Europe and mentioned our plans to any European, the response was almost universally one of horror, for Europeans (including my brother-in-law Basilios) generally like to vacation for several weeks in one spot and really relax and savor the local culture. In addition to worries about trying to do too much, I also worried that seven of us might not all get along traveling together in a small RV. But I think everybody enjoyed the trip. I know I did. Below I'll do a skeleton sketch of some of the places we visited. Sorry about the many photos. I had over 1000 to choose from, and the thirty or so here seem to me like a pathetically small sampling (I really wish Blogger would come up with an easier way to build posts with photos and words).

We started our journey in Munich, Germany, and then spent a day driving along the Romantic Road, which is basically a series of towns and castles that preserve a middle-ages flair.

Next, we picked up my sister Trudie and her husband Basilios and headed for Switzerland, where we visited Zurich and Zermatt. Zurich had good food and a relaxing atmosphere.

Zermatt is a little town at the bottom of Switzerland. It is so deep into the Alps that no roads go beyond it; Zermatt is a dead-end town, but a really cool one. It is the leaping-off point for people who want to climb the Matterhorn and a tourist destination for people like us who just want to see the Matterhorn. My sisters Trudie and Kristinia and my brother Clinton and I took a cog-wheel train up to the top of the Gornergrat, where we had terrific views of the surrounding mountaintops and glacier fields. We hiked back down, which was a little more strenuous and took a little longer than we had anticipated (we were all pretty sore for a few days afterward), but hiking through the Alps was one of the highlights of the trip.

After that, we decided that, since we were there, we should catch some Tour de France action. So we stopped in at Bourg Saint Maurice, which was the start of one of the legs of the race. It was too crowded to see the starting line of that day's leg but we got to see all the cyclists getting ready and appreciated the tremendous effort that goes into this race. We also got to see Lance (swoon) leave his team's bus and ride down to the starting line.

From there, we journeyed to Barcelona, Spain. At first, the heat was stifling, and the traffic, with hundreds of motorized scooters aggressively swarming like wasps between cars, was stressful. But we soon adjusted to the heat and began taking the public transit instead of driving the unwieldy RV, and when we started playing in the Mediterranean, we started to really like Barcelona. One side note: all of the males on the trip were injured except Basilios. My dad had recently tripped and messed up his knee. Two weeks before the trip, I broke my collarbone diving for a catch while playing ultimate Frisbee, and two days before the trip Clinton sliced his hand wide open (notice the blue surgical glove he is wearing to keep from getting his hand wet--it didn't work). So Basilios was the only male who could enjoy the water injury-free, and he did enjoy it, diving under the waves like a giddy seal.
In the city, we visited the Picaso Musuem, which shows the evolution of his artistic vision from his days as a student through his cubist works. We also toured the masterpiece of Gaudi--an influential modernist architect--La Sagrada Familia, an astounding building, and walked around the Gothic Quarter (narrow, medieval-feeling streets packed with little shops, musuems, and a few old churches), and down Las Ramblas (a main pedestrian boulevard that is lined with little shops. Strangely, many of these temporary shops were pet stores). Barcelona is a city I wouldn't mind returning to.

On our way to Verona, Italy, we stopped for a day on the beach near the French Riviera town of Frejus. This stop was definitely too short. The weather, sand, and water were nearly perfect. We were sad to leave. We lived it up while we could, dancing at the campground discoteque, going swimming in the Mediterranean at midnight, and going swimming again in the morning.

In Verona, we watched Verdi's Aida in a Roman arena, built in 30 A.D. While the opera went sort of late (it ended at 1:30 a.m.), the experience of listening to and watching this well-performed masterpiece in a 2000-year-old venue with great acoustics was well worth it.

Venice was next on our list, and while the town was overrun with tourists like us, it was still impressive. The floor mosaics on the church floors were one of many artistic flourishes that struck me. Venice is very photogenic. Basilios, whose father is Greek, was able to point out many of the Byzantine influences throughout the city. Although everyone knows it is a problem, it was still sad to see the Adriatic Sea lapping at the tops of the last barriers that stand between the city and a flooded ruin.

For various reasons, I don't have photos of our journey through Slovenia (a green, hilly, quiet country, where we stopped in at Izola and waded into the Adriatic Sea) and Austria, where we visited Graz and Vienna. In Vienna, I missed Elizabeth the most. We had been there nine years earlier as adventurous, backpacking newlyweds, and memories of us together flashed their way back into my consciousness. She and I will have to go back in the near future. As with most of our other stops, we only got a tiny taste of Vienna, and of all the places we visited, I think this is the city where I would have most liked to spend more time.

Even though the trip was rushed, and we weren't able to stay anywhere as long as we would have liked, I'm glad we went, and I'm glad we were able to see so many sites, eat so many different types of food, smell so many different smells, speak (0r try to speak) so many different languages, and swim in different bodies of water. It was a memorable trip that will give each of us different choices of places we might visit in any future trips.

The Beginnings of Harmful Intent, or When Do We Start Wanting to Hurt People?

2009-03-11T00:20:00.000-07:00

Recently Rowyn has been more of a challenge to put to bed at night. I used to be able to lay her down on the bed, place a pillow one one side, and cuddle up to her other side, and then she would go to sleep. Or if she was having a difficult time, I would hold her in my arms and bounce her lightly while swaying from side to side. This would take longer (20-30 minutes), but it worked well. (I don't want to give the impression with this post that I'm some kind of super dad who puts the kids to be all the time. Elizabeth ends up putting Rowyn to bed 90% of the time, but I've noticed a few things the last few times I've helped her fall asleep).

However, a couple of times when I've recently tried to put her to bed, neither of these techniques have worked. For a week or two, Rowyn took to arching her back, screaming, and thrashing about while going to sleep (or not going to sleep, as was more often the case). She created a marvelous spectacle; she almost seemed possessed by evil spirits. But what really caught my attention was not the squirming, arching, and angry screaming, but the way that in the midst of her apparent fury, she would reach up her plump warm fingers and trace them softly, tenderly even, along my cheek or chin or nose. The contradiction in such moments between her touch and her demeanor was almost surreal.

The first time she did this, I cringed at first because I expected her to try to scratch me or pinch me or pull a few strands of my pathetically thin beard. She was upset and I thought she would lash out at the person nearest her--in these cases, me. I thought such reactions were more or less instinctual, especially in the pre-verbal and early-verbal stages, when part of a person's frustration likely arises from not being able to make oneself understood. If a baby or toddler was frustrated, I thought, it would be natural for that kid to want to bite or scratch or hit. But no matter her emotional state, Rowyn has never shown toward me any sense of malice. It makes me wonder where hurtful responses come from in children. At what point do we begin to desire to hurt others? Is it learned? Do some kids just demonstrate their anger more physically than others? If so, why? Genetics? Parental influence? Diet?

I suppose these are more or less fruitless, unanswerable questions, but they have been on my mind since the first time 11-month-old, in the middle of an awful fit, reached up to my face and told me through her fingertips not that she was frustrated with me, but that she loved me. And why did this surprise me?

A Good Weekend

2009-02-16T19:21:00.000-08:00

So, I know not too long ago I was lamenting the lack of snow, but this weekend made me really look forward to the coming summer. Here is a chronicle of the weekend:

Saturday we went to Klemgard County Park, a great park that is nestled in to a long valley, which is only about 8 miles away from our house. We hiked on part of the hiking trail, crossed an old bridge that spans nothing and goes nowhere,

had a picnic under the old bower,

and played on the playground.

That evening, while I watched the kids, Elizabeth cooked one of our favorite meals. I'm not sure what the name of it is (if it even has a name), but it is a pasta dish with bacon, capers, lightly sauteed zucchini, onions, and sun-dried tomatoes. It is all mixed up together along with a Gorgonzola and white wine sauce.

After the kids were in bed, Elizabeth and I watched Before Sunrise, the prequel to Before Sunset, both excellent films (we watched the sequel first a couple of months ago), though Before Sunset is the better of the two, in our opinion. It was Valentine's Day and we are not usually V-Day people, but we sort of caught the Valentine's spirit and talked about how in love and happy we are. Even though we know we feel this way, it is good to verbalize it occasionally.

Sunday was a slow, lazy day. We went to church, came home, I took a nap, we went for a walk, cooked dinner, put the kids to bed, and then read and surfed the Internet.

Today, President's Day, was busy, but in a good way. This morning, Sonora and I went outside and trimmed some of the apple trees. We also spent some time climbing the trees
and playing ponies (Sonora's latest obsession). Some of the prettier apple branch clippings we bundled into a stick bouquet that we later presented to Elizabeth, who had been inside working and taking care of Rowyn.

