Learning to Live

The Lion King

2012-01-19T20:06:00.000-08:00

We bought a DVD copy of "The Lion King" for Eva, since she was already obsessed with the musical numbers. (This is at least partly due to Dave--Bepa--constantly showing her animated cartoons when we visit. Cartoons like "Rupert and the Frog Song", Paul McCartney's superb musical composition, animated, of a Rupert the Bear story. Eva's a toon lover like her dad.) Besides, The Lion King is one of those iconic films worth owning. There are lots of those, sure, but with kids in the house, animated ones like The Lion King become especially valuable.

Anyhow, we watched it together as a family the night we bought it, and I didn't realize how much I'd forgotten about the story. (Kate was also blown away when I reminded her that the original came out in 1991--it's 20 years old!) The Lion King might be the most successful animated film in history, and though I don't know any numbers on it, probably ranks as Disney's single greatest film, even including the earlier ones which helped make the brand, like Snow White and Cinderella. (Though quietly becoming a fan of ABC's "Once Upon a Time" now has me newly fond of Snow White.)

Viewing the entire Lion King once, and segments since then as Eva re-watches it almost daily (she goes for repetition--and there's no better way to learn something)--my appreciation for the film has only grown. So in this post I'm not going to attempt any comprehensive review, because there have been thousands, but I'm just going to type out some thoughts related to the film.

A general comment on the music. I sing, but I'm not a reader of music, and though I can define an octave, a third, and a fifth, and I know a few other musical vocabulary terms, I'm no musician. So my comments on the music would amount simply to "It's awesome!" Which it is. The playful melody and stretched notes of Simba's "I Just Can't Wait to be King" have a way of staying in my mind. I'm not sure if holding and bending notes up like he does in singing the "just" and "wait" in "I just can't wait..." is a strong feature of African or black American music, but it feels like that. (The bass at which begins the theme to "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids", my favorite cartoon as I grew up, does the same bend-and-hold-the-note.) "I Can't Wait" dances with so light a heart that small ethnic flourishes like a held, bent note would trick it out perfectly. And that kind of detail would be in perfect keeping with the rest of the film.

The animation is stupendous, and one aspect in particular suggests itself to me (aside from the general richness of color and detail in drawing). That would be the faithfulness to biological detail. Now, this is the cartoon world we're talking about, so some obvious departures from reality are needed: namely, that different species associate with on another; and that they all speak a common language; and in the case of this film in particular, that there is an actual government in place, over all the species. But that government is more a function of mythology, which I'll mention later.

Putting aside the obvious suspensions-of-disbelief--for every story requires them in some form--the animals, for being given human qualities, are drawn in very real fashion. Not always: during song and dance sequences (like "Just Can't Wait"), the animals do things they simply couldn't physically. And for comic effect, like getting squeezed, squashed or being in some state of alarm, individuals' (the the bird Zazu's) heads and eyes might swell far beyond their normal size. But these fantastic elements are common to cartoons, and they're balanced by excruciating attention to detail in other things. This balance produces an intelligible caricature of nature, where some parts seem very genuine, as we would observe with our own eyes, and other parts swollen to comic (or horrifying, like the hyenas' eyes and grins) dimension.

As an aside, this kind of counterpoint exists in printed comics too. Pick up any old Calvin & Hobbes and you'll see drawings where the stripes on Hobbes' body and Calvin's shirt don't all stay inside the lines, and they have only four fingers on each hand. But the scenery can be as good as a painting, and the expressions on the faces are eloquent and sometimes very detailed. This balance between realistic and not realistic is basic to animation.

(NOTE: Look carefully at the stripes on Hobbes' arms and flanks. Sloppy sloppy sloppy! And only four fingers. Then dwell on the grass, the water, the log, and their smiles.)

In the Lion King, this detail manifests especially in the movements of the lions. The cubs pad awkwardly around with oversized paws, much like kittens. But it's plain that the artists studied real adult lions closely. When the adult lions walk, especially the males Simba and Mufasa, their heads bob with every step. You wouldn't see the motion any more rhymically in a nature film, or at the zoo, or probably in the savanna either. Second is when the lions are slowing down after running. Being quadrupeds like horses, they have similar rhythms in their strides. As Simba runs across the desert to challenge Scar, we're treated to a long slow-motion close-up of his legs, as the fore paws pass behind the hind paws, all in the air. That's a gallop. And after slowing from a full run, but before walking slowly, the lions trot for a few steps. Invariably, if you see a lion slow down from running to walking or sitting, you'll see those five or six trotting steps as he or she changes to a slower walking rhythm. Biologically accurate elements like those help keep the story so vivid.

And it's touches like those which convince me--not being a biologist,and not really wanting to research it--that even the bugs, grubs and leaves drawn throughout the film are accurate representations of actual African species. Like how in "Finding Nemo", all of the species depicted are known species, including plants and algae. And even the sandy bedforms on the seafloor are accurate for their location in the ocean. I think these animators--especially in recent decades--take their roles as educators and accurate (within the bounds of the story) depictors of nature very, very seriously. I have little doubt that research would identify every insect and grub which squirms beneath or comes crawling out of the log which Timon raids for food (even the little "cream-filled kind").

Enough on the animation. Now I'll turn my attention to the story. Mythically there aren't many characters more powerful than the father who requires atonement. Guilt, doubt and fear are basic to our psychology, and so is the need for release from them. A benevolent, knowing, and powerful parent (whether father or mother) is an excellent vehicle for this. History being what it is, in our society that character is typically male. Suns, lions, kings and fathers have a long symbolic history together. This film taps that symbolism deeply.

The story is Shakespearean in magnitude. Setting aside Shakespeare's magical use of words, Scar is as foul,

devious and personally cowardly a villain as you'll find in any of his plays. And

by executing his brother, and honestly believing he'd also executed the son, he follows as bloody a path to the throne as any including Macbeth. Simba's repressed guilt and hatred of himself, beneath the (actual Swahili! Kate looked it up) mantra of "hakuna matata" is worthy of any drama. (Hamlet's mental trauma was worse but his mother was one of the traitors.) Simba's psychological damage becomes apparent to Nala when she presses him to return. Her confusion at Simba's refusal and excuses are the mirror for the audience

to see the ugliness in his mind. It's up to the mystic Rafiki (admirably voiced by Robert Guillaume, who--along with Ernie Sabella as Pumbaa, and of course James! Earl! Jones!--is my favorite voice in the film) to show Simba that the events of the past are still psychologically present, and with every passing moment, Simba either flees or engages them.

A New Son

2011-08-24T07:30:00.001-07:00

World, Eliot James Gregory Sutherland. Eliot James Gregory, world.

Kate's and my second child, our first son, arrived last Friday at 9:37 AM Eastern daylight time. Kate had hoped for a daytime birth, since she likes to be able to see the blue sky while giving birth, and like with Eva, she was blessed with a clear blue daylight sky when the time came. Though this time around was a bit more worrisome than Eva's birth.

Kate had been diagnosed again with pre-eclampsia, the onset of blood conditions in the mother which can lead to seizures (fully blown eclampsia). The seizures are an immediate threat to the lives of both mother and child, so medical staffs take even the signs of pre-eclampsia very seriously. For a layman like me, these signs boil down to high blood pressure and excess protein in the blood.

High blood pressure can result from many factors, but the elevated protein level is due to partial liver failure (and with this some kidney malfunction, I'm told). The liver fails to clean the blood adequately and the protein continues to build up in the bloodstream, and this leads (directly or indirectly) to seizure. Doctors take serious precautions to keep that from happening.

Kate had something like this with Eva, namely the elevated blood pressure but not the high protein count. Still, the blood pressure alone was enough to spook the docs in Rhode Island so that they requested Kate come in to be induced. I won't re-hash that whole episode since I wrote about it two years ago when I posted about Eva's birth. So you can dig through our old posts if you're inclined!

But this time around, Kate's protein count was quite elevated, 3900 g/l, when anything over 300 g/l is cause for alarm. They almost sent Kate down to Portland, instead of receiving her at Lewiston. Even so, Kate got a phone call on Thursday morning, a day after leaving a urine and blood sample at the Rumford hospital (yes, we've moved to rural Maine--another post) from her midwife Jane, directing her to come to the Lewiston hospital immediately to be induced.

After a discussion over the phone, Kate was convinced that this was a genuine emergency and so we made preparations to head in. We packed one bag, dropped Eva off with Kate's mother, and drove down to Lewiston. We were in a calm kind of panic, knowing that time was precious but that a headlong rush might do more harm than good.

We were both relieved to walk into the M3 ward at the hospital--we were now surrounded by the people and the equipment to deal with an emergency--and were shown into a room.

So it came as some surprise when a nurse walked in and said to Kate, "So, you're just here for a 24-hour observation, right?"

Um, no. We're here because Kate's and the baby's life are both in danger, so she's getting induced.

This was news to the nurse, who promised to go get all the facts. A few minutes later she returned, armed with the facts, and apologized. "Your midwife, Jane, is in the OR with another birth," she said apologetically, "and I didn't get the whole story. I'm sorry. We'll be inducing you, yes."

Jane herself came in a little bit later and apologized again, and started discussing options with Kate.

Basically, there's no fun way to get induced. There's the chemical jelly which softens the cervix, but using it would preclude Kate from using the hot tub during labor. So the jelly was out. There was the balloon, inserted up the vagina and inflated to force the passage to dilate. This had been quite painful the first time around, in Rhode Island, for Kate and she didn't much care for that choice either.

Jane was reassuring. "The design for balloons has come a long way in a few years," she said, "and they're much more comfortable now. You'll still feel it, of course, but it shouldn't cause the same kind of discomfort this time around."

With some trepidation Kate chose the balloon. The medical staff went to work, I went for a walk, and we then settled down to wait. Of course, we both hoped it would be quick--maybe an hour or two of balloon induction, hopefully labor would start, and she'd push the kid out maybe around midnight.

"Oh, no," Jane corrected me. "If this goes well, Kate might go into labor tomorrow morning."

Oh, I see.

The folks at CMMC (Central Maine Medical Center) were kind enough to give me an inflatable mattress--as big an improvement, for my part, over the fold-out chair in Rhode Island as Kate's new balloon was for her--and I settled down for a choppy night's rest.

Kate of course got little or no sleep at all, being a bundle of fear, anticipation and hope, rubbed raw by the balloon. I do recall being woken once or twice by nurses tending to Kate, so I suppose I grabbed an hour or three of sleep. But around 7 AM there were four nurses around Kate's bed, asking how she felt and she was describing labor pains. It had begun.

On Kate's instruction I walked downstairs, and after grabbing my obligatory cup of coffee (not part of her instructions) I called our doula, Naomi, and then Kate's mother. We had hired a doula--an intermediary or intercessor for the mother with the medical staff--to provide some extra guidance and reassurance for Kate since we had so recently moved up to Maine.

Kate doesn't especially love change, you see, particularly of the pack-up-and-move kind, so combining the stress of a relocation with being removed from the entire medical staff she'd come to know with Eva's birth, and the birth of #2 so imminent, we decided that another professional caregiver on the scene would be helpful. The idea was Kate's mother's, and she found Naomi, and I'm glad she did.

Naomi said she'd be coming right in. I went back upstairs and Kate was hard at it, with contractions coming every 10-15 minutes. This time around we weren't alone in the room, Kate wasn't walking around, and I didn't have to do as much massage-and-pep-talk duty. I was, in fact, feeling about 50% in the bag from fatigue so I pretty much let the nurses and midwives have at it.

Naomi arrived, and by about 9:00 Kate's contractions had gotten pretty strong. It seemed to me just moments later that she was pushing, and yelling, and then out popped Eliot.

Honestly, the whole thing seemed to me like it took about three minutes. String me up as an oblivious male, fine. I guess I deserve it.

I was impressed that the entire time, as Kate labored, Naomi almost prowled around the bed, focused competely on Kate's face, giving the lower-back rubs that I'd done with Eva's birth, and constantly monitoring Kate's well-being. Really, it was Naomi who allowed me to kind of flake off and just observe things, because she was proactively doing everything Kate had asked me to do back in Providence two years ago.

So now we had Eliot in the world, and of course next up was the afterbirth.

They gynecologist came in and scooped out the placenta by hand, causing Kate to scream, "Stop! I want a DNC! STOP!" But the guy kept at it, then informed her matter-of-factly that he was 95% sure he'd gotten the whole placenta, and if any pieces were left behind, they'd fall out naturally. And that was that.

(And his words proved to be true, though the process was much longer and more traumatic than we expected...and Kate still has angry memories of being dismissed by the insensitive gynecologist.)

Eliot was a serious little runt, 18" long and all of 5 lbs 4 oz. His eyes were sealed shut, of course, and he looked somewhat like a shriveled little pink alien. He screamed at the top of his miniscule lungs whenever he wasn't wrapped up. But he remained in his bassinet next to Kate's bed.

The docs estimated that Kate lost half of her blood with that birth. She was lightheaded and unable to walk for more than a day. She told me later on that Eliot's birth hurt much more than Eva's had. Even though the boy was smaller, I can only guess that was because of the induction, forcing her body to deliver before it had fully prepared itself.

And this post will end here. But much more is to follow, about the beginning life of our second child, Eliot, and the reaction of his new older sister, Eva.

Summer Fun!

2011-07-18T19:04:00.000-07:00

Kate here ... I know, I know unbelievable right? Well don't get too excited, I'm just posting some pictures then its off to bed for me! 14 more days of work, and then perhaps I will have more time and energy to start posting again ... then again with a toddler, a new born, and a new house to settle into, maybe not. We'll see ... for now though I'm at least making sure I share these great shots we've taken lately to give you a glimpse at a Sutherland summer (thus far)!

Playing in puddles is what Eva dose best!

Her hair is finally long enough for mommy to start playing with it! - She's all dolled up for the graduation ceremony at RI School for the Deaf!

More hair-dos! - Can't forget the b'ankie!

Enjoying her beautiful new bed set from Mima!

Dreaming about rain and jumping in puddles! She put the boots on herself, take note they're on the wrong feet!

Daddy's beautiful blooming garden!

Two of my most favorite people! So lucky to have them both in my life!

Copters and Tractors and Jets, Oh My!

2011-06-23T10:13:00.000-07:00

Dog days of June here. We've just passed the summer solstice, so the long march back toward winter has begun. The weather tends to bounce between upper 60's and lower 80's, usually with some clouds in the sky, sometimes clear blue and sometimes, like today, totally overcast. A couple of mosquitoes humming around. Ordinary Rhode Island summer.

Except that this weekend will be the big air show at Naval Air Station Quonset, about two miles as the crow flies from our home. Several planes have been in the air practicing all week, mostly World War II-vintage props. On the other hand, the big cargo planes aren't coming and going as usual this week, so it's actually been a bit quieter than usual.

Until today, when the Blue Angels took to the air. They're the last act for the Air Show, the rockstars of the whole getup. I've seen them in person, and being no expert on flight, and fearing heights in general, I'm highly impressed by the precision, speed and of course, noise. (The air show folks hand out free earplugs to the crowd--a welcome courtesy.)

So the Blue Angels and a few other jets are now in town rehearsing, and it's possible to hear them screaming and roaring all over the place. It will go mostly quiet for a few minutes, perhaps with a distant purr in the air, when suddenly the scream gets loud again and you can hear a plane (or several) ripping by. If they're especially low--within a few hundred feet--a low hum accompanies the scream. Even as an adult, for me the experience ranges between annoying and unsettling.

For a 21-month-old girl, however, it can be pretty much terrifying. Eva normally loves to watch planes, scans the sky for them, and will point one out as soon as she sees or hears it (and frequently when she doesn't). When the big cargo lugs are coming in and out of the air station, lumbering potbellied 4-prop behemoths, Eva will stop whatever she's doing and stare.

However, when these high-speed war machines go exploding by, the poor girl is no less than nervous, frequently frightened enough to seek a hug, and sometimes dissolves altogether into tears. It doesn't help that right now, as the boys are practicing out there, it's supposed to be naptime.

The planes started flying just as I cleaned up Eva's lunch and brought her into her room for a few books before her nap. I began reading to her when the first group of jets came low overhead.

Now Eva is also learning to listen and talk, and she's growing increasingly sophisticated at it. Just a week or so ago she told her first story, a series of single words which referred to a sequence of events in time: "Mama...dada...pizza...milk...sauce." ("Sauce" being applesauce.) In her babyish way, Eva had described dinner to her doll. Just recently she's begun pairing words, as if she's linking the concepts: "Mama-dada...Mama-Eva...Eva-dada."

Of course she still talks a fair amount of gibberish, that almost-significant alphabet soup of sound toddlers make when they're engaging you but have no English at their command. What's particularly entertaining is when Eva sprinkles actual words in amongst the gibberish. And today, with the planes disturbing our reading session, was the best example yet.

Eva looked up nervously when the planes roared overhead, and clearly wasn't paying attention to Winnie the Pooh, so I started explaining. "Those are planes," I told her, "They're making a lot of noise because they're close to the ground." Of course Eva was just as unsettled as before, so I kept on repeating this, adding that "You're safe. You're here with Dada."

Soon, Eva was repeating, sort of, my words back to me, with her endearingly wide eyes, signed gestures and emphatic diction:

"Eema thama muissu abba pwaaaane."

"Oowa vimmi dikka guwa nooise."

"Matha aiea bamma anni gwoound."

"Amma thama iwi magga safe."

She kept on like that for a little while, nonsense followed by one of the words I'd emphasized to her. I got the feeling it was therapeutic for her, since the planes kept flying by and she was plainly still nervous. At one point, since they were so close, I grabbed her, ran outside and we saw four Blue Angels go ripping overhead in close formation, just a couple of hundred feet above the trees. "Planes," I said, pointing.

"Pwaaanes," Eva answered.

After returning her to her room, the jets came ripping by once more even lower, and I cursed myself for bringing the little girl in too soon. And of course she exploded into tears at the sound, so I went in, calmed her down with another book, and went back out to finish my lunch.

As of right now, the jets are still in the air practicing, and still occasionally flying overhead. And I just checked on the little girl: passed out on her bed, partially covered by her blankie, with one corner stuffed in her mouth.

That's my girl.

My Crappy Garden

2011-06-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

I'm a pretty foofy guy. I do have my angry moments, and there are certainly dark aspects to my personality, but by and large I prefer happiness, love and bright colors. So much so that my sister Julie, after seeing the family nameplate I painted for our front door, opined that I'd father only girls.

(Sorry, Jules. Little Fausto's on the way after all. And remember that Dad was a stud athlete but fathered two girls before he & Mom managed to come up with me.)

In high school I took the whole bright color thing to kind of a silly extreme. Miami Vice was big during my high school years, and despite living in small-town New Hampshire and having pretty much no sense of style at all, I did my middle-class best to emulate Sonny Crockett's look. Only in my case, instead of custom-made Italian silk suits, custom loafers and black Ferrari, it meant light blue cotton pants, pastel shirts, boat moccasins and a gray El Camino. It was roughly as convincing as my espresso-and-stache impression of Tony Stark. Less so probably because of the pink shirt and my inability to grow any facial hair. On top of the timid personality and confirmed reputation as a dork.

Anyway, that silly part of my personality is alive and well. It's the part that loves cartoons, the part that revels in reading to Eva in silly voices (the Winnie-the-Pooh characters are a work in progress), and a number of other foibles Kate could tell you about.

I've enjoyed a moderate bit of gardening for a while now, and since graduating college I've always loved having some flowers around. Inside or out (though you have to be careful about the kinds of flowers that attract bugs), blooms and leaves are good things. I read somewhere that keeping oxygen-producing plants in your living space can noticeably improve your state of mind--removing carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen in the local environment is a good thing--so I've made a point since then of keeping at least a few green and growing things nearby.

I had a few flower pots while at the condo, but obviously no garden. Now that Kate and I rent half of a duplex, I've made a very small effort to grow some flowers near the door. I'm not going to invest time (or money we barely have) in any landscaping, but I did pull a few weeds near the doorway and prepped a little triangular space--handily marked off with some plastic edging--for perennial seeds.

We now have a half-barrel sitting in the driveway, and then this little trianglular patch near the door. I spent the month of April mixing coffee grounds, which are very good for flowers, into the dirt. The potting soil in the half-barrel remained light and dark, but the dirt by the door, no matter how many times I dug it up and aerated it, has packed back down to roughly the texture of concrete.

In early May I planted seeds in the barrel and in the ground by the door. Among the other flowers by the door were about a dozen morning glory vines, which I was hoping would twine up around the hand railings and provide a nice colorful accent to the main entry. I even planted six morning glory seeds at the front corner of the house, so the vines might creep up the gutter pipe.

No such luck.

The barrel's looking quite nice, but the other two areas, not so much.
Even my my not-so-green-a-thumb standards, these flowers are pathetic. Just sad. I can't wait to move to Maine, where the soil is too acid, and the shade too heavy, for anything but ferns and moss. Screw the damn flowers.

(Of course, that didn't stop me from buying some fertilizer and tossing it on the ground. I'll be getting another bag of seeds and scattering those where nothing's growing now. I guess I'm chronic.

Thrift Store Fever

2011-06-09T16:35:00.000-07:00

Recession or no recession, money or no money, for pretty much all of my adult life I've been into thrift stores. I suppose if I'd had all the money I wanted when growing up I never would've had a reason to go to one in the first place, but I've been a regular secondhand shopper for nearly half of my time on the planet. I think it started when my sister Julie got married, and her then-fiance' Halsey told me about a store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I could buy a good used tuxedo--Keezer's. I went, and was blown away. Powder-blue, light gray, white, maroon, long tails, you name it. Of course I got a basic sash collar poly-cotton blend, but I could see that thrift-store shopping is a great way to go.

When I studied in Italy during college, I also got to know several secondhand stores in Rome, and came away with a hideously ugly, green leather trenchcoat, with massive shoulders and a flip-up collar which made me look like a Nazi jackboot. But it was college, and my sense of style was about as fine as my choice of ways to spend my time. (That would be primarily in the basement of a fraternity.) So aside from the green leather trenchcoat (and later a gold lame' tuxedo which I added to my collection), around college I discovered the usefulness of thrift store shopping.

This year, as Kate and I have struggled through the winter on severely reduced means while I look for work, used clothing and other items have become an economic necessity. Thrift stores are almost an exchange mart for baby and toddler clothing, since as a rule the child outgrows the clothing before it wears out. To date we've bought perhaps three pairs of shoes for Eva at retail, but instead dropped $3 to $5 a pair for the used variety. Ditto for jackets and winter clothing.

Kate and I have bought furniture, such as Kate's desk and our couch, from a big used-goods store nearby called Savers. Every few weeks, if we're not out of money, I'll drop by to see if something we're looking for might be there at severly reduced price. Obviously, when shopping used you don't have as much choice as you would at retail. If you're looking for something even moderately specific, you need to be patient and just keep dropping by, and wait to see if something like what you want happens to be on hand. Then, you need to be very thorough in looking the item over, to make sure that it's not defective in some obvious way. The store staff is generally pretty careful about the merchandise they set out for sale, but things like minor rips or burns in clothing can slip through their inspection.

However, it was only recently that I noticed the store's book section. Not that I need any books. I've got a lifetime's library worth of literature, and should I ever have a job again, and should we come to have a decent home, I expect to have a proper library.

Eva's got a library of her own. It's not like mine, though. No Homer or Dante or Joyce or any history or math. No, Eva's library includes titles like "Baby Colors", "Mommy Hugs", "Snuggle Puppy" and "A Very Special Critter". Great books in their way, with illustrations Eva enjoys, and stories she likes to listen to. Since she's learning so many words so quickly now, her ability to listen is improving, and her taste in stories is expanding.

That's good, because I can't tell you how tiresome it gets reading the same three or four books to her every night for months. Even when her selection rotates slowly, it's like listening to the same twenty albums from your youth...until you're 45. After a while you know them too well to even pay attention any more. Maybe Eva's not there with her own books, but I sure am. Dad needs variety. Sometimes I don't care what the baby wants. I need me a little more variety in what I read to her. (I suspect Kate feels much the same, only not so stridently.)

So there's this book section at Savers. I quickly browsed it last week, and found two whole rows of shelves devoted to nothing but children's books. Eureka, I thought, This is how we replenish that library of hers!

Kate's workmates just threw her a baby shower for Fausto, and she was armed with gift cards to Target. I just got a delayed unemployment payment--we'd been surviving without it this past week--and we also got some straight cash for the shower. So I pushed for us to go shopping today, Kate at Target and me at Savers (about a half-mile apart on the commercial strip in Warwick). Since Kate was looking for sandals for Eva--something too specialized to find easily at Savers--she took the baby, and I dove into the books.

Winnie the Pooh, books by Sandra Boynton, Little Critter books (my favorites, aside from the classic Richard Scarry) by Mercer Mayer, and some really excellent Christmas books to stow away--I hit the motherlode today. Seventy cents a volume, so I got twenty books for Eva. Even picked up, since Kate was still busy at Target, a volume of Romantic writing to enjoy over an espresso at Starbucks afterward. As we'd say (and I did) in our Roses and Thorns, my trip to Savers and then Starbucks was unequivocally a rose.

Parental Incompetence, Parental Love

2011-06-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

What about when you screw your baby up? Make her sick, make her sulk or cry by acting genuinely inconsiderate, accidentally hurt her (like, say, by washing her hands with water that's more suitable in hotness for adults). You take steps to make her or him better, that's what. And then you employ your common sense, or else hike your butt to the internet or a book or a doctor or a knowledgeable parent or a trusted friend or all of these and you figure out how not to screw your baby up again. And this process, in various guises, over various timescales, is part of the lifelong process of parenting.

Kate and I just got through with an adventure mostly concerning Eva, considering she was the one getting sick. She'd come down with a rash covering her arms and legs, reddish spots one-half to one inch in diameter, some with darkened red rings like the dreaded bullseye of Lyme disease. Rhode Island is pretty much ground zero for Lyme disease--we're less than sixty miles from Lyme, Connecticut, for which the disease is named--so it was a head-slappingly humilitating, not to mention slightly scary, moment yesterday morning when I first noticed the apparent bullseye patterns on Eva's right leg, one on her calf, one on her shin.

Kate and I share one car these days, and she'd driven it to work, so I couldn't bring Eva to the doctor's office. All I could do was e-mail Kate about it (thereby making her worry all day) and set up a doctor's appointment for today, which Kate would have off. Lyme disease incubates slowly enough, and the bullseyes typically appear quickly enough, that even if this was Lyme, I had small fear that Eva might suffer from it chonically. But I didn't want her to suffer at all.

It being a fine hot spell in early June, we walked down to the beach, about a quarter mile away, where Eva could run in the sand and wade in the ocean water of Narragansett Bay. She's always loved water and swimming, and even though she's still intimidated by the coldness and waves of the seashore, Eva's learning quickly that getting wet there is fun. For about three days straight we'd gone down and Eva had run on the sand and gotten wet. I was happy to watch her discovering a whole new part of the world, something she'll be able to enjoy for the rest of her life.

We'd spent the previous weekend in Maine, visiting Kate's parents, and Maine is still in the grip of blackflies. Blackfly season precedes mosquito season, is roughly as annoying, and lasts about a month. After tagging along after Mima through the yard, petting the bunnies, and sitting on the Ranger for a ride, Eva had a healthy number of bug bites. No big deal, we all did.

Flash forward to this week, when after a few days on the beach, the bites have become spreading red welts and the bullseyes had appeared. My level of concern rose steadily toward panic as the day went on, and by the time Kate came home in the late afternoon, Eva's legs were swollen and red, and more bullseyes had appeared on her arms. I was now alarmed.

But I didn't dare tell Kate, because I was about to head up to Boston as part of my process of preparing to enter the Naval Reserves--one part of my plan to make it through the doctorate program--and I didn't want to freak my poor wife out just before leaving for the evening. It seemed to me, worried as I was about those worsening welts, that to tell Kate I was scared, and then leave minutes later, would be like putting a grenade in her hands, pulling the pin, and walking away. A very unfriendly and very dangerous thing to do. Kate's good enough at working herself into a frenzy without my giving her a big push.

Besides, I counted on her sense. If I was scared, so was she, and if Eva seemed to require emergency room treatment immediately, Kate would go. And so she did. While I spent the evening in a Hilton hotel near Boston, studying calculus and the history of maps, Kate was sitting in the emergency room waiting area in South Kingstown. The doctor informed Kate that the rash was most likely an allergic reaction to sand flea bites.

"Has she been to the beach lately?" the doctor asked Kate.

"Um, yeah, for the past three days straight," she admitted, suddenly feeling a bit foolish. So we seemed to have our answer.

A few rubbings of antihistamine topical cream, and the rash seems to be going down, especially in Eva's arms. After three days if the rash persists then Lyme or something else might be involved. So we'll be looking sharply at Eva's skin for the next three days.

Of course I knew none of this while up in Boston. Since we're doing without cell phones for the time being, I had no idea, and I knew that if something like this happened, that I wouldn't. After leaving last night I thought it at least 50% likely that I'd come home to no Kate and Eva tonight, with Kate at the hospital having Eva tended to.

I arrived back home at 2 PM, driven by my recruiter, to no family car. I expected as much...but then remembered that I hadn't brought my own key. I doubted that Kate had left the door unlocked, and she hadn't.

Fortunately enough windows were open that I found one I could crawl through. Not the first time I'd had to break into my own place, but after a few phone calls I'd heard the basic story. Kate filled in the details when she arrived a bit later, having wrapped up this whole episode with a few hours' worth of therapeutic shopping for baby stuff.

So our task now is, how to limit these stupid flea bites without cutting the little girl off from the beach altogether? Homework, homework.

POSTSCRIPT--After sitting down tonight at dinner, as Kate and I were playing our normal Roses and Thorns game, Kate asked Eva if she had a rose. Let the record show that Eva answered "Dada!" for her first rose ever. And then said it again for her second.

New Numbers

2011-06-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

Eva continues to grow quickly, both physically and behaviorally. Her personality is much more complex now than it was even four months ago, and she's picking up words and concepts now almost like they were toys. It's amusing and at times a bit amazing to see what she does, and how.

At times, however, it's just plain hilarious to watch her and listen to her. She's a largely unselfconscious bundle of inquisitiveness, playfulness and affection, balanced by a pronounced stubborn streak and a good old-fashioned temper. I like her.

Kate tends to be much more active in teaching Eva specifics like the alphabet, numbers and of course signs. I'll do such things in a more desultory, accidental way. I prefer to simply be around, provide her with a range of toys or an environment like going outside, and mostly let her discover her own amusements. Of course I play with her too, but Kate takes a serious initiative in things like this. She's a much better mother than I am.

Both with our explicit instruction, and through the Signing Time videos, and through just paying attention, Eva's loading up her vocabulary almost on a daily basis. A brief (not complete) lexicon of Eva-speak:

Kitty (formerly kit-tieh): cat

Doggy (formerly dog-gieh): dog

Tawaz: colors (i.e. crayons)

Bass: bath

Sawah: shower

Gapes: grapes

Nana: banana

Sasu: dinosaur (among her stuffed animals)

Side: Outside (i.e. I want to go outside!)

Out: Up (i.e. pick me up! We're working on this one)

Aa' done: All done (frequently screamed during a tantrum, or said when she's scared of something)

Sat: What's that?

Ta-ta: cracker

Waddah: water

AAHHH-gin: again (i.e. do that again!)

Sauce: Applesauce

Pizza: (she's gotten this one perfectly since she was 9 months old)

Wainjuh: Ranger (grandma Ande's--i.e. Mima's--Ranger 4-wheeler)

Dink: Drink

Seep: sleep

The list could go on and on, but that's a decent sampling of how her language approaches English pretty well, though she rarely puts several words together. She's still pretty much a one-word-at-a-time speaker.

What's more interesting is her personality, how she's learning coyness and even some skills at manipulation. But there's no mistaking when that temper shows up. Sometimes it's in deadly earnest, when she's howling with all her might for something different than what we're giving her, like some nights on going to bed, or frequently being strapped into her baby seat in the car. A recent development is brief flashes of the temper, when she logs a more or less perfunctory protest but seems to know she's going to lose.

She pulled one of these last night, after we'd lowered her into her crib for the night. Part of the new ritual in putting her to sleep is letting her finish her bottle of water before we take it away and turn out the light. So she stalls, sips the bottle slowly, rolls over on top of it and generally refuses to give it up. Some nights she's more charming than others, but still, by and large, when your baby wants to stretch the day out and make sure you keep her company, it's a wonderful thing. Still, bedtime is bedtime.

