[Above photo: Do you think our civilization has gotten a little decadent?]

7 September 2022

In three days I’ll close the cabin and leave the island for the year, not returning until late May-early June 2023. Summer has been lovely. I’ve grown much closer to my daughter, as she has to me, apparently. And I’ve gotten to know my niece and sister much better.   I haven’t written The Great American Novel or kayaked to the head of the Bay of Fundy, but I feel pleased with my summer activities.

The mother hummingbird and her babies feed intensely on my sugar-water, allowing us to stand 18 inches away, viewing them through the porch screen. They have to battle small wasps at the feeder; the latter are not happy to share whereas the hummers couldn’t care less. Often I impatiently unlatch the screen, pull it back, and swat the wasps. I don’t have warm sentiment towards them, although I presumably should since they must fill an important niche in our life-chain. (I feel similarly inclined toward mosquitos, even though they don’t bother me much.)

For the next 3 days and nights there will be only me and Michael, the caretaker, on the island. I’ll spend Saturday night at Ari’s, treating myself to a cocktail and supper at the bar at the Brooklin Inn where Ari will be working, while my car charges at her house. Then off to Round Pond on Sunday to lunch with a friend from Berkeley and home to Portland.

My electrician, Ryan, will collect the slate tiles covering my rear patio this Saturday so I can plan and plant a garden. Tiles require no maintenance but are heat sinks and ugly.  Non-productive, as well. I’ll plant flowering native bushes and dwarf trees but shall leave room for some herbs and bee-friendly flowers.  It’ll be a nice spot to sit on a warm summer evening. 

I have especially enjoyed visits this summer from Ari and Jon, her boyfriend. He is serious about his photography and has two published books, with a third issuing next Spring. I greatly enjoy seeing them together, as they share a playful, affectionate relationship. We engage in death-dealing Bananagrams, each with our specialty.  Ari wins more often than not, Jon creates very long words, and I use Latin and middle-English to bemuse them. They both are wonderful cooks and we’ve slipped into a routine where they feed me and I provide the locale and do the dishes.  They foraged and found a bucket of chanterelles which Jon promptly sauteed in butter; I’d circled the island two days before and couldn’t find a single one.

Ari bought me a wonderful kayak-caddy with large wheels for my birthday. I really struggle to get my 16 foot-long 55# boat up the ramp from the beach. Since it is wood, I don’t drag it. I’ve researched other boats and have decided to purchase a smaller but wonderfully-designed sea kayak from a manufacturer in Wales. Jon has two of their boats and Ari has one. This model is beautifully crafted and light enough for me to put on my roof-rack. I’m determined to learn to Eskimo-roll automatically; Jon assures me that I can. Ari now can. It will make my forays that much safer.

I withdrew from my writing class at OLLI since I’ll miss 2 of the 5 monthly sessions and it seemed unfair to occupy one of only 10 spaces. 

My plans for Thailand are gaining definition. My two week therapy workshop will be in January with a practicum for an undefined time thereafter.  I plan to use my Rieger award money to underwrite it, unless I can land a grant. Inflation is staggering in Myanmar and the devaluation of the kyat would prohibit most students from attending. I’ll rent a large house where we can live, learn, and cook together, which will be fun and economical. Depending on covid, I’ll then take a bit of time to explore places in Thailand I haven’t visited. I expect I’ll teach a similar workshop by Zooming into Myanmar for CDM psychiatrists who cannot leave the country.

The Annals of Ageing

I’ll have cataract surgery in October and have an inguinal hernia repaired soon after. It has popped out—probably a knuckle of fat—2-3 times per year since 2016 but several times this summer. I like to lift things—boards, boats, bricks—and dislike the too-common consequence. This time it didn’t reduce easily and I can only imagine being far from medical care and unable to put things in their proper place.

I think Don has done it this time. Nuclear intelligence?!! And how many classified folders with their entire contents missing? I would have been in jail a year ago. He is so special? I hope the armed crazies on his team don’t start shooting. Enough nonsense is enough, Donald!

[Above photo:  My parents at home at Merrimont on Mercer Island outside of Seattle, circa 1948.]

31 August 2022

My dear friend of many years, Ed Levin, died peacefully at home yesterday. Prostate cancer, which was misdiagnosed as “benign” 6 months ago, had spread throughout his body. Still, his death was a surprise to me, as I expected to see him in a couple of months when I go to California. Wishful denial, it turns out, although his wife and loving companion, Robin, said everyone was caught off-guard, expecting him to continue to be available for lively discussions for many more months.

I first met Ed in 1980. He was a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist who had lobbied for an adolescent inpatient service at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley. [Because of the high quality of teachers and supervisors in the East Bay community, Herrick had an excellent psychiatry residency training program at that time, which was rather unusual outside of a university setting.]  I was the first medical director of the adolescent unit.

Ed was a remarkable convener of people. He initiated our child study group, which met monthly for supper and two hours of lively discussion of cases and consultation issues for many years [It continues.]. He was the chair of the Mentorship Committee of the regional child psychiatry organization, encouraging, assisting, and welcoming child psychiatrists in training and those newly-minted into the community. He chaired the Continuing Medical Education Committee for psychiatry at Alta Bates Hospital for many years, bringing national quality experts to speak at Grand Rounds three times per month. He even formed a retirees’ luncheon group, a mixed gathering from many disciplines, although he never actually retired.