After about an hour and a half of tree trimming, Sonora and I decided to build our first fairy house. Sonora has been curious about fairy houses since watching the movie Kristen's Fairy House, a gift from her aunt Vanessa. We chose a secluded spot behind the wood pile at the edge of our back yard. We used a sparkly rock as the floor and constructed the little dwelling out of as many pieces of curved wood as we could find. It's not an elaborate house, but it was fun and Sonora is half convinced that a fairy is going to move in.

When the fairy house was done, we ate lunch, went for a long walk together, played in the park, washed out buckets for food storage, cleaned out the garage, washed the cars, cooked and then ate dinner, and put the kids to bed. I still have a few hours of grading to do tonight, but this weekend was mostly free of school work. We were able simply to be together, which was really nice, though it made me long for summer. Mid-June, which is when my summer break starts, is still a long way off.

Death Anxieties and Childish Insights

2009-02-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

So, over the past six months or so, while commuting to and from work, while working in the yard, while doing the dishes, I've been listening to lectures on literature, partially out of interest in literature and partially to get ready for the GRE literature subject test. So far, I've listened to over 100 hours of lectures on literature. To tell you the truth, I really like the insights they provide into the works themselves and the tastes of the works I get from the lectures. However, the literary topics covered are kind of heavy and often sort of pessimistic. I'm not anti-pessimism--sometimes being pessimistic can be really fun and kind of energizing in a weird way, sort of like how saying "Screw it all," and meaning it, can be sort of freeing--but too much pessimism can become tiresome.

(This will be a rather lengthy aside, but here is an example of a warm/fuzzy segment from Georg Buchner's unfinished early nineteenth-century play Woyzeck. The grandkids have asked the grandmother to tell them a good night story and this is her response. Note: this is my own translation from the German, so there might be a few errors:
"Come here, you little crabs! Once upon a time there was a poor child who had no father and no mother. Everyone was dead; there was no one left in the world. Everyone dead, but still the child searched day and night. And because there was no one left on the earth, the child wanted to go up into heaven, and the moon looked down so friendly on the child. When the child got to the moon, it was just a chunk of rotten wood. And then the child went to the sun, but it was just a withered sunflower. And when the child got to the stars, they were little golden mosquitoes, stuck up there like the red-backed shrike sticks them on the sloe. And so the child decided to come back to earth, but the earth was a sunken harbor. And the child was totally alone. And the child sat down and cried, and there the child still sits and is completely alone." Nice bed-time story from Granny, eh?)

A lot of the heaviness from these works of literature has to do with the fear of death and what happens after death. This fear, of course, is as old as consciousness, and even religion can't cure people of it entirely, because, even for the faithful, there is a fear of hell or rebirth or the telestial kingdom, or the nagging doubt that God will turn out to be just like Santa Clause: a comforting fiction. So probably most people are afraid, in one way or another, of what happens after their last breath.

Now, I'm one of those people who believe in God and the afterlife and, truth be told, the thought of death doesn't produce in me a lot of anxiety, but in the same way that it can be fun to toy with pessimism, I sometimes like to imagine death as simply an end to existence, a vacuum, an eternal state of non-perception. This line of thought is thrilling to me in the same way playing "Bloody Mary" was exciting as a kid, or the way it was thrilling and terrifying to imagine that skinwalkers-who-ran-fast-as-cars were real and that they ventured off the nearby Navajo reservation to prey on people in villages just like mine. But I also realize that for many people the fear of death is real. I'm also convinced that death is a difficult concept for any person, regardless of conviction, who has really thought about it.

Anyway, this is to say that these lit lectures have me thinking about the fear of death, and thinking about people thinking about the fear of death--and its inverse, the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life--a lot lately. And this has led me to wonder about what the idea of death means to a kid.

As near I can tell, Sonora first encountered death as a concept when she was two. I can't remember the details, but she was on a hike with Elizabeth and they came upon a recently dead bird. It was bleeding out the mouth and Sonora squatted to examine it. She determined that the bird was painting, not bleeding, that the small, bright crimson pool was the bird's way of creating and sharing art. Elizabeth did not correct Sonora's interpretation, and I think the contradiction--painting, not bleeding; creating, not dying--sort of broke Elizabeth's heart while it also made her laugh.

The next time I can think of when Sonora encountered death was about six months or a year later when she and I were on a walk and she noticed a large ring-necked pheasant lying dead on the shoulder of the road. She asked me what was wrong with it and I told her it was dead. Then I felt compelled to explain what death is--that it is when the body dies and the spirit leaves the body and the body gets eaten by other animals, and doesn't ever move again of its own volition. This led to a discussion of humans and death and, being the sort of lay-it-all-out-there sort of person I am, I told her that she would die one day and Mom and Dad would die, that everyone dies eventually (thinking back on it now, I feel a bit like the grandma in Buchner's play, mentioned above) and that that is okay because the spirit lives on and goes to heaven, etc.

Since then, I think Sonora has spent a bit of time thinking about death. She talks about it when she sees a dead insect or any dead animal or when a character dies on a movie she has watched. She seems mostly okay with it now, but for about a year or so, I think it challenged her conception of life and made her a little more anxious than she might otherwise have been. For example, about six months ago, the plug in our bathroom sink broke. It was one of those metal plugs that is linked to a plunger you can pull up or push down to engage or disengage the plug from the sink. It took me about two weeks to get around to fixing the plug and in the meantime the drain was just open, a black circle with no net, no trap, no security, that the water ran down. Before the plug broke, even when it was disengaged, the plug had provided a sort of safety net to any but the smallest items that were dropped in the sink. One time, when the plug was absent from the sink, Sonora accidentally dropped a small hair barrette down the drain and it slipped into the hole. That ruined her whole day. She wept and shook and asked over and over where it would go. Where would the barrette go that fell down the hole? From then on, she was obsessed with keeping things away from the drain--barrettes, toothbrushes, even things much too large to fall in, like cups and the soap dispenser--so that they wouldn't fall down the hole and suddenly be gone for ever. When I finally repaired the sink so that the plug could go back in, she was visibly relieved. There have been very few things that have upset her as much as the sight and reality of that drain did. This may be a stretch, but I chalk up her fear of the unplugged drain to her anxiety about death. Death is the drain that life suddenly falls into and is then apparently gone forever.

The other instance that led me to believe she ruminates on death occurred when I was driving her to her friend's house for preschool. Out of the blue, she asked me "Daddy, what is under the earth?" I told her, as simply as I could, about dirt and rocks and layers floating on a sort of volcanic marshmallow layer, which led to a cursory explanation of volcanic activity, but her question, I came to understand as we talked, was not "what is the earth made of," but "how stable is the earth? Is it like an egg shell that can crack open and swallow us up?" Again, it was the idea of everything disappearing in a flash that was on her mind.

I guess what this all has taught, or at least reiterated to me is that we humans have a tough reality: from the moment we begin to be conscious of ourselves, we begin to recognize that we will die. For whatever reason, this realization creates a lot of distress in us, and we deal with it in different ways. A lot of art--literary and otherwise--has been created as a way to explore, examine, and cope with the realization of universal mortality and with the thought that "I, too, will die," which feels very profound. Of course, we've got a lot of stuff going on which keeps the wolf (in this case, the wolf is not death, but the idea of death) at bay: love, family, food, work, television, sports, politics, video games, music, hobbies, books, friends, church, school, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, and schedules. So many plugs to hide that awful yawning black hole in the bottom of the sink.

Virtual Bird Mate

2009-02-05T23:05:00.000-08:00

"Come here; I want to show you something," my boss said to me the other day. He pointed out his office window at a bird and told me to watch it. The brownish-gray bird, a little bigger than a sparrow in size, was just then perched on top of the side-view mirror of a van. The bird hopped down so that it was facing the mirror; its feet clung to the rim just underneath the mirror and the bird had to flap its wings to keep from falling off of its thin perch. But it wasn't just flapping its wings to stay put. It was spreading its wings more widely and puffing out its breast more broadly than necessary while rubbing its open beak on the mirror.

I realized why my boss wanted me to see this: the bird was courting the van mirror. "He's been doing this for at least two hours," my boss told me. I watched the bird for a few more minutes as it hopped back up above the mirror, then flailed around in front of the mirror again, then repeated its actions. After a while, it gave up and moved to the mirror of the car parked next to the van, hoping to have more luck courting the virtual bird in that mirror. It was humorous, but also somewhat heartbreaking, to watch this bird try to build a relationship, try to connect with, a reflection.