Eva had selected, among her many dozens of stuffed animals, a small gray koala to go into the crib with her (along with four other bears, a doll and a couple of blankies). I dropped the koala into the crib next to her as she clutched her bottle and resisted giving it to Kate.

Kate remained patient, counted to three, and then took the bottle from Eva's grasping hands. As soon as she'd lost the bottle Eva yelped sharply, grabbed the koala and threw it straight up into the air. It flew up, came back down and landed right in front of her. She ignored it and began a sullen pout, sucking on her red blankie while staring straight ahead.

That was a new kind of protest. It wasn't a genuine attempt to escape or sway us to her will. It was an expletive, a single burst of frustration followed by resigned acceptance of the truth. I was blown away. (I was also laughing to the point of coughing my lungs up.) Our 20-month-old baby had effectively just sworn at us.

Eva's also learning to count. Kate's taught her much of the alphabet (she tends to lose focus if I try to run through it backwards), so now she's turned her attention to numbers. Kate will make the ASL sign for each number in turn, and Eva will speak them. First up to ten, and now up to twenty. Based on tonight's effort, she has a little way to go. A recap of Eva's responses as Kate made the signs:

(1) One!

(2) Two!

(3) Fee!

(4) Fouah!

(5) Five!

(6) Six!

(7) Semmen!

(8) Eight!

(9) Nine!

(10) Ten!

(11) Leven!

(12) Twel!

(13) Benteen!

(14) Benteen!

(15) Benteen!

(16) Benteen!

(17) Benteen!

(18) Twunny!

(19) Twunny!

(20) Twunny!

So Eva's got a little ways to go with the numbers, but I think she's off to a fine start. She told her first story the other day, speaking a string of words which implied an actual sequence of events: "Mama. Dada. Kitty. Pizza. Sauce. Dink. Bass. Seep." Kate heard it and was pretty amazed.

So she's doing a fine job growing up, eating plenty of yogurt and getting her calcium, still in the 99th percentile for height and 75th for weight--tall and slim. Since I'm not so physically imposing myself, I'm hoping Eva winds up 6'6" and scares 98% of the boys away so they won't pester her in high school.

The Wishing Tree

2011-06-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

I love Irish music, and have for over a decade. I became aware of how much I loved it during the winter of 1997-98, when I was living in Philadelphia. I was attending U. Penn that year, studying Greek and Latin and making the decision whether to go into ancient literature as a teaching career (obviously no). I did spend lots of time in bars. I was emerging from an extended phase of drinking heavily, which had begun during my sophomore year in college, and continued on-and-off until just about then.

The death of my father in 1996 from brain cancer shook me into the awareness that my prolonged adolescence was over and it was time to start living a life I respected, and actually accomplishing a series of things I could call a career. In other words, it was time to grow up. I still drank quite a bit that year in Philadelphia, but I was putting an end to the problem. I realized that it's not enough to discover, as I did after sophomore year in college, that alcohol does damage to a person's life, brain and body. When the addiction has become physical, merely wanting to end the addiction is too weak a motive.

Alcohol damages and ends friendships, family relationships and careers. It precluded any scholarship I might have done in college. It deadens the conscious part of the personality, freeing the more primitive urges to express themselves.

This is why drunks tend to act crudely and boorishly, and be undesirable company in general. But if you cultivate the habit of not acting on those crude desires, but only let them loose in your mind, then being drunk can actually become a means to discover what is happening further down in your brain than the consciousness is willing to travel. That's important for thinkers and artists.

There's also the fact that drinking helps destroy relationships and career prospects. It engenders a general sense of shame in a person. And that shame itself can be useful--it is particularly strong acid on many of the assumptions in life, on social and religious conventions, and on identities based on race, nationality and class. In short, drinking heavily can train a person's mind to disregard as unimportant many of the things held sacred by reputable folks. Only your immediate emotional needs survive. If you're a writer or an artist, that is invaluable. It's a prerequisite for the vocation.

The society we've built up, including religion and government, certainly has its basis in our own psychology and in the world around us, but not all of it. Any system includes its own arbitrary limits, declarations peculiar to that system, and not necessarily to any other. Christians make Jesus Christ, only-begotten son of God, the focus of their religion. No other religious system does. Capitalism enshrines the idea that each person has the right to buy and own as much as he or she can afford. Not all economic systems are so. To step beyond those conventions takes hard work, both intellectually and emotionally.

So drinking has its benefits. But I decided against creative writing as a career, so I knew I had to sober up. It took a while, especially since I didn't want to go dry, and preclude the possibility of ever having a social drink again. I knew weaning myself of habitual drinking, without giving it up altogether, would be more difficult than going cold turkey.

But even so, it wasn't enough to simply want to give up drinking. I needed something else I could turn to, something I'd rather be doing instead of drinking. Otherwise, in my bored, solitary moments, I'd be too likely to find myself at a bar again, drunk or well on my way. I needed something similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous calls the "higher power". During that winter in Philadelphia, I found it: ballroom dancing. Ballroom dance was my avenue back toward being social again, making friends, meeting women, and doing something which was fun just by itself. A dance with a decent partner whom I might never see again after that dance is still a fine thing.

My six months of dancing in Philadelphia would be a long story in themselves, so I won't tell it here. But the lessons I took at that studio with my teacher Shana were, altogether, perhaps the biggest single step I took toward forgetting the drinking problem. Still, that didn't mean I wasn't drinking that year. I was, and I got to know plenty of bars around Philly. Philly is just Irish enough--not like Boston, but more than, say, Dallas--that many of the best bars have Irish themes. My favorite--and I have no idea if it's still there--was The Bards, in Central City. It was a modest pub, featuring its own in-house brew (Yard Ale--amber, as smooth as Guinness, but not as heavy), and no TVs. Conversation reigned at The Bards. A person might sit down at the bar, order a pint, pull out a book and start reading. It was a great place, an alcoholic coffee shop (and I was already in love with coffee shops). More than that, it featured musical Sundays.

A widespread custom in Irish bars all over the nation is that Sunday evenings feature a session of musicians who come in with their instruments and play. They tend to know each other, of course, but there's nothing formal about it. It's more of an open mic, though there's rarely any singing, and no mic. Traditional Irish music is something like jazz or blues, with some standard sets and chords and the potential for a band to simply improvise variations endlessly. I fell in love with pipes, fiddles, flutes, guitars, and Bodhran drums. I actually took some violin lessons that spring but decided I didn't have the time to invest.

Aside from becoming a Sunday evening chronic at the sessions, I snatched up a bunch of CDs of Irish music (ITunes didn't exist then, remember). I listened to those discs dozens and dozens of times. My Sunday morning breakfast-and-laundry ritual had an Irish soundtrack, to the point that I'd start making breakfast--either French toast or pancakes with coffee--and be sitting down to eat at pretty much the same point of the same song each week. It was almost choreographed.

Beyond the simple sound of the instruments and the varying rhythms, I loved the emotions the music was so full of. There is the endless, inconsolable lament, which I was sensitive to through the shipwreck of my late teens and 20's. There is also the inexpressible and orgasmic joy, a feeling of celebration which overwhelms everything else. Irish music by itself is nearly the perfect musical expression of the tao principle of yin and yang, two utter opposites forming one whole. I found in it my own psychology.

Two songs were my favorites, one joyful and the other melancholy. First, the happy one. It comes from one of the first discs I bought, actually a 2-disc set of various Irish artists playing tunes both traditional and original. It was composed by the piper Davy Spillane, and it's called "Sliverish". Because of that tune I feel that a banjo makes a fundamentally happy sound.

(And please forgive the crappy audio. It's the best I could do without a sound studio.)

My melancholy favorite is called "The Wishing Tree", composed by Seamus McGuire. It's not so much purely mournful--those tunes can be pretty horrid--but is more an even mixture of joy and sorrow, the combination of both which resounds through the ages of human existence. I think of a tree, somewhat like the tortoise of Asian and Indian mythology, which spans many human ages and comprehends all possibilities of existence, almost beyond life and death themselves.

The illustrations I've posted to this blog entry--one treelike, the other more of of a stylized celtic pattern--are actually concepts of the Norse mythical tree of creation, Yggdrasil. But Yggdrasil has much in common with my concept of the Wishing Tree. It participates in all things foul and fair, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, deadly and life-giving. Everything that can be wished for is already part of our concept of creation. And any wish soever must always have the contrary and unexpected consequences we fondly know as life.

The Wishing Tree implies to me a person's engagement in life, in setting hopes and aspirations, and whether attaining or not, engaging in the struggle which has defined our species throughout its existence. Victory is always attended with sorrow--whether through the austerity and discipline of the preparations, or through the consequences of winning, or by other means. Nothing in this life comes without cost. The stronger and deeper and more sincere a person's expression of life, the stronger the elements of triumph and tragedy exist within that person. Ultimately a person wishes for life or wishes for nothing. To the extent he or she wishes for life, that person learns the wisdom of the Wishing Tree. You cannot wish for part of it: you can only wish for all.

The piece itself is a melody which repeats three times, each time with additional instruments. The first run is a cello with very little accompaniment. A violin takes over the melody in the second repetition, with more strings in the background. The violin continues in the third, but with a swelling background which eventually takes over for the melody and then fades away.

In that tune I hear three generations: grandfather, father and son. By the time I first listened to the Wishing Tree, my father was dead and I had no immediate prospects for a family of my own. I thought of my grandfather, dad's father, and then my father, and me. Dad barely knew his own father, and I of course never met him. There was a mythical character to this distant man, seen in a few black-and-white photos and some fragments of handwriting, even taller apparently than my own father, a skilled musician who brought his accordion to his hospital ship during the war and played for the convalescent soldiers. He was also the man--a gynecologist who wooed and eventually married the younger sister of one of his patients--who wrote home that he was burying the boys he'd delivered earlier in his life. I'm told he returned from the war a broken, desolate man who committed suicide a few months later. I envisioned the deep-toned cello as his voice, sounding its wisdom alone through the echo chambers of time. He is followed by my own father, singing the same melody but higher, more plaintively, closer to the present. I saw myself as the third verse, surrounded by the cacaphony of life today, but producing a melody that hasn't changed.

It's easy to transfer this concept down one generation, with my father becoming the cello, me the second verse, and little Eliot due to become the third. He'll know my father as I knew my granddad, as a quasi-mythical presence who becomes larger due to his absence. When I hear the tune I start to think of this continuity, and then think metaphorically about the quality and the nature of my own wishes on the Wishing Tree. I'm at a crossroads of my career, and life, perhaps lacking the resources to continue on the professional path I've selected. Heroes choose their way, and I've frequently been overly meek and not had enough faith in my own ability. My failures at Dartmouth and later are painful enough evidence of this. I frequently return to the thought that my wishes on the tree have been too small, and that I've asked too little of myself. A crossroads like this in life is another chance for me to define who I am for the rest of my life. Which way will I go? I don't yet know.

* * *

To focus simply on the music for now. I'll list my favorite pieces of non-pop music, holding to my categories of those which have a mournful or somber character, and those which are ecstatic. In no particular order, because I couldn't rank these:

Sorrowful:
-Beethoven's 7th Symphony, 2nd movement (Allegretto);
-Mozart's Requiem, Lacrimosa;
-Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings;
-Brahms' Requiem, Alles Fleisch ist Wie dem Grass;
-Seamus McGuire, The Wishing Tree;
-Dougie MacLean, These Broken Wings;
-Randall Thompson, Alleluia.

Happy:
-Leo Kottke, Stolen;
-Leo Kottke, Morning is the Longest Way Home;
-Altan, Dulaman;
-Hapa, Olinda Road;
-Davy Spillane, Sliverish.

(You might note more entries in the melancholy category. So be it. I'll add, however, that quite a few of the happy--or happy in their way, at least--songs which I love are of the pop/rock variety, like the Beatles' Savoy Truffle, Zep's That's the Way and Boogie with Stu, and Pearl Jam's Bugs. So there.)

A note also about the Beethoven Allegretto movement (and I think Brahms based his Alles Fleisch movement at least partly on it). Last night Kate and I watched The King's Speech, about how British King George VI overcame his stammering problem and was able to speak effectively to his empire during World War II via radio. King George and Winston Churchill combined through the radio to provide the leadership which British citizens needed during the Nazi siege on England, and during the worldwide onslaught of the Axis. The movie concludes with King George delivering his first major address of the war, as hostilities with Germany are about to begin. Churchill has just been elected, all attempts at peace have failed, and Germany has taken Poland by blitzkrieg in a matter of weeks. The Nazi military machine is faster and more fearsome than anything in history, and it is soon to turn toward England.

With this backdrop, the King--Berty as he is known in the film--steps into the broadcast room and prepares to speak. His speech therapist Lionel Logue is with him, and coaches him through the most strenuous effort of his adult life. The development of the film to this point has made it quite clear that the main role of the king is to communicate with his subjects via radio. Berty, with his stammering problem, has no greater weakness than speech. He knew as well as anybody the desperation of England's position in the coming war, and the importance of his own role. And he knew better than anybody that his weakest quality was at the same time his country's greatest need.

As the King prepared to speak, the first chord of Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement, played. I thought, How strange--that sounds like Beethoven. The scene continued, and the movement carried on, and I felt that the choice of music was wrong, too heavy a setting for what should have been more combative or triumphal. But as the scene progressed--shots of Berty laboring to speak, hesitating and stopping, with Lionel standing in front of him desperately coaching him on in silence, alternating with shots of people around the country focused utterly on their radios--the import of his words became obvious. And I realized more and more that the choice of music came to fit the scene perfectly. The stark somberness matched the head-throbbing effort the King made to speak clearly. The darkness and urgency suited the eve of war.

It was a good film--not one of my favorites, but a good film--but that scene by itself is unforgettable, not least for the choice of music.

Fausto

2011-05-28T13:01:00.000-07:00

As Kate reports, we're expecting a son. Now suprises can always happen. I was supposed to be a girl, and if expectations had held my name would have been Stephanie. Of course, this was in the pre-ultrasound days, and the doctors' best method of guessing the sex of the fetus was by its heart rate. Girls tended to have quicker heartbeats than boys, and I clocked out as a girl. So Mom and Dad were surprised when I turned out to be male.

But the ultrasound tech was pretty confident--98% sure, she told us--that Kate's carrying a boy. So we have the name lined up, which I won't reveal online until the little tyke is actually born--until then, and maybe after, I'll call him Fausto. The explanation will come later.

Still, the thought of having a son is tremendously consoling to me. I wanted at least one child of each sex. Should we go for #3 or beyond, it won't matter to me whether it's a boy or girl. There's also a subtle one-upmanship among guys, it seems, that if you're fathering girls, you're firing blanks. A Texan coworker once told me that a man's size determines the sex of his children--you have to be big to have a son. (That idea sums up Texan culture pretty well in my mind.)

Of course I also wanted a child to carry on our family name, since Eva will likely surrender hers to a husband someday. Basically, I've got all the culturally-conditioned neuroses operating nice and strongly in my brain to make me want a son. On top of that, I just want the variety, of having one of each. Boys and girls each present very different challenges as they grow up--boys tending to be reckless and get in trouble, and girls being the focus of all male attention in their vicinity--that I wanted to take on both.

I feel an instinctive connection with my daughter, and by staying home without a job to raise her, I'm seeing her habits and growth on a day-by-day basis that I never would otherwise. I can't say that I'm always the most patient or creative parent, but I do try to keep Eva safe, busy and learning. (Including letting her discover the fun of soaking herself thoroughly in a puddle.) When I think I've been too wrapped up in my own work, or showing too much frustration toward her, she toddles over to my knee, flops her hands on my leg, looks up in my eye and says "Hiii."

Then I know I'm not doing things all wrong.

But the thought of a son is a bit more daunting. I had a decent relationship with my own father, but it was very incomplete. His own father died in 1945, six months after he'd returned from serving as a doctor in World War II. Dad was eight.

The official reason was a heart attack, though it's always been thought within the family that he committed suicide, from despair and depression following the war. I've heard the story of when Dad was told the news. "Father is gone," the children were told. "Can I go too?" Dad answered immediately.

It's fair to say that Dad grew up without a father showing him implicitly how to be a father. I knew that when I was a little kid, Dad was a giant--six-foot-seven, with a deep and powerful voice--who walked with a tread like a feather and who rarely raised his voice. My impression even as a child was that he was afraid of his own strength. Mom spanked me probably hundreds of times. Dad never spanked me once.

He'd been a very good athlete in his youth, being scouted in high school as a pitcher by the Yankees, and then starring on his college basketball team. Dad was everything I wasn't, apparently: big, strong, athletic and popular. I was a mousy runt who liked books, singing and drama. There wasn't much overlap in our interests. So when I ran around a soccer field like the proverbial headless chicken, and never seemed to show much concern with practicing or getting better, Dad said not a word. He let me be myself.

As I grew into high school, I began having social trouble like most all teenagers do, feeling isolated and inadequate and at times altogether friendless. I saw the group of popular athletes and grew terribly jealous, but by then I knew that I was too bookish, and not nearly good enough at any sports, to ever join them. So I remained, like I'd always been, a mama's boy.

I was pretty stupidly a mama's boy, too. I was really convinced that my mother knew everything. And by that time--when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen--I largely knew my father as the big lumbering brute who came home, collapsed in front of the TV and watched news for two hours, and lost all his arguments with Mom. I took this as proof that he was stupid and Mom was much smarter than he was--it never entered my mind at that age that he might be letting her win the fights because he didn't want to argue. (There was obviously much more to their communication than I ever learned about, as I know realize with my own marriage.)

Still, underneath that surface level of disgust, I did have an almost religious reverence for my father. It was due partly to his height--it's difficult not to respect someone who's huge--but even more, and more subtly, to his demeanor. Outside of the occasional fight with Mom, within the confines of our own home, I never knew Dad to lose his composure. (Well, except maybe for the time he burned out his little old chainsaw cutting the winter's firewood, then hurled it with a screamed expletive at the woodpile and smashed it to pieces. Relieved, he walked inside, took a shower, changed, drove down to the hardware store and bought a new, much more powerful, chainsaw.)

I also had a subtle sense, from all his volunteering around town for various (and important) positions like fire department treasurer and school district treasurer, that he was very highly regarded in the town. And Dad never mentioned any sense of pride over this in the house. Toward his own son, as toward nearly everyone else, my father was very understated.

It wasn't until Christmas vacation of my freshman year in college, when I worked at the bank where he was president, that I learned just what kind of professional persona my father had. I was in a back room, stuffing forms in folders and filing them, but I saw the impact that Dad had on everyone there. He'd walk into a room and everyone was paying attention to him. He'd quietly ask for something and walk out once he had it, with no fuss or waste of time. In short, he was a leader. He had a charisma as understated as everything else he did.

I was blown away. "That's my DAD!", I thought to myself. The tired, floppy guy who came home at night was just the reverse image of the man who ran a bank, served a community, directed over a hundred people and was responsible for over a quarter billion dollars.

Though our relationship didn't overtly change after that, I understood much better just what Dad did, and who he was. At the end of my freshman year at Dartmouth--my only good year there--when he and Mom came to pick me up, after loading the car I threw my arms around him and thanked him for everything he'd done, namely pay for it all. Dad didn't react much at the time, but this moment came back eight years later as he lay dying of brain cancer.

He'd been diagnosed in June 1996 with advanced brain melanoma, with 13 (likely more) tumors growing all over his brain. The onset, as is typically the case with cancer, was subtle and gained speed with time. In December 1995 he began noticing that he was losing dexterity in his left hand, and over the following months the problem worsened. Mom later recalled occasional memory lapeses or bursts of hostility (she never stopped blaming herself for missing the disease's approach). At a family vacation in Connecticut--days before his diagnosis--I recall playing pinball with him, the venerable "Addams Family" game. (Someday, I'd like one of those in my basement.)

Now, Dad was born in 1938, and was a teenager in the 50's. He grew up on pinball and rock'n'roll. Factor in his well-above-average athleticism...well, he could kick my ass at pinball any old time he liked. It wasn't even anything resembling a contest (like it was in basketball, where I could at least rely on his tiring out after five minutes). Dad never lost at Addams Family.

That day in June, he lost. He couldn't score any big points. I later recalled, the money button on that game is on the left side of the machine. Dad simply couldn't hit it. His hand was no longer answering his brain. By the time Dad drove up to New Hampshire that following Monday to see the doctor, he was really scared.

The whole family gathered once we heard the diagnosis, inoperable brain cancer with three to four weeks to live. I spent two of those weeks at home, keeping Dad company and helping Mom with some of the work. Lisa and Julie were there too, of course, particularly Lisa who still lived in Moultonboro.

During one of the weeks I spent at home, I was sitting next to him holding his hand when one of his closest friends walked in, Rick Buckler. Only the best of friends were admitted to see Dad as he deteriorated, and Rick was one. Rick had proven his friendship as steadfastly as a person can, helping us several times during Dad's decline (stories I'd rather not go into right now). Rick was a trusted and beloved friend.

He walked into the room where Dad and I were and they began talking. After a few minutes, Dad wandered onto the topic of my freshman year at Dartmouth, and how I'd hugged him and thanked him at the end. Tears were rolling down his cheeks as he told Rick about this. It had been the first of perhaps two times I'd ever told my father I loved him, and only eight years later did I see how strongly it had impressed him. As he died, at last, Dad and I were becoming friends.

I'd gone back down to Boston, to resume my job and wait to travel back up to visit him again. It was now three and a half weeks after diagnosis, and though Dad's condition had worsened dramatically--he couldn't leave his bed and could barely talk--still hope wouldn't die. On a Wednesday afternoon, for no particular reason, I called home from my job, asked for Dad to be put on the phone, and told him, "Dad, I'm really proud of how you've been handling all this. I love you. I'll see you soon."

At five-thirty next morning I got the phone call that he had died. One small thing I had no regret over: I'd told Dad the most important single thing I had to say, and he died knowing how much I cared for him. That little, at least, mattered in my mind.

My biggest regret since he died was that we never fully became friends as adults. Needless to say, as I've flip-flopped my way through successive decades--it's now nearly fifteen years since he died--I've come to resemble my father more than I did as a snot-nosed college grad. I feel more compatibility with his occasionally dirty sense of humor, his social instincts (though I'll never develop them as highly as he did his), his wry humor with himself.

I've come to admit that no man on earth will ever resemble me as much as my own father did--with the possible exception of my son. But as I struggled into the responsibilities of adulthood, namely career and family, it would have been tremendously comforting to have a man I could turn to and trust implicitly, to talk with, share laughs with, and even suffer criticism from. Honest criticism, courageous, blunt and loving. There are many times I could well have used it.

As I think about my own son, hopefully on the way, I look forward to taking my memories of my own childhood and father, and being a good father to him too, as well as Eva. I'm looking forward to seeing how like and unlike me he is. (And I won't grudge him being a mama's boy and thinking I'm an idiot.)

As for the nickname.

I'm a baseball fan. I root for the Red Sox no matter what. In the years before 2004, when the championship drought was 70+, 80+ years and counting, my allegiance was always with the Sox. Didn't matter how much they stunk, how close they came, or what the Yankees did. I was for Boston.

Then 2004 happened, and fans like me learned what it meant to win. It was a good feeling.

Fast-forward to 2007, when Boston won again. But before that, the Yankees met the Cleveland Indians in the divisional playoffs. Now any old-school Boston fan is also a Yankees hater, so I was pulling for New York to lose. Boston was in its own playoff series, but on this one night, I was watching Cleveland, at home, versus the Yankees. And again like any old-school Boston fan, I had a secretly paralytic fear of the Yankees, that they were simply a juggernaut waiting to burst out and steamroll all opposition. So I was desperately rooting for the Indians to defeat what I feared might be an undefeatable opponent.

I think the Indians swept that series, so the Yanks weren't so immune to defeat. But on that one night, a pitcher by the name of Fausto Carmona took the mound for Cleveland. Cleveland's strength was in its pitching, with Carmona, and ace CC (Chesterton Charles! No wonder he goes by CC) Sabathia (now a Yankee), and a bullpen featuring the twin Rafaels, Perez and Betancourt. It was quite a fearsome lineup, and they pretty much had their way with New York (and also with Boston, for the first four games at least...then the Sox won the last three).

But on this night, as I watched, Fausto Carmona stood on the mound, facing down possibly the best lineup of hitters in baseball. The Cleveland fans were screaming crazily from all sides, as Fausto pitched and pitched again. I was awed by his presence on the mound, cap pulled down to the tip of his nose, glove brought up to the cap's brim, looking down to the catcher with a violent scowl.

The scene called to mind the Roman Horatius, a lone man holding a bridge against the invading army of Etruscans; it recalled the Spartans holding Thermopylae against the Persian hordes. Or, to cleverly foreshadow events, it was like one of my favorite short stories from childhood, Leiningen Versus the Ants. Only that night, it was Fausto Versus the Bugs.

The fate of baseball rested on one single pitcher, staring with dour ferocity down from the mound. Through seven innings he held them scoreless. Then came the bugs.

Apparently, on warm nights in Cleveland during the spring and fall, it's not unusual for millions of midges to rise from the shoreline mud of Lake Erie and swarm the city, infesting everything as they go. Suddenly the ballfield was a thick cloud of bugs, visible even on the TV screen. They swirled in clouds around the pitchers, winging jerkily in all directions and seeming only to grow thicker.

Fausto only bore down harder, growing even more icy and pitching with the same precision and strength. Unfortunately for the Yankees, their man on the mound was Joba Chamberlain.

Joba had been a revelation that year, coming up from the minors as a relief pitcher, throwing in the high-90's and over the course of his first 11 or so innings in the majors not allowing even a single hit. (The first to get a hit off him was Boston's Kevin Yooouuuuuukilis. Youuuuk!)

So that night, needing to keep the game close, Joe Torre sent Chamberlain to the mound in the bottom of the 8th. The bugs were out, and within about a minute it was clear that they were really getting to Joba. He took his hat off, swung at them, stepped off the rubber, and generally made an idiot of himself. Without going back to look at the box score (so I might have some of my game details already a bit wrong), I'll say Joba allowed a run or two of desperately-needed insurance for the Indians. I do recall that Torre pulled him off the mound before the inning was over and inserted Mariano Rivera, in a last-ditch bid to preserve the chance of winning. To no avail--Cleveland won.

I'll always have a warm spot in my heart for what Fausto did that night--since then he's been up-and-down as a pitcher, never quite living up to his early promise, though far from a bust. Simply put, Fausto is a decent major-league starting pitcher, a tremendous accomplishment in itself. But for that one night, Fausto's game was solid gold, and that's all I asked.

Then he stunk it up against Boston and I loved him almost as much for that.

So there's that, plus I just think the name is very cool. Faust + o, Fausto. I love the sound. But Kate won't hear of actually naming a kid that, so I'm stuck with using it as a nickname. Oh, well.

It's a BOY!

2011-04-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

By the way, did I mention I'm pregnant! I'll be 19 weeks tomorrow, and one week shy of being half way to term! Kind of unbelievable how fast time flies! Of course this time around I'm working full time and when I come home in the afternoons I try to get in as much quality time with Eva as possible (with Michael too of course, but much of our quality time now is spent sharing quality with Eva). Strangely enough though having less time idle has given me more time to worry about all the possible complications that could potentially happen. The excitement of having a boy this time around kind of ups the ante too. The prospect of welcoming a new life, male or female is thrilling in and of itself, however after already having gone through the experience of having a baby girl, the whole "new and different" aspect of raising a little boy has both Mike and I kind of on the edge of our seats!

I suppose now you all might be too! ... Although many of you already knew I was pregnant, because the very day I found out I blabbed it to just about everyone in our immediate families. It was Christmas day, and my mom and step-father were here visiting. Mike and I had started "trying" again in early December (since I nursed Eva until mid October) so I stocked up on pregnancy tests a couple weeks later. By Christmas day I was down to my last test out of three, (the first two were negative of course because I took them much too early) and with it being Christmas day and all I fantasized about what a wonderful gift it would be to find out that day! The digital stick promptly read "pregnant" and a second later I was announcing it to Michael, my mother and step-father (and Eva)! I followed the announcement by insisting we keep a secret at least until it was doctor confirmed, but then my sister called to say Merry Christmas, and it just popped out of my mouth! - And then I just couldn't stop!

It didn't occur to me at the time, but now I'm sure the reason I couldn't hold it in, even for a minute, was because when I got pregnant for the first time it was a surprise even to myself. Although I couldn't have been happier, there was a bit of uncertainty surrounding the issue. I was slightly nervous to tell Michael (but he quickly alleviated every once of that within moments of my telling him), I very a bit more nervous to tell our families, and wracked with fear to tell my grandmother, with whom I was living with at the time. It took me a month to muster up the courage to tell her, but when I finally did she offered her blessing just as happily as everyone else! This time around, our situation, being married, and already having a child, seems to

automatically lend itself to celebration! So with no fear of judgements being passed this time, any hesitation to announcing my pregnancy was tossed to the wind!

I'm not going to get into it here, as my husband might on one of his infamous diatribes, but I will suggest to you all to watch Kill Bill II if not for the genius of the film alone, but for the wonderfully hysterical scene where Betrix first discovers she's pregnant while on an assassination mission.

There a beautifully awkward, yet honest exchange between her and another female assassin just after she realizes what it means if the strip turns blue. Needless to say the other woman lets Betrix and her unborn child live, and ends the scene as any typical woman would after finding out such news! Trust me, it will leave you with a smile, if no other scene does!

Returning to our story though, the pregnancy was indeed confirmed a week or so late

r and we've been anxiously anticipating "the" ultrasound to find out just who exactly is in there.

The day finally arrived last week and we were both happy to find out that the new little life we created is a boy! Had michael not been holding Eva when the ultrasound tech informed us, I do believe he would have jumped clear through the ceiling! Having some more testosterone in the house will be an adjustment for me, as 90% of my family consists of estrogen! Eva has made it quite clear in the past several months that she is die hard daddy's girl, so I am deeply hoping this little guy will turn out to be a mama's boy! It will be fascinating to watch Eva interact with her new little brother too of course, and how she deals with no longer being the baby, and to see if all that we've taught her on how to be gentle with the kitty will transfer to how she is with him. Mostly though I can't wait to have another infant in the house, and ALL that, that entails!

It will be another 21 weeks before we get to welcome him into the world, mean while he's movin' and a groovin' in his cozy home inside my belly, and I'm enjoying that quite a bit! The actuality of being a mother and raising a child is wonderful, but all that leads up to that is just as amazing if not more so! Creating life, carrying life, and bring it into the world is, to me, by far the most spiritual experience there is. I struggle to find adequate words to describe how pregnancy, labor and delivery make me feel, the closest I can come is; Fulfillment. I adore being the vessel with which to bear life, and could do it a hundred times if I had the opportunity! In fact the the idea of being a surrogate has crossed my mind on several occasions, and if my body allows might one day seriously consider it.

For now though, I'm enjoying OUR little boy and planning for his arrival in early September!

Courage

2011-04-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

It's nearly 2 PM now, creeping toward the time when Eva wakes up, and is either surly and groggy for an hour, or is bright, chirpy and running all around. In either case, especially since it's raining intermittently, it spells the end of my quiet reading/writing period of the day. (I resume somewhat when Kate comes home for the evening, but only for a little while.)

I mentioned in the last blog that I'm back to reading history of the American oil industry, which is fascinating in so many respects, including that it forms the unseen skeleton of the general histories of this country you might read: our population explosion, our expansion across the continent, the rise of our industrial and military might. Oil is the only reason we've become militarily involved in places like Iraq and Libya (agree or disagree with the interventions as you will).

But I think oil could really serve as the exemplar American industry, exactly how Herman Melville thought whaling was in the mid-1800's. He published Moby Dick in 1851, only 10 years before the first successful oil well was drilled, in Titusville, PA by "Colonel" Drake. Melville's choice of the characteristic American industry--whaling--was eclipsed within two decades by oil. Still, his choice for a symbol--the white whale--of the nemesis each person carries within works much better than The Great White Oil. Or whatever color you'd want to make it. The whale's a living thing and just makes a better symbol.

Of course, that's all nonsense. The point of this blurb was altogether different: courage. See, between 2001-2008, I wasted a lot of time watching cartoons. During study breaks, after the day's work, whatever. I pretty much knew the Cartoon Network's whole lineup, and the (few, honestly) shows that I liked. One of these was Courage the Cowardly Dog, about this little pink dog named Courage, who's afraid of everything.