On a more personal level, Ed and I discussed difficult cases. We happily socialized together with our wives. We had a call coverage group and met regularly for lunch to coordinate that. He prescribed marijuana for me when the chemotherapy for my lung cancer made eating impossible. He even screened a new romantic interest for me after my divorce: “What are your intentions with my friend George?” She passed with flying colors.

Ed was a tireless crusader for quality in our profession, hounding the leadership of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), especially when they bowed too low to Big Pharma. He published a number of articles in our field, including one demonstrating the superiority of a developmental approach, versus the reflexive use of medication(s), when helping disruptive, traumatized children and teens in residential care gain self-control.  Noticing some adolescents in his practice with anxiety about the risk of nuclear annihilation during the dark days of the Cold War, Ed started a committee to study and discuss the same at AACAP.

In recent years he served as a senior consultant for difficult cases to other psychiatrists in the community and took great pleasure in teaching and supervising clinical psychology graduate students at the Wright Institute in Berkeley.

In summation, and knowing that it will be inadequate, Ed was a kind, loving, loyal, smart, curious, principled, and tenacious man, an excellent friend and a valued colleague for me over many years. I shall miss him regularly.

Pause.

I lunched with a friend near the Portland waterfront on Sunday. We noticed two immense cruise ships unloading at piers. One was 990 feet in length, the other was 947 feet. The superstructures were staggering. The appeal of being trapped in a luxury hotel, afloat, for a week or more is minimal for me. It is worse than traveling the world, moving from fancy hotel to fancy hotel, insulated from the people and cultures against which one is supposedly there to rub. Add covid, norovirus, too many desserts, massive pollution, and careless captains and such a trip seems closer to hell than heaven.  This would be different from a small-boat river or canal cruise in Europe, for example, where you can disembark and walk or ride a bike along the towpath and into town.

I had great luck at the University of Southern Maine Glickman Library last Friday. It appears to provide me with full access to many of the major journals I want to search, retrieving interesting and topical papers for my students.   I’m formulating a two-week child and adolescent training program for psychologists, complete with practicum, that I’ll lead in Thailand in January/February.

I plan to make my visit to Thailand coincide with the seating of Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Joe Biden’s soaring popularity ratings as people allow themselves to recognize what he has done for the country and the working classes, and DT’s indictment, if not trial, for obstruction of justice and sedition. What did he plan to do with the documents? Sell them to the highest bidder, I’d guess, as making money for himself is never far from his intentions.

[Above photo: Gaby and Michael, including their two dogs, sailing the Bay in Blue Onion, their yacht.  I suspect they have more fun and laughter on theirs than Jeff Bezos will on his. One of the dogs, who love to go on the boat, fell in.]

12 August 2022

Summer is winding down. While it is still warm and pleasant during the day, the nights are crisp. I keep the window at the head of my bed cracked so I can enjoy the pure, cool air. That is never the case in the tropics, ever, unless c/o Carrier.

Connie and Harold arrive tomorrow for 5 days. I had a dream last night in which I was running a gathering at Harvard for incoming freshmen (First years?). I was pretty casual about my role until I realized that the meeting had a lot of potential: to assuage anxiety, to alert them to the 4 year banquet before them, to help them to pursue their interests and develop their talents, etc. It amazed me, in my dream, that upon taking responsibility for running the meeting, a flood of useful ideas came to me.

Upon awakening, my associations led me to when I was a freshman, not feeling confident of my intellect and being totally unsure of what I wanted for myself from the experience. I was content to work hard at what I was told to do, not at all the explorer I would later become. It would be helpful, I think, to have a high school class on “The Rest of Your Life” or some such. Some way to catch the attention of the student, to help them develop their curiosity and feel adequate to venture into new territory(s). And to recognize the amazing opportunities offered to an undergraduate. I think the prompt for the dream was because Harold has always appeared to have that intellectual confidence, curiosity, and drive.

Bernard Shaw’s “Education [alternately, “Youth”] is wasted on the young.” [and its corollary, “Wealth is wasted on the old.”] reflects a chronic dilemma. We want to educate our young but many are too young (inexperienced) to appreciate and fully exploit the opportunity.  In a way, the European (and Asian/African) system makes sense. Go to professional/trade/technical school right out of high school. Those who are unready to truly open their minds can learn, follow the rules, master the subjects taught them. Later, they can “develop” themselves more fully. Even as I say this, it sounds like nonsense. In developing countries youth don’t first go to liberal arts colleges before professional or technical schools because it saves a few years of education and moves them into the workforce more rapidly and efficiently.

Beto O’Rourke’s campaigning profile in the Times today was very moving. He has been driving furiously over the vast expanse of red-state Texas to hold campaign rallies in tiny towns in hopes of garnering a few more votes, anticipating the predictable harassment by Trumpers, who constitute the vast majority of the population, clinging to their open carry, AR-15’s, and abortion bans.

Trump’s use of fear to sew chaos and division has been remarkably effective in the American populace. I wonder what de Tocqueville would make of it. “Caravans” of Central American migrants crossing Mexico to “invade” the US. “Scary” Muslims. And so forth, while he cozies up to truly scary dictators and his son-in-law lands a 2 billion dollar investment from the Saudis. And what does MBS expect from Jared, who has little investing experience and almost sank the Kushner real estate enterprise with a previous ill-advised purchase?  Demon rum may be the Devil’s work but Money is truly the root of much evil.