There's a message somewhere in this, I told myself. An obvious one is that human industry messes with wildlife in innumerable ways. But that "lesson" didn't resonate deeply enough. I've seen other things--starved deer hanging from barbed wire fences, for example--that have driven that point home more successfully. The missive that seemed to fit best had more, I think, to do with connection, illusory connection.

The radio and television provide a sense of connection to people that is an illusion, but I think we mostly know that it is an illusion, and are therefore charmed as much as seduced by these media. But the Internet, I'm beginning to think, is more seductive in convincing us that we are part of something larger. On the internet, people who haven't seen each other for many years, and very likely will never actually see each other again, ever, "connect" through the Internet. I've become "friends" with many old acquaintances on Facebook, for example, though after a few exchanges of "what have you been up to for the last 15 years," we usually lose interest in each other and sort of forget that we had re-connected. Such re-connections are enjoyable and make one feel momentarily young and alive, but, at least in my experience, tend to be short-lived. Even Facebook connections I have with my siblings and other family members are, after a few ecstatic Hello-how-are-yous, left untended.

Another example of a mirror is this blog and some of the other blogs I read. I can update people on what is going on with Elizabeth, me, and the girls. I can read about other people's families, their travels, accomplishments, and even sometimes their sorrows. This is rather convenient and, again, makes me feel a sense of connection with some of the people I care about. However, a blog entry is a poor substitute for a conversation over warm cocoa. It is no replacement for a handshake, an embrace, an understanding glance, a shared laugh.

I suppose the bird-mirror/human-Internet comparison breaks down at some point: unlike the bird and the mirror, Internet communication does have at each end an actual human. In essence, with the Internet, there IS a bird on the other side of the glass. The sad thing, though, is that the glass barrier is there and the birds, for all our flapping wings, can not touch.

Christmas Eve in Our Town

2009-01-24T21:30:00.001-08:00

So, I meant to write about this a while ago, but never got around to it. Normally, if I wait too long, I don't get back around to writing about an event, but this one was unique enough to hold onto.

For Christmas Eve, we decided to go to the local community church, which, actually, is the only church in our town (there is another church building in town, but it is currently functioning as a duplex, not as a place of worship). The church had advertised its Christmas Eve meeting by setting up outside the post office a small plywood A-frame to which was stapled a letter-sized invitation to everyone.

We had been intending to go to church here ever since we moved into the town a year and a half ago, but we had never made it. That night, we dressed up in casual semi-formal clothes and hurried off so as not to be late. Turns out we were over-dressed and, though we arrived one or two minutes late, we were early. About 25 people in all showed up that night. 15 minutes after the advertised start time, the service began. A woman and a man co-led the service.

I want to pause here to give you the setting of the place: it is a wooden church, painted white on the outside, that is perhaps 60 years old. The floors were a little creaky, but were covered in red carpet. Two rows of pews face a podium which sits upon a slightly raised landing. On the right-hand side of the landing was a piano, before which Elizabeth now sat. On the left-hand side were a couple of electric guitars and a set of drums (apparently someone who attended there could play some instruments). The ceiling was vaulted, but, with old exposed beams, felt more like a nice barn than a cathedral. However, despite its rough appearance, it had a welcoming, non-pretentious warmth to it. In some ways the building reminded me of the local Grange halls near the tiny village in southwestern Colorado where I grew up. The community would hold square dances, charity dinners, auctions, and other gatherings in these halls. This little church felt sort of like a sanctified Grange hall.

"Unfortunately," the woman said as a disclaimer at she began the service, "we won't be having any music tonight. That is, unless one of you out there happens to play the piano." She chuckled at the suggestion, presumably because she was acquainted with everyone in the congregation besides us and knew that none of them played. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elizabeth's hand slowly raising itself, almost unbidden, until the woman turned her attention to my shy wife.

"Really? You can play the piano?" the woman asked. Elizabeth nodded.

"And you'd be willing to play tonight?" Again Elizabeth nodded. "Thank the Lord!" the woman said. She gave Elizabeth the name of the first song, and then went about searching through the hymnal and scratching together a list of songs while someone else began reading the Christmas story found in Luke.

As Luke 2 and then Matthew 2 were read aloud, the reader would stop after each major plot occurrence and children would come forward with the appropriate ceramic figurines of a manger scene. Sonora had been given a wise man and when it came time to take up her piece, she proceeded with full concentration to the little stable that was set up on a card table in front of the podium and carefully set the stoic wise man in place, then returned to me.

At each of these pauses, we would sing a song to Elizabeth's piano playing. No one led the music; the woman would just sort of nod in Elizabeth's direction and then she would play a short introduction and then begin the song. I really could not believe that Elizabeth was playing at all. She is person who is generally reserved, afraid to call attention to herself. Recently, she became very sweaty, shaky, and rather nauseaus simply from giving a presentation to a group of women about sprouting. Most of the meeting I stared at her back in disbelief (After the meeting, when I expressed my surprise to her, she said "You can't have Christmas Eve with no music. That would just be sad.") In between songs, she would flip the hymnal open to the next song and brush her fingers silently across the keys in order to practice the song in her head. She played quite well the five or so songs that were given to her.

At the end of the meeting, the man leading the meeting called our attention to a cake at the front of the room. It was coated in white frosting and, written across the cake in red frosting were the words "Happy Birthday Jesus." He lit the fourteen or so candles (I have no idea how they chose the number of candles) and then called the kids up to blow out the candles. Sonora contributed by blowing on the elbow of the older girl in front of her.

Then we retired to an adjoining multi-purpose room where some tables had been set up, and we ate cake and drank water. No one approached us to ask our names or find out where we lived or to see if we would be coming back, or to talk to us at all. It was as if, somehow, they had expected a complete stranger and her family to appear unannounced and play the piano for the Christmas Eve service.

Although the service was poorly planned and poorly attended, I was impressed by a congregation that has the faith to produce, out of thin air and my normally shy wife, a musician to play for their Christmas program.

The Snow is Gone

2009-01-15T22:42:00.000-08:00

A week and a half ago, we had snow,

snow,

snow,

snow,

snow.

It had been cold and snowing for three weeks.

We received a package we had ordered a few weeks earlier: a conversion kit for our bike trailer that would make it so we could pull the kids behind us while we cross-country skied.

We tried it out that Monday night and skied around the streets of our village: up and down some of the smaller hills, to the ends and back of a few dead-end streets, back and forth on the only paved street, and finally, out on a county road that winds along beside the creek. It was fun. We felt free. In the darkness we slid silently along the roadways in between rows of houses made cozy with snow.

It is sometimes hard to find ways to exercise, to get outside as a family, during the winter, but we decided this was going to be our activity. We would travel the back roads that spiral away from our back-road town.

And then, the next day, everything began to melt. It rained for a few days, and then it was sunny. The creek swelled to five or six times its normal size. The roads turned to gravelly mud. The sledding hill turned to green grass. Birds can often be heard chirping. A few days ago, we went to the park and played for a while. I rode my bike to work the other day and was not uncomfortably cold.

It is more convenient with the snow gone. My back likes not shoveling the driveway. We can drive more quickly on the roads.

However, our little cross-country ski rickshaw is still fully assembled, waiting, in the garage. The long poles that lead out from the body of it, the poles that connect Dad or Mom to the carriage, seem to yearn like a lonely person's arms. "Where is the snow?" it seems to be asking me every time I visit.

Night Sledding

2008-12-23T00:35:00.000-08:00

After we woke up this morning (Monday), Elizabeth asked me what was on my schedule. "Not much" was my reply, but it still ended up being a busy and somewhat stressful day for me and for Elizabeth. But in the early evening, around 5:30, after I had finished shoveling the driveway and walkway, I had an urge to go sledding. There wasn't much time for it, but I went inside and asked Sonora (who, on an annoying sugar high, had been pestering Elizabeth all day) if she wanted to go sledding. She said yes excitedly and I helped her suit up.

It's good that Sonora has good snow gear, because it was cold tonight. The sun had set a little after 4:00 and the temperature was now hovering a few degrees above zero. The air burned our faces. The sled crackled each time we sat on it. Where the snow had been mostly plowed or scraped away, it moaned dryly beneath our feet, not wanting to pack together. Instead it shifted into stratified little mounds beside our boots.