He has bad teeth and somehat mangy fur and his main abilities are: (1) pulling all kinds of equipment and costumes out of his butt when he needs them in an emergency; (2) screaming; and (3) doing absolutely anything for the love of Muriel, the kindly old woman who takes care of him. (Muriel's husband Eustace hates the dog, of course, the source of much of the cartoon's humor.)

Muriel is a sound sleeper. Her snores shake the timbers of the house. In one episode, an insomniac Sandman snatches Muriel's ability to sleep, so that he can get some rest, and leaving poor Muriel without a moment's bit of slumber for weeks. (Of course, it's up to Courage to get it back.)

That puts me in mind of another reference to sleep I enjoy, from one of my favorite action novels: The Three Musketeers (worth a post of its own, but in essence: D'Artagnan is not the true hero of that story. Who is?). A few of my favorite quotes come from that book, especially:

-Wine makes a man either happy or sad. It makes me sad...

(Athos, drunk, beginning to tell the story of his past to D'Artagnan in the basement of an inn)

In this case, the passage I have in mind isn't so much a full quote, as just the use of what I'm sure must have already been a cliche in Dumas' time. On D'Artagnan's first full day in Paris, having rented a room and having no money for food, he lay down on the floor and "slept the sleep of the brave." That phrase was new to me, and it grabbed my attention hard. That the quality of sleep could describe a person...well, of course. Those with sound consciences, masters of their fear, sleep well.

So I look at Jasper on the couch next to me, and think, Damn, if I could sleep like that, I'd be twice the man I am awake.

Captains and Kings

2011-04-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

Real quickie post here. Kate and I have Netflix, and our latest disc was the first two parts of her favorite miniseries (one she watched while I was in the Gulf last summer), Captains and Kings. (I guess it was a bestseller book before it was made into a miniseries, but since I ignore bestseller lists, I might never had heard of it otherwise.) It's about this Irish immigrant Joseph Armagh, who so far is an amalgam of Joe Kennedy and John D. Rockefeller. I'll pick up other historical references as they're tossed into the mix. So the guy becomes rich and powerful and goes through all kinds of family tribulations and betrayals, same old thing.

The movie so far is better than I expected, though Kate and I were pretty much laughing at the first bedroom scene between Armagh and his then-lover Martinique. The actress playing Martinique is pretty creepy and not all that attractive, with heavy black curls and one eyelid that droops a little lower than the other. She's supposed to be some darkly passionate enigma with a murky past but she comes off kind of like a bat. And their bedroom scene could have been lifted from an old-school horror film, with foreboding music, rain pelting the windowpanes, and frequent lightning and thunder. Makes you think Martinique will have some sort of unfortunate influence on things down the road (think Roy Hobbs), but I confess to not caring.

I'm more into the historical references to the oil industry and the war (like I didn't care about the white whale allegory in Moby Dick--I have no idea what the whale stood for. I was into the portrayal of whaling). Anyhow, from the reading I've done (not all that much, sort of dilettante-level), Captains and Kings is pretty accurate about the oil industry and the war, including the reference to Standard Oil's system of rebates and penalties with the oil-shipping railroad companies.

So my point? Just this: the movie makes me think of one of my favorite U2 songs, Silver and Gold (which never made it onto one of their regular albums, at least in its studio version--I think it was part of some benefit CD). I love the low pitch and echo of the guitar, and I love the images in the lyrics (albeit images of oppression, but they're evocative). The lines which come to mind:

Captains and kings

In the ship's hold

They came to collect

Silver and gold.

I love that song, and the line. I suppose Bono had read this book, seeing as how he's Irish and all. Just a neat little connection. Maybe he'd never heard of the book at all and then got slapped with a copyright infringement suit after the song hit the airwaves. Dunno...but it's fun to think that he had the story in mind.

Sheen's Giant Bomb of Suck

2011-04-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

Gorgeous early spring day here, topping out around 60 degrees, though quite windy at the park. We went there this morning (getting out of the house by 11:15 AM on a weekend counts as a victory of warlockian proportions for us). After about 15 minutes at Wilson Park--one of Kate's happy places, and Eva is quickly taking after her--my hands were cold, and I was quietly looking for excuses to leave. It didn't help that I was looking wistfully around at the play area itself--a small section of the park as a whole--and the people in it.

Wilson Park is the center of children's, and even adults', outdoor sports in North Kingstown. There are four tennis courts, three or four baseball/softball diamonds, and room for up to five soccer/lacrosse fields. (It was a tykes' lacrosse game there last spring which gave Kate and me the lacrosse bug...yeah, we've really followed up on that.) In addition to the athletic playing fields is a giant sandlot with several climbing jungle-gyms and a few swingsets. It's becoming Eva's little empire, since she's not used to sand.

The ground around our home is pretty hard-packed, with well-established grass, and a few thickets of trees or else hedges, and of course the paved driveways and road. There's no sand, and very little diggable dirt to speak of. So sand is still a new thing to the little girl, and she hugely enjoys just picking it up in her hands and throwing it into the air. She was doing that today, and tackling a few of the jungle gyms, as I surveyed the park and the many families, not unlike the three of us, taking the sunny spring morning outdoors as well, and wondering how long any of this will exist.

Of course we all have fits of thought driven by surges of emotion, which come and go like waves up and down a seashore. Still, I consider how the ultra-rich are doing their very best, out of sight, to terminate democracy and gather all available wealth to themselves, and I wonder for how much longer towns like North Kingstown will be able to provide even simple things like parks for the general public. An irrational thought, you might say, a weak theory of conspiracy baked too long until it's hardened into a cinder. But I read about the state-by-state lobbying groups funded by the likes of Charles and David Koch, at the state level pushing savage policies attacking the working class, such as the abolition of collective bargaining rights for public employees, and in Maine, even the abolition of child labor laws. It's hard not to read this news and feel the kind of foreboding which makes it difficult to keep food down.

And there's the case of Fox News, run by another billionaire, Rupert Murdoch, and wholly dominated by his persona and outlook (as well as that of his hand-picked deputy Roger Ailes). Fox News, including every one of its news and opinion hosts, has a slender allegiance--at best--to the facts, and often an outright antipathy, as the network as a whole acts to forward a libertarian viewpoint often blurring with anarchy. (Bill O'Reilly proudly touts his belief that the moon has nothing to do with tides. It's worth wondering, if you watch O'Reilly or any other Fox host, how rudeness, insult and the display of willful ignorance have come to be so prominent in major American media.) In short, Fox News is not legitimate news. But in the words of the immortal Sheen, at the moment they seem to be on the side that's winning.

That is as far as I'll go into social and political issues now, as this is a family blog. But a deep and growing fear for the future of my country is very much a part of my thinking these days, and it's not something I can altogether avoid when I write. I believe in some collective sacrifice on the part of every individual for the sake of a community, whether on the local level, or for states, or for our country, or above all the whole planet. Paying a fair amount of taxes and doing perhaps some physical service for the community are certainly part. The further we turn to an attitude of securing only our own benefit, the more we destroy this nation we grew up in and are protected by.

So these thoughts, and fingers turning white in the chilly breeze, had me wanting to leave the park well before Eva did. Sometimes I'm the crump in the family, the one who backs out of a thing because I'm not feeling up to it. I don't even have the perfectly good reason, like Kate, of being pregnant to just check out of commission for a day. With me, the trouble is usually in my head. My body just follows along.

Except for yesterday, when I did a bit of work for Kate's boss Cheryl, spring cleanup of their yard. Cheryl and her husband have a very nice log cabin--a genuine log structure, not a frame house with log-looking siding--on a small pond. (The small pond has the look to me of a kettle hole, a big hole in the land left by a melting chunk of ice as the glaciers melted back. If the glacier had been floating on the ocean, like Arctic ice, such melting chunks would have become icebergs. Over land, they fall onto the ground, rivers of meltwater pile sand and gravel all around them, and they gradually melt to leave huge holes where the ice had been--kettle holes.)

So Cheryl and her husband live on the shore of a kettle hole, surrounded by oak trees. And with all the terraces and retaining walls around their place, there are plenty of spots where the wind eddies around and drops oak leaves. It seems the oak leaves from half the pond's shoreline end up in Cheryl's yard. Eight inches thick in places, wet and starting to mulch. I can tell you, raking, pitchforking and then hauling these things away in a tarp was a tougher full-body workout than anything I'd done at the Y in the last two years. I practically had to drag myself back to the car when I finished (for the day--I'm going back next Saturday), with sore quads and hamstrings, sore hips, extremely sore shoulders, and wanting to go to sleep. This was the kind of whole-body fatigue and soreness that makes it painful to roll over in bed.

So this morning, the blahs were probably 65% in my mind, but still a good 35% was post-strain soreness still, and wanting just to flop down in a comfortable chair, dig into a good book, and start thinking about something. Standing in a park with the wind whistling through my fingers just got me onto a mean path of thought that took me to the bleak place I described just above. This morning, I suppose my body led my mind.

As for the reading, I'm back into the history of the petroleum industry. I'm taking a break for a bit from philosophy and the whatever-it-is you'd call Finnegans Wake. If reading Kant is like using a pickaxe to get through a bed of coal, reading the Wake is like blasting through granite, and reading some history is like digging in sand. Compared to the first two, it's practically a vacation. Besides, it has me thinking about yet another writing project (beyond the Deepwater Horizon project) that I'd like to embark on.

Meanwhile, on the way to the park this morning, we listened to a bit of sports radio. Kate and I have the rough policy that the driver picks the radio station--common sense enough, though when the family travels together I usually drive, so that means I dominate the radio.

I adore sports talk. I fell in love with it in the fall of 2005, when I was living in North Kingstown and taking classes up at Harvard, and I would drive up and back once a week, and for the two-hour trip started listening to those guys yelling and screaming about local teams all day. Only, by and large, listening to the noonday and afternoon hosts, I found them to be pretty reasonable guys, by and large, though certainly pushing certain issues which would get a response out of listeners (such as critizing an underperforming player or team).

The real trick of a successful host is to successfully manage the callers, who range from very knowledgeable to idiots oblivious to the facts. Entertaining shows draw many callers, and of course a slew of regulars who don't mind spending an hour a day on hold just to talk on the radio for 30 to 120 seconds. (I confess to having called in five or six times, once to advocate that the Sox sign Barry Bonds to a one-year contract. If the Red Sox, after 2004, were viewed as the Evil Empire Lite, well, why not eliminate the "Lite" part? Anyway.)

So I like sports talk radio. We listened this morning for about half the trip out to the park, before I changed the station to one of the pop-dance stations that Katie likes and I despise so much (she says sports radio puts her to sleep, so I try to listen to it at the start of our trips to and from Maine). The weekend shows tend to be pretty dull, I admit, since the top-line hosts have the days off, and the majority of games are in progress. So this morning the guys were talking about Charlie Sheen.

I'm not exactly a pop culture maven. I grew up on pop and rock music, checked out of rap, and have been more or less unaware of new groups and performers since 1995. (I think U2 is a modern Rolling Stones--great lead singer, good lead guitarist, plus two guys--and I believe that Led Zeppelin might never be approached for musicality, once they narrowly edged the Beatles in that category.)

I resolutely ignore reality TV, since it's more contrived than anything, and I have a visceral dislike for people intentionally making fools of themselves for the sake of attention. (Physical comedy is something else--that requires talent. But people being petulant, violent jerks to one another is simply demeaning, to everyone who participates and watches. Kate watches BrideZillas, and it makes me wish I had an office in another room.)

My reality TV is live sports. Here you've got guys--or women, when I watch skiing or skating--who are among the very best on the planet at what they do, honestly competing. (Okay, some dog it from time to time, and sometimes the refs are questionable, but that still doesn't approach the all-around voyeuristic worthlessness of reality TV.)

I avoid sitcoms for much the same reason--dullwitted characters, with uninspired writing, foundering their way through contrived plots. Though I do watch cartoons, including (occasionally) Dragonball Z. Any watcher of reality TV or sitcoms might want to skewer me for that, but (a) the writing is often better, and (b) at least the ridiculous nature of the cartoons is obvious, not concealed.

I don't want to go into an even longer digression here, but there are two television shows (aside from live games) I do watch: House and Breaking Bad. All I'll say now is that, I'm proud to have introduced Kate to two of her favorite shows and characters: Metalocalypse (and Pickles), and Breaking Bad (and Walter White). She introduced me to House, and has compared me to him on numerous occasions. So every once in a while I play along and walk with a limp.

I've seen, total, maybe ten minutes of Two and a Half Men. It fits perfectly into the category of dullwitted sitcom I so despise. Charlie Sheen has been part of some pretty fun movies--Hot Shots! and Major League come to mind--but I had pretty much no reaction at all to his ongoing role on this show. Of course, it's impossible to navigate to a news website these days without idiotic Lilo-Britney-type gossip prominently getting in the way, so I've seen more than I ever cared to about Sheen's professional meltdown. (I suppose it's been accompanied by a personal meltdown of sorts, but who really knows?)

He got himself fired in spectacular fashion from a very successful TV show, while revealing a huge amount of disgust (concealing even more jealousy?) for the show's creator. During a round of interviews Charlie gave, he let loose with a series of almost inspired quotes, including drinking tiger blood (I hear he's trademarked it and has sold the name rights to a drink manufacturer--PETA will love that), and my favorite, riding the mercury surfboard. (Mercury is liquid at room temperature, though Bill O'Reilly might not be so sure--but in any case, who cares? The idea is too much fun.) Winning, the warlock thing and "defeat is not an option" are much less clever and much more mockable.

So Sheen torched his present job (though there's a small possibility he might have it back next fall), and then arranged a 20-city tour of his new one-man (and two-goddess) tour, the "Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option" tour. He might have called it the "Huge Bomb of Suck/Defeat is Highly Likely" tour. The first show occurred last night (April 2), in Detroit, Michigan. Why not on April Fools Day?

Apparently Charlie rambled pointlessly, the audience booed frequently and Sheen at many points derisively mocked those who heckled him, including with the taunt that they'd already given their money to him. Too bad, because he could've really turned this tour into something. Apparently Sheen wrote the whole thing, if you can call it that. That was his first mistake. Furthermore, he goes over the events of his divorce from CBS and subsequent talk-show rampage. That was his second.

I say, Sheen should've hired five or ten good comedy writers to put together a series of vignettes, of comic one- or two-person scenes illustrating various ideas, or really not related to anything at all. The whole show could've had a general thrust in the direction of life as a star, or some of the reality of putting together a weekly show, or something actually new to the audience. You know, something vaguely educational, a comic show about a slice of experience unknown to the people attending.

Rule #1: don't even mention Two and a Half Men, or anyone associated, or CBS, by name. Let any reference be implicit. Rule #2: have a planned, rehearsed series of one-man character vignettes (Sheen could play two guys at once, like one-man-show actors frequently do) that he's rehearsed and knows cold. I think Sheen has the charisma and acting ability to hold a stage for 90 minutes by himself. If he'd followed those two rules, I think this tour might have turned into something pretty successful. As it is, it's likely to end before he wanted it to. I don't see the theaters in cities #10-20 hanging onto such a lame no-show. (Apparently those extremely quick sellouts weren't people going...they were scalpers and secondary ticket agencies, who are now losing lots of money because they can only sell the tickets at a loss.)

Tough luck, Chuck. At least Sarah Palin--another charismatic dope--has a few handlers who know what they're doing.

Music

2011-03-30T05:11:00.001-07:00

What's becoming increasingly common these days, is for Eva to wake up before Kate leaves for work (generally by 7 AM), denying me a comfortable sleep in until about 8 or so. Generally though, when I'm not feeling worn out (like this morning), I like getting up around 6:30, early enough to make our coffee and peruse some news--though most doesn't post until 7-7:30--before I hit the books and then help Eva through her morning.

But today the little girl was upnatom early, and she even shared breakfast with Kate and me, so now she's wandering around in her trundler with nothing specific to do (no, I don't play with her every instant of the day), especially since I warned her not to follow the cat everywhere.

Eva loves Jasper. Loves him not quite to death, but certainly to the point of scaring him and frequently bugging the crap out of him. There aren't many spots outside of the basement--which is generally cold--where the little guy can remain out of her reach. (Our bed is the one that comes to mind right now.) If he's curled up on a chair, or under a chair, or in some nook on the carpet somewhere, or like right now, on the corner of the couch by the window, it's seldom more than ten minutes before Eva routs him out. She's just too fascinated.

Before Eva was born, I mentioned the presence of a cat in the household to Kate's aunts one Sunday, and they responded with many dark and urgent warnings that the cat would smother the baby, if not out of jealousy, then at least out of being oblivious to the presence of a small child. Nothing could have been further from reality. Jasper is, as my friend Martha (who introduced me to him), a lover not a fighter. (Just yesterday I saw a neighbor's cat rolling happily in the dirt by our driveway, while Jasper cowered five feet away beneath the side-door stairs).

I've never seen an animal more deferent and gentle in the presence of a human infant. Jasper really avoided contact with Eva for several months, and only two or three times (maybe more, I suppose, since Kate was usually home) did we have to rout him out of the bassinet (with Eva not in it, of course). The cat seemed to realize clearly that Eva was a living creature and gave her a very wide berth, particularly in her sleeping spot. There was never a problem.

Fast-forward to now, when Eva's an increasingly speedy and grabby toddler, full of affection and curiosity and, at her small size, unaware of her strength when it comes to things still smaller. Read: the cat. She can really whack the stuffing out of him when she winds up to deliver a love tap. Fortunately she rarely gets a second whack, but she's also grabbed him by the tail and hauled on several occasions, leading to at least one episode of the poor cat wailing from the kitchen as she dragged him across the linoleum.

By and large he offers no resistance. Unless, of course, he has a defensive position, like on an arm of the couch or in Kate's desk chair. Then, if Eva just quietly bugs him enough, Jasper's liable to extend a single claw and catch the baby by one sleeve, and hold on while she turns to me or Kate and whines. "That's what you get for bugging him," we'll say. He's never taken a full-out swipe at her--I'd have no choice but to punish him if he did--and I think that's due to two things.

First, Jasper is too gentle by nature. Even when he and I roughhouse--and nobody else does with him--he'll eventually get pretty feral and deliver a good hard bite. Almost immediately he'll stop, as if in shame, and begin licking the spot he just bit. It's pretty funny. But second, and on top of that, Eva is too gentle. She's not abusive or cruel by nature (unlike me as a young boy, who showed an unfortunate talent for willfully abusing our family cat Simon, another tuxedo like Jasper).

Eva doesn't do anything, by and large, worthy of really fierce retaliation, like throwing or poking him. Yes, a big whack to the ribs every once in a while isn't nice, but no cat's sticking around for more of that, mean or not. (And Simon was part Siamese, the breed developed to guard the temples of Siam. It is by design that those cats are loud, obnoxious and somewhat territorial. Jasper's got none of that mean blood in him).

So the cat has a kind of wary tolerance for the little girl, not fleeing on sight, but always alert to her position and ready to move at the first sign of things going bad. He'll allow her to touch him if she's gentle and not grabby, and doesn't poke at his feet or anything. But she's still too young to have developed any sophisticated behaviors toward the cat, like dangling a string for him to play with.

One of Eva's toys is a three-foot segment of gold Christmas tree string beads, cheap plastic glittery things which helped form our holiday decorations this year. I thought she might like them as a kind of necklace-thingy, and for months Eva draped them over her shoulders in just that way. But now she's discovered how the cat likes to chase dangly things, and at least a dozen times a day Eva will drag the golden bead string over to me, hold it out with her insistent "Eh-eh-eh," (she's on her way right now--just took a two-minute bead break), expecting me to lure the cat over by drawing the beads back and forth across the carpet.

It usually works (as it did just now), and the cat is soon on hand, staring at the beads and making ready to spring. Only then, Eva wants back in on the action, and reachs for the string again, so I hand it to her. Only the little girl then flings it up and down as hard as she can, and then goes running at the cat yelling "Kit-teh!" You can imagine how well that ends.

So the little girl has a fair amount to learn, but her heart's in the right place. Helping her along through the morning, sprinkling episodes of playing (and Signing Time videos!) in among my reading and writing, is my typical pattern, however early Eva gets up. Today is a Wednesday, and for the first time in a while I'll be going to RI Civic Chorale rehearsal tonight.

I took the winter off because I missed so much rehearsal time while I was working nights, but this spring, with no job at all and a really grand concert coming up to conclude the year, I wanted to spare no effort to participate. Rehearsal days are always a bit of a two-edged sword. Having taken the last few months off from singing, I've gotten used to not having to leave home for four hours on Wednesday nights.

It's very easy to get used to being home and not having to go. Frequently I have to drag myself to practice, dreading the two-and-a-half hour's work. But I almost always come away refreshed, with more energy, after singing. That alone is a good indication of the good it does me, and by extension, the people around me.

This spring we'll be singing one of my two favorite pieces of music, the Mozart Requiem. (The other is Beethoven's Ninth. In one of those depressing surveys of American highschoolers, the question was asked, "How many symphonies did Beethoven write?" and one kid answered, "Two. The Fifth and the Ninth.") At some point in the future I'll write a post about the Ninth, only because I have a more systematic understanding of it, and I feel it's one of the very greatest works of art on the planet.

I first sang the Requiem in college with the Glee Club, and we barely pulled it off. And I mean barely. We had a full-out dress rehearsal the morning of the performance, and that dress rehearsal was the first time we'd sung the whole thing through. Our conductor, Louis Burkot, apologized to us during that rehearsal for maybe overestimating our ability as a group. (But we had a secret weapon: a kick-ass bass named Rocky as one of our soloists, a guy who'd soloed at the Met. Notwithstanding that he's a guy, his singing is a small but important part of my reason for picking Rocky as Eva's nickname--well, notwithstanding also that Sylvester Stallone is a guy too. But it's the whole crossover cuteness I'm going for here. Anyway...)

And that Tuba Mirum bass solo...it's giving me chills all across my shoulders now. "Tooooooo-baaa meeee-rooom spar-jens soooohhhhhhhhhhh-oooooohhhhhhh-ooohhhhhhhh-oh-oh-ohh-noooooom...." (The piece is about the mythic trumpet which will awake the dead on the day of judgment.)

Safe to say, Rocky made an impression on the whole Glee Club. Even sopranos were singing his solo to themselves. Almost the whole Requiem, like most of them are, is in Latin. The text for a Requiem mass is mostly set, taken from several Christian poems, most especially "Dies Irae" or "Day of Wrath" (a somewhat long poem). Not every composer used the same movements as the others, so sometimes texts will appear in one requiem mass that don't appear in others. It was pretty much up to each individual guy, what he used or not.

"Dies Irae"--not the whole Latin poem, but the part that actually names the Day of Wrath--is one of the commonest parts included in the mass, and it's usually a show-stopper with its energy and urgency. "Confutatis", "The Confounded" (i.e. cursed), is one of the most famous specifically in Mozart's mass for its violence and, by contrast, its subsequent profound fear and humility. I posted some time ago about how Kate and I watched the movie Amadeus, and unwittingly watched Part II before Part I. Eh, it was still a good movie and all the touches of Mozart's music throughout made it worth seeing regardless of the script (which wasn't bad at all).

I'm no expert on Mozart, but I do know enough about his life to realize that the movie creators (of course) took some creative license with Mozart's life for the sake of their plot (such as, I'm not too sure Salieri actively worked to kill him). But in college, Louis told us, as he was introducing us to the piece, about how Mozart composed much of the Requiem on his deathbed, though made it only through the seventh movement, Lacrimosa.

In the course of learning the individual movements, Louis broke down the Confutatis for us, stripping away its surging rhythm and getting down only to basic chords--and it still made an impression. That was, for me, Louis at his best, teaching us about music at the same time that he coached us to sing. Mozart lived from 1756-1791, and was dying as he composed this Requiem. In no small sense, he wrote it for himself.

Every artist worthy of the title bases every part of every work on her or his own experience alone. But Mozart's requiem is urgently so, filled with the intensity of a person about to die. Verdi's requiem might be far bigger, and Brahms' more imposing and dreadful overall, but no requiem mass approaches Mozart's for immediacy, force and delicacy of emotion.

I'm not going through the entire mass. For one thing, after the Lacrimosa, it's not even Mozart's work, and even though it's not bad, it becomes somewhat more dance-hall music until the final movement, when the follow-up composer quoted the opening movement at length. (The version commonly used now was completed by Franz Sussmayr, one of Mozart's contemporaries.) Second, I'm barely a musician, hardly able to read notes. I've raved a bit about the Tuba Mirum movement, and how the bass solo which leads it off is one of my favorite phrases in music.

But now for the Lacrimosa, my favorite movement of the whole piece, and really, the climax and beating heart of his whole Requiem mass. It begins delicately, plaintively with just strings sighing out disconnected chords, as if from so many people lying or sitting on the ground in pain and anticipation. The text runs:

Lacrimosa dies illa

qua resurget ex favilla

iudicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce deus

pie Jesu, Jesu domine.

Dona nobis requiem

Amen.

Translation:

Tearful that day

when from the ash will stand up

risen man to be judged.

Therefore spare me God

holy Jesus, Jesus lord.

Give us rest

Amen.

That segment of the poem is about the day of judgment itself, when some will be saved and others will not. The tears are for and from the cursed, because they have been cursed. Mourning is barely even the beginning of this movement. I think there might not be a movement in all of music (mind you I'm no well-versed musician) with so many densely mixed emotions.

The piece is a farewell to life, full of foreboding and some hope as to what comes after. It begins with the bleakness of waking alone on a cold and desolate morning and slowly swells to a full chorus. Always the sopranos are riding above the other three parts, adding the pity and sense of tragedy which permeate the whole thing. The "huic ergo..." sentence, sung softly, is a last, quiet, desperate prayer for safety, after which the grandeur of the "Dona nobis", sung in a good strong forte, floods in. "Nobis", us, is a prayer for all humans, but of course it includes the individual praying. It could refer to the chorus singing, the orchestra playing, the audience listening, the whole world of people.

You don't need to be a Christian to understand the urgency of that prayer. "Rest" doesn't even need to mean heaven--it could refer to forgetful oblivion, the lack of all consciousness whatsoever. You can think of yourself during the "dona nobis" passage, or you can think of those you mourn. And this life, for all its joys and triumphs and beauty, still ends more often than not in pain, with the dying person alone, mourned by those who will survive him or her. And it is in the memory of the survivors that the pain of death lives on, and that is why prayers for the dead to rest quietly remain so strong.

Mozart was staring his own death in the face. He might really have feared going to hell--I won't try to imagine what was in his mind. He composed the Lacrimosa out of his own hope and overriding dread of death. This translates easily in each of us into mourning for those already gone, and yet to go in the future.

By the time the chorus reaches the "Amen", I'm frequently in tears, and the only thing which keeps me going through it is to keep breathing. When your voice starts to falter during a song, return to your breathing. Breathing is the engine that drives you through all trouble.

Goulash II

2011-03-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

My last goulash post was well over a year ago, but since I don't want to repeat myself too often, I'll just make this second in a series. (A random series of nothing in particular, but we've all watched TV, haven't we?)

It's a cloudless, breezy, and none-too-warm (43 deg. at 11:30 AM) Sunday, and Kate and I are preparing for a park/supermarket expedition before Eva chows down for lunch and drops off for her afternoon nap. (To say nothing of Kate, who hauled herself groggily out of bed today around quarter of ten...though she did make a kick-ass breakfast, and was sadly gracious when I told her that I dislike the cheddar she loves adding to scrambled eggs. So she responded by saying that she despises the olive oil which I love in scrambled eggs. Ah, married life...)

Anyhow, this post will span the midday shopping trip for Eva's exercise and the family's basic food (and again, the Crock-Pot has become our salvation. Easy, energy-efficient, tasty and complete meals...this is not an advertisement--it's more of a gloat). But as I type Kate's nearly ready to head out the door.

As I wait out the unemployment, having applied to dozens of jobs for which I'm marginally qualified (being more of an offshore geologist, not onshore), I'm letting my spirit sing by delving into the literature I've neglected for a long time. And the list of things I want to read is still long. Homer in the original (not translated). Dante in the original (made it through the Inferno a few years ago). The Aeneid in the original. But right now I've devoted myself, in addition to a little math, to two of the most hard-core writings in the west: Joyce's Finnegans Wake, as I've been posting about for a week or so now, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

The Wake is all about dreams, about the things which emerge in our minds when consciousness, filled with light, bounded by rules and littered with goals, is absent. The unconscious, at its most primitive and paranoid, rules the nighttime of sleep. No human can verify--as Joyce himself realized--that Finnegans Wake is an accurate reproduction of a complete cycle of sleep. Most likely it isn't. However, the fragmented and repetitive aesthetic and the timeless, funhouse-mirror versions of events are based on the brain's activity during sleep. As the title of one prominent commentary states, the Wake is Joyce's book of the dark.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who lived from 1724 to 1804. He was an intellectual giant of his age who wrote about philosophy, astronomy (he discovered that the earth's rotation is gradually slowing down) and history. He is most remembered now for his theory of transcendental ideas, or you might even say fundamental ideas: aspects of perception which exist in the human mind before all experience begins. Neuroscience and prenatal research didn't exist when Kant wrote, so we have much more to say now about the development of the human brain, but Kant's two transcendental ideas within the brain are time and space. Without an inherent awareness of these two things, all experience, including everything we learn, would be impossible for us.

So Kant was into metaphysics. Metaphysics through the centuries has referred to many things. In Aristotle's time, metaphysics basically meant astronomy. In the time of Aquinas it meant theology. Nearer to Kant's own time, and later, it referred to psychology. But Kant himself stepped outside psychology, avoiding the mechanics of how the brain apprehends, remembers and imagines things, and explored how it is that humans can apprehend and imagine things at all. By thinking along those lines he developed his theory of transcendental ideas.

Thoreau and his buddies--Emerson and others--were known as Transcendentalists, for their devotion to Kant and to the very active reality that ideas play in our daily lives. In writing Walden, Thoreau was trying to make a transcendental, idea-driven life as actual as possible. Devotion to ideas, in Thoreau's mind, meant simplifying his life and living as much in harmony with nature as he could, while not ignoring human society.

I find it intriguing that while Thoreau discusses many works of fiction and at least Hindu philosophy, he never overtly discusses Kant anywhere in his published works. Writers don't always disclose their models. It's commonly thought that Dante received the idea of writing about a journey through hell from at least two Muslim works, the Isra and the Mirage. Especially worthy of notice here is that the lowest circle of Dante's hell, the ninth (where Satan is a prisoner), is frozen. Ice doesn't occur in writings about Christian hell until Dante; but it was not unknown in Muslim writing. And you can sure bet that Dante wouldn't concede an Islamic source for his supremely Christian work.

Not that Thoreau feared charges of apostasy or heresy, or even of being a hypocrite, by admitting that he admired the writing of Immanuel Kant. I think it more likely that he so thoroughly incorporated Kant's thinking into his own, that to discuss Kant would be beside the point, as if he were merely cataloguing his own bones and muscles: better to use the bones and muscles to go on a walk, and talk about the things seen, heard and smelled, than to dwell on his bones and muscles. He simply treated the philosophical structure as a given and spent his time on other topics.

I respect that, and it makes me all the more eager to read Kant for myself and understand what he wrote about. The little I've written above is from the first chapter, the bare introduction. Things get complicated quickly after that.

But another thing appeals to me in deciding to tackle this book of philosophy now: the contrast with Joyce. Kant wrote in the mid- to late 1700's, before much of anything was known about what we'd now call psychology. (The 1800's saw many writers exploring the human mind, like Blake, and finding many different, warring aspects within each of us. Much later, Joseph Campbell wrote about how 20th century psychology merely stamped the "QED" ("Quod Erat Demonstrandum", or "We've proven what we set out to prove") on 19th century literature.) But Kant wrote in a time when most still thought dreams to be divine, prophetic gifts, and not products of our own brains.

And he wasn't concerned with any of that. Kant wrote about the fully wakeful, highly rational mind, and how it can perceive things. Reducing his philosophy to a simplified cartoon, Kant wrote about the day, while Joyce wrote about the night.

So that's what I'm doing now: reading and trying to understand the daylightiest and darknightiest works from our civilization.

Hey, it's a way to cope with unemployment!