[I am so uninspired that I should probably deep-six this post!]

I had a lovely afternoon yesterday. My distant cousin (the age of a niece) is on the island for a week with her 8yo son, especially to visit her mother who spends her summers here. I offered to take the two of them to Butter Island in Tern, our speedy launch. To get the boat off the mooring I took a tiny (child’s) sit-on-top kayak which I am sure I used last summer for the same purpose. We’d need a vessel at the other end when I’d anchor the boat after dropping them ashore. 10 feet from shore I decided the kayak was too tippy and, confirming my observation, it overturned as I attempted to return to the beach. Soaking, I dragged it ashore and was pleased I had stowed my phone in a small dry-bag within my backpack, although I hadn’t thought to include my wallet.

I carried a more capable plastic kayak to the water and, dripping, retrieved Tern, picking them up at the dock. Hugh steered the entire way and was a model helmsman, paying full attention to the task, avoiding the lobster buoys in our path. Upon arriving at the beach on Butter, I left them on shore, set Tern’s picnic anchor, and paddled the more stable kayak to land. Others were there with small boats, several were swimming, and there were even two who were camping, having arrived by stand-up paddleboard.

We walked the beach and headed into the woods on the marked trail up a hill. Tom Cabot, whose family owns the island and who cruised these waters for years, died in 1995.  A granite bench, inscribed with a likeness of his sailboat, was placed by helicopter on the top of a ridge from which it is possible to view many of the islands of Penobscot Bay.

Before we hiked up, I told Hugh that I had a surprise I thought he’d enjoy when we got to the top. I brought out a parabolic nylon kite and, after a few attempts, Hugh managed to fly it high above us. When we’d had enough we reeled it in, descended, climbed on the boat, and zipped back to our island. Hugh asked, “Maybe someday I can be the boat driver for the island?” I affirmed that he surely could if he wished and if he practiced a lot when he was here.

It was a nice afternoon. Children are the future. Hearing of the floods, fires, and droughts worldwide, I wonder how that will be.

[Above photo: Three blueberry bushes and the path to the compost. ]

14 August 2022

We hear so often of politicians that they have done so-and-so, “thinking of their legacy”. Sports figures, at least those very few who are at the pinnacle of pinnacles in their chosen activity, are concerned about their legacy. How many Super Bowl rings, how many NBA championships, how many Grand Slam titles?  I suppose with the death of Bill Russell and Serena’s retirement from tennis, I think more of this. And famous scientists, movie stars, all manner of prominent people.  We all want to be remembered.

This is on my mind as I just read a biographical sketch of Norbert Rieger, the child psychiatrist in whose name I’ll get an award in October. In brief, after fleeing Austria and Italy for America in 1938, he desperately attempted to bring his wife and children but failed. They perished in a Nazi camp. He then dedicated himself to working with severely disturbed, often psychotic, children, helping to find their humanity and creating healing programs for them that became national models.  That seems to me to be a legacy with which I can identify, one that is fully human, fashioned with kindness, curiosity, intelligence and tenacity. Not so easily quantifiable as 7 Super Bowl rings but surely a fuller measure of the man.

I was discussing climate change with my niece last night—who better?!  She suggests that if all the ice melts, the sea will rise some 400 feet. With just a 20 or 30 foot rise—the collapse of a large Antarctic ice shelf  or part of the Greenland ice cap— there would be death, chaos, loss, and massive displacement of populations in the world. In thinking about our future on this island, it would seem prudent to consider selling now and buying on a lake—no tides, easily accessed, much less expensive infrastructure, and so forth. My thought is that I couldn’t easily focus on my summer retreat if the world is collapsing. She makes the good point that the world is currently collapsing. True, enough, and I find it difficult now to tolerate my relative ease and security with much of the world’s population desperate for survival.

I enjoy my time here immensely, both sharing it with others and being solitary. Just as I am nearly hypnotized by the current political show, the scoff-laws and would-be tyrants parading their lies, if the drama of climate collapse is even more ever-present, it would seem impossible for my conscience to tolerate my summer retreat while others have no roof. And it isn’t that my not having it helps anyone. It’s just how I’m built.

Being all too human, I treated myself to a box of fresh figs this week. With all the mangos, mangosteen, and passion fruit in the tropics, I’d forgotten how much I love figs. Across the levee road from our first home, situated on the Sacramento River, was the foundation of a farmstead.  Nearby was an immense fig tree, abandoned and neglected except for the many ground squirrels who were eagerly eating the fruit. In season my wife and I gathered as many as we wanted, gorging on them. A ripe fig is a marvel, one of Nature’s special gifts. I don’t recall if we ever cooked them, so delicious were they fresh, their flesh nearly jellied and a deep brownish-maroon. 