But this crispness to the air and snow felt good somehow. It more sharply defined things, brought everything closer together, even the stars. Clouds had hung over us most of the time for the last few weeks, but tonight while Sonora and I were out, the stars were clearly visible behind the puffs of fog created by our breathing: galaxies, constellations, clusters, lone stars. Sonora pointed to a star and said, "Look at that bright star. I wonder if that was the one that shined on baby Jesus." I told her it might have been.

At first, we tried sledding down the long hill behind our house, but, though we had sledded on it just a couple of days ago, there was nearly a foot of new snow on top of the previous track we had used. We just couldn't get up any speed in the deep snow, so we took to the streets. Very few cars were out and I felt confident that we would see any car headlights in enough time to react to avoid a collision. We didn't end up seeing any cars while sledding, so I couldn't test my hypothesis.

There are many hills in our village. We sledded down four of them, the last one, a couple hundred yards long, being the longest ride of the night. The walk up the hill was slow and we had to stop a few times so I could warm Sonora's freezing face by cupping my bare hand around her chin and mouth and cheeks. But the descent was worth it. It was long and fast-paced. We were mostly surrounded by darkness, though I could see well enough to stay between the looming snow banks on either side of the road. Ice crystals knocked loose by the sled pelted our faces like sand. We blinked to keep our eyes clear and to keep them in focus. It was exhilarating, soaring down the snow-coated street, hugging my daughter tightly in front of me, knowing that she was enjoying herself as we skittered and bounced and lurched over the uneven, crunching surface, submitting completely to gravity as it hurled us downward.

When we came to a rest in the middle of a block, underneath towering old leafless trees, Sonora said "Let's keep going Dadda." But we had reached the bottom. We would have to climb another hill in order to sled again, she was getting cold all over, and Elizabeth would have just finished making dinner, so I told Sonora it was time to go. She held onto the rope of the sled and trotted in front of me. She was Rudolph and I was Santa and the sled was our sleigh and we were delivering presents to all of the kids, she told me. So we hurried home while playing at being Saint Nicholas and, upon arrival at our warm home, congratulated ourselves for a job well done; many imaginary children had received many imaginary gifts because or our hard work.

From there, the day continued as before: we ate dinner, Elizabeth and I got the kids ready for bed, put them to bed, and then kept on working on things deep into the night. I'm glad that Sonora and I could go sledding. Those 45 minutes playing outside in the cold night with my daughter changed a stressful day into an enjoyable day.

Holiday Tradition

2008-12-15T21:58:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, snow fell for the first time this year. It finally felt like winter. The doors to our cars have been frozen shut every morning since. I have to pound on them with my frozen fist, beating around the outline of the door, trying to break the thin ice seal that holds the weather stripping fast against the metal frame. Tonight, when I arrived home and stepped out of my car, I breathed in deeply through my mouth; my throat caught, protecting itself from the biting cold (it's supposed to get down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit tonight) , and I coughed spasmodically, and my throat burned.

I'll eventually tire of these inconveniences and long for spring, but right now, I am glad for these manifestations of winter. Winter is a time to retreat indoors for the long night; it's a time to savor Saturdays in the snow; it's a time for hot chocolate and soup. It's also when Christmas happens, and Christmas traditions have been on my mind lately.

Having children and watching them experience some of the same traditions I experienced has given these annual acts new meaning for me. Each Christmas ritual Sonora performs reminds me of one that I did, and conversely, it makes me think of my parents, when they were younger, and then my whole sense of childhood returns, if only for a few moments. These traditions seem to collapse time, sort of like a compressed accordion; multiple generations connect. Often many generations of a family do gather and re-connect at Christmas time, but even when I am not with my brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents at Christmas, I feel linked to them through memory and association.

Here are some of the memories that have presented themselves so far in the build-up this Christmas:

Elizabeth has sewn each of us a stocking. These stockings are clean and cute and personalized. We've never hung them from a mantel piece above a fireplace because we've never lived anywhere that had such a thing. When I was a kid, we only lived for two years in a house with a fireplace and a mantel. Otherwise, we hung our stockings from thumbtacks pushed into the wood-panel walls. Our stockings were not very clean and weren't particularly cute. Mine had my name on the white cuff. It was made out of a fleece-like material. What I remember most about it was the hard candy stuck inside the toe of the stocking. Each year, another piece of candy seemed to attach itself to the mass of hard sugar that had somehow latched onto the material. I would pick at the candy lump, but wouldn't tear it out for fear of ripping the stocking. Besides, I never have really liked hard candy, so I wasn't sad it was going to waste.

Most of our presents are wrapped in reusable cloth gift bags Elizabeth sewed a few years ago, but one of the presents I purchased was too large to fit in any of these bags, so I had to wrap it in wrapping paper. When I was young, we had a family present-wrapping ritual. My mom and dad would hide most of the presents under their bed and, when it was time to start putting gifts under the tree, my parents would call us into their bedroom one by one to wrap gifts for our siblings. My parents had a bedroom at one end of our single-wide trailer-house. Their bedroom was removed from much of the commotion experienced in the rest of the small dwelling. When I would go in there to wrap gifts, it always seemed quiet, still. Part of this sense of peace was due to the act of wrapping. Under my mom's guidance, I had to concentrate on cutting the paper to the right length, wrapping it carefully, so as not to rip it, taping it in the right spots, and finally, creasing the ends in the right places so that the paper neatly hid the contents of the gift. Sitting on my parents' bed in their quiet room, keenly focusing on a task, the experience felt almost sacred. For some reason, I am sure that my mom, when she was a child, sat like that, together with her mom, wrapping gifts.

The Christmas of 2003 was the first one Elizabeth and I spent in Washington. We didn't have a Christmas tree, and we were conflicted about buying a real one, conflicted because they were expensive and because it seemed a waste to support cutting down a 10-30 year-old tree just so we could have a "real" tree in our house. So we decided to buy one. In fact, it was her sister Camille, who was living with us at the time, and I who picked one out from a wide selection at a local thrift store, and hauled it back to the house. Elizabeth and I are still using that same tree; Sonora helped me assemble it this year.

But one thing I do miss about not having a real tree is the pine smell. When I was a kid, the family would drive to the 10-acre lot of land we owned about 5 miles from where we lived. The land was covered with juniper and pinion trees and we would tromp around in the snow, looking for the perfect tree. For us, however, the perfect tree was one with identifiable flaws that my mother insisted on: it couldn't be too big (it pained my mom to think of us killing a mature tree that had struggled as long as she had against the extremes of the high deserts of southwestern Colorado); and it had to be growing very close to a larger tree (her reason for this qualification was that, if the little tree was growing close to a larger one, it was likely to die anyway, so we weren't making too big an impact on the Pygmy forest). Once chosen, each of the kids would take a turn swinging the dull hatchet my dad had brought along and then we would haul off the meager beast and set it up in a corner of the living room. It was always in a corner because we wanted to do our best to hide the limbless side--the side that had been growing against the larger tree--from view. No matter how far we shoved the tree into the corner, though, it still looked a little shabby. But it always smelled as good as the full trees my friends put up in their houses. My grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great-grandparents all spent a lot of time in those high deserts and would have had similar trees. Sometimes I feel guilty when I think about how Elizabeth and I have changed the tradition by using a fake tree, but we live in Washington where there are no pinion or juniper trees of the varieties my ancestors would have known, so a fake tree isn't so bad.

When I was a kid, almost every Christmas, we would make gingerbread houses. For the gingerbread, we would use graham crackers glued together with a powdered sugar/egg/cream of tartar frosting. The trick was to handle the crackers carefully and hold them in place much longer than you would think necessary to allow the frosting to set. But Elizabeth is a purist. She makes the gingerbread from scratch. It's an all-day process of mixing and chilling the dough, rolling it out to a certain thickness, cutting out patterns, baking the pieces, putting them together, and decorating them. A couple of years ago, in addition to a house for herself, Sonora, and me, she planned and made an elaborate gingerbread train.

This year, we just did houses and a small train.At first, I was opposed to all this work. "Let's just use graham crackers." I said. Elizabeth acted as if I'd profaned a sacred institution. We've never used graham crackers. But I've come to appreciate these dark, hand-made, fragrant, thick-walled structures. I've come to understand that they are fleeting works of art similar to Navajo or Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings that are intricately constructed for traditional ceremonies and then swept away. Sometimes the construction of something is what matters, even if the final product is impermanent.

This year, Elizabeth's magnum opus was the Advent calendar. She worked on it at night for many nights after the kids went to bed. This is not a cardstock open-the-box-and-get-a-cheap-piece-of-fake-chocolate Advent calendar. This is one that will last until we die. The first thing Sonora does each morning is to excitedly take an ornament from the appropriate pouch and hang it on the cloth tree.