Spring is nominally here, and it's certainly warmer, but the three of us went to the park this morning and within about ten minutes Kate's and my fingers were pretty cold. Eva, whose fingers are smaller, had red hands, but she was oblivious. It's still not all that clear how aware she is of her different body parts. She's futher along than she was, say, four months ago, when she was closing a toy plastic phone on her thumb, and crying about the pain at the same time. She now has the sense to remove her thumb. But she doesn't have the language skill right now to tell us that a specific body part is, for example, cold. If she hits her hand, she will often hold it out as she cries. So the awareness is dawning, but with anything other than sharp, immediate pain, it still seems to Kate and me that we need to be pretty vigilant on Eva's behalf.

This is the case especially now with physical accidents. As Eva grows more mobile and her inquisitiveness has longer legs and longer arms, she has a vastly increased ability to get herself hurt. She reaches for drawers now, including the ones with sharp knives. Other than closing the drawers again and firmly warning her away from them, Kate and I have yet to take any action on these (like putting in smaller versions of the plastic safety latches we have on several cupboards). But most worriesome right now is Eva's tendency to approach an open door from behind, peek through the open crack at the hinges, and sneak her fingers through.

Since Kate and I commonly keep Eva away from the open side of the refrigerator door when we're getting something, this is her way of still getting a peek at things. Even more worrisome is when she does the same thing at the pantry. If Eva were to sneak her fingers through the crack in hinge side of the refrigerator door, at least the rubber molding would cusion the pressure on her hand and prevent serious injury. But the other night Eva got behind the pantry door and snuck a hand through while I was getting dinner fixings. I didn't see her and if Kate hadn't yelled I'd've shut the door firmly on my little girl's right hand, and I would've broken or possibly severed all four of her fingers. Needless to say I never would have forgiven myself and the thought that I very nearly maimed my own daughter still gives me chills.

Wow, are kids their own worst enemies at times! (I was my own especially in college, but that's not worth dwelling on now. Or maybe ever.)

So Eva has survived past her eighteenth month. Every time Kate and I look at her early ultrasounds, where her spine and teeth within the jaw are visible, it seems always more and more miraculous.

Deeper and Deeper

2011-03-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

Kate and I just celebrated our second anniversary, not the first day of spring this year (well, the first complete day maybe, but the earth actually moved into its springtime orbit Sunday night). We were limited by budget, as we are in most all other respects these days, so our celebration was cards given to each other and a big pot roast dinner (featuring cauliflower instead of potatoes since I'm now back on the diet).

My erratic work history since early January (when Triton's roof caved in from snow), including about four days of cab driving, along with difficulty securing another cycle of unemployment payments, has badly damaged our already feeble budget. We have telephone, internet and TV service right now largely by the graces of the service provider, since we're about two months behind on our bill. But now that Kate's through her winter cycle of vacations and snow days, and now that I'm at least receiving steady unemployment aid, I do see our situation remaining modest but stable.

So while I apply for work and stay at home minding Eva, I have lots of time to engage in other things.

I wasn't particuarly literate as a teenager. I was nerdy, imaginative and solitary, and I loved singing, but I wasn't really a serious student of anything at all (except maybe Saturday morning cartoons). I still remember how, when I was in 6th grade, my cousin Monie (who was going to Dartmouth at the time) gave me a book as a present and told me that she knew I loved to read.

Really, I loved to read? Honestly, it was news to me. I had no idea at that age that I loved to read.

I remember how, in third grade, one of those book fairs came to my elementary school, with all the tables spread throughout the library. It was thrilling to see so many colorful books in one place, and of course I wished I could buy them all, but that was really a pretty shallow kind of interest. My best friend bought The Hobbit, and I resolved to buy a thicker book, so I bought The Return of the King.

In fifth grade I tried reading it, made it about a paragraph in, got confused and bored, and set it down until eighth grade.

But back to Monie's gift: A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle. I'd never heard of her, and though the back of the book described it as being the second part of a trilogy (1: A Wrinkle in Time; 2: A Wind in the Door; 3: A Swiftly Tilting Planet), I gave it a go. It was very entertaining, and I quickly read the other two. And still, when I think of cherubim, the lower angels, I still tend to think of a whirling mass of wings and eyes, like in L'Engle's book. (As an aside, when I learned that the original concept of seraphim was winged cobras, I was very, very impressed. I mean, that's worthy of Calvin & Hobbes. Ain't nobody messing with a legion of them.)

So, maybe Monie did kind of get me on the love-to-read thing, but it's not like I became some super-literary prodigy in high school. I just did my homework, generally found it pretty easy, and got into college. It was really that simple. By the time I got there, I'd read perhaps two Shakespeare plays (Julius Caesar and maybe Romeo and Cleopatra), and I know I'd heard of James Joyce and Dante, but I do know I'd never read a thing by either. Heck, among American A-listers, by college I'd read Huckleberry Finn by Twain and maybe four or five short stories by Poe. I've still yet to read my first book by Hemingway. I wasn't much of an aficionado, at all.

Among the many other causes for my complete spinout and utter failure at Dartmouth (yes, I had a B average, but you could almost get that by showing up), not realizing in high school what hard work really is, is probably a part. But I had four years at Dartmouth to figure out just exactly what hard work is, and I didn't, so my results are all on me.

Fortunately, I've had two big occasions in the past year to cool my heels for weeks or months at a time: severe colitis last spring, and unemployment this winter. Among other things--like spending lots of time raising and getting to know my daughter--I can devote several hours a day to reading, like I haven't in many years. (Reading science and studying math aren't literature, so I'm not counting time spent doing that.)

And all over again I'm feeling regret for the opportunity I blew in college to spend time doing nothing but this--reading and exploring ideas. I have no idea what direction my study might have taken had I deferred for one year between high school and college (my original idea), and gained a bit of social maturity before heading in. Would I have stuck with literature or tried something else completely? I don't know.

But I can say that this winter, moving from Thoreau to Homer to Joyce has been one of the bright lights during a season that at times has been very dark. I've posted a few times about Finnegans Wake, and won't go into great length here. I have my commentaries and annotations and I'm delving into the book itself now--still in Part 1 chapter 1, having skimmed it once and now going through with a finer comb to get at least a working sense of some of the puns (stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upon our leatherbed and in the night and at the fading of the stars!). It's slow going, as you might imagine.

Not without its reward, however--you might liken it to climbing a very tall mountain with no clear path, only a jumble of rocks to keep clambering over. Or there's Joyce's own analogy, that the Wake was him burrowing into a mountain from several different sides. The book's incoherence is a result of being about the dream state, when the mind's unconscious thoughts and desires are manifest, and the elements of myth are revealed as the building blocks of our dreams. Religion and mythology are the external product of our sleeping neuroses.

Now the book is much more than that. Joyce, like most expatriates, remained deeply concerned with his home country, and the plots of his books were all located in Dublin. He believed that by understanding Dublin thoroughly, he could understand any city on earth. The all is contained in the particular. So Dublin of Finnegans Wake is used as a prism for all times and places in human history (and prehistory).

But even with all these fragments of history and literature and language scattered within the book's psychological matrix, still a disproportionate number of the fragments refer to Irish heritage, history and culture. And there's plenty of amusement in the references. One series of puns goes: Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain's chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the nation...There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too.

Now to unpack this just a bit. Fillagain's wake = Finnegan's wake. Chrissormiss...hoolivans...plumbs and grumes (etc.) = Mrs. Hooligan's Christmas Cake, another folk ditty.

And that ditty goes:

MRS. HOOLIGAN'S CHRISTMAS CAKE

As I sat in me window last evenin'
A letterman came unto me.
He'd a nice little neat invitation
Sayin' "Won't you come over to tea?"
I knew it was Hooligan sent it
So I went for our friendship's sake
And the first thing he gave me to tackle
Was a slice of Mrs. Hooligan's cake.

REFRAIN:
There were plums and prunes and cherries
There were raisins, currants and cinnamon too.
There were nuts and cloves and berries
but the crust it was stuck on with glue.
There were caraway seeds in abundance,
It would give yer a fine stomach ache
'Twould kill any man twice to be eatin'
A slice of Mrs Hooligan's Christmas cake.

Now Bridie Mulligan wanted to taste it,
Ah but sure it was all of no use.
Though she worked at it over one hour
Still she could get not any of it loose.
Till Hooligan went for the hatchet,
And Kelly came in with the saw
That cake was enough, by the power,
To paralyse any man's jaw.

(REFRAIN)

Now Mrs. Hooligan proud as a peacock,
she was smilin' and blinkin' away
Till she tripped over Flanigan's brogans
and spill'd the whole brewins of tay.
Mrs Hooly, she cried: "You're not eatin'.
Won't you try a bit more for my sake."
"I've a roof to repair, Misses Hoolie,
so I'd like the recipe for that cake."

(REFRAIN)

I'm not even going into the history or the dream interpretation stuff. One really thrilling aspect about this book (about any good book, really, each in its own way): it's an education in itself.

More Eva

2011-03-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

As it gets warmer Eva grows more insistent on being outside. That's not a real problem (though she can't go out as much as she'd like), except that it's becoming difficult to get her into the car. Every time we leave home she expects to start running around the yard, and she rebels noisily when we try to fit her into the car. Eva's gained enough strength, enough body control, and enough twistiness that she can put up a pretty effective fight when she doesn't want to be placed in something like a safety seat or a shopping cart. This afternoon at the supermarket it took concerted work by Kate and me to push the little imp into the cart seat. And she didn't go quietly, I can assure you that.

But an event the other day, while Kate was at work, got me to thinking about one of my less proud moments from my own early childhood. See, Eva and I were heading home from the park--it had been a nice morning and she ran all over the place--and I stopped in at the store to pick up a few odds and ends. The store had special kids' carts with built-in cars in front, so the child could sit in a seat (buckled, of course) facing forward and with a small steering wheel to play with while the adult pushes the cart around.

Several months ago Kate and I put Eva in one of these, and the little girl flipped out because (we surmised) she couldn't see us. Eva needed some hard-core reassurance after that one, so we abandoned the thought of using them until last weekend, when Kate tried again. This time Eva reacted with glee, screaming and yelping and laughing the whole time. The only moment she fell silent was when I rammed a display case in a full head-on collision. (In my defense, those plastic mock cars stick out a good foot or so beyond the cart, and it's easy to forget how far out they are. It's like not knowing where the bumpers and corners on your own car are, I realize, but this was my first time handling one of those things! Anyway...) So Eva loved the car-styled cart the second time around.

So this Tuesday I stuck her in one, did my bit of shopping, and headed toward the cashiers. I guess the belt was kind of loose, because Eva was all over the cab of the car, twisting around backwards, standing up, generally behaving imprudently. I figured we were nearly done so I let it go. We went through the line, I paid for my food, and out to the car we went.

When I leaned over to remove Eva from the front of the cart, I saw a Snickers bar in her hands.

Plainly she'd reached out and grabbed one while waiting in the cashier line, and nobody had noticed. Who looks down for a shoplifting baby? Plus, the cashier at that counter couldn't see so far down over the edge of the counter anyway, so unless someone in front saw the baby with the candy, it would be the perfect crime. And the perfect crime it was.

At first I was morally indignant that Eva would do such a thing, then I remembered that she's a baby and she grabs everything that's not fastened down. Then I thought that I should return the candy bar, since it was stolen. Then I thought that it would be a hassle to bring the baby and the candy bar back in, and I was eager to get home after spending most of the morning out. Then I thought that I hadn't had a Snickers bar in a long, long time. So I kept it.

Eva made no protest when I took it from her hands, set her in the carseat, and buckled her in. I tossed the Snickers bar onto the front seat, put my bag of groceries in the rear seat, and got in. When I opened the wrapper, however, is when Eva piped up. And pipe up she did. That little thief yelled and cried and screamed for a good five minutes as I drove home, eating the candy bar in resentful silence. Not only did I have the crime of eating a shoplifted candy bar on my conscience (and Eva to blame for it), but she had to make me pay even further by screaming because I'd stolen it from her.

(And of course, I'll be checking her hands every time through that she sits in one of those forward-facing carts from now on, you can believe that.)

When I was a twerp, maybe three or four (I don't recall exactly, but I was sitting in a forward-facing booster in the middle of the back seat), I'd get hauled along to the supermarket once or twice a week, and I had to tolerate the interminable boredom. (Only clothes shopping for Lisa and Julie was worse.) Only this time was different. Around then--early to mid-70's--there was a brand of gum called Fruit Stripe or something like that, with a multicolored zebra on the packet.

I dug the colors and I adored anything sweet, so I made up my mind to get me some of that gum. Only I knew Mom would never approve--her list of legal sugary foods for me was very, VERY short, and furthermore candy was a useless luxury--so I just swiped it. And like Eva, I got away clean, right out to the car with nobody noticing. Only I wasn't a baby innocently grabbing things, I was a theiving little boy with a plan, albeit a bad one.

See, I'd gotten out of the store easily, but the next part of my plan was pretty much off the charts for stupidity. I was too impatient to wait until I got home to start eating the gum, so I started eating it right in the car, in my booster chair, in the middle of the back seat. Only I thought I'd be furtive about it, so I leaned way over to one side and chewed while looking down and to the rear.

Of course my mother noticed this in about five seconds, pulled over and extracted the truth from me. That done, we turned around and drove back, walked into to the store again, and she made me return the pack of gum in person to the store manager and apologize for stealing it.

My mother knew how to punish effectively, though it doesn't seem to have stuck into adulthood.

Today (no more stealing) we went to the park again, and it was an even warmer day. Eva did me proud, and put her education from a recent rainy day to work. She stomped right through four puddles in the dirt parking lot and soaked her shoes, socks and the lower part of her pants. Then we walked over to the sand-filled playground with its jungle gyms and swings. In between a few bouts on the swings, and a couple of trips down the slide, Eva just rolled around in the sand, and tossed handfuls up in the air, all over herself.

I was extremely proud. That's the child of a Dartmouth man, develping a real appreciation for mother earth.

Emendation

2011-03-16T08:57:00.001-07:00

Homestead's full this morning. Kate felt lousy yesterday--she asked me to come rescue her from work at noon--and with no co-op students to coach today, she called in sick. Kate is thankfully feeling better, but it's thrown off my normal routine of scudding out to the gym and then being home in time for lunch.

Add that it's raining steadily, so that not even I would encourage Eva to go out (I believe getting wet and dirty on a regular basis are indispensable to childhood).

But Eva's trapped inside with her mother and me, no YMCA day care for an hour (when I say "We're going to the YMCA," she answers, "See-ay,") to distract her. She's doing the early toddler version of going stir-crazy, digging through the recycling bin (her auxiliary toy chest), scrabbling for items off her mother's and my bureaus (Kate's watch is a frequent theft), scattering her possessions in every room and verbally announcing her discontentment the whole while.

She's driving Kate and me a little bit nuts (to say nothing of an increasingly harried and persecuted cat).

Everyone's heard the old saw, "Ain't mama happy, ain't nobody happy." And in any family that's certainly true. It really describes the centrality of the mother to the homestead, because the woman has traditionally been the person most consistently taking care of it and the other family members. So the mother's state of mind has a larger effect on everyone else than any other family member's would. That's much less true now with the fragmentation of the American home, due to two working parents and many other causes. But even so, to a large extent the old saying is still very true, and to paraphrase my favorite B-poet Robert Service, ain't mama happy, she makes it spread misere.

But really, if anyone's unhappy, the rest feel it. There's no doubt that I've dragged Kate's state of mind farther down this winter by being the scowling lump of doldrum that I've been, looking unsuccessfully for work and despairing over bringing in any money at all. And my lack of gitup'n'go rubs off on Eva, whom I've often left to her own whining devices while I just funk out in front of the TV or reading more bad news from Daily Kos.

So, in every family unit, everybody affects everybody. It's a smaller version of the earth, really, or the universe. And it's obviously much more visible on such a small scale, but it's none the less true.

So the "ain't mama..." thing is cute, and funny, but less than the whole story.

Which brings us to the baby.

When this trundling little tyke with the 10-second attention span and an increasingly long arm's reach gets bored and ornery, things happen around the house, and generally not to the good. My first memory is of nearly electrocuting myself by sticking a key in a socket at 14 months. Eva loves to play with keys, so that's another thing to make sure are never within her reach. Without policing her every motion it's impossible to keep her out of the proximity of electrical outlets, so of course our main task is to make nothing available she might be able to stick in one. And so on down the line--child-proofing a dwelling is an entirely different level of safety from baby-proofing. As Kate and I are learning.

But for right now, we might as well rewrite the old saw: "Ain't baby happy, ain't nobody happy."

What Sound Does a Bird Make?

2011-03-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

Wading gradually into Finnegans Wake, supplied by several commentaries with some concepts. and in the absence of money to buy the book of annotations (because virtually every word in the Wake is a pun, often several, and frequently in two or more languages--like I said last time, this book is complicated), an online annotation which helps unravel the puns and the many languages and layers.

Joyce being Joyce, there is humor in every word and every pun. Joyce views the human tragedy of life and the many kinds of violence humans execute on one another through the lens of all humans being psychologically the same. Therefore we humans do violence only on ourselves, and this violent, tragic life becomes a rough comedy, a hurly-burly. The violence humans perform on themselves is a necessary part of pent-up energy being released and helping to create more life. Humans are humans like, for Red Sox fans of the aughts, Manny was Manny. Self-destructive behavior is not universally destructive but is, rather, the means toward more life (or, in Manny's case, more clutch baseball).

So the book is filled with references to sex, whether between husband and wife, or adulterous, or cross-generational, or incestuous, and every reference is humorous and tinged with a sense of nature, of inevitability (like how hurricanes are statistically inevitable in the Gulf of Mexico). The sexual humor is wry and incessant. From the online commentary I'm relying on comes a note concerning a Japanese element ("kaminari", thunder) in the text: 'Joyce asked me "Aren't there 4 terrible things in Japan, 'Kaminari' being one of them?" I counted for him: Jishin (earthquake), kaminari (thunder), kaji (fire), oyaji (paternity)." And he laughed - Takaoki Katta, 15 juillet, 1926.'

That snippet is a' propos of nothing except that I found it funny. Even from the land of zen and dour samurai we have paternity jokes. I suppose we humans are alike after all.

I'm posting more now because my spirits have risen considerably over the past week or so. In no small part this is because I'm finally on a regular income (though small) of unemployment payments. I'm not proud of that except that it enables us to pay our bills, which had been piling up unpaid for nearly two months. Add to this that spring is definitely approaching--not even another blizzard or two will undo the thaw we've had--and today was (Surprise!) daylight savings day. I woke to our automatic clock, which reads the time through the power grid, telling me that it was nearly nine.

So much for an early start to the day, eh?

But now it's nearly seven and twilight still hangs in the air. And that's good. Trees are now filled with twittering birds so that Eva constantly points them out when she can hear them from inside the house. Morning and evening she points toward the window and says, "Bud-dy."

The return of birds and the noise they make makes me think of when I first moved away from New Hampshire, down to Boston to live and work with my cousin Drew. We lived on P Street in South Boston, still the Irish end of town then (nearly 20 years ago), and one block from Columbia Park which looks onto the bay and the old revolutionary fort which guards Boston Harbor. The tip of Southie, which sticks like a thumb out into the harbor, is a mile or two across the water from Logan Airport, and when the wind is out of the southwest, we were under its takeoff pattern. This made for noisy evenings.

(A side note: commercial airports double as gigantic weathervanes. When I saw eight planes stacked up on their landing approach to the south, I knew that the wind was out of the north-northwest, and we were in for good weather for a while. Anyhow...)

So Southie was loud, between the family upstairs (and the father, falsely claiming medical disability like half the other people I met in that neighborhood), the caterwauling tomcats all night outside, the passersby in the street, and the planes overhead. And no birds.

Oh, there were some seagulls, and perhaps a crow or two, but certainly no songbirds. Nothing you'd want to open up a window, sit down with a cup of coffee, and listen to. Just city toughs getting along, like all the other animals (including humans and insects) there.

I moved down in February, in the midst of a very snowy winter (and I learned just how territorial and irrational these folks could be when it came to claiming and defending parking spots). I didn't visit my parents in Moultonboro, on the northern tip of Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire until mid-June. I drove up one Friday evening, opened my bedroom window open because it was really hot, hopped in bed and went to sleep.

The following morning, around 5:30 AM, I was awoken by a screaming clatter like I'd never heard in Boston. "EEAAHWRAAKKEEII-NAKAAWEEEIIKKIEEAAWRAAAAEEIIKIIEE!" and on and on and on.

The birds.

It was as if 10,000 birds were sitting outside my window, and suddenly on cue, began screaming at maximum volume in one deafening chorus.

(Calvin and Hobbes has long been my favorite cartoon strip, occasionally displaced by Doonesbury and The Far Side. But Snoopy is unassailably my favorite character. Can't touch Joe Cool. He's as elemental as anyone in the Wake.)

Back to the startlingly loud birds. I jumped out of bed, pretty scared, until I realized about five seconds later what the noise was. Of course I had a good chuckle at myself but there was no way I could go back to sleep so I just went downstairs and joined Mom for a cup of coffee.

Fast-forward to today. That story about the screaming is one of the ones I've told Kate three or four dozen times. On account of the sudden influx of songbirds, and the (still leafless) treetops filled with chattering flocks in the twilight, tonight was one more. And I added the sound effect, "WRAAAAEEEAAAGHH!"

Kate, generally more attuned to these things than I am, commented, "You're startling Eva."

So I turned to Eva. "Birds," I said, "go WRAAA." and bugged my eyes out. Eva reacted with her startled, fearful laugh, and her answer said it all: "Bankie." (Whenever she's dismayed or scared her first thought is for her blankie.)

Kate, not pleased, objected. "Birds go tweet-tweet-tweet." And she made the ASL sign for a bird, thumb and forefinger opening and shutting in front of the lips.

I made the same sign and insisted, "Birds go WRAAA."

Eva wasn't sure who to pay attention to, but she was showing signs of maybe wanting to start crying, so I backed off.

But later on, as Kate read her a story before bed, the story mentioned a crow.

"Wraa," the baby said, and looked at me.

Hyah!

Gusto

2011-03-10T16:27:00.000-08:00

Kate and I try to avoid having too many "What bills can we pay this week?", and "Well, that payment bounced, we'll try it again next month" conversations. Yes, we keep only loose track of our money, but it's not like I go out gambling and drinking, and we don't like antagonizing ourselves or each other with the obvious. We're not poor, but we're not rich.

If you look at life economically, in terms of a person's earning potential, then I'm still not really worried. My line of work is transferable internationally, with the right licenses and a bit of language brushup. So if the economy ever unfreezes enough for a galoot with a few years' experience to slip his way through a door again, then I have reason to feel good about the years to come.

Of course, like an ancient Irish poem says about spring: it's pretty, but there's no food. Hope isn't dinner.

About fifteen years ago, while I was drunkenly schlepping my way through my 20's, a beggar in Boston asked me for money. I walked past, and thought, I have quite a bit of credit card debt right now that I can't pay off. Total all my assets and liabilities up--books versus debts--and I'm in the negative. I'm worth less than that beggar! It left me thinking that I should go back and demand money from him.

That's nonsense, of course, because I have an education and had the prospects of receiving money from a reasonably well-off family. In other words, I had support and the potential to earn that the beggar most likely didn't. (Although some beggars might have suprising personal histories. One slovenly drunk I knew was a black-sheep castoff of a Boston Brahmin clan.)

Anyhow, my main point here is that there is no mystery in the presence or absence of money in a person's life. Unless one wants to live off the grid (the little bengal's floated it once or twice), money is an essential tool. So Kate and I try to avoid wrangling too often over it, when our general situation is pretty obvious to both of us.

In the meantime, while Kate works, I've mentioned studying math and geodetics (the science of locating things geometrically on planet Earth), but I'm also taking the opportunity, like last year in the hospital and afterward, to dig into some literature I've been neglecting for some time. Like last year, it started with Thoreau.

(Well, last year it started with Shakespeare and Chaucer, but once I got to Thoreau, I realized I'd found a writer I could understand instinctively. So in that sense it started with Thoreau.)

Thoreau, during his discourses, mentions many old writers. Walden is a modern Confessions, a sincere psychological self-profile by a mature adult male. In the Confessions Augustine describes his conversion to Christianity, and in Walden Thoreau describes his two-year experiment to simplify his life so as to eliminate all unnecessary things, or in his own words, "all that was not life." Both discuss the writers which influenced them--Augustine famously writing that he fell in love with Vergil's heroine Dido, and Thoreau spreading his affections a bit more widely.

Time in Walden is somewhat kaleidoscopic, with many different moments of time merged within one picture. The book moves generally through the four seasons, but with two years' experience compressed into the apparent passage of one single year, and even then, sometimes Thoreau will range across several months, or even years, to find another memory which illustrates a point. And during the course of this not-quite-passage of time, he describes several books, or even classes of literature, which have especially formed his thinking.

Oddly enough Thoreau never mentions Kant, whose philosophy was the basis of the label given later to Thoreau and his friends: the Transcendentalists. Perhaps Kant was as intimidating and as feared a writer then as he is among undergraduates now, and Thoreau didn't want to scare off his readers. In any event, Thoreau never mentions him.

He does, however, discuss Homer at length, and Hindu philosophy in general, at even greater length. In "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers" time passes even more vaguely--where a few weeks seem to encompass the passage of spring to fall, as well as several extended forays into memories from years past--and the discourses on literature are longer, and nearly as fascinating. (I'm ashamed to admit that in one of his essays, Thoreau lavishes praise on the Scottish poet Ossian, supposed author of several Gaelic epics. Unfortunately, by Thoreau's time Ossian had long been revealed to be the fraudulent creation of the Scottish poet James McPherson, who had taken actual ancient Gaelic fragments and incorporated them into several English works of his own invention. The incomparable Samuel Johnson, who almost immediately detected the counterfeit, wrote that the books of the nonexistent Ossian were as "gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with." And nearly a century later, my intellectual hero fell for it. Ah well.)

In Walden, Thoreau celebrates the heroism less of the characters than of the poet, whose work is a joyful affirmation of piratic and warlike life in bronze age Greece. And all Homer's heroism is overwhelmed by a tiny moment's experience in his own life: "I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment in earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and the Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting fertility and vigor of the world."

Literature speaks very much to writers of literature. However, life speaks to everyone, and literature might at best describe outlines or echoes of what we live every day. But these outlines and echoes can be valuable clues by themselves for living. To the literary woman or man, however, not only the content but the aesthetic is the lesson. What matters to me is not only the experience and thought compressed into Thoreau's words, but the arrangement of words themselves. When he blends time together imperceptibly, turning his Walden calendar into a delicate fiction, I am charmed and intrigued. When two weeks become nearly one full year on the river, spanning from spring to the onset of winter, I'm inspired to find the more rapid seasons within my own life.

So I wanted to take Thoreau's advice: go back to the source. Every source has its source, of course, and when the person we call Homer was composing poetry, the stories he (or she? I subscribe to the idea that a woman composed the Odyssey) was telling in verse might well have been ancient beyond memory. (This is Thomas Mann's time coulisse, the endless dive into human memory. "Very deep is the well of time. Shall we not call it bottomless?" he wrote.) Unfortunately, Homer is our earliest coherent source for these Greek stories, and fortunately they are told so magnificently that they along with the Bible have formed the unmovable foundation for European and American literature.

The Iliad is all about war, and shines with soldiers' joy in their work. Death is more than a necessary evil--it is a tool for gaining fame. Mankind's spirituality was still in its childhood, with godly male and female characters displaying our species' psychology on a cosmic stage. Whether acting unseen by the mortals within the poem, or planting suggestions within the humans' brains, the gods and goddesses perform psychologically valid acts. They are part of the framework for displaying the humans in the poem.

The role of gods and goddesses--mainly Poseidon and Athena--in the Odyssey is the same as in the Iliad. The main character is Odysseus, a man; Poseidon, also male, is the principle divine antagonist, and Zeus, another male, remains the high arbiter of the gods. However, Odysseus and his son Telemachus live in a world of settled homesteads, where the heroic culture is counterproductive at best (think Ivanhoe). The Odyssey occurs largely in a world dominated by women, where Penelope is the focus of over a hundred brawling and blasphemous suitors. Athena, the crafty goddess of wisdom and battle, quietly guides both Odysseus and his son through a series of desperate adventures, none greater than ridding the palace of the mob of suitors.

Helen, adulterous cause of the Trojan War, is beyond reproach and beyond analysis in this story. She so thoroughly dominates her (apparently rather stupid) husband King Menelaus of Sparta, that he can adoringly tell the story of how, when he, Odysseus and others were crouched within the Trojan Horse, Helen walked round it, with her (second! After Paris had been killed) Trojan husband, calling the names of the principal Greeks--imitating their wives' voices. Menelaus' tale comes just a few lines after Helen had condemned herself as a prostitute, and said that her mind had changed at Troy, and she wanted only to return to Menelaus and the Greeks.

The point that defies analysis: if Helen told the truth about wanting to forsake Troy, why try to flush the Greeks out of the horse? (And the sequence of time is clear: Helen mentioned wanting to leave Troy behind before the horse was ever brought in.) But if her self-accusation was a lie, why bother to tell it when it's so unbelievable? In no small part because Menelaus was gullible enough to believe her. And this is just the beginning of the mystery that is Helen, and the theme she so grandly introduces, of duplicity. Whether calculated, or subconscious, or simply to cover up a monstrous crime, the poem is a nearly unbroken series of deceptions.

Helen's physical beauty is undeniable. Her magic, on display more than once, is almost terrifying. Her motives in using it, inscrutable. She is both greater and less than Penelope--faithless follower of her own advantage, and capable of steering the minds of anyone she is with. Penelope, unspeakably faithful, is clever but not magical and is held almost prisoner by her illegitimate suitors.

Odysseus, the lone adult male profiled at any length in the poem, exists almost in isolation. Even his son Telemachus, introduced earlier, is constantly described as just exiting adolescence and entering adulthood--so he is hardly comparable to his father. It is the several female characters--Penelope, Helen, Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, even Athena--who can be compared to each other, and who at various times (except for Helen) hold Odysseus' fate in their hands. Rejection by any one of these would mean death (or, in Penelope's case, worse) to the poem's namesake.

This is not to become a dissertation on my favorite book. I just wanted to explore a few themes which I've been considering since re-reading it. Like the Iliad, and I'll agree with Thoreau here, joy suffuses the poem, in the acuity of description, the detail which validates the story as a whole, and in the overall affirmation of the lives of its characters.

So I want to keep taking Thoreau's advice in Walden, "Read the best books first, or you may never have the chance to read them at all." So I'm moving from translated Homer, as my warmup, to possibly the most intimidating book in Western literature: Finnegans Wake.

Joyce took the title from a 19th-century Irish folk song about the wake of Tim Finnegan, a mason (well, a hod carrier: the guy who brought bricks and mortar up to the bricklayers) who fell off a ladder and died. At his wake there was a fight, and someone accidentally splashed whiskey on his face as he lay in the open casket. Finnegan awoke and joined in the party.

There's a bit of etymology behind the name "Finnegan": the name comes from "Finn-again", as in, a reincarnated version of the hero from Irish myth, Finn MacCool. That's precisely the kind of trick that Joyce adores, so who am I to deny it? (Joyce is the one who wrote, "God is dog spelled backwards.") So with the death and reincarnation of Finnegan, Joyce is dealing with the process of sin, guilt and redemption. And that's just the itsy-bitsiest kernel of things.

I can't really even describe what that book's about, except to say that it's about everybody, and everything. Since all humans share the same basic psychology, we all play out similar psychological dramas in our lives. Based on this, Joyce's book is full of male and female characters which are all ultimately lesser parts of, and distorted expressions of, the two main characters: HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody), and his wife ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle).

Their two sons Shem and Shaun are utterly opposite in nature, and constantly fight. They are the source of all wars in history (with a generous assist from their sister the temptress). The daughter Isabel is the object of all the males' attentions (not least her brothers and father). Within these five characters is the grounds for Joyce to display and explore all human history. Finnegans Wake is the fantastically complicated journey of exploration. (And that point I made earlier, about meaning plus aesthetic...well, let's just say, I really don't want to get too far into that topic right now.)

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs."

That's how the book begins.

"Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousends thee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"

That's how the book ends. Note how you can go right back to the beginning from the end. And that's one of the main points of the book: the story never ends, and it's the same thing over and over. (And it's worth mentioning that the title, "Finnegans Wake", has no apostrophe indicating the possessive. It's really a statement that all we Finnegans must wake up from our guilt-imposed psychological self-abuse: our own death, in a manner of speaking. And in another sense, Finnegan wakes in the form of children who grow up and take their parents' place in the world.)