I visited new friends’ for supper. She’s a child psychiatrist and he was in, I think, IT. He previously lived on Peaks Island, commuting the 3 miles to Portland by kayak each day. Now retired, he built a jewel box of a modern house near me in Portland.  The roof-deck has a view of Casco Bay and, you guessed it, Peaks Island. But the real stunner is his woodworking.  In a modest basement room he has a full commercial lathe, table and band-saws, a planer-joiner, and other tools, mechanized and hand, of the trade. He has focused on funriture and turning hardwood bowls of various sizes. They are spectacular, even as he talks about the imperfections that he (not I) can see in them. The processes of completing a bowl appear to be all-consuming in a meditative way that would leave me feeling calm and satisfied.  I had just wanted to see his design for a workbench!  Hidden talents, they must be everywhere, people who can focus their passions intensely so that they develop remarkable skills and create things of great beauty and utility. It is too easy to squander our gifts, rather than to develop them. We comply with the purveyors of objects and media to our own impoverishment. It can be quite a struggle to resist or limit ourselves. It is interesting, because these distractions are such recent, and recently accelerating, phenomena.

You heard it here first! If it is really getting hot for the Donald, and the temperature appears to be rising, I predict he’ll head to Saudi Arabia with nuclear secrets. They’ll reward him handsomely with a palace and limitless MacDonalds, refuse his extradition, and he’ll attempt to exert his influence over the GOP and his minions virtually from there.  The irony is that after many failed business ventures, DT has found something he’s exceptional at: creating fear, division, and illusion.

Clouds, especially in an otherwise clear blue sky, can appear surprisingly substantial. It makes some sense that theologically-inspired painters of old would place a throne and their chosen be-robed, wild-haired, bearded man sitting on it in the midst of a great cloud. But why did they choose a man, not a woman, to be the Supreme Being? Just one of numerous flaws in the Tale, a reflection of the strategic dominance of men in creating the legend.

Of my legacy….what?  “He played a poor hand well [with help].” seems self-pitying, even though there is truth in it. “He loved children.” sounds creepy.  “On balance, he was good man. Not perfect but he sought redemption for his failings through good works.”  It beats serial infidelity, 30,000 lies, and an insurrection!

[Above photo: Heading for South Brooksville in the fog.]

9 August 2022

If a nearly-82 year old man says he wants to dig a 50 foot long 18 inch deep trench for an EV charger conduit and wire (or for anything else), call the Mental Health Crisis Team.  What possessed me? I am accustomed to doing things myself—-plumbing, tune-ups (in the old days), construction. I didn’t know a laborer to hire, nor did my electrician. I thought it would help give me some shoulder strength as I learn Eskimo rolls in my kayak. And I recall digging ditches or holes for leaching fields, septic tanks, sprinkler systems, and endless fence posts when I was in my late teens and early 20’s. Then in my 60’s, digging alongside others, the 25- 4’ deep x 4’ diameter holes for the concrete piers to support my Maine cabin. And we were pressed since the builders would arrive to frame the house in a few weeks and the piers needed time to cure.

It turns out that I am no longer in my 20’s or, even, 60’s. I returned from the island to Portland 2 days ago, in the midst of a record-smashing heat spell. It was a bit cooler yesterday afternoon as I began to dig across my parking lot. It was impenetrable and I returned to Maine Hardware for a pickax which I used to soften the compacted, rocky soil. With a trenching spade I was able to gradually deepen the ditch until I hit—wood?  Ever the optimist, my first thought was how to equitably distribute the cache of gold doubloons which I’d soon discover in the buried wooden chest.  Sad to say, it was the stump of a hardwood tree, buried in 5 inches of soil squarely in the middle of my path.

Electrical code reminds us that there can be no more than 360 degrees of turn for buried cable from the time it enters the soil until it exits.  Perhaps the electricity becomes confused and heads in the wrong direction or establishes an electrical field that will cause your vehicle to swerve. To understand, I mean deeply, the movement of electrons through a wire challenges many of us. My sister, as a young adult, subscribed to the theory that if you removed a bulb from its socket and turned on the electricity, the latter would flow out into the room. (My brother, Roger, loved to prey on her gullibility, since she, by self-admission, had been pretty awful to her usurper when he was young.) Circling, however warily, around the stump was not an option.

Plus, there was to be a jog between the patio and the edge of the pavement which required not only two 22.5 degree angles but a 3.5 foot long, 18 inch deep tunnel beneath the asphalt. Stumped by the stump, I turned my considerable digging talents to tunneling. [Think of the immense borers used for the Chunnel and how they came from France and England and met, spot on, in the middle.] Pretty quickly I was up to my elbow, working with a trowel at both ends and bumping into huge stones that I couldn’t remove.  Oh, and lying in the dirt, occasionally resting my cheek on the latter, consumed by the futility of it all. What really must have puzzled my neighbors, was when this old man decided that crossing the parking lot was a fool’s mission and I re-filled the ditch, now 12’ deep, demoralized, sweaty, and exhausted.

I re-sited the charger at the gate to my patio, a simple 25’ straight run through sand and gravel with only one granite slab under which to bore. At 6:50 this morning I was hard at it and had the ditch and the post-hole dug by 8:30AM when Ryan, my fit, competent, pony-tailed certified electrical contractor arrived. “That looks great. I’ll take it from here.” Welcome words, indeed. It’s only 11AM but I can’t wait for him to finish and leave so I can take a nap. I suppose that acting on my fantasy that I am still a youngster does make me risible to some, a silly old man.

My brother and his son, with the latter’s wife and a friend, spent a week on the Island. We had fun dining together and found plenty to talk about, although avoiding politics altogether since there could have been some sparks. I am very slow at learning to distinguish between what I can and cannot alter in a person I care about and ignoring the “cannots”. It is good to have goals and that is one for me, with each of my siblings. I am not as dispassionate about ”seeing things differently” as that phrase implies if the issues are really important to me. 