My family didn't do Advent calendars. I didn't even know what one was when I visited a friend's house in my early adolescence and they had one of the cardstock ones. When he explained it to me, I was excited, but the chocolate for that day had already been eaten, and I then revised my opinion: this now seemed to me a stingy way to approach the build-up to Christmas.

I'm excited to add Elizabeth's calendar to the list of traditions. Even though the memories are only a few weeks old, I already remember with fondness watching her plan out and slowly construct this addition to the Christmas atmosphere. And it is fun to have a tangible countdown to the 25th.

I'm sure that, as is the case with the Advent calendar, every so often we will add a new memory to the list of those we revisit each year. Hopefully, our kids will take these with them, the most lasting of the Christmas gifts we give them, and carry them into their lives to give to their children.

Washing Dishes by Hand

2008-11-20T23:13:00.000-08:00

I've always hated washing dishes. When I was a kid and it was my turn to do the dishes, I would often hide a couple of the grimier dishes so I didn't have to wash them. When I was fifteen, I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant. I came home at night feeling greasy, feeling coated in chunks of half-eaten food. I lasted three days as a professional dishwasher, and then I quit.

But one time when I was in my early twenties and was home visiting my parents, I had a sort of breakthrough with dish washing. It was late at night and I was washing the dinner dishes alone in the kitchen while listening to Tracy Chapman; my hands worked mindlessly in the warm, slippery water. And then, suddenly, I felt alive, elated almost. I wanted to sing. It sort of felt spiritual; I wanted to pray. I also got the urge to go wandering. So, when I finished the dishes, I walked outside and wandered in the darkness around the little southwestern Colorado village. I ended up at the small park at the center of town and there, looking up at pinpoint explosions of light in the blackness, I followed my urge and chanted energetically at God. When I returned home, I felt refreshed.

Since then, I have experienced a few other transcendent moments while washing the dishes. Tonight, for example, while I was washing dishes in our silent house, everyone else having gone to bed, I realized again that washing dishes isn't so bad. That was my first realization.

The other realization that came to me as I cleansed plates and cups is one I've had many times before, but it was particularly clear to me tonight: Everyone feels misunderstood. Virtually everyone feels, on a regular basis, left out, overlooked, insecure, victimized, unloved, passed over. And this includes those who seem to be on the inside. They may even envy those who envy them. Or maybe they don't notice the enviers at all. But they don't feel understood. Nobody feels understood, but most people forget this and feel alone in their isolation and wonder Why Me?

Mine was not an original thought--many people have reached this same conclusion--but in that moment it felt an important realization and I was glad to have thought it, glad to have experienced the flow of thought, the thrill of connecting conceptions, the satisfaction of epiphany. Something about doing dishes opened my mind to contemplation, and I thought; the result of this thinking wasn't life-altering, but I was glad for the exercise.

I think part of what can make dish washing an enlightening experience is the process: through simple, cyclical, repetitive motions, I am accomplishing something, cleansing kitchen implements, making attractive that which was moments before unappealing. But more than anything, I think, it is the texture, the feel of things that causes the thoughts, like stones in tilled earth, to rise to the surface. The smooth, rounded handle of the Pyrex measuring cup, slick with suds. The stick-slide-stick-slide-stick chatter of my fingers across the wet glass casserole dish. The sloping descent of the warm red rag over the fork tines. The efficient swoop of the rag over the belly of a cream-colored bowl whose surface, like that of an egg shell, is not quite smooth. The continual re-warming of my air-cooled hands (re-inserting my hands into the water feels each time like a discovery). The almost imperceptible vibrations as my fingernails pass over the thin stainless steel salad bowls, creating a sound that is almost unsettling but at the same time clarion. This sound vibrates up my fingers and settles in the underside of my wrist.

Somehow these textures create a sort of tactile music that mixes with the motions of the task to create a meditative space, and in this space, I can think. It's not that I look forward to doing the dishes now. I don't. But the next time I do them, there will likely come a moment, when I'm about half-way done, during which I will feel enlivened, and my mind will be glad that I've decided to immerse my hands in warm, slippery water.

Books and Year

2008-11-20T20:03:00.000-08:00

This past year, I read perhaps more pages than during any other year in my life. It's not that I read all that many books; it's that many of the books I read were long. Most of these books, I'm a little ashamed to admit, weren't very intellectual. In fact, the bulk of my reading consisted of fantasy fiction books: long, drawn out tales of men and women involved in epic struggles in a reality that includes magic and fantastic creatures. These accounted for about 7,000 of the roughly 9,000 pages I read this year, and I'm not going to waste any more words on these fantasy books except to say that it was, for the most part, enjoyable and fun to read them. However, they almost never inspired me, awed me, or caused me to contemplate. But a few other books did.

The Backslider, by Levi Peterson
fascinated me. This novel, set in rural southern Utah in the 1950s, is about a sometimes wayward Mormon boy who struggles with faith and sexuality. The novel has wide emotional undulations--often it is hilariously funny, at other times somber, and other times, it is tragic. This book is not for the Mormon faint of heart. It is no Gerald Lund rip-off. The book is quite irreverent. One of the many humorous scenes described in the book is of the main character, Frank, and his brother, Jeremy, wrestling the reluctant family dog into a creek so they can baptize him. The main character often views God as a pleasure-killing, vengeful master, and the Holy Ghost as an entity best avoided (he might tell you not to do something fun; or he might tell you to do something unpleasant). The book also includes a fair amount of swearing, several descriptions of sexual encounters, and frank discussions about masturbation.

The Backslider drags out from the closet some Mormon-specific skeletons--polygamy; blood atonement; and varying interpretations of the Word of Wisdom--but many of the conflicts are more broadly defined within the context of Christianity. For example, Frank's view of God seems mostly informed by the images of an angry, frightening Old Testament God, unreconciled with the much more personable Jesus of the New Testament. When Frank touches fossils in rock, he wonders how old the earth really is, and, if the earth is only a few thousand years old, why God would want to trick us with so many misleading clues, such as dinosaur bones and fossils. Frank vacillates between monastic self-denial and indulgences of the flesh. Guilt, repentance, and sin appear throughout the book.

The thing I found most refreshing about the book was its honesty. It asks aloud many of the questions people are afraid to utter. At times, however, the book tips past honesty into absurdity, as with the times when various characters get themselves so tied up in guilt, self-denial, and asceticism that they do things to themselves that seem implausible. Another thing that slightly disappointed me was the conversion to Mormonism that one of the main characters undergoes at the end of the book (converting to the faith has become a cliche that Mormons seem reluctant to leave out of most stories). However, the conversion is handled so artfully, in such a unique series of events, that I quickly forgave the author for turning the book in that direction. In fact, the most important conversion (not to any religion, per se, but to Jesus/God as a loving, empathetic, easy-going guy) , the one that comes to Frank at a vital moment near the end of the novel, is mildly shocking and not at all what a seminary graduate would expect to encounter in a conversion story.

Overall, The Backslider is a well-constructed novel that caused me to reflect upon the human condition, the nature of God, the place of pleasure in life, the necessity of love, and the struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

I'll save for a future post my thougths of the three other books I've recently read: Straight Man; In Cold Blood; and Anna Karinena.

By the way, I just realized that all of the books I've read this year have been written by male authors. I'd like to make the next book I read one written by a woman. Recommendations?

Ferris Bueller's Teacher

2008-11-18T21:37:00.000-08:00

I just came across the following quote of Ferris Bueller's economics teacher. It brought back a lot of memories and associations with mid-adolescent emotions. Here is the quote:

"In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. 'Voodoo' economics."

But besides calling up mid-teenage anxieties, it also made me realize with mild horror that I've sort of become that guy. Today in class, I was leading a discussion on George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant." The essay, published in 1936 takes place in Burma (Myanmar), which was then controlled by the British as part of their extensive empire. I wanted to bring present-day relevance to the essay. The (mostly one-sided) discussion went something like this:

"Does anyone know what Burma calls itself today? (long awkward silence) Myanmar. What news in the last year has been associated with Myanmar? No one? Buddhist monks? Protests? Anyone? Hmmm. (Brief explanation of the protests for civil rights and against human rights violations) What other recent events has Myanmar been in the news for? (long awkward silence) Cyclone? Anyone know what I'm talking about? Tens of thousands of people dead? International help refused? Any of this familiar? U.S. Navy ships just sitting there with unused supplies? An international debate about violating a country's sovereignty to help its citizens? Nobody knows what I'm talking about? Well, let's get back to the essay. Why was Orwell, a British Imperial Police officer, in Burma in the late 1920's? Anyone?"