The book is too complex, and I have too much to learn about it, to waste anyone's time blathering about it now. But I intend to learn. And I'm getting ready to write my own, but you might say I'm taking a good stiff draft of excellent literature to prepare my own spirit for the act of writing.

* * *

A version of the Irish ballad "Finnegan's Wake" I picked up from the internet:

Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin' Street,
A gentleman Irish mighty odd;
He had a brogue both rich and sweet,
And to rise in the world he carried a hod.
Now Tim had a sort of a tipplin' way,
With a love of the whiskey he was born,
And to help him on with his work each day,
He'd a drop of the craythur every morn.

Chorus:
Whack fol the dah O, dance to your partner,
Welt the floor, your trotters shake;
Wasn't it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake!

One mornin' Tim was feelin' full,
His head was heavy which made him shake;
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull,
And they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They rolled him up in a nice clean sheet,
And laid him out upon the bed,
A gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.

Chorus

His friends assembled at the wake,
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tay and cake,
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O'Brien began to bawl,
"Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
"O Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?"
"Arragh, hold your gob," said Paddy McGhee!

Chorus

Then Maggie O'Connor took up the job,
"O Biddy," says she, "You're wrong, I'm sure",
Biddy she gave her a belt in the gob,
And left her sprawlin' on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage,
'Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage,
And a row and a ruction soon began.

Chorus

Then Mickey Maloney ducked his head,
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him,
It missed, and falling on the bed,
The liquor scattered over Tim!
The corpse revives! See how he raises!
Timothy rising from the bed,Says,
"Whirl your whiskey around like blazes,
Thanum an Dhoul! Do you think I'm dead?"

Chorus

Strawberry Milk and Bounced Checks

2011-03-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

Since Kate seems to have lost the ability to type, and posting a sign video would use too much bandwidth, and only a few folks could understand it anyway, it looks like I'm going to be doing all the posting for the foreseeable future. And my glacial posting rate assures that we've lost the few readers we ever had, so I suppose I'm writing now pretty much for myself, Kate, and maybe Eva if she ever chooses to read this.

Oh, well.

I've honestly felt like there's little to post this winter, as the family struggles through a period of scarce money and half employment. Kate's borne up valiantly with her job, when she's told me many times that she'd rather be home with Eva. And I'd love to give her that freedom--I hope to still, in years to come. Despite the steady erosion of America's middle class, I hope to earn enough that Kate can be a full-time mother. I grew up with one of those, and despite the times she kind of aggravated me by asking tons of questions when I didn't feel like talking (which was actually kind of rare, that I wouldn't feel like talking), it was pretty good having a mother around all the time.

On the other hand, I did grow up pretty sheltered and dependent, so there are consequences to everything. But hey, as a race we have to roll with the psychology we're born with, so I won't be listing complaints.

And that gets to the seed of why I haven't posted much lately. This is a theme I've mentioned a few times already, but I feel the need to discuss it again now, if only due to the persistence of my shame and frustration with the trouble we've been having lately. I've backed myself into an industry segment--offshore geology and geophysics--which is strongly seasonal. On top of that, I've had some significant debts--mostly the condominium, but also some credit cards--to dig out from beneath. Kate of course had nothing to do with creating these problems, but she's had to suffer through the period of solving them. And no small part of that has been my anger and self-isolation resulting from ongoing lack of money, and knowing that my choices have led directly to this.

There aren't many nights when I don't dig through old memories, mostly from college, and accuse myself of the laziness and indifference which led to me as a 40-year-old struggling to establish a career in marine science. When I went to Dartmouth I had no intention of becoming a professor, and I gravitated toward Greek and Latin only because I had an excellent Latin teacher in high school (thank you again, Mrs. Moser!). But at Dartmouth I never took the prospect of academic achievement seriously, for many tangled reasons, and not until my late 20's did that attitude change. Since then I've struggled to narrow down and specify what I want to do, and how.

Meanwhile investment bankers ruined the world economy and I'm left holding a very empty bag of vague aspirations, and hoping that I haven't doomed myself and my family. I don't always feel so bleakly, but it's an impossible thought to escape completely. Buddha I'm not.

My days don't really have a routine, except what centers around Eva: breakfast between 8 and 9 (depending on when she wakes up), shower while she watches a Signing Time video, lunch around noon, 30-40 minutes of her running around outside, followed by her afternoon nap, when I'm free to do what I like around the house. Generally this is my time to work on math, since I have a bunch of loose sheets of paper and a couple of pencils lying around, normally things (especially the pencils) I don't want her getting her hands on.

I'm proceeding right now in the hope that I will get into UNH, working on a few types of math which I'll need as an ocean mapper. And even if I don't get in, I'll be disappointed but I'll carry on learning this and apply it in my private career. I'm not about to give up, despite my rage and embarassment throughout this winter. Kate has suffered through this extended mental darkness of mine, and we've had some bright moments but she's usually found slight comfort in me.

Eva remains a smiling, dancing, and increasingly talkative baby. In my dour moods, while I'm reading at the computer, she'll trundle up with her blankie (the red one is becoming her favorite, and I'm not surprised) and ask to sit on my lap. Once there she'll lean on my ribcage and suck away on her blanket. I don't like her to retreat into her blanket for very long stretches outside of her naps, so I'll generally do something with her after a few minutes. But she breaks through even my desk meditations.

I still drop the occasional inappropriate word in her presence, and she's given to repeating the last word she heard, so I've been momentarily humiliated on a number of occasions by my own foul mouth.

Eva loves to go outside, and she's learning to love splashing through mud and puddles of water. Last fall she learned to love grabbing dirt from the half-barrel in the driveway and flinging it over her shoulder. The dirt in the barrel is still mostly frozen (not for long, though!), so she can't do that yet. But she does love to pick things up and hand them to me--leaves, tufts of grass, pebbles--though fortunately no deer scat (and there are piles of it all over the yard).

I've resumed singing drills in the morning, after my shower, and Eva has resumed her somewhat uncertain relationship with my singing, alternately intrigued, or milling around somewhat indifferently, or standing in the doorway with her blankie and managing the occasional sob as she looks at me. She's probably angling for attention, but I do sit down with her on my lap afterwards and show her the keyboard. (That baby will know the notes A-G, as well as what an octave, a third and a fifth are before she's three. Maybe before she's two...then we'll work on chords.)

So Eva's delightful, hardly my only joy, but certainly one of the major joys in my life. My little bengal, though she's often feeling as much or more stress than I am, is another. And carrying on with intellectual work even while unemployed is another.

But some things Eva isn't quite so wonderful at--drinking milk is one. It's nearly impossible to get her to drink any. It's gotten to the point that she expects it at dinner, and if we use a sippy cup she doesn't normally use (like one you can't see through), she'll inspect it carefully and try to see any drops of milk on it. Then she'll try the drink, and if it's milk, her face will wrinkle slightly and she won't touch it again.

We tried chocolate, but Kate's mom says that the chocolate binds up the calcium in the milk, effectively canceling out its main benefit. But I haven't seen anything like that written about strawberry flavor, so I've given it a try on little Rocky these past few nights, with marginal success at best. Kate and I give Eva two spoonfuls of calcium supplement every night, but Eva's still too young to understand language to the point of bargaining--such as, "Drink your milk or you won't leave the table." I see plenty of standoffs like that in years to come. And though Eva's revealed herself to have a temper like mine, those aren't standoffs I intend to lose. As Bill Cosby once said, "You don't mess with Dad. That's the old gunfighter, jack."

As for the other part of this title--bounced checks--well, yeah, we bounce a few every month. Neither of us has mastered, or even tried to learn, the lost art of balancing a checkbook. And I suppose our week-to-week budgeting skills are pretty meager too. But some embarrassments and bank fees aside, we've survived so far, and I think we'll continue to do just that.

Parenting

2011-01-23T19:08:00.001-08:00

Learning how to raise kids, or in our case so far, a single kid, is constantly amazing, a series of heartwarming moments and challenges that can be funny, exasperating or humiliating, and often a mixture of these.

In living with the colitis, and pursuing the specific carb diet, I've stopped drinking coffee the way I had since college: with tons of cream and sugar. My aunt Beth, whose son Drew (my cousin, obviously) drinks it the same way I used to, derisively calls it ice cream. I learned to drink it that way from my mother, whose diet was to stay on a constant sugar high and not eat much food. Drew, I have no idea where he learned it from.

But the specific carb diet targets complex carbohydrates, the ones which the stomach alone can't digest. The theory behind the diet says that the carbs which aren't absorbed directly by the stomach--namely, anything except fructose (fruits) or galactose (organic yogurt) or glucose (simple C6H12O6, the most basic sugar)--all other sugars and starches move into the small and large intestine, and feed the invading bugs. The invading bugs don't inhabit the gut in a symbiotic way, and produce all kinds of chemicals that damage the gut and lead to the inflammation and ulcers. So the point of the diet is to starve the invaders, so they die off completely and the gut can heal. Simple theory.

These carbohydrates--sugars and starches--range from table sugar (sucrose) to the starches found in grains, potatoes and rice, and to the gluten in wheat, which allows for the light and fluffy texture of baked goods. And, last but certainly not least: they include lactose, the sugar found in milk and nearly all dairy products except a few cheeses (fortunately cheddar is among these). So grains, like for pasta and pizza dough, are out. Sugar, and I eat like my mom did, is out. And both milk and cream are out.

Basically, I'm drinking my coffee black. And when it's not espresso--or even when it is--it's frequently a pucker-up-and-just-get-through-it experience.

Since the temporary job I was working--overnight phone sales, not exactly a career ambition--came to a close, I've lost my bad excuse to ignore even parts of the diet. I was allowing myself grains--i.e. pasta, pizza and bread--again, but not milk or straight sugar. But even that was nice, because, of course, I looooooove my pizza. As does Kate, and even little Eva too. At dinnertime, now, she'll walk around repeating "piz-za," over and over and over. She's not yet 2 and her favorite food is obvious. The little girl has a lifelong love affair to look forward to.

I also enjoyed toast with my eggs--an egg sandwich with potato bread toast is one of life's genuine pleasures to me.

This morning, Kate was making breakfast, eggs scrambled with onions and two cheeses (cheddar & parmesan). It's kind of a gourmet thing, really. I took care of the toast and the coffee.

But when it came time to actually prepare the cupfuls, I realized we were almost out of sugar. At the very least I had enough for Kate's cup. (She now drinks it much like I did before, though with not quite as much sugar.) Then I looked for cream...and realized that we'd thrown it out last week, because it was bad, because I hadn't bought any since November. So we had no milk or cream.

I reported this to Kate, who had a classic Saxon retort:

"$%*&."

Eva was right there, and being the adoring, imitative child she is, answered right back:

"$%*&."

We burst into sheepish laughter and both resolved to clean up our mouths. And that's that.

Cranberry Juice by Wineglass

2011-01-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

Many months since the last post. This winter has surpassed the last two for anxiety, with work on the Gulf coming to a close and nothing closer to home to replace it, except for a nighttime phone-sales gig. That work is less than fascinating, focusing as it does on a few simple things:

(1) Know the product sales script and basic info;
(2) Identify the caller’s individual reason for wanting the product, and pitch the product toward that reason before revealing the price (this process is known as “building value”);
(3) Ask, as often as necessary, for the customer’s credit card number (i.e. close);
(4) Rebut 3 times any series of excuses the caller gives for not wanting to buy (no credit card; needs to check with the spouse; needs more time to think; not sure the product is right for them).

Friendly pressure, or sometimes just plain pressure, is the method. Depending on the product and the clientele, the pitch can become contentious. Very often TV infomercials deliberately avoid pricing information, or worse, toss out a deceptive first payment which in fact represents only a small fraction (maybe 10%) of the cost. The word “free” is used frequently with borderline fraudulence, when it applies only to a limited portion of the advertised product, but the customer is left to infer that it means much more. It’s hard to fault many people being tricked—the trick is intentional, to induce them to call.

Some buyers are cheerful and rightly assume that nothing is cheap; some are skeptical, if not of the worth of the product, then at least of the incomplete pricing information; others start out angry, and grow steadily angrier during the call. A significant fraction of callers—particularly for some of the self-help programs—seem confused that a credit card should be necessary, and why we aren’t able to deliver C.O.D., or else they just mail in a check when they decide they like it. But those are still only the normal folks.

Then there are the weirdos.

Toward the end of one 9 PM to 5 AM shift—probably around 4:30—I took a call for a space heater, from a man with a strong drawl and a lot of energy.

-Hello, thank you for calling, my name is Michael. May I have your name, please?

-Hello, Michael, my name is Willie, and I’ve been drinking!

-How may I help you with regard to our heater?

-Oh, I just saw your commercial, so I gave you a call, and I’ve been drinking!

-Do you have any interest in buying one this evening?

-No, I don’t care at all about those, but I’ve…(click)

On the call cancellation form I checked that one off as “Crank caller”.

Frequently, and especially for self-help programs, people call up with very intense personal stories, in desperation to talk to someone. Depending on my patience level and overall state of mind, I might consider them poignant, humorous or simply moronic. One man called me up and talked about his time in prison, and how it was harder being back out. He was so drunk he couldn’t remember his zip code. And that was one of the better conversations I had all night.

So satisfaction is hard to come by on this job, especially when the job is an hour away, pays $10 an hour and I work overnights. It’s come to this while I await news from the doctorate program I’m seeking to transfer to, and as I hope for anything else—temporary or full-time—to come back from the rafts of applications I’ve sent out. Few times in my life have I felt so impotent and angry—maybe never. I lived my 20’s with no clear purpose, and only during my 30’s have I been chipping away at the shape of a career in earth science, steadily eliminating options and gathering knowledge and forming goals.

So now I find myself 40 years old, in a career situation many people much younger than I are in: having limited prospects during an historically bad downturn due to a brief track record in their present line of work. I’m frequently furious with myself over this, but I also have my life to go on living, and a wife and daughter to support (though Kate’s making most of the money right now. But I do shovel the driveway and wash the dishes).

Fear, bitterness and anger have been regularly occurring emotions of mine for months now, especially at holidays when family gathers. I look at this as paying my emotional dues, heading for an ambitious career again after taking nearly a decade of my life off, and coping with the challenges and my built-up feelings of inadequacy. If I’m to prove equal to my hopes, then I have to let the fear, bitterness and anger go—feel them, know their causes, and let their energy bleed away to zero. As I do this, and as I gain the skills and experience to work at a very high level, I feel the weight of failed potential falling from my shoulders, relieved by the lightness of accomplishment. That process is incomplete, at times moving along very slowly—right now, virtually not at all.

Many nights I’ve lain awake watching the digital clock count the minutes toward dawn—though that’s not my problem now that I stay awake until dawn anyway. If only the YMCA were open 24 hours a day, I’d be golden—in the best shape of my life. As it is, I rip off a few laps in the pool (up to 7, after several years off—hey hey) before returning the car to Kate for her to skedaddle up to work in the morning. She leaves with Eva, and I go to sleep.

That’s our life right now. Although I do like swimming in the morning, I’m not fond of the night shift.

I’ve been dealing with colitis since May—obviously, before then as well, but unknowingly, and without medication—and it continues to be an annoyance. Chronic diseases in general are unpleasant socially, particularly digestive disorders, and above all those which, like colitis, have largely unknown causes.

Anyone who’s experienced cancer in the family, and has done any reading on alternative therapies, knows that there are many theories behind the disease which focus on a compromised immune system. Hospital physicians will not necessarily concur. A similar situation exists within the field of Crohn’s disease/colitis/celiac disease, three digestive disorders which result in diarrhea and sometimes bowel punctures. Surgeons and diagnosticians will tell you the causes for each are unclear.

Off-the-shelf books will tell you that they are due to microbial infestations of the gut, frequently resulting from repeated courses of antibiotics which wipe out white blood cells and the ordinary populations of benign gut bugs and allow room for the invaders to take over. These new, unfriendly bugs interfere with the gut’s operation, causing damage and impeding digestion. Several drugs, of varying strength and severity, are available to manage the symptoms. I’m currently on the second tier out of three, in terms of severity. Beyond tier three is surgical removal of the colon.

However, the books will tell you that a road to cure—outright cure—lies through starving out the invading bugs, by eating no carbohydrates and only extremely limited forms of sugar (fructose and galactose—absolutely not table sugar, sucrose, or lactose, which is found in milk and dairy products). Two years or so of never eating these things should be enough to starve the bad bugs out and let the gut recover.

Sounds great, and I began it after Thanksgiving, but I’ve let myself go. I did lose 20 pounds in about 3 weeks—this “specific carb diet”, as it’s called, is basically the Atkins diet plus no dairy products—but once I began working this overnight job, my state of mind plummeted even further. I felt that in order to make it through an annoying job assignment, I’d need some comfort food—frozen pizza.

So I’m breaking the rules, selectively. Grains and some foods with sugar—like jelly, tomato soup, the occasional soda—are back in. But pure sugar and the dairy are still out. Maybe that’s like committing only a little treason, but I also don’t want to get back into all my old habits when I know that I hope soon to have a day job again and not need the comfort food as a crutch.

Even so, one of our phone products is this juice derived from the fruit of the nopal cactus—prickly pear juice, it’s often called. (I won’t be posting the brand name online.) We pitch it as an anti-inflammatory pain reducer, the juice naturally full of antioxidants which remove toxins from individual cells and ultimately reduce muscular, pulmonary and cardiovascular swelling. Sounds great—maybe not so great at $40 a quart, but still, the testimonials are impressive.

Then do a little online hunting. The nopal fruit—prickly pear—is simply one of a group of fruits with antioxidant properties, generally dark berry fruits. Nopal, açai berry, blueberry, cranberry and pomegranate are on the list. So you can buy the prickly pear juice over the phone for $40 a quart, or you can go to a store and buy some pure cranberry juice for $4 a quart, and probably feel the same bodily effects over time. The prickly pear juice might work very well, and live up to its billing, but it costs ten times as much. In that comparison you can find my contempt for phone marketing.

Still, Kate has become concerned with her own intestinal health, and has looked into antioxidants as a means of furthering her and my health, and wanted to try cranberry juice. Of course she found the most expensive, fruity fruit brand at the natural foods store (albeit still 8 to 10 times cheaper than the phone stuff), but I went for a cheaper, slightly cut-rate (but still no sugar added!) supermarket brand. She’s disgusted with the juice I bought as being too sweet. She wants the sour stuff, the straight cran.

Reminds me of a story I read about the great Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson. He’d been a heavy drinker in his youth, but later quit. While marauding with his army all over the battlefields of the Civil War, he was well-known for sucking on lemon slices. A fellow officer asked him one day why he sucked on the lemons.

“Because I hate them,” was the answer.

Sounds a bit like my little bengal.

Of course whenever I do anything I like it a bit ceremonial. I like my windows big and church-like, my living room like a sanctuary. I want the formality of a library room. I like a long dining table with candlesticks and a centerpiece. I go for tuxedoes and long, swooping waltzes. Big concerts and crowded halls full of formally-dressed people make me feel tingly. Not that I want my life to be stuffy—anything but—but I take comfort in grandiosity and a certain amount of ritual, enough for people to slow down and appreciate themselves and each other. Don’t ask why—it’s just who I am. I’m 40, and that part of me isn’t changing.

So even when it comes to cranberry juice, I like to dress it up a bit. Include the fact that we’ve dropped TV and internet service and keep our house at barely 60 degrees in order to eke our money through the winter, and putting a bit of ceremony into dinner where there was none is another big mental placebo. So the cranberry juice goes into wineglasses. Kate didn’t object. (To the wineglasses, that is—she certainly objects to the juice I bought.)

All the while Kate’s been carrying on with her work as a job coach for deaf students at a local school. She’s a natural teacher and has told me plenty of the frustrations and satisfactions of educating teenagers—specifically, deaf teenagers, who don’t have the same sensibilities about communication as hearing folks have—on how to hold a job and deal respectfully with the people around them. It’s hard work, educating adolescents who are surrounded by people (the hearing—frequently including their own families) who can’t communicate effectively with them, since very few know sign language (I still know barely any. It’s fair to say that Eva knows more than I do. Kate’s been very polite not to throw this in my face).

I’m not here to tell Kate’s story, just enough to explain that she finds herself weary from work many days as well, though for different reasons than I do. Kate’s a born teacher, and she takes being a role model and an instructor with real seriousness. So when the difficulties recur, and kids don’t respond, she brings the fatigue and frustration home. (Besides, she hates driving vans, especially in the city.)

Not that I blame her for bringing the frustration home. I wear my disgust for phone sales on my face regularly. When I think of that line—by Rudyard Kipling, I think, though I won’t look it up now—about “treating those impostors, failure and success, just the same”, I think of another line from a less profound but very fun poet, Robert Service, talking about fur traders and gold-prospecting sourdoughs in Canada and Alaska, ranging alone through the forested wilderness, often “dying with curses in [their] mouth”. I feel more kinship with the second line, and not just because I’m altogether too given to swearing.

Rather because I believe determination and effort don’t need to be pretty. Of course, the two snippets from the two different poets are not mutually exclusive. You can be a profane coot who maintains a healthy philosophical distance from events. But really, when you commit yourself to something—when you invest time and effort to bring that thing about—to be indifferent to the results is to emotionally renounce your own life. That I will not do.

I can understand Michael Jordan’s saying—hardly original, but he did say it—“I can accept failure. I cannot accept not trying.” I’ve failed plenty of times in the past several years. Failed to hold down jobs, especially. In some cases I was marginally qualified and did my best but didn’t make the cut. In other cases, I was very raw and had a lot to learn about being a professional. Even now, with a job even the thought of which drags down my mood, my reasons for working there are clear: to keep my family fed and sheltered. If there’s nothing else I can do, I’ll do that. I can be proud of that alone.

However, I won’t pretend to be happy about it, and I won’t adjust my desire to work as a writer and an ocean mapper. Surrender in times of difficulty and frustration is foolishness. Changing tactics and adjusting to the situation is necessary—but outright surrender, never. So perhaps I am merging the different sayings—the Jordanesque, Kiplingesque detachment from the results, in that, failure might be bitter, but there is some peace to be found in an honest effort. (Besides, Kipling doesn’t advise the reader to feel the same in triumph or defeat; only to act with the same demeanor.) However, my effort might be Service-like in its crudeness. So be it. I use my temper, and at times it does come in handy. A bit of a berserker rage can plow through the toughest part of a tough job. (At other times, it can lead me to do useless things like smash the remote—though I’ve only done that once.)

I might add a big Eva update here, but she’s just a baby and I don’t want to splash all kinds of details of her life on the internet. Though I will say, that at 16 months she’s got a vocabulary of maybe a dozen or two words, and easily twice that many signs. She shows startling feats of memory, like Kate’s favorite: my nephew Alex likes to stick his index finger in his mouth and pop his cheek. Over Thanksgiving he did this several times. Lately, Eva saw a picture of Alex and immediately did the finger-pop herself. She remembered him for it.

Also, she taught herself to snap. Her fingers are still very short and weak, so it’s barely audible, but she gets a definite, quiet snap out of her right hand.

She’s also showing more affection than ever, and the other night (as she often is) she was my rose for the day. (Kate and I have a game called Roses and Thorns. We each describe one thing we enjoyed about the day, the rose; and one thing we disliked, the thorn.) That night’s particular rose was Eva resting on my chest as I reclined on the couch, and placing the side of her head gently on my shoulder. Every ten seconds or so she’d lift her head and say, “Da-da,” and then place her head on my shoulder again.

I have no memory of what I was like as a baby—I’ve heard a couple of stories, but that’s it—so I wonder what kind of heartwarming moments I gave my parents. (The stories I’ve heard about myself weren’t the heartwarming kind of moments.) Every kid gives the parents some of them, and Eva’s becoming communicative enough that they’re coming more often than ever.

Of course, that means the frustrating moments are getting more frequent too. Meals are becoming more and more of a playtime for her, particularly when she doesn’t like the food—itself an increasingly big issue. She’s not so much the kind of baby to wind up wearing her meal, but she might deposit most of it on the floor. If she’s not hungry for it, she’ll simply take a handful, swing her arm out over the side of her high chair, and let it go with a deliberate “euh” remark. She put half a taco on the kitchen floor the other night this way. We might need to remove the rug if she keeps this up.

In short, she’s a growing baby. I think the fact that I spent several weeks this fall, while I was looking after her during the day, practicing my voice has really impacted our ability to get through to her. Specifically, volume doesn’t bother her a bit. Eva would mill around the room while I belted out scales, drills and actual pieces, often at rather high volume. She wasn’t fazed, at all. Every now and then she’d even join in, and squeal out a high note for several seconds.

So now, if she’s getting into something (like the garbage, or the mail), and I yell, “Eva! No!” she’ll just kind of lazily look over at me, and either carry on or else calmly go somewhere else. Or else she’ll just ignore me altogether. I’ve already conditioned my kid to tolerate shouting. Call her a sourdough baby, I suppose.

Piz-zilla

2010-10-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

Eva loves food. Most people do, or at least the satisfaction that food provides.

One of my first jokes about Eva was that she had a big mouth and her plumbing worked with tremendous efficiency--no doubt she was a Sutherland.

Kate was already a lover of Italian food, and I've only confirmed and strengthened the obsession. Tomato sauce is the one thing I have the confidence to freely improvise with, and Kate's come to have quite a lot of skill herself. Carrots, fiddleheads, even apple shavings on occasion--just about anything (except hamburger! Tasteless bane of tomato sauce) can become an artful and tasty part of dinner. (There aren't many rules, aside from common-sense things like not being jerks to each other, that I ask Kate to abide by: three of those are, If she hears voices in her head, call me (a joke from an episode of House); make sure Eva gets her vitamin C and calcium supplements every day; and never, under any circumstances, add hamburger to tomato sauce. I think I'm pretty easy.)

So we love Italian food. That includes making (sort of) our own pizza--only "sort of" because we buy the pre-made, uncooked dough, and buy our sauce in a jar. But we do put everything together and cook it, so it's more homemade than order-out. Besides, Kate's gotten pretty good at spreading the dough. Not toss-it-in-the-air good (though she could if she wanted), but much better than I am at spreading it out evenly so there aren't holes or rips or thick spots. She hated doing it at first, when I kept on foisting it off on her, but she came to enjoy it, and now she's pretty kick-butt at it.

In the division of labor, that leaves me to chop up the toppings, commonly kibble-sized bits of pepperoni and tiny shards of garlic. Aside from finding (in lieu of actually making) the right dough with a touch of sweetness, we have a few important idiosyncrasies. First, the shape of the pepperoni. Big round slices are hard to eat, because sometimes you can't bite through the whole thing, and it pulls off a bunch of cheese with it. Start with your pepperoni stick, cut nice, thick slices (1/8 to 1/4 inch thick), and then cut those into sixths. Carefully spread the thick little pepperoni wedges around on the sauce, distributing them evenly. (Yes, this is a recipe for delicious pizza. No, this is not a technique for making pizzas quickly and for profit.) Second, use twice as much sauce as is normal on a pizza. It just adds to the savor. Third, the toppings go on the sauce, underneath the cheese. That way they don't char.

So we've got this technique, and Kate says we're going to be the cool house, where kids will want to come because we make great pizza. That sounds OK to me.

And it looks like we're off to a good start, because little Eva is taking after us quite nicely. She has a real and unmistakable fondness for Italian food, mainly pasta in tomato sauce and above all else (even including applesauce), pizza.

Little Eva even knows the difference between homemade sauce and Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. Two mouthfulls of the Chef and she's averting her head. If she can develop similar taste in music...

Anyhow, we've seen her worse and more ferocious instincts come out when we serve pizza. The first time was last summer, probably early or mid-June, before I left for Louisiana the first time. We'd made a few pizzas for ourselves, Ma and Dave, and all sat down at the table to eat. It's too bad I don't have pictures or video to demonstrate what I write: once Eva realized she was having pizza for dinner, she began roaring for more.

Meaning, slamming her palm on the table and screaming "Wraaaaaaaaaaaaa!" at the top of her lungs until we gave her another piece. It was like the first time I gave my cat shrimp, and he reacted by jumping and yelling at me and clawing my leg, only Eva was roughly 200 times as loud. There was no plaintiveness, no crying, no coyness or amusement. The little baby was all aggression, trying to get more in her mouth.

(There's no doubt that infants go through much of the range of human psychology--pretty much everything except the sexual sensations, I'd guess--within the first year or two. Just seeing the intensity--the whole-body-writhing, face-contorting intensity--of joy, fright, pain, peacefulness and rage, is kind of amazing. And of course, Kate blames Eva's temper on me.)

So anyhow, we realized we had a little tyrannosaur on our hands. Infants don't joke around, when it comes to something they need, but in a near-toddler (at that point--she wasn't even crawling yet), it was pretty surprising to see basic instinct rear itself up to near-violence. It became a bit of a joke between us, and I started referring to Eva occasionally as godzilla.

(I've been searching for a good nickname for our daughter, since my father came up with one of the very best I've ever heard of, for my elder sister Julie: J-bird. Even better than Bops' calling my mother "pud"--that's pronounced "pood", as in short for pudding, not as in "pudley" or anything insulting like that. Anyway...)

Plainly godzilla would be a cruel and derisive nickname to give a girl. I might've deserved it as a small boy, but my mother's sense of humor was quite a bit gentler than mine is. In Eva's infancy, I called her "Rocky" because she slept with both her arms raised above her head, as if in triumph. But she stopped doing that so I figured it was time to let that one go. Sometimes I've called her Thumper, because of how she learned to crawl (from me) by slamming the floor with her hands, something she still does. That's a little better because there's a bunny rabbit in children's literature named Thumper, but still, it seems a little mean-spirited. It's not good to be too sarcastic with a child, I think, particularly in how you address her. Who knows, maybe things will turn out like in Dirty Dancing, and I'll just call her "Baby" until she's about 40. I have no idea.

So godzilla was mostly a memory, until Thursday night. Kate having mostly recovered from her mysterious maybe-Lyme disease, she ventured to have a small frozen pizza, while I made some pasta for myself. Things were a bit discombobulated, with Kate taking a late-afternoon nap and Eva threatening to blow up because she was hungry, so I gave the little girl her own dreadfully dull dinner while I began preparing my own meal (garlic and shrimp in tomato sauce--the key is to drain off the water from the shrimp so the sauce stays thick).

True to form, Eva ate quite a bit while I worked, and got things bubbling on the stove. She was done by the time Kate came to, entered the kitchen and got her pizza going. We thought we'd have a more relaxed dinner than usual, since Eva had already eaten and wouldn't need constant tending.

We sat down and she walked over to Kate, put her hands on Kate's leg and began crying. Only she refused mouthfuls of food when offered, turned her head away and began crying even more insistently. We put her back in her high chair and tried giving her a second dinner, with no more success, only a steadily worsening tantrum.

There are times I come close to losing my temper in return, when I see my child in discomfort and she resists my best efforts to help. I know getting angry in return won't accomplish a thing, but it's impossible to avoid the reaction. The little imp doesn't know what's good for her sometimes...

Kate and I were both worrying that this wasn't an ordinary tantrum. Kate herself might have been suffering from Lyme disease, and though it's not contagious, still, any vectors Kate was exposed to, Eva probably was too. What if the little baby was in constant; head-to-foot pain, and every motion was agony? What if she were in serious abdominal distress, and had no words to tell us with?

Kate took her temperature--twice--and confirmed there was no fever. What, then? Kate brought her back into the kitchen, and nearing her wits' end, placed the baby on her lap and gave her a whole piece of pizza to munch on.

Quiet. Blissful, immediate, profound quiet, as the thirteen-month-old girl wrapped both hands around the wedge of pizza, sunk her teeth into it, and began suckling. And that's virtually what she did--take occasional bites, and chew them, but otherwise simply kept her mouth clamped on the pizza, held it firmly in both hands, and looked me straight in the eye with satisfaction and almost a hint of defiance.

For twenty minutes nothing changed, except that 3/4 of the piece of pizza disappeared, and Eva's drool was now dripping off the bottom of the crust onto her pants leg.

If Godzilla were to run into a mountain range made of baked ham, and settle down to eat it for a day or two, the effect would have been similar. The Sutherland house went from baby-induced pandemonium to bucolic in less than a moment.

Next night, more pizza, of course. Because it was Friday, and Friday means homemade pizza in our house (as Sunday means clean-out-the-leftovers). Only this time we were wise to it, and devoted one whole piece (garlic included) to the baby, though we did cut it into smaller pieces (the crust being much fluffier than the frozen one the night before). We ate in front of the TV, watching Celtics preseason basketball (still too difficult to talk about last season), with their six top players on the bench and the subs nearly taking Philly down. (Philly's terrible, and even they know it.) And Eva was happy as she'd been earlier, laughing, smiling, babbling "da-da" and clucking her tongue like she does when she's happy.