I am so glad to see my daughter as happy as she is.  Her lifestyle is, to say the least, pretty unconventional by my ancient standards—-get your education, get a job and move up or develop a professional identity and deepen it, start a company, marry, 1.7 children, etc. Then I see what a free bird she is, how she constantly thinks about and learns from the world, how she is creative, and, mostly, how she is enjoying her life and doing kind things for her friends. We could use a few more like her, I think.

I’ll shout “Let’s go, Biden!” from the rooftops because the man, is spite of his age, has overseen the passage of amazingly significant legislation during his term, all while the GOP seems apoplectic with rage and desire for revenge, heedless of their best interests. Deprive veterans of health care and disability benefits for illnesses accrued while having to tend military burn-pits? Prevent women’s choice and control of their own bodies? Not support a revival of chip manufacturing in the US? And try, ever so hard, to support the petroleum czars and block climate change legislation? Are you all nuts? Talk about digging, how about your own graves and that of the antediluvian GOP?  Clinging to that leaky boat, rather than swimming to safety on a near shore, seems an exercise in self-annihilation. It is advisable to be on the right side of Progress. 

Imagine, all my whining about digging a ditch one afternoon and the next morning. Most people in the world do hard physical labor much of their lives.

I wonder what was in the safe and what was in Alex Jones’ text messages in addition to a nude photo of his wife he sent to Roger Stone. Did she consent?

[Above photo: A clear view of the pier, gangway, and float from my porch.]

31 July 2022

NPR aired an interview with the Director of the Islamic Relief Society about refugees from the turmoil in Somalia. He was speaking about a 500,000 person camp in (?) Kenya where food and water are in very short supply. 70 babies have died in the past week. People trekked there with no food or water for 7 days—is that even possible, to survive 7 days in that climate without water?  NGO’s are not able to fulfill the basic life needs of the largely elderly, women, and children in the camp.

Meanwhile, in Myanmar, many are supporting the armed groups (PDF or People’s Defense Force) contesting the ruling military, to their great peril. Chinese have supplied the military with software to monitor phone, email, and social media communications, as well as facial recognition programs. How effectively these are implemented is unknown to me but the level of fear and the courage to overcome it among the dissidents must be considerable, especially since the formal executions have recently begun. Of course, the junta has been executing protesters informally, shooting into crowds and abducting opposition leaders from their homes, since the third week of February 2021, three weeks after the coup.

I am becoming irascible, less charitable with my family and more angrily outspoken. I don’t like it. I don’t feel depressed, although there are ample reasons for that. One of my dearest friends has started treatment for cancer that has spread all over his body, in part as a conclusion of a missed diagnosis 6 months ago. That figures into my feelings, clearly.

However, I think I am overloaded with media and messages. We seem unable to stop striving and killing. Women aren’t allowed to have control over their bodies. The Catholic Church is reportedly putting millions of dollars into a campaign in Kansas to make abortion illegal. I am sick that Donald Trump is walking free; why doesn’t that cheeseburger-chomping ball of lard keel over with a heart attack?  I am irritable.

I shall be given the Charlotte and Norbert Rieger Award for Service Program Excellence at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in October. I’ll give a talk about my work in Myanmar and create a quotation for publication. I have valued the Academy as a professional home, although I have disagreed with its direction at times. For example, the “medicalization” of psychiatry, which means primarily giving pills like other physicians, has been a big error. Most psychiatric trainees these days do not emerge capable of conducting psychotherapy. This is a change over the past 40 years. It is part of why I loved my work in Malawi and in Myanmar, as I could give full voice to the power of “the talking cure”. The judicious use of medications is always part of my training.

The porch of my house faces east and is warmed by the rising sun early each morning. There are two bamboo rollup shades to keep the brightness out of our eyes as we sit in one of the three very comfortable hanging hammock chairs, drinking coffee and looking down the meadow towards the harbor. I discovered the chairs at the Blue Zebra, a little resort occupying a tiny island in Lake Malawi. I had their manufacturer in Johannesburg courier a set of 4 to Cape Town where I visited family, bringing the chairs home in a suitcase.

The meadow changes color each year, depending on the amount of rainfall. Sometimes it is green; at others it is a deep purple. This year with the drought it is golden. I mentioned to an amateur biologist friend that it recalled ‘Christina’s World’, the famous Andrew Wyeth painting. He noted that it wasn’t surprising, since the grass species is identical in both Maine sites.

My lady hummingbird friend is hard at it, feeding her brood and chasing intruders from the feeder. The latter leave with the haste and chagrin of a stranger fleeing through the back door after you discover them at your fridge drinking milk from a carton, like the opening scene of “The Big Lebowski” but without Jeff Bridges’ indifference.

Within her tiny body, which weighs less than an ounce, lives more beautiful, complex, and sophisticated machinery than anything we’ll ever design or construct. Intelligence, guidance systems, and reproductive capacity, in addition to everything else. Does her manufacture or operation damage the environment? On the contrary, she likely is a pollinator and her tiny droppings fertilize wherever they fall.