I wonder if my students were just hearing that Waa, Wa, Wa, Wa, Waa, Waa sound that Charlie Brown hears when adults speak to him. I hope I don't get to the point where, for the whole hour, I just turn my back to them while I write on the board and drone on about some uninteresting subject.

Inheritance Scam Spam

2008-11-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

So, the Inheritance Scam E-mail is unlike most other spam in that, when you write it, you don't pressure and guilt your audience into forwarding it to everyone. You want your audience to think that she or he alone has received this rather remarkable offer. Your goal in this E-mail is not to bounce your E-mail around the globe forever; instead the purpose is to get the recipients of the message to give you money, and lots of it.

To get your reader to give you money, you need to convince her or him that you, in fact, want to give him or her a lot of money. Convince your reader that you are linked to an important person, someone she or he may have heard of in the news. Be sure, however, that your own invented identity is not someone she or he would be familiar with. Your scheme for how to actually get the money from the poor sap is up to you (arrange a meeting in Amsterdam; send a fake money order, etc.); the purpose of this communication is to teach you how to hook your readers and convince them to take the next step, whatever that might be.

Here are some tips:
Always originate your story in another country. Americans often assume that their country is the only stable one and will therefore not be surprised when you write that recently, when the Brazilian (or Ugandan, German, Chinese, Australian, etc.) government collapsed, you escaped with millions of dollars.

Come up with any reason why you need this person's help in liquidating the money. It doesn't need to be a rational reason. Make something up.

Instead of just writing $ or "dollars" when discussing the money, always refer to it as U.S. Dollars or USD. This will demonstrate that you are an international, metropolitan person, someone people can trust.

Make lots of grammatical, spelling, and wording errors. This will make your audience connect with you, will make them think, "Gee whiz, this is someone I could go bowling with, someone I could drink a beer with." Americans value feeling this way about people and will believe you if you awaken such emotions in them.

Lastly, address your E-mail so that it sounds as if it was sent specifically to this one recipient so that the recipient thinks he or she has been specially chosen for this important task; also, include as your contact E-mail address one that includes the name of organization you are claiming to represent, but has as its domain name some common E-mail service (example: OfficialDeutcheBankRepresentative@hotmail.com).

So, here is a brief example. As always, feel free to expand on this. Oh, and 12% of all US Dollars made using this method will need to be sent to me.

Dear Sur/Mam,

Allow me introduce myself. I am Honorable Hanz Werner Magnus from Norway, and am need your help. Recently my oder brother, Crown Prince Haakon of the Emaculate Kingdom Norway, tried cheat me out my inheritence. A snivelly thing this was to do to me and so there for I took my inheritence and sneaked out of the country by way of Sweden.

This inheritance is 47 million US Dollars. I can assure you that I have always said money on my person always. As an onorable member of the royal famly I am embarrased to have to ask such a thing of you, but I need help getting said USD into a useable state. You see, I am hiding in barn in Sweden. Luckily, no one has recognized me. No one knew about me because every person talked only on my brother, not me, so I can remain hidden.

I am willing to offer you, kind sir/Madam (and I make this offer to no one else; I have been told you are unique and trustworthy), 25% of my 42 million USD if you will help me get to the U.S.A. where I will be safe from my brother. Here is what you have to do. Send me 10 thousand USD so that I can come by a plain ticket and a fake passport. As a measure of my good will toward you, I will immediately, upone receive your 10 thousand USD, send you a real money order for 12 thousand USD. When I get to the U.SA, I will give you the remainder of promised 25% of my ineritance: 37 million USD.

Please hurry. I need help. My brother soon will discovery my were bouts. You will be richly rewarded. Send me the 10 thousand USD soon before I am caught and you will be rich man/woman.

Contact me very soon at my email address: OfficialPrinceNorway@gmail.com.

Many cind thanks,

The Onorable Prince Werner--Norway.

Remember to be kind yet firm, approachable yet authoritative, vulnerable but not pitiful. But above all, be convincing!

Endangered Woman Spam

2008-10-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

As with all spam you send, when you mail out to hundreds of thousands of people your "Let's Scare Women" spam message, the point is to get as many people as possible to forward it. Your message has to make people afraid, really afraid. It's important to instill fear in women, but it is equally important to instill fear in dads and husbands, because, if these males and females are scared, they might actually drag their lazy mouse hand and click on "Forward," which will fill you (although you will never know the button has been clicked), the author, with a sense of fulfillment bordering upon divine rapture.

Besides personal fulfillment, the purpose of the "Let's Scare Women" spam is to re-balance our messed-up society. By reminding women that they are weak and vulnerable, you are doing a duty by keeping women from crossing a lot of dangerous boundaries they might otherwise cross. And by making the dads and husbands afraid for them, you are providing fodder for the argument that women need a man's protection. And we all know what the sub-text of this argument is (although we don't state this to the fairer sex because they might get offended)--women should be controlled by men.

So, having established two important reasons for the composition of such a communique, let us proceed directly to the outline of how it is produced:

1) Open with a voice of concern that lets the anonymous recipient know that you care about him or her. Remember that this E-mail will be forwarded between acquaintances, so when a person receives it, your thoughtful words will make the receiver feel as if the sender actually cares.

2) Provide some examples that prey on people's natural fears. Include some examples about women being drugged, maimed, and beaten by people who were hiding in wait for the victim. You want your reader to forever wonder if someone is hiding under her car, in the dark van next to her, or in that dark blind spot behind her seat. One of the goals is to unsettle your audience. One way to do this is to make it sound as if such attacks were everyday occurrences.

3) Make an allusion to a credible-sounding source. The source can be real or imagined, but it needs to sound credible. Don't worry, most of your audience will trust that the information really came from the New York Times, or they will believe that there is a small newspaper in Kansas called the Quarterville Post. You can even provide a link to the home page of a newspaper; the reader will assume that the story must have existed and is now simply buried within the archives of the paper you linked to.

4) End the E-mail with a Call to Action. Remember that your purpose is two-fold: to get people to forward this E-mail to everyone they know, and to put women back in their place. So your call to action needs to encompass these two aims.

Below is a short example. Feel free to write much longer spam messages that include many more frightful examples.

"I'm forwarding this to you because I care about women, and I know you do too. Recently, there has been a series of brutal attacks on women that the Liberal News Media are simply ignoring. The Wall Street Journal has reported on several of these attacks, but the trend is much more wide-spread than even they are willing to admit. The Kansas-based Quarterville Post broke the news that throughout the past year, over one hundred women have been attacked in this fashion. Here is what the assailants do: They "hang out" at grocery stores and banks and wait for women to go inside. Then they quickly slip under the car of the woman and wait for her to return. When she gets back, the attacker takes out a knife and cuts the woman's achilles tendons. Now that she is unable to flee, the attacker drags her under the car with him and robs and beats her and sometimes steals her groceries, too.

"Some reports suggest that these attacks are being coordinated by a gang, and that this achilles-slicing gang has a presence in every town with a population over 10,000. The only reason you haven't heard about this is because members of the wussy liberal media think these gang members can be reformed and the members of the press don't want to offend this gang. But make no mistake: these are awful people and they are probably staking out women at your local Safeway as you read this.

"The best way to get a handle on this is to spread the word through grass-roots efforts. It is up to you to send this message on. Send it to everyone you know, even to those you don't know. If you don't forward this message, you might be responsible for the beating, robbery, and slicing up of a woman you care about. And men, don't stop there. Be sure to always escort your women whereever they go. Don't let them out of the house until you return for work. It just isn't safe out there without you there to protect them. The best way to protect a song bird from getting killed by a falcoln is to clip its wings and cage it. The same is true of women.

"Again, if you care about women, you must send this to everyone you know. It only takes .7 seconds. Send it. If you don't, you'll regret it some day. When your sister or friend or wife or daughter crawls home from the grocery store without her groceries, her face battered and her ankles bloodied, and asks you, "Why didn't you warn me?," you will regret not having warned her by simply clicking on the Forward button at the top of this page. Do it. Do it now. Forward this, or you'll be sorry, and so will everyone around you."