And that's good. Because when she's not...

Samwich Fayah

2010-10-10T21:27:00.000-07:00

I'm not above a little joking Down-Eastese, since I'm a native New Englandah and the only person I've ever known personally who genuinely spoke in such an accent, and honestly ended every sentence with an "ayuh", was from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's part of my heritage, you never know where you'll find it, and humor generally involves a bit of affection anyhow. Things we truly despise we don't laugh at.

And besides, county fairs themselves are about as rural American as you can get, along with huntin', fishin', fahmin' and maple syrupin'. And that's not just to be cliche'd about it. Fairs grew up as exhibitions especially for the farmers. These days the midway rides, shyster games and cotton candy have taken over, but generally half a fair is old school, livestock exhibitions, prize vegetables, horse, ox and tractor pulls, 4-H and a bluegrass band or two.

I'm not saying anything new to anyone from New England, or from further abroad where nature plays much of a role in daily life. Last summer, working in Alaska, I was treated to the weeklong extravaganza known as the Alaska State Fair, just like the Sandwich Fair only about 10 or 20 times as big, and including a demolition derby. Plus, I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for the 4-H exhibit by the teenage girl about slaughtering pigs, which included photos of her picking up a blood-covered knee from one of the dead animals and making like it was a football, or a microphone:

Now that's personality. I admire that.

Kate's no stranger to the harvest-season fair either, having grown up in the general vicinity of the Fryeburg Fair, which ranks between Sandwich and Alaska, but closer to Sandwich, for size. (And for the record, I've never been to one of the really giant fairs in the midwest, like in Kansas or Nebraska or Oklahoma or Texas. All I can say about those is based on an essay by the late (and great) nature essayist, Noel Perrin. He wrote an essay on, I think, the Kansas State Fair, entitled "773 Prizes for Sheep". Enough said.) So I'm dealing with the pipsqueak fairs anyway, even including Alaska (which isn't exactly one of the breadbasket states). But still. In some sense, a fair's a fair and I've been to plenty.

Kate didn't go to any last year, recovering as she was from birth, and Eva still being too small and delicate to spend long periods of time out of doors. (Infants are a lot tougher than their parents generally give them credit for, but then again, why go testing their limits merely for the fun of it? If Kate honestly had no choice but to be outdoors all day with a newborn Eva strapped to her back--say, actually harvesting back in the colonial days--I'm willing to bet Eva would've turned out just fine. Even healthier maybe, for exposure to the air. But neither of us feel like playing with our child's well-being quite so aggressively. Anyway...)

So there's this fair. It takes place in Sandwich, NH, about ten miles north of the house I grew up in. Sandwich is a small--quiet is kind of loud compared to what that town is like--town just south of the White Mountains, and it's been deliberately kept almost comatose by the landowners there, who steadfastly oppose any road connecting their town to the ski mecca just to the north. Sandwich is dominated by wealthy landowners, many industrialists from Boston and elsewhere, and this little town is their retreat. There is a lot of wealth and intelligence sequestered among the pines there, so much that it's sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Athens of the north".

Growing up, I visited Sandwich once a year: for the fair. When I was a twerp, it was billed as "New England's Biggest One-Day Fair!", and we'd be up by 5:30, putting on thermal underwear, long socks and heavy boots, driving up bumpy old Sheridan Road in a freezing cold station wagon, parking along the roadside and walking the last mile or so to the front gate of the fair.

I mean, we earned it.

Now it's a three-day blowout, there's four times as much parking in the surrounding fields, and since winter has virtually disappeared shorts, sneakers and sweatshirts are the most common clothes for kids. Saturday, however, it was actually somewhat cold, in the 60s and breezy, so when a cloud came between us and the sun, it was downright chilly. Even so, there hadn't been a trace of frost, and it was so dry that the normally ubiquitous mud was nowhere to be seen.

Despite all that, the Fair was the Fair, and I hadn't been in close to a decade. For my part, after a big honking portion of fried dough and a cup of coffee, I'd satisfied about half of my craving for the fair, the other half being looking for any chintzy souvenir I might want to take home. But that wasn't necessary, since I already have enough clothes to last me for the next decade or two (unless I get fat), and I have about enough honky tonk wear for my tastes. Like my holstein cowboy hat, my fake-snakeskin-but-really-cowhide cowboy hat, and my favorite, my Kill Bill jacket. (Kate especially hates that one, guaranteeing I'll keep it.)

One honky-tonk... Two honky-tonk...

...three honky-tonk!

So I didn't need any more schlock. (Couldn't afford it even if I did.) After the fried dough and a tour through the arts & crafts, the rest of our time was more spent with the family: Lisa had driven out from Pennsylvania, and Julie & Hals had come up with the boys, spending a day at the Fair before taking a four-day hike in the White Mountains. (Julie's no girlie girl, but I respect how she's willing to do down-and-dirty stuff to keep the men in her life happy. She was upset at the thought of not showering for half a week, but I reminded her that everybody else would smell as badly as she did, so it didn't matter.)

Kate and I had just barely made it up, since Kate spent the entire week home, most of it in bed, with some strange, as-yet undiagnosed ailment that basically paralyzed her for two days. Possibly it was Lyme disease, though the blood test came back negative (though false negatives are common enough with that disease). So far the antibiotics have restored her mobility, but they have other side effects which have laid her low again today.

Kate's two good days were the days central to our plan: the drive up Friday, and the Fair on Saturday. I lightly cracked the whip--I don't give myself much practice at that kind of thing, so I'm really not much of a taskmaster--to get us out of the house by 9:30 Friday morning, to beat the Boston traffic. It's horrific on Columbus Day weekend, leading to 5-hour commutes from Boston to Moultonboro, and 6+ hour commutes from Boston to Portland. We successfully beat it, had time for a leisurely lunch in Concord, and then rambled on up to Wonalancet, a tiny little village north of Sandwich, where we were staying with an old friend of mine, my 5th-6th grade teacher, Chele Miller.

Chele was the first person I told that Kate and I were going to get engaged--in an as-yet unwritten chapter of the Pup & Ben series--in the upstairs lounge at the Corner House (my second-favorite New Hampshire restaurant behind the Common Man). She'd offered to put us up should we return, so we took her up on the offer and all had Chinese that night for dinner before knocking off to sleep.

Our Saturday wasn't too early, considering Kate likes her mornings in (so do I, but she really treasures hers), and it takes about an hour to get Eva ready for anything (food, diaper, change, play a little bit to settle her down). So it was moving toward noon by the time we finally entered the fair.

Eva, just over a year old, of course had no clue as to where she was or what was going on. But when she's stimulated, she shows it, and she loved the midway games. Not long after we arrived, Eva met a miniature horse, and a little bit later Kate bagged a small stuffed crab for her at a basketball game (and we both had to keep her hands off the merchandise in the arts & crafts stalls).

But maybe the high point of the day for her was the merry-go-round, which she actually enjoyed quite a bit. Kate suggested it, and I thought Eva might dislike it as too noisy and fast, but not at all (though she didn't love the saddle at first).

That night at dinner, at the Corner House again (right across the street from the fairgrounds), all of us Sutherlands and Platts sat down with Chele and spent a few hours chowing down and telling stories. Eva amazed us all by drinking a good honest 8 oz of apple cider (more than she'd ever had from a cup), and then more milk besides. (Kate's mother is right: wean the kid, and thirst will teach them how to drink from a cup!)

When things like how much the baby drank are among the headlines of the day, you know it was a very placid day. And that it was: enjoyable and placid.

After Wednesday night's emergency room adventure, placid was just fine. (And maybe the emergency room will merit its own post, but not right now. Suffice it to say, even ordering and eating pizza there is a trial.)

Sports Fan

2010-10-03T18:32:00.000-07:00

Last year Kate became a Celtics fan, enough to understand Rondo's contributions on the offensive boards, Perk's ability to be more than a big galoot and Tony Allen's trick-or-treat game. In other words, more than a casual fan. We weren't able to keep our cable subscription past early December, so we only got to see the first few games of the season. But by that time Eva had become a TV veteran, with her daily dose of Signing Time while Kate or I were doing chores or showering. For 30 minutes to an hour a day, Eva would be stationed in her Bumbo six feet away from the TV, watching Hopkins and co. bounce through another day.

Of course, there was dinner too, which in the condominium almost always took place in front of the TV (including Roses & Thorns), so Eva would by default watch what we were watching too--either a DVD, or else a little sports.

And it became quickly apparent that Eva adored sports, particularly basketball and hockey.

And why not? Especially on a hi-def screen, the images are spectacular, there's constant motion, shifting patterns and constant rise and fall in the noise. The ice rink, with all the players drifting smoothly across it, is dazzling. And the basketball players' uniforms are as bright as ornaments, and though not as swiftly as in hockey, the players are in constant motion, gathering, dispersing and recombining later all over the floor. There's a lot for a baby to pay attention to.

Eva would jump and laugh even more excitedly than at the start of a Signing Time video.

I, of course, was thrilled. Kate was kind of happy too.

Fast forward to now. We've set ourselves back up with (less expensive) cable and internet service, including the local sports networks, of course. And today marked the final day of the Red Sox' 2010 season.

A farewell and thanks to two players in particular: Jason Varitek, captain now for nearly ten years and as professional and reliable a catcher as has ever played the game. And Mike Lowell, third baseman and power hitter who quietly and with impeccable grace endeared himself to almost every Red Sox fan--not least by hitting plenty of bombs over the Monster. Mike is almost certainly retiring, and Jason likely not, but just as likely will be playing elsewhere next year, as a Crash Davis-type backup and mentor, providing that vaunted and despised "locker-room presence". (The old debate: if a guy can't bring it on the field any more, what possible leadership can he provide?)

So anyway, we've got TV again. This afternoon, Kate took a few hours by herself to go bargain-hunting at a nearby clothing depot, and I set up my workshop downstairs and did other puttering-type activities. Eventually Eva woke up and wanted food, and she took down a full adult's portion of tuna before I let her loose and started washing dishes.

The Sox' final game was against the Yankees. The Bronx Bumblers came into today's game tied in overall record with Tampa Bay for the lead in the AL East, but trailed in head-to-head record against them. So the Sox, out of the postseason, could play spoiler by beating New York. The two teams split a doubleheader yesterday (both games into 10 innings: the first, 6-5 NY; the second, 7-6 Boston). So it came down to today (since Tampa Bay wasn't exactly helping itself this weekend, busily getting swept by Kansas City).

Of course I was interested. This is a blood feud. This is Lakers-Celtics. This game was not meaningless. By winning, the Sox could send New York to Minnesota (AL Central winners), a much tougher opponent than the Texas Rangers (winners of the AL West). If the Sox no longer have the chance to win the Series, then the next-best thing is at every opportunity to screw up the Yankees' season. This game was exactly that.

Granted, New York was starting a scrub on the mound, so their priority was to rest their best guys over winning first place, but still. Every bit counts. The Twins are a better team top-to-bottom than the Rangers, and the Metrodome is a tougher ballpark than Arlington.

I turned on the TV, so I could listen from the kitchen. And much to my surprise (and the little girl simply won't allow a candid photo when she knows a camera's in the vicinity):

I was too slow. She'd been laughing and clapping and jumping, watching the screen.

Later on, the Sutherland family enjoyed leftovers in front of the TV, a hallowed Sunday tradition from my own adolescence. And while Kate kind of zoned out, the baby didn't:

I mean, every baby starts out with limitless potential, and then winds up cut down to size as an adult, like the rest of us. It happened to me too, I'm fine with the course of life. Eva might wind up loving music (hold her in your arms and bounce to some music, and she'll start dancing too), she might be an intellectual, she might be a hard-core jock. She might be none of these things. It doesn't matter.

It's a whole lot of fun seeing her react to things she really enjoys.

Angel of Destruction

2010-10-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

What might the vehicle of God's wrath look like, the instrument of worldwide devastation? A giant horned beast with shadowy eyes, hide like steel, a voice like ten thousand moans and wings which blot out the sun? A majestic emissary from the stars, clad in thunder and lightning, a voice like golden trumpets and swinging a resistless sword?

Or maybe it'll be 500 feet tall, have soft pink skin and wispy hair, and it will babble pleasantly and just blunder into things.

Eva of course is not yet at the stage where we need to punish her for anything. The extent of her rebellion so far is to look you mischievously in the eye, giggle and reach for whatever is in front of her (and usually put it in her mouth). There's nothing to punish. Our main job is to keep her from hurting herself (and the one time I've honestly yelled at her was when she was going for the electrical plugs beneath my desk).

About that. My earliest memory is from when my mother told me I was about 14 months. I nearly electrocuted myself. It's a bit strange. I remember it because it was traumatic, but what's strange is that I remember several seconds leading up to the trauma, not just the trauma itself. Why does the brain work that way? I have no idea.

The memory plays like a film in my head, and seems to have that ambered black-and-white character. Images are coherent and recognizable, but still indistinct, as if due to lack of color. One color, however, did stand out: bright blue. That in a moment.

I remember crawling along the floor, under the kitchen table. There was a set of keys there, apparently my mother's. I remember picking them up, looking at the socket on the wall (not knowing it was an electrical socket, of course), and thinking, "These look like they'd fit pretty nicely in there." So I put one in.

I could see the St. Elmo's fire around the key and my hand--the bright blue arcing--and looked up to my right to see my panicked mother running over to bat me away from the wall.

That's all I remember.

Obviously I survived, and you can insert any kind of joke you'd like (as a substitute for the you-must-have-been-dropped-on-your-head-as-a-child variety). Still, that's not the kind of experiment I'd like my own baby to try. So I really meant to scare her when she approached the outlet.

So far, that's about all the punishment she's needed. (Well, then again, you might want to ask Kate about Eva's tendency to bite when she's frustrated...but even then, it's hard to think that the little girl is trying to cause harm.) For now anyway, she's innocent, if not always happy.

The destructive power of a baby is pretty small, at least directly. A small child can start a chain reaction of things, such as pulling a tablecloth down with other things on it, or tipping a pot or a plate off the edge of a counter, or even pulling a whole shelf down if it's not very stable. When we babyproofed our apartment, aside from the standard outlet plugs and cabinet locks, we firmly wired our heirloom shelf to the wall, because it was a prime candidate for Eva to (a) pull herself up to standing postion with, and (b) pull down on top of herself.

Next after that was the basement door, with those steps down to the concrete wall and floor which terrify me. If even I were to fall down them I'd wind up pretty badly hurt. So even when the door was always shut, I mounted one of those security door chains on it, about six feet off the floor, so that even if Eva worked the door handle open, she'd never fit through. Now that the cat's back, and we keep the door propped open so he can reach his litter box downstairs, the chain is an absolute necessity.

Eva's learning lessons about behavior now, when Kate and I aren't even involved. Now that the cat is back, he's here with Eva. That's a new dimension to his life, since she learned to crawl, and it's one he doesn't really enjoy. I remember how cruel I was to our tuxedo cat Simon when I was a small boy. It wasn't that I hated him, at all--I liked him, but I also liked provoking him to get a reaction. And that's the problem with cats--they aren't scary. Even a moderate-sized dog, say twenty-five or thirty pounds, can bare its teeth and earn the respect of a child. Cats, not so much.

Eva is a gentle baby--she doesn't like pain so she does things carefully--and she adores animals. Every time Jasper walks by she follows him with her head and says "ki-tieh". And she's learning, with steady lessons from Kate and me, to pet him very gently. But it's altogether too easy for Eva to start whacking him instead, and grab for things like the tail, or an ear, or some whiskers. Or even for her to simply chase him all over the place, rooting him out of hiding spots and driving him from one room to the next.

I've got to say, I'm extremely impressed, and a little humbled, by that cat's patience. He's behaving like the classic floppy family dog who absorbs all mistreatment. Most cats I know would have stuck up for themselves in some manner long before Jasper has. And he still has all his claws...

Well, Saturday night things came to some kind of head. With the apartment largely secured, Kate and I feel comfortable letting the baby wander into an adjacent room, and we merely keep our ears peeled for either a big noise or an overly long silence. And that night, there was silence, followed by an explosion of cries from the baby.

Kate was in there in less than two seconds, ahead of me and she was diving for the baby on the floor on the other side of the kitchen table. I noticed the cat hustling out from under the table and out of the room, where we'd just run in. Eva was in a full-steam panicked cry, but we searched her face and most of her body and found no marks, no blood. It seemed the cat had done something to scare her, but hadn't actually broken skin.

And I thought that was good--if Jasper batted at her face, but didn't harm her physically, maybe Eva would learn to give him a wider berth, without needing to be actually hurt in the process. For the one day since then, she's seemed slightly more deferent around him, not nearly as quick to chase him down and slug him. In his reluctant way maybe the cat did teach her a lesson.

So we have this occasionally whirlwind little baby--one of her favorite sports is to flop back and forth across the couch, from one armrest to the other and without regard to the drop on one side. Of course, that means Kate or I play stopper, and prop her up when she comes near the edge. It's kind of Eva's version of swimming laps, or something like that, I suppose. She does enjoy a good faceplant into something soft.

So really, to complete the image of a gigantic infant bringing untold destruction on the world, the monster would have to do significant damage to itself as well. You know, level a mountain range and skin its knee in the process. Destroy New York but scrape its belly on the Statue of Liberty, and crawl in a bawling rage off to Chicago where it would sweep the downtown violently aside.

This kind of destructive angel would wind up sitting, job finished, in plaintive tears waiting for God to lift it back up to heaven where things are much less painful. An angel more self-destructive than destructive. Maybe not the most effective of biblical images--it's not quite as severe as the author of Revelations was trying for, perhaps--but who are we to judge the inscrutable?

The Cat is Back

2010-09-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, after a summer's worth of training and becoming, as I must now admit, in fact a moderately accomplished nighttime hunter of chipmunks, mice and even bats, Jasper's back in the house.

Which means he left the other house, being Kate's mother and stepdad's place up in the woods of Maine. I dissed him--terribly--this June as being inept and probably a lifelong failure at catching anything but bugs and ping-pong balls. Well, Jasper proved me wrong. Kate told me a story--left me the story on my voicemail, actually, and it's still there--of how a chipmunk more or less walked into Jasper's mouth while he was asleep. So he managed to catch that one. I also heard about a mouse he'd dropped by the door a few weeks later. Then on one of my visits home, I actually picked up a dead little bat, complete with toothmarks, lying in front of the doorway. How the cat managed to snag a bat I don't know, but it was plain that Jasper was getting his game on.

I hear now that the stereotypical gifts from the cat had become commonplace, and that the squirrels who live in the oak tree outside the door, would chatter angrily when Jasper took up station below it, keeping them from loading their nests for the winter.

I'd seen his outdoor style evolve, from frantic and unfocused in May and June, to tense but controlled in August. I guess one season in AAA has really seasoned the little guy.

Unfortunately Dave, my step-father-in-law, is allergic to cats and the onset of fall, and Jasper's resultant shedding, has brought on a wicked and ongoing case of hives for him. Kate and I don't need much provocation to visit, but rescuing Dave from Jasper, and Jasper from an otherwise uncertain fate, was more than enough. So we made the round trip this weekend--and I rediscovered the joys of a McDonald's vanilla shake, thanks to my wife--and brought the cat back down with us.

Kate had done a splendid job of persuading the landlord--who hates cats--that Jasper would be a harmless addition to the household (which he will be). I actually feel somewhat badly that we pulled Jasper from his new leafy playground, where he'd learned to do what cats do, which is stalk and kill small animals. I feel like he's being busted back down to AA or A ball for no fault of his own. He's my kitty cat, and I do enjoy his company, although Eva and Kate have more than filled the empty space in my life. I certainly haven't missed him these last few months, being in Louisiana or with my two girls, the way I would have as a bachelor. All the same, I'm glad he's back around.

And I know he missed me. As soon as I showed up in Maine, he was at my ankles, and was sitting, if not in my lap, then right next to me (including in the chair next to me at the dinner table. Jasper's pretty charming that way). On the 5-hour drive back down from Maine, the cat spent about 98% of his time in my lap. (I refuse to use a cat carrier.)

So the cat's back. He's christened his litter box, he's eaten half of his food, and almost ventured outside (before chickening out and scampering back in as I closed the door). But soon enough. I doubt he'll find the same rich hunting grounds of critters around here now, and he might wind up in (and lose) a scuffle or two with neighboring cats. We'll see. He was becoming such a happy country cat that I do feel I've dislocated him now somewhat.

Eva's First Steps

2010-09-25T18:11:00.000-07:00

Back in Maine for the weekend, celebrating Kate's (24th) and Eva's (1st) birthdays. I'm home from Louisiana, for the time being, though it seems unlikely that I'll be headed back. Now that the well has been killed, the scientific work is being scaled back and its objectives shifted, so my aspect of the expeditionary work is done. Now I'm a stay-at-home dad, and in some ways, it's easier being at sea.

Not that I dislike being with my daughter all day--I like it a lot. Seeing her personality, how she responds to me and watching her do the things she likes to do, are all part--a small part--of being a parent and helping a small child grow up. I'm not as fearful physically as I used to be, of dropping her or breaking her neck by holding her, or something like that. (I'm a nervous enough nellie to have put a chain lock on the basement door, so that she can't open it even if she works the door handle open, however.) I've certainly learned how to be more comfortable handling my baby in the course of a day's regular tasks, such as changing diapers, or bundling her in and out of the car.

And it's a joy listening to her own little language as she goes on talking about things. And she does talk. Many words of her own are recognizable, and will appear fairly regularly (such as "duh-gyieh"--which might mean "doggie", though there isn't always a dog around when she says it. She does seem to know "ki-tieh", for kitty, and of course "mama" and "dada" are certain by now). But otherwise, she mostly babbles.

And when I'm sitting at my desk, and Eva crawls over, pulls herself up to a standing position at me, and begins prattling, well, it's impossible not to look down and smile. Sometimes I let her prattle, sometimes I lift her up onto my lap. Though it's hard to keep her there without her going after everything within reach on the desk, which is where the problems begin.

My sister Julie gave me a bit of advice not too long ago, seeing as I'm the stay-at-home parent: "Give her 5 minutes and she'll give you 30." In other words, 5 minutes of play with her, will give her the ideas and motivation to play on her own for another half hour (or so). Well, I've been trying that, and so far, the rule plays out more like, Give her 5 minutes, and she'll give me 3.

So learning patience is a part of parenthood. I am learning, I can claim that much.

But here we are in Maine again, and the Atkins diet is history for us, as we feasted on a large pepperoni pizza (with extra sauce, of course), and Eva with us. Good to know that we'll be making sure Eva gets her carbos from now on (she gets plenty of protein as it is--she eats an adult portion of tuna every day at lunch).

One year, 21 lbs 10 oz, 31 inches long. Amazon Eve, she's gonna be.

Now by the time she'd learned to crawl--at the end of June, just before I headed down to the Deepwater spill for the first time--she was already trying to stand. Crawling was just never really a priority for her, and to this day, she retains the noisy floor-slapping habit I taught her (trying to emphasize the pick-the-hand-up-then-put-it-down aspect), and she often picks her knees up and goes on all fours, with only hands and feet.

But she's kept on trying to stand and walk, and it's a regular thing now for Eva to stand up beside something, put one or both hands on it, and sidle along while she balances herself against the object (couch, refrigerator, table, person, whatever's handy). And she's been standing, however wobblily, for weeks now.

But tonight she walked.

Not too far--four or five steps--but not the crashing-forward, unbalanced steps before she hits the deck. She took deliberate, planted steps and was just as balanced afterward as before. While Dave was telling me here downstairs about the somewhat tragic case of musician Emitt Rhodes, Kate and her mother were upstairs encouraging Eva to walk. Once they were satisfied with what they saw, they called me in, and of course I brought the videocam:

So there you have it! At a year and five days old, Eva's started walking.

Yuckamuck

2010-09-11T23:22:00.000-07:00

Things are going pretty smoothly now that we're out to sea. (There aren't even any hurricanes breathing down our neck.) I've taken on some additional duties, sampling water at the various stations and depths our program requires. Sampling isn't really my strength. I discovered an uncanny talent in college chemistry class (I was pre-med for all of one year, like half of all incoming freshmen) for finding the critical step of any experiment, and screwing it up.

So it was with some reluctance that I agreed to help now, but it would hardly be team playing to refuse. Besides, hours of work are better than hours of idleness (at least, most of the time). But then, I wasn't thinking ahead to a night like tonight, when we shifted all the refrigerated samples into ice-filled chests for transfer to another boat, which will ferry them to shore, whence they'll be brought to the lab for analysis.

All that sounds a bit whimsical but these water samples are the foundation for almost all the scientific work now going on here. Simply put, the remote sensing and nearly all the instruments mean nothing without the water samples to correlate to. Just like with sidescan sonar, you can't confidently interpret seafloor without samples, or some kind of independent knowledge of what's down there. Tens of thousands of samples have been taken all over the northern Gulf this summer. Those samples are the concrete, the rock on which any subsequent scientific structure will be built. More than ever before, this area has become America's marine laboratory.

So it's been a surprisingly long and annoying day, with hauling huge coolers around, loading them with ice, carefully packing the bottles, making sure that the bottles match the packing list, sighing off on everything, and then taping the coolers shut. All told it was nearly four hours' work, and by the end I was getting ready to bark at someone, just out of frustration. (I didn't, but I wanted to.)

So the rendezvous boat came, we gave them our coolers full of bottles, and they're gone. And now I'm going to sleep myself. But not before posting a few photos!

The double-bladed moon is the result of my shaking hands, but I like the effect.

I love my hard hat.

Emendation

2010-09-09T06:05:00.000-07:00

Since I posted several items--the list of 7 whoppers I'd seen attributed to Matt Simmons--in respect of Matt's reputation and overall body of work, and simply in the effort to be intellectually fair, I hunted through some YouTube, CNBC and MSNBC video archives to hear and see for myself what Matt was saying this spring and summer.

I will say, I turned up some interesting conspiracies. There's plenty of junk on YouTube--a nice microcosm of the internet in general--and to be fair, Simmons wasn't saying things one one-hundredth as moronic as some of these other geniuses. My favorite was how the Gulf blowout was really the start of a volcano, controlled by a rapacious, advanced intergalactic race of predators known as the Gorgons, spoken of in several ancient myths worldwide. Those who do not believe in the Gorgons' presence only hasten their takeover.

It didn't sound like Matt saying these things, and I was relieved to hear the speaker's name was something else (I don't remember it, and didn't want to waste more time listening).

But there was plenty of Matt Simmons' actual words, on TV and radio interviews, to pay attention to. And it was dismaying to hear such a respected person launch into borderline incoherence, talking in circles and being eagerly led on by smallminded interviewers. He spent a full hour on a radio show called TruNews, self-advertised as the only news program counting down the time to the second coming of our lord! (Small surprise the host spoke with a drawl.)

Poor Matt was led into some pretty dumb statements by this guy (fire? volcanoes? methane eruptions?), but the truth is that he didn't need very much help. A list of the things I heard Matt say, and it's not very different from my list of yesterday's post:

1) There's a lake of oil below the surface of the Gulf, either (a) 120 miles wide and 4-500 feet deep, or (b) covering 40% of the Gulf, or (c) somehow both.
2) There is only one blowout, but the real source of oil is an open hole 10 miles away from the reported site. BP has no idea where the blowout preventer is, and all ROV images are only of the dribble of oil from the riser (pipe) which had connected the well to the Deepwater Horizon rig;
3) 120,000 barrels of oil are spilling from the well;
4) The well site is a "cauldron" spewing oil and flames (underwater!);
5) The well might have pierced the earth's crust and created a volcano (as prompted by the millennarian host);
6) Methane is more poisonous than mustard gas;
7) A hurricane would drive the methane ashore and poison the entire Gulf Coast region. Evacuations were necessary;
8) 40% of the Gulf had become anoxic.

Some are not as bad, some are even worse than what I'd read.

Of all those statements, #3, the 120,000 barrels/day claim, I give some credence to. I dismissed out of hand the 150,000 barrels/day estimate in my first writing, but there have been wells (mostly in the mideast) which have produced over 100,000 barrels/day, and they were much shallower. This well is under 5,000 feet of water, and 13,000 more feet of rock below that--in other words, an awful lot of pressure (estimated at roughly 11,000 atmospheres). So if allowed to flow freely, at the initial stages, the oil could well be coming up at a horrifically high rate like 120,000 bbl/day. But the well wouldn't sustain that output. The MC252 reservoir is not Ghawar, giant among giants, in Saudi Arabia. (If it were, other wells in the area would've tapped it earlier. Ghawar is over 100 miles long.) So there's a strong element of truth in that claim, in my opinion.

As for the "lake" of oil...not enough oil had spilled to create a pure oil lake of that size (certainly not covering 40% of the Gulf!). Dispersed particles, possibly...a steady stream of oil from the well, flowing for weeks on end, would create a stream of particulate oil stretching closer to 200 miles in length...not so much in width, however. And it wouldn't be a pure stream of oil, it would be particles suspended within the water. Not all that close to Simmons' outlandish claims.

The rest of the statements are too foolish to consider. I will, however, address one thing the host added on, as encouragement to Matt when he was rambling on about the methane. The host mentioned a lake in Cameroon--Lake Nyos--which killed 1800 lakeshore inhabitants with a methane/carbon dioxide eruption several years ago. And this is, in fact, the case. Lake Nyos is one of several central African "exploding lakes", known for the fact that they grow saturated with gas (carbon dioxide and/or methane) over time. Think of a bottle of soda, filled with carbon dioxide. Then shake it up.

That's what happens to these lakes--they fill with gas, most likely from volcanic seeps below the surface. Then a seismic shock--landslide, earthquake, volcano--can destabilize the gas/water suspension, and cause the gas to come rushing out exactly like the carbon dioxide bubbles and bursts out of a shaken-up soda bottle. Only, there's not one single, gigantic bubble that comes floating out--it's more like a violent fizzing all over the lake. And enough gas emerges, apparently, to slaughter thousands of humans.

Now there's no evidence that the Gulf of Mexico has become similarly saturated with gas--the water is moving around constantly, and can hold a pretty huge volume. One of the issues with those lakes is that they're smaller than the ocean (obviously), and they don't turn over seasonally, since the seasons in that part of the world aren't as severely contrasting as, say, in North America. So, the gas can slowly build up inside the water, and it's never exposed to the air, and so the gas never vents slowly and peacefully (the equivalent, in my analogy, to gently cracking the bottle and letting the carbon dioxide seep off without foaming over). Of all the scientific alarm--genuinely well-founded scientific alarm--I've read and heard about this summer, the Gulf of Mexico becoming an exploding gulf isn't an element.

Simmons gave all of these interviews from his house in Maine, and he didn't quite sound like the firm, authoritative speaker I'd heard in other venues (speaking on peak oil in previous years, for example). He dithered, dwelled on inanities and engaged in some pointless hyperbole ("the finest oceanographic vessel ever built, the Thomas Jefferson"--it's a fine ship, but that's pushing it). Matt's every claim--from the real well being 10 miles away, to the gigantic lake of oil, to the methane bubble--was placed sqarely on the shoulders of ther TJ crew. And their official report (which he cited) doesn't support a single thing he said.

A sad demise to a proud career. I fell apart in college--I have no intention, especially now that I have a family to look out for, of doing so again, whether in the noon or the twilight of my own career.

One more thing: a shot of me, passed out from seasickness at my workstation in the control van. Thanks a ton, Grant.

Heading Out Again

2010-09-06T19:54:00.000-07:00

Back in Houma after three altogether too short weeks with Kate and Eva. Despite all the excitement and challenge of the summer's work in the Gulf, I also felt defeated at losing two months with my girls, up in the land of forests and lakes. They managed quite nicely without me, being with Kate's mother and her husband Dave, but among other things, nearly all of Kate's and my to-do list went undone. A few items on the list which we didn't get to:

1) Visit cousin Drew on Moosehead Lake;
2) Visit Uncle Jack and Pat again, and help him build his house addition;
3) Go dancing at the Silver Spur;
4) Play some pickup lacrosse one Sunday evening in Portland;
5) Check out a race or two at Oxford Plains Speedway.

I'm sure Kate could add several more, but those stick out in my mind.

Now I'd come home from the last voyage fairly fried mentally, and the low-key birthday celebration (I turned 40 this year, and I think I'm still in a kind of denial--at least, I still want to be immature) was just fine for me. Only I didn't realize how devious Kate and her mother (not to mention Dave) can be.