It seems important for Us to manipulate the environment, to assert our power over it, to even attempt to conquer it. It feels too passive to simply live, love, and bear witness. We must best our neighbor, the rest be damned. We strive for inequality, with ourselves on top. And ease and often glittery, luxurious objects, not unlike our monkey ancestors.

Science can be used to bear witness, to simply understand what is happening. However, without activating the advances in public health and medical knowledge we’d live about 35 years. We need a new paradigm to guide and limit our manipulation of the environment.

The Gross National Happiness quotient of Bhutan seemed magical and unreal when I first heard of it: A   country measuring its progress by considering the well-being of all of its citizens?! Newly reading about the massive importance of the underworld of fungi for the health of trees and for carbon sequestration, it seems our ambition should be to live in harmony with the natural world and all of its inhabitants, like many of our ancestors.

Their convictions formed before the Industrial and Information Ages and, once having driven a Tesla or texted a friend, it’s difficult to roll the clock back. Thank goodness there are eoclogists and environmentalists, including those mycologists tramping around Chile sampling the soil to map the mycological genome, to remind us of what we are destroying

Then there is Senator Ted Cruz fist-bumping Senator Chris Daines after they blocked passage of a bill to provide medical and other support to military victims of toxic fumes from the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost as good as Ted’s flight to Cancun in winter during the Texas electrical grid failure, when people in Texas were freezing to death. Not as funny as the montage of Senator Josh Hawley’s solidarity fist and then fleeing like a scared bunny on January 6.  What low specimens we have directing our government. Give a man free-will, (a bit of) intelligence, and an elected office and see what a mess he can make of our lives.

I’ll take hummingbirds. And all the “good” people, of course. It would improve my attitude to stop reading the Times and the Post, but I won’t.

[Above photo: Awkward looking? Amateur construction? All true but a durable platform for a splendid outdoor solar shower.]

24 July 2022

Summer is half done: medium rare, I guess. I zipped to Buck’s Harbor this morning to retrieve Ari and Jon. The Seaway skiff with a 70hp Yamaha outboard makes for a short trip. It’s hard for me to imagine this wonderful, reliable, and quiet engine is manufactured by the same company that produced our resonant, melodious upright piano. The water was calm for the trips in and out; there is a breeze now and it would have been a wetter, rougher ride even 2 hours later.

I’m reading a collection of short stories by Nadine Gordimer, the remarkable Booker and Nobel Prize- winning S. African writer.  Burger’s Daughter is a novel we read in our colonial/post-colonial reading group. I was not captivated at first but by the end was swept away by the power of her writing. These are similarly impressive, so finely nuanced and revealing of the currents of human nature (frailty, really).

She expresses our strengths, weaknesses, our courage and lack thereof almost offhandedly, so naturally are they revealed. She has no need to tie up characters or stories with a bow. It is so different from reading, say, Midnight’s Children by Salmon Rushdie. His characters are often quite monolithic, caricatures really, unless he wants to surprise you when they switch passions abruptly.  Gordimer infuses complexity, indecision, and quiet surprise, nothing flashy or glittering.  Her writing ultimately provides many more moving moments.

I want to spend a couple of the Maine winter months this year in Thailand where I plan to teach my students in person. Fulbright no longer lists Burma (The US State Department doesn’t recognize ‘Myanmar’; the name was coined by the former ong-term military dictator, General Ne Win.) as a Fulbright site because of the the military coup and subsequent civil war. The universities have mostly reopened but are staffed by military sympathizers. No Scholars will be sent to the country. I made a plea that they consider my application as special, since I continue to work there virtually, I have a strong positive history and many connections there, and there is great need to train practitioners to help with the newly traumatized population. We’ll see. I expect I’ll go on my own dime if I don’t get a grant.

It is drier than I have ever seen it here. The well is hardly filling. When I pumped this morning the well had been untouched for 16 hours and I still had only a foot or so of water to pump.  Usually it would be 4 feet to pump and would fill instantly after completion. The trees all look fine and the 3 blueberry bushes I planted are burdened with fruit. There appear to be many fewer itchy caterpillars than last year and almost no mosquitos, which may cause trouble for some bird species.  Our caretaker saw a family of 5 mink cavorting in the meadow. They eat the [monogamous] prairie voles and when that population drops, the mink swim off to another island to exercise their particular form of family planning.

As a sign of Nature’s resilience and intelligence, the mother hummingbird I fed last summer has returned. She hatched 4 or 5 little ones who sparred in child-like hummingbird ways around my feeder in late August and September. Ari visited on several weekends before my arrival and the mother kept stopping by and checking for the feeder. “What’s up? Where is it?” Now that it is filled and hung, she is feeding like crazy from it. I hope to see another brood late in August. Imagine, they all leave North America at the end of summer for Central America. They winter from Mexico to Panama, depending. Their mass exodus is unrelated to distaste for the current group of Republican cowards, fearful of speaking truth to lies.  Tiny, pugnacious snips of iridescent beauty.  My brother and his wife feed them religiously each summer when they are on the island.

The sound of her flight as she approaches and leaves the feeder reminds me that as we returned from S. Brooksville, we saw a motor yacht, “Miss Molly” from Orrington ME, anchored off of Round Beach.  There were 4 or 5 people on the beach who we assumed were picnicking. Then we heard a buzzing overhead, clearly a drone. We quickly took the boat around and I announced that they were welcome to enjoy the beach but that they shouldn’t use drones over our property. Drones are magical fun and allow us to indulge in our universal curiosity about what others of the species are doing.  But they feel incredibly invasive to this object. Most likely it was an unthinking teenager, but it is not a nice thing to do, invading someone’s privacy. I had fantasies of lining one up in a telescopic sight and making it vanish, if I had such a weapon.