Now, after you have composed this message, send it to a whole bank of E-mail addresses. Someone in the group will send it on to people she or he knows, and then it will have a personal touch. You can now sleep peacefully knowing you have acheived something today: you have started a message that will probably be forwarded forever. Never mind that most cars are too low to the ground for an adult to fit underneath. Nevermind that many people would find it weird and report it if they saw a man trying to throw himself underneath someone else's car. When people are scared, they don't think about these things, because you've made it so easy for them to pass on the message. And as the message spreads through the infinite webs of cyberspace, know this: You have acheived immortality!

Low-Quality Junk Mail

2008-10-23T23:49:00.000-07:00

I've noticed lately that most of my junk mail is decidedly inferior to what it used to be. It's almost as if junk mail authors are starting to become disheartened and are only sending out second-best work. In an effort to improve the general quality of E-spam, and to help restore it to its previously lofty position (before E-mail services imposed "junk" filters onto everyone) as America's most-read material, I am going to do a series, including examples, on how to write and disseminate good junk. If you have any favorite categories I should cover, let me know, and I'll do my best to give 'em a shoutout.

Listen

2008-10-21T21:26:00.000-07:00

The shrill whine that train wheels make when they grate slowly against metal tracks has always appealed to me. I first heard it, and became fond of it, in the mid 1990s in Germany, in the huge train station in Hamburg, on the small platforms near rural villages. It sounds like a deeply-felt song, a series of long, high notes that trail after each other, as if one note, with its hand out, were chasing after the one that came before it, which was in turn longing after the one before, each crying out a sound of un-anxious longing.

In larger train stations, where several trains are always arriving and departing, the shrieks and cries of many large metal bodies blend to make a chorus of sorts. The sounds blend to a hum, almost like a harmonica whose five or six highest notes are being played simultaneously. Here the trains can really show off because they are guided by slanting rails into specific slots, guided sharply at clanking angles that would send them, at higher speeds, cartwheeling free of their constraints. But here, crawling along at this pace, they can bump and shimmy and squeal without worry; these sounds let their charges know that, momentarily, they will safely be deposed onto the platform, where friends wait to embrace them after their long absence. Or these passengers might ignore the hugging crowds and hurry to another train to head in yet another direction; or to home to fall asleep on the velvet couch. The heavy wheels spin one way, stop, and then spin the other way, singing on their way in, singing on their way out.

Another place, besides stations, where this sound arrests me is underneath overpasses. While in grad school in Spokane, I often walked under such an overpass at night on my way back to my car. If a train passed over, I would stop and listen to its conflicted sounds: the heavy, rhythmic crashing that caused the concrete pillars to tremble and the ground to shake, contrasted with the lofty whine of the wheels--the whale song of the tracks. On these nights those high pitches were the sound of contemplation; they embodied emotionally my disembodied thoughts.

I'm not one of those people who love trains; I don't fantasize about being a conductor or an engineer. I've never owned a model train. But I do like how the metal sounds as it grates against itself. It is a high, straining, somewhat hollow, metallic sound that rises and falls slowly. It is the sound of longing, the sound of waiting, the sound of relief, the sound of understanding, the sound of being found, of taking leave, of regret and forgiveness, of lamentations and rejoicings, the sound of coming and of going. It is the sound of gray drizzle on centuries-old roofs, the sound of cracked concrete and soot-covered backs, of luggage wheels clacking over slotted concrete, the sound of pigeons pecking pea-sized chunks of cheese bread from frozen cobblestones, the sound of hog farms and grain bins, of obsolete ingenuity and inter-dependence, of never-coming-back.

Those high peals drag their fingernails over the chalky hearts of the hearing near-by, searching, awakening...something, usually. Unless the sounds escaping from steel ring out and meet with no response, become incorporeal, impotent shockwaves diminishing into mute, dampening space

(So, um, in other words, I like that high-pitched sound that train wheels make when they move slowly down the track...and, in the moment of composition, I was also feeling fond of alliteration).

Travel vs. Goats

2008-10-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Laura posted some thoughts on her blog that sort of tapped into a latent dilemma that lately has been pressing on me: the traveling urge. Ever since Elizabeth and I got back eight years ago from spending three months in Europe (we were mostly in Germany, but we also spent time in the Czech Republic, Austria, and France), I have wanted to go back. Two and a half years ago, we geared up to go on a really cool trip; it still pains me to think about it.

Here were the plans: Our group would consist of Elizabeth, Sonora (then 1.5 years old and thus costless on an airlplane), me, and Elizabeth's sister Carrie and her new husband Carson.
We would fly with our bikes, panniers, a child bike trailer, and our camping gear to Munich Germany, where we would set out to the south-east. We would take 4 leisurely weeks biking through southern Germany and most of Austria, finally ending up in Budapest, Hungary. We would either take a train back to Munich, or fly out from Budapest.

We had the whole trek planned out. There are campgrounds, most of which are right on the water at one picturesque mountain lake or another, every ten miles or so along the route. I looked up rules on taking bikes as luggage. We purchased all the gear we needed.

And then we did our budget.

The year before, we had lived on my $22,000 salary, and while my salary had increased since then, we weren't going to be able to muster up, without going into debt, the $3,500 we figured we'd need for the trip. So for the next few months I cringed when a now-irrelevant deadline passed: the date we would need to buy our plane tickets; the date we would board the airplane; the date we would set out peddling at the feet of the Alps.

Since then we've taken one trip--to Alaska for a week--which was a pretty cool trip; it felt as if we had gone somewhere. Besides that, we've just driven to Utah or Colorado or to the other side of Washington. Or we've had stay-cations, which are a poor substitute. Our journeys have been kept short partially because, having purchased a house, we haven't had much extra money, and because we had Rowyn.

But as Rowyn gets old enough to make travel a little easier, and we begin to entertain thoughts of travel again, we've also started making plans that will anchor us to where we are. These plans consist of goats and chickens.

Elizabeth and I are as drawn to the idea of procuring our own food as we are to traveling and, I'm realizing, these are mutually exclusive pursuits. Milk goats have to be milked multiple times a day, every day of every week of the year, or else the milk will dry up. Eggs have to be gathered every day or else eventually the chickens will peck into them and develop a taste for eggs that would ruin the flock for egg-bearing.

We could ask our neighbors to milk our goats and gather the eggs, but to ask someone to do this for a month while we romp about Europe (or South America, or Africa, or Asia, or Australia) would be irresponsible. Besides, few people would have time to do this. Fewer people still would like us enough to do it.

We don't have any animals yet, nor do we have any plans for travel. Over the coming winter, we will make a decision that will of necessity exclude from our lives something we are excited about.

Summer's End

2008-10-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I'm pleased with my job is that I get summers off: almost three months in a row, one-fourth of a year. That is a pretty good deal. I don't get paid for these months, but we've been able to save up enough money to make it through each summer so far. I cherish these months of spending time with Elizabeth and the girls. But one difficulty with this schedule I've noticed particularly acutely this time around is that, when I go back to work, I go through withdrawals. The symptoms are sadness, frustration, and a sense of loss.

Elizabeth feels many of these same feelings when I go back to work. She can't just go outside and leave the baby. She can't just make a quick trip to town or run an errand without packing up the kids. Most days, she sees no other adults and spends her time reviewing the alphabet, wiping up curdled breast milk, making crafts and cleaning up the house. When I get home, we try to talk to each other about our respective days, to re-energize each other with casual, caring conversation, but we can't really talk, because Sonora becomes frustrated at the shift of attention away from herself and yelps "MOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMY" until one of us busies ourselves with her.

However, tonight, Sonora said something that led me to believe that she, too, senses that something has changed, that she, too, misses having her other parent around. "Daddy, do you feel okay?" she asked me. I had had a hard day, a long series of non-accomplishments at work. And I had had a couple of hard days before that--working a normal day, coming home for an hour to eat dinner, going to three-hour Scout meetings, and coming home to a dark, silent house. Tomorrow, I get to spend another Saturday doing Scout stuff.

"No, I don't feel that good," I told her.

"I wish we could play together more," was her reply. Since mid-September, I've only taken her to the park once.

"I wish we could, too."

I don't really have a right to complain. I love spending that time, those slow, warm, family months, with them. Few families get to spend that kind of time together. But the transition back out of that life is a shock, even though I knew it is coming. It's a sort of metamorphosis, I guess, like the cycle of a perennial plant that withers with the first frost, hunkers its essence down into its buried bulb and then waits, waits, those long, lonely months, for the sun to warm the earth and beckon it into bloom.

Bike Winning

2008-09-10T16:43:00.000-07:00

Two or three months ago, a friend of mine described for me an interesting way to teach a kid to ride a bike. The main idea was that you remove the training wheels and the pedals and let the kid propel herself with her feet. This will teach her or him balance. Once the child can balance somewhat, put the pedals on and the child should be able to learn how to ride without falling over so much.