They'd put together a surprise party, involving all the nearby family, and those of my friends who could make the trip up to Maine. But the leadup was even more impressive than the party for its level of deception.

Kate's mother needed me out of the way on Saturday, while she decorated and while people arrived. So they gave me a gift card to LL Bean, a surefire method to get rid of me...only they also needed to ensure that I'd go on Saturday and not before. (I suggested driving down Wednesday night, but allowed Kate to shoot that down.) So, to keep me there Thursday and Friday, Dave had ordered a delivery of cut & split firewood, which I was to haul and stack in the garage.

I EARNED that party, I tell you. I loaded two and a half cords of wood inside that stupid garage Thursday and Friday...well, not just I alone. I whined to Kate Friday morning that I wanted to go to Freeport then, and finish the wood on Saturday. In somewhat of a panic (though keeping outwardly cool), Kate offered to help me with the wood if I'd do it then.

And I'd thought Kate wasn't capable of lying. How foolish was I?

So we left Saturday, and bought some stuff, and came home around 4 PM (Kate had even learned the back-road way, so as to avoid the parked cars), and I got my big surprise. It was a great party, a fun way to end the summer, and I got nice & sloshed on cold duck. Cold duck! Cheap red spritzy wine, who'd'a guessed it tasted so good? Fortunately I only finished three bottles, so I have over a case left.

(Make that one bottle fewer, since Kate enjoyed a bottle last night while watching Kung Fu.)

We then moved back down to RI, and hauled most of our possessions to our new apartment (fortunately with a basement), and began post-condo life. I was bitter for a day or two, but once we'd arranged enough furniture and could live more or less normally in the new place, I settled down. Considering our desperate circumstances of last April, the progress we've made in five months to clear debt, lower our cost of living and clarify our longer-term plans, we've turned things around quite a bit. We arrested a freefall and are now stationed rather comfortably.

Of course, the most obvious constant this whole time has been Eva, our burbling little ball of fidget. She's not quite walking yet, though she's getting all the practice she can, hauling herself up on whatever's handy and sidling along. Kate and I have agreed many times that Eva's coming along so early in our relationship cut off a lot of the light-hearted play we might've had before getting married. But in times like these, when anxiety and tension have been such constants in Kate's and my lives, Eva has been our (mostly) placid relief, our happy little reminder that life is infinitely more than bills and plans and careers.

We say, not really joking at all, that Eva is now the head of the family. Her physical needs trump everything else, nearly all the time. (And, as conscientious parents, Kate and I do try to distinguish between Eva's needs and her moods--and the moods are becoming more prominent with time.) But throughout the winter and spring, when I had a job that I knew was going badly, my standard of measurement was Eva's behavior. If she stayed happy, and glad to see me and Kate, then I knew we were doing well.

The responsibility and joy of raising a daughter has provided Kate and me with continuity and satisfaction that might not have been possible otherwise. So now that we're here, on the verge of autumn (the little bengal's and my favorite season), Eva's state of mind and health remain our basic family measure. We have a home, we both have jobs, and we're steadily regaining financial health. But all the while, the baby's been growing and the coccoon we're trying to provide her seems to be intact.

I type this as we're steaming south through the bayou toward the open water, which is still hours away. I'll be asleep before we reach it, and awake again before we arrive at our first station to begin testing equipment.

This summer's work on the Deepwater spill has brought about a professional renaissance which I desperately needed. I'd stalled out almost completely at URI. This spring, when I began obsessively following the spill in the news, part of me sensed that I was partly trying to escape the doctorate, looking for any worthy distraction. Only, this blowout was far more than a distraction: it was an opportunity to learn about some new worlds to me, the engineering, economics and politics of energy.

I've begun to learn. I'm an environmentalist in general, not the fiercest but I do recycle, economize on fuel and electricity, and try to live simply. Questions of how global society obtains and consumes energy, and the physical toll this takes on the planet (an unsubstantiated bit of trivia: it requires three gallons of water to produce one gallon of gasoline--factoids like that earned me the nickname "Bankrupt Intellect" from my fourth-grade teacher), have become fascinating to me. You might say that I was more in tune with the act locally aspect of environmentalism; now I'm learning more about thinking globally.

It will be quite some time before I'm any kind of authority on the topic, whether in petroleum, nuclear, coal or renewables. I've learned about petroleum exploration, and some of the particulars of oil wells, and how oil reservoirs can be managed or mismanaged. I've learned some basics of the scale on which the global economy operates, and about the impacts of that scale economy on local production around the world. It really is a new world to my mind and I feel like a child exploring it.

Granted, when the topic involves concepts like peak oil, carbon emissions, economic warfare and political control, child's play might seem like a poor comparison. But when the complexity and depth and overall motion of a set of things is unfamiliar and mesmerizing, it can take on the brightness and fascination that comes over children with their toys. (And after all, even in major industries of global importance, we talk about "players.") I feel like a little kid who's walked into a gigantic toybox full of ideas and histories and consequences and it's all bright as sunshine--though oil itself is thick, dark and rather poisonous.

Enough about my foolish state of mind. The things I'm learning are at some levels quite frightening, and when I begin feeling that reaction, I have a few reminders for myself. First, I'm still new to it all. First impressions can be prophetic, but not always. Besides, I refuse to let myself be ruled by fear (for example, of sudden global economic and political collapse due to scarcity of oil). A measure of reassurance comes from an intellectual hero of mine, Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist. He set himself the task of identifying the biological causes for the various mythologies which humanity has created for itself--original biological causes growing later, of course, into historical trends all around the world, but still maintaining their biological and psychological significance. If the myths were to lose their contact with human psychology, then they would cease to be relevant. But that's a tangent I don't need to explore.

Campbell had a point concerning end-of-the-world doomsayers of all stripes, including environmentalists. Fear of impending disaster is one of the universal themes of myth. Whether by flood, or fire, or armies of locusts, some terrible judgment is generally coming down the turnpike toward us deserving infidels. You can seamlessly substitute modern science, with its fears of rising seas and warming air, for earlier mysticism. Campbell was on record as saying that in 10,000 years, humans then will have some other unavoidable catastrophe to worry themselves with. (This is where we venture into the psychological side of things, and I won't go further, knowing just about nothing about psychology.)

Anyhow, oil and water shortages fit this pattern perfectly. Except that complacency is an ignorant response. The science which has led us to the patterns of consumption we have now, also provides evidence of the consequences. The world, the universe, even our own bodies and minds are complex beyond the possibility of our imagining. But we can still measure aspects of the world around us, and try to act intelligently. (That is, after all, partly how we came to possess these brains in the first place.)

And when it comes to our consumption of fuel, every measure we have says that there isn't enough oil in the earth to support the amount we use now. The concept of "peak oil" isn't of a sudden drop of oil production to zero. It rather is the concept of a worldwide production maximum, after decades of increase, after which point production of oil must irreversibly decrease. Gradually, most likely, and over the course of decades, but still, oil production must become less as we deplete our best (and second-best, and third-best) resources. Common sense agrees: we as a race wouldn't be drilling for oil in a mile of water, and two miles further into the earth's crust beyond that, if there were still shallow oil fields to be found on dry land. We go way offshore, and extremely deep, because that's the easiest oil left. Kind of like scrabbling for change on the floor of your car because your pockets are empty.

One of the leading voices of peak oil (his term is twilight) over the past several years has been investment banker Matt Simmons. He specialized in energy investments, and over several decades had been quite successful. Matt's single largest contribution to thinking on energy was his 2006 book, "Twilight in the Desert", which profiles Saudi Arabian oil production, in the effort to determine how much oil that nation produces, and how much it has left. Saudi Arabia, like the other members of OPEC, doesn't publish any detailed production information, and even its yearly national statistics are dismissed as falsehoods. As the title "Twilight" implies, Matt's assessment is that Saudi Arabian oilfields are in decline after nearly 50 years of heavy production.

I first heard of Matt this year, of course, as a result of the Deepwater accident, but not in a complimentary way. He was apparently making the rounds of talk shows, spreading fantasy and malicious lies about the situation in the Gulf. I'd become a devoted reader of an expert energy website, The Oil Drum, run by a group of energy professionals, and through that site learned about many of Matt's most ridiculous statements. Not knowing who this person was--a longtime, respected authority on petroleum markets--I imagined an ignorant commentator in his 20s, armed with intensity but no knowledge, inventing things he thought were real.

A list of some of the falsehoods attributed to Simmons (I haven't tried to YouTube any clips, but these statements were corroborated by many different people posting to the website):

1) The so-called blown-out well was actually a second blowout. The first blowout had occurred six miles northeast, and was still flowing freely and was unattended to, as late as mid-June;
2) The blowout preventer (BOP) at the so-called blown-out well, had been ejected by an explosion from the real, first blowout six miles northeast, and had flown the six miles through the air and landed at the site of the second well;
3) The oil gusher would result in a gigantic crater in the northern part of the Gulf, and billions of barrels of oil would come flooding out at once when it collapsed;
4) There were giant bubbles of methane gas in the Gulf, which would float to the surface and then float ashore and likely explode over land, or at least poison everybody there;
5) The federal government was actively evacuating 20 million people from the Gulf coast as a result of the methane explosion threat;
6) The oil was gushing out of the well at the rate of 150,000 barrels per day;
7) There was a subsurface lake of oil in the Gulf, as big as Montana and 75 feet thick, resulting from the blowout.

Now all seven of these are ridiculous statements, and again, I didn't hear them come from Matt's mouth, but read repeated attributions to him. In perhaps related news, Matt Simmons died in the hot tub at his home in Maine this summer. In addition to his finance firm based in Houston, Matt led an ocean energy think tank and venture capital group, based in Maine and hoping to turn that state into a global center for renewable energy. He was clearly a leader, a forward-thinking person who could motivate people. How optimistic he sincerely was seems to be in doubt in light of his behavior this spring and summer.

Why the idiotic statements? Anyone with common sense, and a bit of geological and engineering knowledge, could easily dismiss those seven items above. I'll do so right now:

1) If there were a second blowout, there would have been a second sheen on the ocean surface, but there was none. At some point it would have become clear that there was a second oil source.
2) An explosion powerful enough to send a 45-foot-tall steel machine (the blowout preventer) up through 5,000 feet of water, and then six miles away through the air, would have (a) completely destroyed the machine first, (b) have generated some pretty big waves which people would have noticed along shore. (Not to mention what would have happened to what was left of the BOP once it hit the water again after flying six miles in the air.)
3) Oil doesn't exist in gigantic, cavernous pools underground. It exists in networks of tiny pore spaces within rock. Once the oil is gone, the rock might subside somewhat, especially if the oil has gushed out quickly. The ground over a big reservoir, like the Wilmington oil field in California, might sink by 20 feet or so, but that's fairly rare. They certainly don't collapse like sinkholes.
4) There were no giant methane bubbles. There was (and is) a lot of methane, but it's dissolved throughout the water, not lurking as one gigantic bubble (and if it were, since methane is far lighter than water, it'd come to the surface in a big hurry). Gases spread out and diffuse, they don't float along like giant water balloons. Furthermore, methane isn't a poison. It can asphyxiate you by crowding out the oxygen, but it's not an active poison the way hydrogen sulfide or chlorine are. The exploding/poisonous-methane lie--and Simmons knew enough about gas to understand it was a lie--might be the most malicious of them all, as it left many thousands of people along the coast in real panic.
5) Contrary to Glenn Beck's lies about FEMA concentration camps, there were no mass forced evacuations.
6) Historically, the very largest wells have produced up to 100,000 barrels a day--a very select group. Generally speaking, 65,000 barrels a day is tremendous. (I think wells in the US average 1,300 barrels a day.) 150K barrels per day is a stupidly high estimate.
7) Even if the well were gushing at 150,000 barrels per day, it would take over a hundred years to produce a lake the size of Montana and 75 feet thick.

So the question is: what was Matt up to? Had he just cracked and gone nuts? Did he decide to act like a carnival barker and just spew inaccuracies in order to scare people? Or perhaps something in between? Maybe years of crusading for more moderate energy use and increasing development of renewables, had made him so hopelessly frustrated that he did honestly lose his mind just a bit at the news of this accident.

I've read a Powerpoint presentation he gave on May 6 of this year, more than two weeks after the initial explosion, and it was as intelligent and lucid as his book. It certainly doesn't seem to be the work of a raving idiot. So I'm leaning toward the cynical, lying manipulator theory, but I really don't know, and probably never will.

In some ways, despite his spectacular meltdown at the end of his career, Matt Simmons is an intellectual hero of mine. His natural curiosity, fed by a series of offhand observations and growing suspicion, led him to conduct a large-scale research project on a very important, and largely ignored question: does the reality of Saudi Arabia's oilfield production match the Saudi Arabian government's claims, and if not, what does that imply for the world economy?

Simmons' book hit like a bombshell, and the shock has reverberated throughout the energy industry ever since. He has ripped the veil off the face of mideast oil production.

In some ways, Matt Simmons' descent into utter irrationality this summer, and the confusion it produced in many observers, reminds me of another, much more famous conversion, which has also left people mystified. Though the more famous conversion wasn't into a bizarre pack of lies, but rather into a new religion. Still, the man's own testimony hasn't helped anyone to clear up what exactly went on inside him.

I mean Paul, the apostle, who converted from Judaism to Christianity on the Damascus road. The question people (even my hero Joseph Campbell) ask is, Why? What happened? How could such a strong personality and forceful thinker as Paul suddenly change his philosophy so completely? Was it a cynical story, one he crafted in order to gain favor with the Christians he had decided to cultivate?

I say no. I think it was sincere, and it was longer in the coming than anyone, especially Paul himself, realized.

The clue is in one of Paul's letters (I forget to whom), when he describes his days as Saul, one of the Jewish priests who was trying to re-convert Christians back to Judaism. In the letter, Paul admits to disputing with the Christians, trying logically to convince them of the error of their ways, and to return to the true faith within the house of Yahweh.

In other words, it sounds a lot like what Paul was later doing to gentiles, Jews and believers of other religions, trying to convince them that Christianity was the true path. Whether as the Jewish Saul, or as the Christian Paul, this man was trying to argue and dispute and convince people into accepting his religion.

Only, I think the Christians really got to the Jewish Saul. I think their faith, their emotional need to believe in a god who died and was resurrected in order to relieve them of their guilt, touched a similar, deep, and desperate need in the proud, argumentative Saul. I think Saul's own self-doubt and uncertainty blossomed over the years--years, he writes in his letter--which he spent trying to re-convert Christians. Eventually, Saul's own heart told him that Christianity was the truer religion, and his brain finally realized what his heart had long felt, as Saul traveled on the road to Damascus, and then became Paul.

I think the Damascus light was the sudden decision of Paul's conscious brain to believe what its subconscious had been convinced of for quite a while. It was a divided and unhealthy man who set out to Damascus that day, and it was a restored and whole one who completed the journey.

The application of this idea to Matt Simmons isn't very kind. It makes Simmons look like a petty fool, though a bit tragic. The mounting frustration and despair he felt at not effecting enough change might simply have overwhelmed him. Possibly he made a deliberate, cold-blooded decision to play an on-air buffoon and spout falsehoods meant to terrify the ignorant. (There is a network which uses this as a business model, and Simmons was a very astute businessman.) I don't know.

I do grieve the loss of a fine thinker and visionary. In some measure, I will devote my career to solving the energy crisis. And here as elsewhere, questions will never cease to appear.

Quickie

2010-08-10T17:47:00.000-07:00

No, not that. ; )

A quick little post since we're running in to Houma, trying to beat a tropical storm bearing straight down on us from the southeast. Whether I escape Louisiana ahead of the windy deluge is debatable...

Another evening, another spectacular ruddy sunset.

The clouds seem to dance with the sunlight...

...and the sunlight seems to animate the clouds.

Not quite the waterspout. Between water and gray cloud above, in the center-left of the picture, you will see a faint rainbow. The sun was behind us, as the clouds broke up late in the afternoon.

Tampons for Science, or Lifting the Veil

2010-08-09T22:36:00.000-07:00

Fine drama this isn't. But it is an account of mischief combining with science to brighten an otherwise ordinary day.

Names have been changed to protect the embarrassed.

* * *

SETTING: On station at some unspecified location on the Gulf of Mexico, aboard the M/V Caroline Hench, a tender turned science vessel., during a hot, blustery summer afternoon.

CHARACTERS:

JOE, survey tech
BIG JIM, surveyor/deck boss.
ETHAN, ocean engineer.
AARON, party chief.
MIKE, oceanographer.
OLIVIA, a geophysicist.

SCENE 1. Fantail of the Caroline Hench. AARON, BIG JIM, ETHAN, JOE, and MIKE are assembled variously around the upright metal frame of an instrument (also known as the fish) about to be dropped via winch and cable into the ocean, for the sake of making observations on petroleum content.

ETHAN. You know, I’d been hoping to put something on the fish that might be able to pick up any oil it goes through on the way down. Paper or something…

MIKE. Yeah, that’s not a bad idea. Though paper might rip.

JOE. How about a sorbent pad?

ETHAN. Might work…are they tough enough?

MIKE (Walks across the deck to a dirty sorbent pad lying beneath a hose valve. Rips the pad slightly.) Well, they rip pretty easily, but I don’t think they’ll fall apart in the water like paper would.

ETHAN. I was kind of thinking of a paper plate. They kind of have a coating that keeps the water off.

MIKE. That’d keep the oil off too.

JOE. How about a facecloth?

ETHAN. Yeah, though we’d need a white one.

MIKE. Hmm… (Leaves)

ETHAN. Well, we might as well use some sorbent. Is there a clean pad anywhere?

JOE. Yeah, over in the box. (Goes to the box and retrieves a soft pad of sorbent.)

BIG JIM. Yeah, that’ work…where’s the duct tape?

JOE retrieves a roll of duct tape, brings that and the sorbent to BIG JIM, who tears off a piece of sorbent, wraps it around part of the instrument frame, and begins taping it in place.

Re-enter MIKE, who waves the plate overhead and carries an off-white facecloth in the other hand as he walks toward ETHAN.

MIKE. Here, is this what you wanted? (Tears the plate in half.)

BIG JIM. No, leave it whole! The edges provide strength.

MIKE. (Staring at the two halves of a plate.) Oh. (Walks over to the garbage bin, places one half inside, and gives the other half to BIG JIM, who begins wrapping it and taping it down.)

MIKE. And I snagged a facecloth too, though it’s a little off-white.

ETHAN. It’ll be off-white by the time we’re done with it anyway.

JOE. I doubt the sorbent or the plate will last, anyhow. They’ll probably just fall off.

MIKE. You know what would work perfectly…?

JOE. I know what you’re thinking.

ETHAN. Yeah, a tampon would be pretty ideal.

MIKE. I mean, it’d stand up to the water, and it’s probably twice as absorbent as the sorbent pad!

ETHAN. So, do you want to go ask?

MIKE. Well…that’s the problem.

JOE. Yeah, wanna get slapped?

MIKE. Slapped with a harassment suit, more like!

AARON. Though a tampon would work perfectly…

ETHAN. Yeah, and who better to do it than the survey chief? (Slaps AARON on the back.)

JOE. Yeah, I say you should go get it!

AARON. Hey, I got you your chair. I’m not getting you your tampon.

ETHAN. (To MIKE.) I’ve got an idea. You could just raid their bedroom.

MIKE. Yeah, they’d never notice, I’d find it immediately, and everything would be OK.

ETHAN. Well, it was just a gag anyway, probably better we not bother.

AARON. And we wouldn’t learn much from it anyway. Better to just leave that one alone.

BIG JIM. Too bad, because those things are probably ten times as absorbent as a sorbent pad. I worked with a guy once…

AARON. Alright, guys, we should start thinking about how we’re going to handle this rising sea state. It’s going to be tougher to deploy and recover. (Enters into technical discussion with BIG JIM and JOE. MIKE zones out.)

ETHAN. (To MIKE.) So what do you think about this weather building up?

MIKE. I’m thinking about going in and asking anyway.

ETHAN. (Chuckles.) It’s up to you, but I think we’re okay without it.

AARON. If these waves continue to rise, this will be our last cast for the day. We’ll need to check the weather and see if we’ll need to lay in or think about heading to shore.

BIG JIM. Aahhh, we shouldn’t give up yet. These things are barely four feet tall!

AARON. Yes, but if they get much bigger we won’t be able to operate. The sonar arm will likely start vibrating as well.

MIKE. Screw it. No guts no glory. (Leaves)

SCENE 2. Control van of the Caroline Hench, a cargo container outfitted inside as a dry lab, both sides lined with desks and computers. Among 8 other people at work, OLIVIA sits at her computer, entering data. Enter MIKE.

MIKE. (Kneels.) Hey, Olivia.

OLIVIA. Yes?

MIKE. I’ve got a question for you, and if it’s offensive or seems inappropriate, please excuse me. But it’s strictly for science…

(OLIVIA looks at him quizzically. Her neighbor at the desk looks over with mild alarm.)

MIKE. You see, we got the idea of putting something absorbent on the fish, which might be able to pick up any oil that it goes through on its way down. We got a sorbent pad, a facecloth and some paper, but I was hoping…

OLIVIA. (Being patient.) Would you like a tampon?

MIKE. Yes. Or a maxi pad.

OLIVIA. No problem. Would you like both?

MIKE. Sure, if you can spare them, thanks!

(Exeunt.)

SCENE 3. Fantail of the Caroline Hench. AARON, BIG JIM, ETHAN, and JOE stand about the fish, talking. Enter MIKE.

MIKE. We’re in business!

JOE. Ask, and you shall receive.

MIKE. Ask nicely enough, and you shall receive. You can’t just be a dick about it.

BIG JIM takes the tampon and maxi pad, removes the wrapper from the tampon, and begins taping it to the frame.

SCENE 4. Fantail of the Caroline Hench. ETHAN and MIKE walk toward the fish, having been reeled back up on deck following two dives. BIG JIM is already there, inspecting the equipment.

MIKE. Well, the tampon isn’t scientifically valid now. We left the same one on for two consecutive casts.

ETHAN. Yeah, but it’s white. It’s a negative result anyway.

MIKE. Still, worth trying.

BIG JIM. Yeah, well I’m proud of that little tampon! It’s still on there!

(All three nod.)

FINIS

* * *

Instruments of science:

The maxi pad.

The tampon.

* * *

Now, any woman reading this might think, You're so proud of yourself for going to ask a humdrum question about a perfectly ordinary thing like a tampon? That took nerve? I'll tell you about nerve. Pass a swollen football through a passage the size of your throat, and you'll learn about nerve.

To which every male can only have the same response: Yes dear.

Legendary

2010-08-09T14:17:00.001-07:00

Not legendary in the sense you may have been thinking. (I may be on my way to being legendary, but I will admit that I'm not there yet. Even being the grossest and most disgusting brother in my college fraternity for a while hasn't earned me that honor.) No, I'm talking about something else, which will be made clear a little bit farther down.

In the meantime, a few odd pics sitting in my folder:

A photo taken on our first day out, as we hovered about 24 km out from the wellhead, in the company of a line of tenders standing by in case they were needed at the site. Not sure why, but the line of waiting ships impressed me quite a bit. That much heavy hardware, just idling by, is one small indicator of the size and importance of this whole well-closing project.

Another line of clouds, another red sunset.

Same, a few minutes later and closer up.

And now we come to the legendary part of this entry.

My mother loved Rockwood, Maine, and Moosehead Lake in general. The pine woods were bigger and thicker, the lake darker and wilder, the neighbors much farther away up there. (And that's where country folks go for vacation, apparently: even farther out into the country.)

She also loved moose. Had little statuettes of them, pictures of them, a few sweatshirts featuring them. It never rose to the level of a fully blown mania--say, like my childhood love of owls which led a cousin to think I was possessed--and a few other artifacts. One was moostletoe, a Christmas decoration made out of laquered moose droppings, strung along a cord like beads, with alternating red and green bows. If she was willing to put dried and hardened moose feces on her Christmas tree, it's pretty safe to say she liked all things moose.

She and Dad had many friends from college, a few especially close. Two of them, Dick and Sue Cox, lived on the Cape and, despite having spent four years in Maine for college (albeit in Lewiston--hardly a moose mecca) and having visited my parents several times up on the lake, had never seen a moose. Dick went so far as to disavow their existence, claiming them to be a fiction of Mom's (and it wouldn't've been the first fiction she'd put out there, if Dick had been right).

So Mom tried to rise to the occasion and document their presence. But there were two problems with this: if you aren't willing to tromp through the woods to seek them out, but would rather stay in your car, then you're pretty much out of luck unless it's dawn or dusk. Second, Mom would only use her simple little point-and-shoot, much like my little point-and-shoot except that mine is digital, and takes four seconds for one photograph because it tries to get the light and focus right.

One night, on the drive back from Greenville to their cabin, Mom and Dad spotted a moose, standing about 100 feet away from the right side of the road, at the edge of the forest. So Mom had Dad stop the car, and she whipped out her little point-and-shoot, and shot.

When she got the photo developed...you could see some grass, and then the shadowy edge of a forest. Mom claimed there was a moose in the shadow, and she was brave enough to show the photo to Dick and Sue. But really, it was even less conclusive than a UFO pic. She put it in her photo album with the caption, "Can you find the moose". It became something of a legend in my family for bad photography.

And so we come to this: my entry into the Sutherland "What the Eff is That?" photo pantheon. Behold:

Can you see the waterspout?

I saw my first waterspout today! I was upset with myself four days ago when one of my colleagues said she'd spotted one during a squall, I think while I was busy at my computer. So today someone raised the alarm, and I went bounding out of the control van to see.

It was pretty wimpy--actually, there were two, but that was the bigger--and never touched the sea. It poked tentatively down out of the cloud, and then slowly shrank back in.

We're currently on station, doing an instrument cast. The seas have risen noticeably with the passage of a front, possibly related to a new tropical weather formation southeast of us, still a few hundred miles away. The ship's roll is quite noticeable so I took the precaution of two Dramamine pills. About half of the storm track predictions have this thing--called a tropical wave, one grade below a tropical depression (which is one grade below a tropical storm, which is one below a hurricane) running right over us, bringing 25-mph winds and waves 5-7' tall.

Almost every trade has its version of machismo, and offshore work is certainly no different. However, big storms have a way of bringing out the alarmist in mariners:

When will we bug out? Remains to be seen.

Sunset

2010-08-06T17:57:00.001-07:00

Nursing a bit of homesick heartache, so I finally thought to watch a sunset. Whenever I see one over the water, I think of one of my favorite poems:

God having a hemhorrage-
Blood coughed across the sky-
That is sunset in the Caribbean.
(Langston Hughes)

This isn't the Caribbean, but we're not all that far away. And though it's not a desert, some other lines came into my head:

Your burning skies, are never ending
across your red brush plains
Out where the dingo still is king
and eternity remains.
(Dougie McLean)

Lots of photos of the very same clouds and sun, taken only minutes apart. But if you care to look closely enough, many differences will start to appear...

Third Cruise

2010-08-04T22:05:00.000-07:00

Finally on the water! The nagging issues were resolved, the problems fixed, the gear brought aboard and stowed. So now we're on our third cruise, which is officially known as the second cruise. I suppose that's because my first cruise, the four-day shakedown punctuated by Hurricane Alex, was in fact the zeroth cruise. So while this is known officially as the second cruise, it's my third trip to Louisiana, my third absence from my family, and my third situation on the water, so to speak. So I'll go ahead and refer to it as the third cruise.

And as usual, I have pictures.

Carl working on the towed mass spectrometer. Mass specs are fascinating pieces of equipment--they identify the chemical content of solids, liquids and gases. There are various methods and designs, but the basic operating concept is this: a sample is vaporized, so the molecules are floating in a vacuum. Those molecules are then given slight electrical charges, which makes them susceptible to magnetism. They're then shot past a magnet, which bends their flight according to their mass: the heavier the molecule, the less its flight is bent; the lighter the molecule, the more its flight is bent. A sensor picks up where the molecules hit, calculates the amount of bend in their flight, and determines the identity of the molecule. Pretty amazing.

Generally, tools like that are used in the lab, in the safety and comfort of a dry-land setting. This instrument is towed in the water, as deep as 1500m down, to analzye chemicals still within the ocean. To my knowledge there is only one other like it on the planet. And now we're using it...sort of. Some water got in one of the connections today and shut us down, while the spectrometry team got busy troubleshooting it. (Marine science, if you haven't gotten a clear sense from me yet, involves an awful lot of troubleshooting. To mix a Thomas Edison quote with one from Yogi Berra, Ocean science is 99% perspiration, and the other half is troubleshooting.

A tangent which still bugs me: between my first and second cruises, when I'd first heard that we were going to have the use of this incredible gizmo, I began reading up on spectrometers, so I'd have some kind of clue as to what we were working with. Borrowed some books, hunted up some PDFs online, the ordinary routine. But, as it turns out, there's a world expert on mass spectrometry, as applied to oil spills, at the oceanography school where I got my master's. So hey, why not go ask him some basic questions about what we might expect to see? Sure, I'm a neophyte or less at chemical analysis of the ocean, but certainly the general reading I've done, and a thoughtful talk with an expert, could lead me to some more meaningful questions that I'd be able to ask him. Why not, you know? So I e-mailed him and showed up at his office.

My reception was polite, but hardly accepting. And he was very quick to deny any relevant knowledge: "I work in the lab, not in the field. I really wouldn't know anything about what you're doing." Right. Nothing about various types of spectrometers, sensitivity issues, equilibration time issues, what types of chemicals we might expect at depth...nah. By analogy, it's like going to a world expert on the letter A, and asking for help. Only he tells you, "Well, I specialize in upper-case A. You're interested in lower-case a, which is totally different, so I can't help you."

I'm not in love with commercial or corporate culture, by any means. But there are things about academic culture which positively disgust me, and intellectual cowardice is one of the biggest. It's as if by taking one of these specialists six inches out of his playpen, he's suddenly in foreign, unknown territory. My baby girl has more spirit of adventure than many professors.

Alright, that tangent is over. Moving on to the next pic...

The rosette, with twelve remotely-operated bottles which we can open electronically and obtain samples at the depths we choose. Below that, beneath the towel, is a complex little instrument which measures salinity, temperature, and pressure (i.e. depth), as well as the content of dissolved oxygen and chemical content based on emitted light. The light sensor is known as a fluorometer. It emits a spectrum of light, which causes certain types of chemicals to give off light spectra themselves. The fluorometer measures the intensity and frequencies of returning light, which gives us an indication of the chemicals in the water (not as precise as the spectrometer but not as difficult to use, either). Another neat little instrument.

The mechanical sidearm to which the singlebeam sonar is mounted. Problem is, when we put the arm down and moved along at our survey speed of 5 kts, the arm began vibrating against the ship's hull at about 4 beats/second, moving in and out about 2-3 inches at waterline. This wasn't good for anything, least of all our observations or the sonar unit, so we slowed down. Then it appeared that the bolts on the lower flange had been bent by the vibrations, and we couldn't draw the arm back up...so we're waiting on a sawzall and some very tough blades to cut the bolts and replace them.

Meet the new winch, same as the old winch. (Well, it's newer, and smaller, and the cable won't carry as heavy of a load. But I thought the line was neat, and besides, it's still a winch.)

The tarp. One of the ongoing problems on this boat is air conditioning. With daytime temperatures over 100 deg, and as many people running around on the boat as there are, the AC units are hard put to it to keep us comfortable. So some of the more inventive science crew rigged up this tarp over the control van to provide shade. It reminds me of Istanbul, where the side streets have sheets stretched out from the buildings on one side to the buildings on the other side, covering the entire street in shade and beautifully knocking down the intensity of the sunlight.

Not one of the kill bore drillers--we're not near the site yet. It's simply another drilling rig, possibly one of the ones shut down by Obama's ban. I've seen three different definitions of "deep Gulf"--500 ft, 500 m , and 1000 m--so this one might qualify, or not. The smoke leads me to believe it's working, but I'm not sure. A petroleum engineer I'm not.

Big tough Jim. This is not the first job I've worked on with him. He's as solid and steady as they come, an old survey hand who knows every practical aspect of the job. He's the deck boss, and he's a good choice. When he's not surveying on the high seas he lives in the mountains of Thailand with his young wife. On the muggiest and most sweltering 100+ degree day, he'll say brightly, "It's just like home!"