It is hard to grasp that our then-President chose not to intervene, in any positive way, with the attack on Democracy. He only further incited the mob with his tweet about the VP lacking “courage to do the right thing” but otherwise planted his fat butt in the [presidential] dining room [most likely with burgers, chips, and Coke] to watch the mayhem on TV for over 3 hours.  If that isn’t treasonous collusion, defining the latter is impossible.  “Only the good die young.”

Jon and Ari are fishing for mackerel at the moment.  Jon made a divine dish with fileted fresh-caught mackerel last weekend. I can only hope for the same tonight. I’m sleepy, mid-afternoon. A nap sounds good. I’ve vowed to circle the island daily, unless the weather is foul. I’ll generally do it in a kayak but possibly in a dory or on foot. I want to build some upper body strength before asking Jon to teach me to roll in my kayak. He can do it all day, remarkably. I once took a course to learn it, using small white-water kayaks in the Richmond Plunge. I was successful but it wasn’t easy. And the water was warm.  And I was 30 years younger!

[Above photo: My final rocket display over Casco Bay for the season.]

18 July 2022

I have returned to our island in Penobscot Bay. We’ve definitely launched into a new cycle here. Several, actually. There are very few young children in the immediate family, which is a huge change. Many of the late ‘teens or young adults aren’t wild to spend their holiday time here, among aging adults and demands for their labor. Also, the costs of house and dock maintenance, boat purchase and storage, and, in general, summer operations have risen considerably over the past 10-15 years. It was a stretch for my brother and is becoming so for me. I can do it, but it will mean less for my kids at my demise and it is beginning to feel like too much of a luxury in a world falling down.

In addition, as my niece, an accomplished PhD oceanographer, suggested today, if a huge Antarctic ice shelf calves or a large piece of the Greenland ice cap slips into the sea, our well water will be saline, our shoreline eroded, and two of our houses and the barn will be inundated. Britain, Wales, France, and Spain currently have record high temperatures.  Our thirst for fossil fuels steadily climbs, worsening whatever natural cycle may or may not be occurring. And there is no international climate accord or commensurate action, despite dire warnings from virtually all unbiased climate scientists and the leaders of the UN.  Developed nations have reneged on our promise to give billions to developing countries to even the playing field. The latter, of course, are not the cause of our climate catastrophe but they will suffer more, and sooner, than we who have caused or largely contributed to it. Many are experiencing terrible consequences already. We are skidding at high speed over a cliff, it seems.

There has even been talk of selling the island and using the proceeds to buy a family compound on an inland lake, which would be more easily accessible and much less expensive to maintain. Still, my mother came here at 9yo in 1913 and my father bought her an undivided half in 1926. My children, and a host of other relatives, have grown up here in the summers. It has the gravestones of our deceased family members. I have limitless memories of a great variety attached to the island. I suppose I can keep them alongside all the others that won’t be repeated.

I saw Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” which I recommend to all. It is a close-up look at youthful attraction and vulnerability in a sweet, warm way. Show that to the dictators of the world, the moguls and would-be tyrants.  It is so appealing it will make them abandon their selfish and cruel acquisitiveness in favor of directing their energy and talents toward accessing true love. Well, probably not or they wouldn’t be who they were, but the film moved me. I later saw “Before Sunset”, part 2 of the trilogy, which was very interesting in its own way but contained less of the magic of uncomplicated new, young love.  

I cannot understand the summary judgement of the followers of the GOP that the lies, treachery, and sedition, the attempt to overthrow a peaceful transition of power by multiple, including violent, means, doesn’t trump (Sorry!) all other matters at this moment. Or that the high price of gasoline and food, which by the way is worldwide and caused by forces well beyond the control of any single president, will cause many people to ignore all other issues and vote for a party whose signature legislative accomplishment, according to them, was a tax-break for the corporations and ultra-wealthy.  It has not resulted in business expansion or trickle-down to middle and working-class Americans. We are prey to irrational fears (immigrants, “replacement”), the demands of our organized religions, and the trope that any change of leadership will be for the better, which is demonstrably false.

My daughter, Ari, and her boyfriend, Jon, are here. At the moment, after kayaking miles and practicing their rolls and self-rescues for 4 or 5 hours, they are in a rowboat in the rain fishing for our supper. They know about foraging in Maine and retrieve great bounty from the woods in Summer and Autumn. Matsutake mushrooms, as an example. They are the Japanese pine mushrooms that 15 years ago sold fresh for $35/pound at the BerkeleyBowl. They have never been successfully cultivated and in the Pacific Northwest they are so valuable that gangs of armed men stake out territory on the slopes of Mt. Rainier to harvest them. They are fabulously fragrant. When we lived in San Francisco and Berkeley, in the Fall we’d generally get a call from United Airlines that we had a package at the freight terminal. Poki’s parents generously shared some of their matsutake foraging, gently wrapped in fir tips.

Jon completed culinary academy and is a fabulous cook. They’ll do something special tonight, I know. Last night was penne pasta with a garlic-butter-squash sauce topped with steamed broccolini and parmesan. So delicious!