It wasn't that simple with Sonora. She is only 3.5 years old. In some ways, she is perhaps too young to ride a bike, but I didn't want to have to teach her how to ride with training wheels and then take them off and have to teach her all over again. Better to teach her all at once, I figured. However, she hadn't done much pedaling of anything before, so I had to teach her how to pedal as well as how to balance. We practiced almost every day of the week for about a month and a half before she got it. The video below shows her at various stages in the process. It was a rewarding way to spend time with her.

Slack-lining

2008-08-31T00:18:00.000-07:00

Earlier this spring, Elizabeth's sister Carrie came to visit. Her husband Carson brought with them his slack line. He had me try it and I was hooked. So for my birthday, Elizabeth got me a slack line kit. It has been sort of rainy since then, so I've only been able to set it up a few times, but Thursday Elizabeth's sister Vanessa came down and we took the slack line to the park. Everyone tried it out, but it takes a long time to get a feel for balancing on a piece of bouncy one-inch webbing (I practiced on Carson's slack line for a couple of hours before I could take more than one step without falling off). Even though no one was able to walk the line by herself, I think everyone had fun trying.

Re-planting

2008-08-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

When we got back from our three-week jaunt to Utah/Colorado/Idaho earlier this summer, the arugula (a nutty-tasting salad green) and spinach plants in our garden had gone to seed. From every plant, a shoot had shot up a couple of feet; leaves, as if surprised by the sudden surge away from the earth, clung desperately, limply, to the sides of the new stalks. I picked a few of these leaves--we added some to salads--but the good taste had gone out of them. They had passed beyond their prime and had set about procreating, had done what all life tries to do: perpetuate itself.

I think what most people do, what I've always done when a plant goes to seed and no longer produces food, is pull up the plant and toss it into the compost pile or dispose of it in some other way. But this time I didn't want to do that. I wanted to see what would happen if I let these plants do what they wanted to do. I asked myself why do we buy packets of seeds every year? Why not let the plants supply their own offspring? I kept watering the plot they were in and observed as more seeds populated the spinach stalks, more seed pods stretched away from the arugula stalks. At first the seeds and seed pods were green, moist, soft. The arugula seeds were tiny in their pods, but they exploded with a peppery, nutty, radishy flavor when I sampled them. Slowly they began to dry out and firm up. But I was worried the seeds might not be any good.

In recent history, as agribusiness has mostly outgrown local production and become a major industry, people have bred and modified some plants so that they are sterile. They may or may not produce seeds, but they don't produce any offspring. Other plants have been genetically modified significantly enough that their seeds can be patented; it is illegal to collect and re-plant these seeds. Both scenarios--intentionally producing and perpetuating sterile crops, and making it illegal to re-plant a seed--seem to me bizarre and mildly abhorrent. This strong human desire to own, to control, to manipulate, to dictate even to nature is just weird and possibly very destructive. When food corporations completely dictate or shut down the reproductive capacities of edible plants, they reinforce the idea that profit is more important than life.

Scandinavians, by investing in and building Svalbard International Seed Vault in a remote area of Norway, have recently taken an important and decisive step toward preserving plant life, toward ensuring the survival of millions of plant species against natural disasters, wars, and human interference. This seed vault has been called, sometimes derogatorily, the "Dooms-Day Vault" or "Noah's Ark," but I find its presence to be rather comforting, even though it is very, very far away from me. It shows that, somewhere at least, people care enough about the essence of life to drill a huge hole into a frozen mountain and store millions of seeds from all over the world, to be re-distributed at need. All this effort and money to build a vault to store not gold or military weaponry, but seeds, which are at once so banal and so benignant.

When the arugula and spinach seeds were dry and seemed to be ready, I decided to make our own mini seed vault. The seeds came free easily, eagerly. It took a little while to separate the seeds from the organic debris that came with them. I lightly shook the arugula seeds in a bowl and picked out the dried pods. With the spinach seeds came many small pieces of brittle, papery yellowish leaves. These I had to blow away like wheat chaff. Once I had a small pile of each type of seed (I gathered enough to last about 15-20 plantings), I set the seeds aside, dug up the plot, and re-planted two rows of arugula and two rows of spinach to see if the seeds were good. The rest of the seeds I stored in brown paper pouches. In three days, the arugula had sprouted; two days later the spinach started coming up. It took twice that long for the seeds to germinate in the spring. The whole process has been strangely exhilarating.

Now I'm thinking we'll harvest seeds from all the plants in the garden that do well. These seeds will form the foundation of next year's garden. Another idea I had today was that we should buy produce from the local farmers market and get seeds from the plants (tomatoes, cantaloupes, peppers, cucumbers, peaches, cherries, etc.). These plants have been grown locally and should, therefore, do well in the local climate, as opposed to a seed packet sold in Washington filled with seeds produced from a plant in Florida.

I can't help but think that my recent interest in the perpetuation of plants has something to do with my interest in my family. Elizabeth and I tried for four years before we got pregnant with Sonora. We thought we were sterile, but now we have two miraculous daughters, now a sapling and a seedling, both straining upward, plunging their branches toward the sun. My parents are nearing retirement. They went to seed a while ago. They move cautiously and are becoming a little more brittle each year. I have one grandparent left: my mom's mom. We are all of her stock.

About a month ago, while Sonora and I were out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, we saw the biggest cherry tree I've ever seen. It stood as tall and almost as wide as the two-story Victorian home in whose front yard it was rooted. I lingered, wondering if I couldn't collect some of the ripe deep-burgundy cherries. While I was staring at the tree, a short, thin, jolly old man approached Sonora and me from across the street. His captivating smile was that of a person who thrilled in making other people happy. He asked us if we wanted some of those cherries. I said we did, but we didn't have any way to carry them. He went home and returned with eight empty plastic whipped-cream containers. He used to live in this house, he told me. Now his son lived there, though he was out of town for the weekend. The old man's son had planted that tree for his daughter when she was a little girl. She is now in her forties.

A seedling planted by a father for his daughter. And Sonora and I stood in its shade as it towered over us.

The cherries were sweet and juicy and full. Sonora helped me pick some, but she mostly stained crimson her face and hands and shirt; even though she picked many cherries, her container never filled up. We brought seven full containers home to Elizabeth and we all ate them over the next week.

Even before I had harvested the spinach and arugula seeds, before I knew I was interested in saving seeds, I saved a few of those cherry seeds and pushed them into the moist earth near our home. I saved them because their parent had grown well in this town, had grown well for that man's daughter, for that old man's granddaughter. I hope our small seeds will grow tall and spread their branches wide, wide over us. While we are waiting for that to happen, we will enjoy the cycle of planting, caring, harvesting, eating. To get the whole thing started, we'll have spring greens this autumn.

Summer

2008-08-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

I lover summertime, and I love our front yard in the summertime. The three maple trees out front have flung out their leaves like so many sieves sifting the sun, green hands holding up the air. These trees provide shade over the grass until the early afternoon, and after a few hours the house shades the same spot, so it is cool and comfortable there; the grass is soft. The warm weather draws us outside; the shade keeps us there.

This summer has been about as fun a summer as I've had since I was a kid (probably, I'll never again have a summer as enjoyable as those I had between the ages of 4 and 12, because those days of freedom and discovery on the plateau lands in southwestern Colorado have set a very high standard). Part of it has to do with having a house and land and trees. The two summers previous to this one were spend in two different locations, neither with any trees nearby. I felt stifled and dried out. But now we can walk outside, walk barefoot through the grass and weeds, spend time in the shade, lie back on the ground.

Besides the house, the land, and the trees, I savor the summer because I don't work. I wake up with Elizabeth and the kids, we spend most of the day together, we put the kids down for bed, and the Elizabeth and I have a few hours to ourselves; sometimes we do something together, sometimes we do things in isolation, but the evenings provide a nice rejuvenating buffer between one day and the next.

Here are some of the things I've enjoyed most this summer:

teaching Sonora to ride her bike on the basketball court at the nearby park (she still has training wheels on, but at least she can pedal reasonably well)

picking vegetables from our garden with Sonora

walking through the yard while holding Rowyn (she likes being outside and seems to listen intently to all the sounds

watching Sonora walk around with her watering pail and water random plants (she even made a couple of flowers grow and then blossom in a planter we thought had nothing in it)

going on walks as a family

jogging every morning with Elizabeth and the kids

traveling to see family

eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner outside on the porch or the patio or the lawn