Ever wonder how we get trash off a boat? We put the garbage bags into much bigger bags made out of some kind of plastic burlap, with web handles. A crane dangles its hook overhead, we loop the bag handles over the hook, and the crane takes the garbage away. And that's how we get rid of trash on a boat.

Unless we're outside of any nation's exclusive economic zone, in which case we could dump almost anything except plastic overboard with impunity.

The back deck, a scene of activity as we prepare to launch the spectrometer.

Jim, Carl and Ryan talking things over.

Fellow oceanographer Dennis keeps an eye on proceedings.

The official boat photographers. Though really, only Craig (on the right) is the official photographer. Ann Marie just sweetly finagled her way closer to the action by claiming to be the backup. For legal reasons--since all basic aspects of a photograph must be documented (location, time date, etc.)--we've designated one (and only one) photographer. So the poor lawyers have some clue of what we're talking about when we write about mass spectrometers, and rosettes, and our other tools of the marine science trade.

Eric and Carl on station at the winch, as we get ready to deploy the mass spec.

Jim, the deck boss, sole man on the rear deck.

Managing the instrument as the winch and A-frame lift it (note the angle of the A-frame as it carries the instrument away from the deck and over the water).

Walking the instrument back. That can be a hazardous job in even moderate waves. If an instrument weighing even 50 pounds starts swinging with much velocity, it can hurt you pretty badly--especially if it hammers you up against the A-frame.

Winching the mass spec down. Note Jim's right hand, pointing down: drawing circles with your index finger pointing down means "lower". Drawing circles with your index finger pointing up means "raise". Making a pinching motion with your thumb & forefinger pointing down means "lower very slowly". Doing the same, but with fingers pointing up, means "raise very slowly". Clenched fist generally means stop. And a string of expletives means the instrument slammed into the rear of the ship and probably needs fixing.

Dog Days

2010-08-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

Hot, in Louisiana, Rhode Island and Maine. Harder still to put up with when I'm frustrated, bored and lonely on the job, and Kate is frustrated, bored and lonely while raising Eva.

Not that my job is all boring, but being trapped in port with another series of minor mechanical problems is really frustrating. We're on a tender, a marine pickup truck which runs supplies to and from oil platforms. Tenders aren't science vessels, which means this mobilization--mobe for short--has taken an uncommonly long time, with a more thorough build-out including a side-arm for the sonar unit and the A-frame on the stern, not to mention welding the cargo box to the deck, which has become our control van. Many things can go wrong, and several have, and so we're still in port when we should have left nearly one full week ago.

I'm resigned to it now, partly because I have plenty of computer work to do, partly because I have a Starbucks I can escape to when I feel the need, and partly because I can walk again. I've had some bizarre muscle tightness in my hamstrings for the last two weeks which got especially bad once I returned to Louisiana, and left me almost unable to walk. If you've ever had severe muscle tightness, the kind that pulls on and affects all the muscles around it, you know what I mean. My glutes (yes, my rear end) and my calves felt almost as nasty as my hammies, and it left me almost unable to sleep, on top of hobbling around ship like an old man with arthritis. After a particularly bad night last night, I feel closer to normal today than I've felt in a few weeks.

Don't know why, but I'm not arguing. I hope the cramps don't come back.

Kate, meanwhile, has been more than holding up her end of the bargain in Maine, occasionally in Rhode Island. Not only tolerating my constant absence this summer, raising Eva alone like she did last fall, but managing our household affairs while I e-mail and phone the things I'd like her to do. We're moving soon, into an apartment not too far away from the condo in North Kingstown. It's a great little place (so I'm told), near the beach, secluded, with a basement. The only drawback is that they don't allow pets, so Jasper will stay in Maine. (Mom-in-law and Dave are happy to keep him around--if not thrilled about tending the litter box and feeding him every day--but I know he'll miss me. I'll miss him too--he's my little feline bud.)

Anyhow, this is a bit of a headlong move because Kate and I are trying to avert or at least gracefully endure foreclosure. My spotty employment of the last two years has finally brought a degree of ruin upon us. It's possible that we'll short-sell, though not given. This summer, I made the decision that I was willing to accept foreclosure--if we couldn't sell--but not bankruptcy. Since the bankruptcy laws were rewritten in 2005, it's a really terrible arrangement and I'd rather not go through that creditor-friendly wringer if I can possibly avoid it. I may yet fail, but I've not yet surrendered.

So Kate's endured several urgent errands that I've pressed upon her from my hot and sleepy vantage in the bayou. All while searching for, and finding, our new living space on her own, and managing an increasingly mobile and expressive little fidget monster who doesn't always enjoy being hauled along for the ride.

Last weekend, since Kate succeeded in securing our new apartment, she had an extra day to make it out to the Cape and spend some time with the Sutherland side of the family, at the reunion going on there. Sister Julie and her husband Halsey have thrown a few of these now, and the whole family enjoys gathering on the beach. Halsey's now an old pro at throwing big beach bashes, and the location is great enough to overcome anyone's hesitance at having to put up with the rest of their family.

It was an odd feeling of displacement I had, talking to my sisters, aunts and cousins via webcam, while Kate was there in person. Like Kate and especially Eva were claiming them all for their own--Eva especially. She still has that infant charisma, being responsive but helpless enough to be a perfect magnet for everyone's attention. In two years, she'll be running around and screaming and it'll be easier for people to tune her out.

But now, it's not possible. She's a crawling, squidgy, vocal center of the universe and I felt very much on the margin when I talked to them from my chair in Starbucks. Eva as usual tried to eat the screen, or perhaps crawl through it (I can't tell which, and she's not saying), but she does seem to recognize me on the computer.

Kate had a good time there, drove back home to Maine, and promptly got really, really sick. She still is, as I type.

So it's been an eventful summer! An unexpected job, with lots of twists. The family flight from the unaffordable, though lovely, condo to a more affordable, and almost as lovely, apartment (actually, in some ways, probably even lovelier--but I'll miss my big windows and hardwood floor). The nerve-wracking choices and deadlines involved in trying to narrowly avoid bankruptcy. The pain, loneliness and frustration of being apart. The sense of triumph and accomplishment for me, at times, of work and, for Kate, of raising a child who's so far been universally praised and adored by friends and family.

Plus just making it through an adventurous year, being mostly happy, and honestly so. I can read Thoreau--stylistically not very charming, but one of America's, and the world's, great thinkers, in my opinion--and not cringe in shame. To paraphrase from a few of his books (and he wrote a lot more than just Walden! Though Walden was the most consistently introspective): "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I consider my best years still in front of me, having wasted enough time in constructive ways that I'm all the more convinced that the emotional ground my hopes have grown in, is deep and rich. Like he says of the swamp--those years of idleness will help many things to grow. "The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer...speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him." The age of cable television and the internet has exploded the number of orators, to use his term--loudmouths like Breitbart, Coulter, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Palin, Bachmann and the rest who might believe what they say or might not, but in any case seek the largest audience and most profit and influence they can. It's not my aim to be widely known, or very rich. I'd like for Kate and me to have a comfortable, clean home, and for our kids (yes, we want at least one more after Eva--and of course I want a son) to have good educations and an honest shot at lives as good as ours. My life goals outside of family are coming steadily into view, and the mark I leave on the world does not need to include my name. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." I don't mean to repeat Thoreau's experiment. His adventure was going to the woods and living a simple, introspective life, observing both himself and the natural world around him. His vision was incomparably fine. Thoreau's adventure was to Walden and the woods around it; mine will be elsewhere, but the effort I make and my sincerity in doing so will be worthy of Thoreau's account in Walden--and this includes my life with my family.

I've come to deeply admire Thoreau's thinking this year, starting when I was in the hospital for colitis this spring. I began reading Walden then, and was thrilled with the joy and dry humor I found in his writing, beyond the earthiness and severity which most people assign to him. (By contrast I find Emerson a crank. He might agree with Thoreau in almost every particular, but where HD details the smallest, most repetitive or bleakest aspects of his experience, Emerson paints only pastel. I hate pastel. He's like the pink, orange and yellow negative to Thoreau's deep green, brown and blue.) Thoreau has a simultaneous and inseparable admiration of and disdain for every aspect of life which is the equal of any poet. He was well-versed enough in Hindu mythology, and wrote compellingly enough about the value of simplicity and the falseness of all doctrine, that Mahatma Gandhi counted him as a teacher. Henry's ongoing joy at perpetually discovering the things around him floods out of every word. "Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings."

Kate endured many nights of my plowing though Thoreau, while I was hopped up on steroids and sleeping anywhere from one to three hours a night. But she's lived her adventure, and will continue to this fall when she begins counseling and teaching. She's a born teacher, and has reserves of patience I will never hope to equal. I consider my impatience a strength and will use it in other ways.

So it's been a tough year, and it's made us tough along with it. But not Eva, not yet. She has many years of her own, away from us as she learns to live on her own terms, to gain toughness. I see no need to scar and toughen up my little baby quite yet.

Houma Way from Home

2010-07-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

Back in Houma, after an awfully short weekend visit home. The Ridley Thomas was chased off the job, replaced by the tender Nick Skanski. It's a very awkward arrangement, involving a huge mobilization ("mobe") which may or may not be complete by 6 PM Saturday--our target departure time. The less said about my state of mind right now, the better--but I'm up to playing tourist again and showing all of my dozen or so (if that many) readers my new situation, at least. Including, being docked on the bayou. A very heavily industrialized bayou, with barely any traces of bayou left, it's true. But what once was a bayou, at least.

Gator #1

Gator #2

Gator #3 (heading toward me at the time)

Work at the fantail. A busy place, with the A-frame still being assembled!

Not sure I'd want to be wedged between a 130-foot boat and the dock.

Ye olde A-frame, which will tow the fish.

The towfish, with most of the equipment still to be added.

Just a spot of deckwork...

The crowded mess known as our rear deck.

Ryan, one of the guys running the spectrometer (a tool which identifies chemicals in the water).

The rear deck, from the superstructure and looking aft. (The big white container on the right is the control van.)

Sunset over the Emily Bordelon.

Sunset over the construction yard--those are platform legs being built.

The row of ships alongside us in port.

The inside of the control van (that big white cargo container), looking aft.

The control van, looking forward.

See, the other ships' back decks are crowded and messy too, really!

The Nick Skanski, from the port side.

The connection point for the tow cable to the fish.

The towfish, showing the platform which will carry the spectrometer, and behind that, the round frame which will carry the rosette of 10 sampling bottles.

That would be my state of mind right now.

In Transit

2010-07-24T08:13:00.001-07:00

Traveling can become a way of life, depending on your line of work. I don't intend for that to happen in my case--nor do I think Katie (to say nothing of Eva!) would allow it to--but loitering in airline terminals, and the ritual of takeoff and landing become an easy habit before long, like adapting to a one-hour drive to and from work. Not something ideally in your life plan, not something you brag about, but still, something you can get used to.

Of course, the ability to go online in most places nowadays makes it a bit easier to be a road warrior.

But I'm not really a road warrior. I'm coming home from all of my second trip to the Gulf (having more or less traded places with my sister- and mother-in-law, along with the SIL Cori's kids, who headed to Pensacola a day ago) this year. It's likely I'll be headed down at least once more, though nothing is ever definite with marine work, except that the ocean will be there, and there will be hurricanes. All the other stuff about ships is dependent on circumstances.

It's a measure of my impatience with travel that two trips feels like 20. It's a measure of my homebodiness that three weeks away feels like three months. Yes, I love to see other parts of the world, I love to experience things that don't happen at home, and I'm a sucker for variety. But the rest of the world, the new experiences, the variety in the end reinforce what I love and need in home. Though the topmost branches of an oak tree might wave in breezes which don't touch ground, still its roots never move and draw the water there that the whole tree needs.

The analogy breaks down, of course, as all analogies do. My whole self, so to speak, is waving in the breeze when I go somewhere else, and then my whole self plunges back into the earth and drinks up the water when I return home. It's not the simultaneous thing that a tree experiences, but at least part of the idea is the same. (And that's the point of an analogy.)

My water comes in two forms, one just cutting her teeth right now, and the other easing her through babyhood into toddlerdom.

As close as I was to my mother--and I was an abject mama's boy until at least age 16 or so (my sister Lisa would argue until I was 35 or so, but she didn't know me as well as she thinks she did--insert smiley face here)--anyhow, I was pretty close to her through adolescence, and after drifting for a few years, we became very close again after Dad died.

How could we not, really? The whole family drew together. Even Lisa and I made a serious effort to get to know each other. (Took a while, but we get along now. Really.)

What I've regretted most, at least consciously, in Dad dying when he did--so young--was missing the chance to have him as a friend. I've had some very good friends--and do now--but who better than my own father? Who could resemble me more, or I him? When I was growing up, a shy, bookish kid with theatrical leanings, Dad must've wondered at least once or twice if we had anything in common. (I'll refrain from the old is-he-really-mine joke. I certainly don't have his ears or his height, so maybe he did wonder.) Anyhow, Dad was the giant, gregarious athlete of the sort I was very jealous of as a kid. I wondered too if we'd ever have gotten along if I'd known him as a young man.

But since 1996, when he died of brain cancer, I've continued growing (fortunately!). Now especially, with a family of my own, life has assumed new dimensions and I need to grow to fill them. I've got a pretty good partner in Kate, so it's not like I'm on my own here, but still, the reality of two people, one an adult and one almost utterly helpless, depending on me is like swimming in the ocean, versus standing in the shallow end of a pool.

It'd be good to talk shop and share few laughs--wistful, self-effacing or otherwise--with someone who's been in the same spot of water, know what I mean?

And not just concerning the basics--taking care of my family emotionally and physically--but for the things internal to me too, my own hopes, my own sometimes outlandish plans. Dad was a businessman, a charming and reasonably accomplished politician and a guy whose ethical standards I admire. (The way his friends spoke about him, and stood by our family, even years after his death is all the proof I'll ever need, even though I rarely saw him at work.)

Well...slightly wistful thoughts, I guess, as I wait for my flight to pull up to the gate here at JFK in NYC. In two hours I'll be with the felines, one big, one small (and a third that's genuinely feline), and all the important things in my life will be right again.

And they'll be made even better shortly thereafter by pizza...

Rage

2010-07-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

Not that I'm necessarily skating along the jagged brink of disaster by posting about my life down here in Louisiana, since I'm sharing no data or observations on our data. Though I am slowly going through some of the laws concerning this. BP, which is ultimately paying for the remediation and the science work going into the natural resources damage assessment (NRDA), is doing its best to close down all public access to any relevant information.

I find this odious. I did make a brief statement on it in an earlier post, and I'm not trying to lose my job or cause anyone else to lose theirs.

However, there are laws behind this NRDA, and I'm going about reading them, to see if it's specified how much access the general public has to scientific information, both during and after the collection process. Right now we, as well as government groups like NOAA, are guarding everything pretty carefully. Unaffiliated scientists especially would love access to all of this information. (The general public might be mildlly interested, but also not as able to interpret things. The hard data's for the geeks.)

So there's a general aroma of secrecy about our work, even though we're simply monitoring the environment. And even within the operation there are sharp edges, pieces out of place and the occasional slash and bleed.

That metaphor isn't meant to imply actual injury--though those have occurred, in many phases of this remediation work--but rather, discord and interference among the different parties involved. I'm on board the Ridley again, as we steam back out toward the wellhead, having spent nearly the last full week on shore, and having spent four days before that exiled to the outer margins of the Deepwater site.

Last week, when BP opened up the damaged riser in order to fit it with a new cap, we were pushed off-site and prohibited from doing any monitoring. The chain of events was as childish and stupid as it was exasperating: local boat contractors refused to communicate with the Ridley's Filipino crew, claiming we were driving erratically and refusing to respond to radio hails.

Lies, all of it. This crew, from the captain down to the steward, is one of the best and most professional I've ever worked with. Only NOAA boats might be better, among those I've worked on, and that's only because they're more plush. (I hear Fugro ships are kind of like cruise vessels for the science crew, but I wouldn't know.) What I can say, during the time I've spent on bridge and in every interaction I've had with these guys, is that they keep a clean ship and they're very serious about their work.

But some locals didn't like their accent, didn't like how they're all business on the radio, and didn't like that this ship is flagged out of the Marshall Islands (known, along with Panama and Liberia, for its lax-to-nonexistent maritime regulation--making those three nations' flags popular to fly in the merchant marine). The local boys ganged up on the foreigner. To what extent BP was not unhappy with this, due to the opening of the wellhead, I can't say but I can say how frustrated I am.

We're here to look at the spread of oil. I realize that our work, compared to stopping the flow of oil, is right now unimportant. Shoot all the sonar we want, we have no influence on the leak, or on any decisions concerning it. Our work is exclusively for down the road.

And it's that down the road aspect which outrages me. There are possibly six or more vessels at various times doing testing and taking samples in the vicinity of the wellhead. The Ridley Thomas is one of four ships, along with NOAA's Thomas Jefferson, which does acoustics, and for most of last week, we were the only one on site. It's the acoustics, as imperfect as this application is, which can provide a large-scale view of the subsurface oil. The more our results are correlated to chemical tests, the bolder we can become with our interpretation. Gathering as much data as we can about the spread of oil below the ocean's surface is the best contribution we can make now to future science. Our best opportunity to inspect and measure the seafloor gusher last week was summarily taken away from us. Our best chance to contribute to posterity's knowledge of seafloor blowouts and current activity in general is gone.

That frustrates me.

So now BP's finally given permission, and we're going back to the wellhead, likely with the good ole boys no more kindly disposed to our crew than before, to take a few days' data before heading back to Fourchon in 84 hours.

Yes, No Complaints Club. I'm not going to stop doing my work--rather the opposite!--but I don't like being jerked around.

So here I am, on a boat being hit with a steady stream of jabs and uppercuts in the form of 4-6' waves. A new tropical wave, Invest 97 (still don't understand that Invest thing), is lurking behind Puerto Rico and bidding to make straight for us. Should be an intriguing couple of days.

I won't post a photograph, but today's snack from the kitchen is a little alarming. Donuts, which are fine--topped with what seems like Tartar sauce (smells like it too), and grated cheese.

Great time to start slimming down again, huh? To get rid of the face pudge...and the rest of the pudge, for that matter. I'm starting to look a little more like the "after" in this before-and-after picture series...and yes, it's the same guy.

Before: thin Val.

After: fat Val. Wonder

when he's due?...

Blah Blah

2010-07-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

Life has settled into a routine here on board ship, as you'd expect. The mantra in the offshore industry is, We strive for boring days. In other words, when the weather is good, and the equipment works well, and the crew is competent and on task, life is uneventful. Cows chewing grass.

It's been that kind of day, and if we have 10 more of these, I'll be very happy. Steady work, steady accumulation of data, and good crew relations.

Other than that, nothing to say about life on board ship. Literally. I'm not allowed to say anything else, so I won't. I trust that all of the data currently being gathered by governmental, university and private (like us) sources for the Natural Resources Damage Assessment, to be used for the spill litigation, will eventually become public domain. I believe the NRDA framework was all set up by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, as a direct result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. My URI geology advisor, the estimable Dr. B, has described working (either as a contractor or else for the Alaska state or the federal government) on an environmental damage assessment for that spill alongside several other coastal science colleagues. Only, they'd all been hired by different parties, and were not allowed to share any data or thoughts at all. They were staying in neighboring, or the same, hotels, ate and drank at the same restaurants, had drinks together...and couldn't discuss anything of what they'd been doing all day.

Now that's awkward. Dr. B's a fairly savvy guy. He's a born storyteller--one reason we get along--so he's not one of these calculating, overly concealing, close-to-the-chest types who annoy me extremely. But neither is he an oblivious brag, by any means. Dr. B knows how to parse his words and speak carefully, so I'm sure he was able to get along with his buds and not be too inappropriate. But still, it's hard to put your passion to work and devote yourself to a task, and have to clam up about it afterward. But it must be done.

But as far as the dueling environmental assessments, they're a gigantic waste of time, effort and money. They also make open fraud (in the case of Exxon trying to minimize all aspects of the spill's impact) a real and vibrant likelihood. I've yet to read the 1990 Act--I intend to--but my impression is that the NRDA for which we're gathering information is a child of that law. And I'll repeat my hope that the public will have access to this information someday. We all deserve to. This spill is on the short list of world's worst environmental disasters, along with Chernobyl, Saddam's destruction of the Kuwaiti wells, Ixtoc, the loss of the Aral Sea and the ongoing devastation of the Niger delta.

In the meantime, I'll write about quality-of-life things, and ancillary stuff like the photos I've taken to posting. It's good to spread some general contextual info, and bring people a little closer to events down here, even if the science is off-limits for a while.

Aside from that, I do still have thoughts on the outside world...like, I'll never quite recover from the Celts losing in the Finals this year. One quarter. Kobe pushed Perk from behind in Game 6, which is why he landed awkardly on his left leg and blew out his ACL. And that may have been the difference, the loss of interior defense and rebounding. This hurt worse than the Giants beating the Patriots in '08. I feel a little badly for the bengal, who became a serious fan this year (even though we dropped cable 1/4 of the way into the season and couldn't watch any more games) and in the end was faced with a very bleak conclusion to the season.

I also think LeBrand made LeCopOut by joining DaWayne down in Miami. I do think more of Dwyane (the actual spelling of his name) for helping engineer this: that guy's a real baby-faced killer of a player, with far more on- and off-court shrewdness than most. Nothing like Granddaddy Bill Russell, of course, whose practice of taking Wilt out to dinner during series and thereby dulling his competitive edge is both established fact, and legendary. (Nobody will ever surpass Bill Russell for sheer wiliness.) But Dwyane seems to be respectably comparable. He's managed to convince a better player than he is to come join his team and be second fiddle. How about them apples!

As for LeBlah...I don't care if his team wins four, five, or eight championships. He gave up on himself.

On to some pictures!

I couldn't resist some nighttime shots, even despite the blurriness.

Even worse, but the lights on these drill rigs and ships are pretty spectacular.

Check out the smoke from the oil/gas flare, lit by the flare itself.

Saturday morning (July 10), a much clearer, less hazy day. From 10 km, where I took this shot, you'd've seen only impenetrable blue-gray haze on Friday.

A little closer in. That flare is just mean-looking. I read that the gas flares on platforms off of West Africa are so big and so fierce that the workers stationed there sleep in their fireproof suits.

City of Ships, from a distance.

Northwestern corner of the City, with the nearby Loch Rannoch ready to start receiving oil. BP is switching caps on the damaged well today, from the awkward, inefficient first-generation cap to a better-fitting and more permanent second generation cap which is predicted to be able to capture all of the outpouring gas and oil. We'll see.

Southern portion of the City, with the Q4000 and its oil/gas flare, and the DDII a bit to the right of that. Behind the DDII is the rising plume of smoke--hazy blue in the distance--from a surface oil burn, on the Gulf itself, miles away.

The closest I've come to an American morning snack yet--though it's about 3 in the afternoon. The cooks made donuts, but then decorated them with chocolate and, it looks like, peanuts. I scraped off the chocolate and peanuts and was left with a not-half-bad donut. Not quite as sweet as I like 'em (and I do enjoy plain donuts), but far from bad. And that's genuine coffee. From-the-bean, brewed coffee. Matt and I have come to depend on the little stash in the processing room.

Spectacular and Awful

2010-07-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

Our first day on the site, and we spent slightly less than half of it surveying. Our morning was occupied with routine safety, muster and abandon-ship drills, and then waiting for permission to enter the 5 nautical mile exclusion zone and begin working close to the rigs. And once we got permission, in we went.

As ever, part of me was eager to be a gawking touristy little boy, so I put my digital camera to use. Here's a selection:

The legendary A-Whale. This thing was apparently, as of late April, going to be just another run-of-the-mill supertanker, until the Deepwater blew up. Then its builders decided to convert it into a skimmer, which swallows polluted water at the bow, separates oil from water, and spits cleaned water (pretty clean, anyway) out the stern. They completed the conversion in two months. That, to me, is amazing. For the record, I have no idea if the A-Whale will remotely live up to its billing, and the scale of this spill is orders of magnitude beyond the capacity of all the world's skimmers, but hey, if you've got it, use it.

(And that applies to us and our sonar, too. Check out these apples!)

Smaller skimmers at work. Two boats haul a section of boom between them, and one boat pumps in fouled surface water. Unlike the A-Whale, the small skimmers have to haul the oily water to shore, where it's separated. A much less efficient process.

The skimmer again, closer up.

Oil in the water. It's all over the place near the well.

As the oil gets thicker, and goes from being a sheen-type slick to being mousse, it takes on a somewhat crusty look atop the water...and it also turns the foam brown.

One of the dozens of support vessels in the area which we had to navigate around. Those helipads over the bridge are fairly common among larger oilfield vessels--can't do anything good for the ship's stability in a storm!

City of Ships.

Weird support vessels for specialized missions like this. What the heck is that thing on the left, with the three orange tubs on a rack? I have no idea.

The Deepwater Driller III, or DDIII. It's drilling the kill bore which is supposedly just a few feet from intersecting the runaway well. It's also SIMOPS headquarters. That thing floats on gigantuous pontoons, just like the Deepwater Horizon did, just like the DDII nearby, and just like the Thunderhorse platform a few miles away (which almost sank in a hurricane a few years ago).

Another specialized support vessel, with lots of pipes and things, and a helipad too. Duuuude!

More skimmers. A lot of these skimming/recovery vessels are locals who've volunteered or leased their boats out. We spent most of the morning listening to a few chatty skimmers, locals who were having lots of fun wasting radio airtime talking about things. They weren't using boom, though, they were using another type of tool, pompom-type absorbers which basically just sponge up oil from the water. As one said to his buddy on air, "Just dip it in the water, swish it around 3 or 4 times, pick it up and put it in the bag. It's dirty...it's fun...it's funny...it's a job!"

The Q4000, a specialized production platform. The flames are a flare for the oil it's piping up from the sea floor. I read some very intelligent analysis (from my favorite commentator Fishgrease), that BP is pulling some (surprise, surprise) very elaborate fraud by means of this vessel. Rather than carefully separate water, oil and natural gas, BP is simply flaring the mixed oil and gas in haphazard fashion. Because separating them would mean the amounts can be measured, which means that much more definite amounts emerging from the well can be calculated, which would then be entered into evidence against BP in the upcoming court battles. And BP would rather keep important details like the amount spilled as nebulous and inadmissible as possible. I write this not because it's wild speculation--it's intelligent analysis by a longtime oilfield professional.

Still, fraud or no, that flare is pretty effing cool. Or the opposite of cool--blazingly hot. It was nearly 100 outside today, and we were 1.5 km away, so I wouldn't claim to have felt any heat fro the flame. But we could hear it. It sounded like when you take the hose off of a vacuum cleaner, and listen to the air being sucked in the intake. Only, you're a mile away. That stream of water is from a fire boat, to keep the flare pipe and deck cool. When the deck heats up to about 180 degrees or so, the guys ask to be doused with water.

Stern of the Discovery Enterprise, central vessel to this whole operation, and the one from which most operations have taken place. That flare is just methane.

Q4000, from the northeast. Note the flower pattern of the flames, and the glare on the midday water!

Discovery Enterprise, starboard side, from the northeast.

Closeup of the firey petals.

That is one angry-looking flower, don't you think?

Discovery Enterprise again.

Closeup of the Enterprise flare. Looks almost quaint compared to that circular monster on the Q4000.

The two drillers, DDII (nearground, right) and DDIII (background, left) from the west.

The Loch Rannoch, a specialized tanker hooked up to the blown-out well via pipes, and collecting oil.

DDII again.

Discovery Enterprise, portside, from the south.

Vadda FHREAKING mess, ahh?!

The two flares, from a distance.

Yet another of the Discovery Enterprise.

Mo' Photos!

2010-07-08T17:24:00.000-07:00

What can I say? I'm a country boy. Big machines shock and awe me, so I take pictures of them. I've posted some.

...though the machines are barely visible here, mostly a rosy post-sunset sky. I missed the sunset itself by two minutes, but the afterglow is no less amazing.

A cute little jack-up.

One of the bigger and fancier tenders you'll see. That two-tone orange and yellow color scheme, belonging to the Edison Chouest company, is a common sight: they're a bigtime contractor on the Gulf.

One half of the fabrication/staging building where tenders load up.

...the other half.

A big daddy jack-up. These things do the exploratory drilling (like the Deepwater Horizon was doing, only it was on pontoons, as it worked in much deeper water) in 300' or less of water. If the well is successfully completed, then the production company will build a stationary platform there and begin producing. But the work starts with a mobile jack-up.

Not sure what this boat does--it's not a science vessel, since those have open back decks and A-frames. It's sure not a tender, since those are basically pickup trucks. There are lots of pipes and what looks like pumping equipment on the lower deck--possibly it's associated with the cleanup effort.

Double- and triple-parking is common. You just need to cushion the boats and rig up your gangways...

The avenue.

A closeup of the avenue...those big spools in the center of the picture are on the order of ten feet in diameter.

Gators & Rain

2010-07-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

Louisana is the land of bayous. The whole southern part of the state is a swamp, with various portions built up to support roads and buildings. I haven't asked, but I'm guessing that almost everything built down here has been built on fill, since there are large, wide ditches between most roads and the yards of houses alongside them, as if some earth needed to be scooped up to create the drier land. At the very least--where fill was needed and where it wasn't--the water table isn't far below. On this most recent drive down to Fourchon, one of those road-yard ditches was overfull, and the houses' yards were underwater. The standing pond reached the doorstep of most houses along the way. I saw two kids playing in a rowboat in their front yard.

And where there's water, there are gators. Not to mention, where there's forest or underbrush, and yes, water, there are snakes. I'm starting to learn my snakes, to distinguish markings of the poisonous ones from the non-poisonous (and yes, some are quite similar. Nature has its mimics). But the main danger is from gators, in and near the water.

I was told, two years ago in Cameron, that there are so many gators around that I probably wouldn't make it alive from the hospital (where I'd been laid up for the night) to the port, a few miles away, by walking. It's hard to know, given the disdain many southerners feel for yankees like me, if I was being played, or if alligators are really that present a danger. Then there are the signs:

There's one like that at the roadside ditch separating the BP command center in Houma from the highway. (I'd photo it but I don't want to risk being tackled and jailed.) A drainage ditch, 20' wide, with an alligator warning. Is that just an inside joke or what? I guess not, but I just don't have much experience down here, so I'll take the warnings seriously.

Gators: there where you least expect them. If my coffee had weeds in it I'd probably leave the cup alone.

Then there's the rain. Warm air holds lots of moisture, and it's powerfully warm down here. Blue sky, with or without white clouds, is common. But just as common is building gray, when the moisture gathers into giant clouds which sweep in and deluge the area with pounding rain for minutes or the better part of an hour at a time. I've found it useful to keep a jacket with me at all times, sort of like how people keep breath mints handy. You just never know when you'll need it, you know?

Flight

2010-06-29T14:49:00.001-07:00

Back on land, in Houma, to meet with some colleagues tonight after some interesting days afloat. Simply being near the incident site, where so much massive equipment--the best the planet has to offer--is hardly able to cope with this disaster, is amazing. Improvising (intelligently, but still improvising) means to learn about the scale of the spill is fascinating and a challenge. And getting chased off the scene like flock of birds by a dog is different.

I learned, during my first unhappy stint in Louisiana, about the aftermath of a big hurricane. 20-foot tall piles of garbage, including siding to buildings, roofs, telephone poles, boats, trees and buses, lay scattered along the roadside throughout the southwestern part of the state. Telephone poles were wireless and leaning over, years after the storm's passage. Empty, half-wrecked buildings were common. The town of Cameron is still mostly swept away, with concrete pads marking where buildings and homes used to stand. The swamps smelled of decaying animals months after the previous storm.

This time, it's happening live. Tropical storm, soon to be hurricane, Alex is churning westward toward Mexico, having crossed the Yucatan in the last day. And even though the storm center is several hundred miles from here, the system covers the entire Gulf and the winds cleared out all but the largest ships from the incident site (and may well clear them out too, though it's starting to seem unlikely).

Start at the storm center, and head outward at about 1 o'clock. Continue about 1/8 inch past the Louisiana coastline, and that's roughly where I am right now, under those clouds.

We in the northeast simply don't comprehend the force and the scale and the terror of hurricanes. When they manage to touch our coasts, we lose some beaches, snicker at the richies who need to redo the first floors of their mansions, and otherwise suffer through a bad rainstorm with some broken branches. What we get in New England is a decrepit old man using a walker, compared to a wrestler in his prime they have to contend with down here in the Gulf. I'm starting to understand.