I arrived expecting to have a full complement of clothing, as I keep it all here. I’d forgotten that at the end of last year my room was redolent of an animal’s den, so I took all the shoes and clothing I’ve warn and worked in for years ashore. Some I tossed, some I washed, and the latter I stored in Ari’s attic.  When  arrived here I realized that I have no underpants, no pajamas, no long pants, etc. I’ll fetch them in a day or two from her home. The main thing is, it really doesn’t matter. I can wash my one pair of underpants in the evening and they’ll be dry by morning. It is so quiet and peaceful, so glorious not to have a car within 6 ½ miles (the mainland).   I doubt we’ll sell.

[Above photo: Another rocket’s display. ]

10 July 2022

The following ad on NPR holds intriguing possibilities.

“C3AI. Allowing companies to solve previously unsolved problems through Artificial Intelligence at enterprise scale. C3AI.”

Why should the problems be limited to those of companies? How about marital discord? Chronic eczema or hemorrhoids?  Should I buy an electric vehicle? Do maroon socks go with a yellow tie? (No!) Territorial disputes—-did Russia try C3AI before invading Ukraine? (I doubt it, somehow.)  Is French language and culture truly superior to all others? All leading to the overwhelming question (Not J. Alfred Prufrock’s)—-Does God exist? If so, is he white? Perhaps variably hued, like an octopus or chameleon. Is he, a he? Does s/he speak and understand ALL spoken languages? Will s/he seriously attend to the plaintive performative piety of a high school football coach summoning his team to prayer on the 50 yard line after each game?

If C3AI can provide useful answers to these dilemmas, sign me up!

I was walking with a friend at the Audubon Gilsland Farm today when it struck me why so many of us privileged people find it difficult to think in detail about the problems of the world. There we were, strolling through lovely peaceful meadows and leafy woods, hearing birdsong, feeling the soft warm breeze, and experiencing no sense of immediate worry. And yesterday, as I sailed with a friend through the islands of Casco Bay and we came unpleasantly close to ramming into a sunken ledge, it was through our own negligence, not because we were hungry, hunted, or fleeing in terror. When I returned home I realized I hadn’t even remembered to lock the front door.

The thoughts of my affluence, security, leisure, pleasure, and comfort contrast dramatically with the dire circumstances of hunger, thirst, poverty, deception, and threat from which many, if not the majority, of the world’s inhabitants suffer.  The desire for a good education, which is obtainable by most here, is burning yet unrequited for the majority of youth in the developing world.  For those of us in the developed world who have lived in the period following World War 2 to the present, our security, mobility, and prosperity are anomalies in the history of the world, although we accept the same as “normal”.

To think of most of the world, the “Have-nots”, in the midst of my Plentitude sets up a cognitive dissonance for me. Even if I give some of my time and some of my money to help them, it doesn’t feel enough as long as I am regularly enjoying what they don’t have. It makes me and most people, I imagine, want to look away, to think abstractly about the issues, or to deny them altogether.

On another note, if a company is dysfunctional in the area of sexual harassment, it’s helpful to look to the leadership. If people have poor work habits and that is tolerated, look to the leadership. If a country devolves into hatred, armed hooliganism, racial supremacy, and serial dishonesty, look to the leadership.

Just as we are capable of such amazing creativity, as well as repeated acts of mercy, kindness, and generosity, humans are also obviously able to turn our destructive tendencies to terrible ends. Tigers kill to eat, to establish their status in their family group, and to defend their immediate territory, as do others in the various families of carnivorous predators.  Humans kill widely to express diffuse or specific anger, for philosophical differences, and to gain power, an abstract form of territorial supremacy and hierarchy, I guess. But given our endless capacity for destructive behaviors, why do we allow individuals to arm themselves with powerful weapons and to carry them among us? Furthermore, why are many satisfied with the explanation that this is an expression of Freedom?  And the statement that these semi-automatic people-killers are “sporting rifles”? Which sport is that? I get that the politicians are paid off by the gun manufacturers who are making a fortune. But I am puzzled that so many people, who are not getting donations or kick-backs, seem hypnotized by the rhetoric.  I’ve never held or fired an AR-15; perhaps it is exhilarating beyond comprehension, like an orgasm.

Portland remains a sweet, civil, and pretty town. There is a considerable number of homeless people. There will always be those who cannot fit in or support themselves or for whom it is a great struggle. We have to provide them with respectable food, clothing, shelter, and training, even as our society must help the other Vulnerables.  Even though it is difficult for some to accept the help, we must offer it if we are to call ourselves “Civilized”. Yet the protests from many people of means seem endless.  If not caring for the vulnerable among us, what, then, does “civilized” mean?  Good table manners?  Brushing your teeth? Writing “Thank you” notes? Not cursing?

[Above photo: The Rockets’ Red Glare]

5 July 2022

I heard a wonderful NPR interview two days ago with Annette Gordon-Reid, a Harvard law professor and historian who wrote, among other books, On Juneteenth and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.  Her warmth, poise, and capacity to contain the contradictions in discussing Thomas Jefferson were breathtaking. Reading from his writings and other historical documents, she brightly illuminated his struggles with being a slaveholder, espousing equality, and fathering several children by Sally Hemings, his (initially 16yo) slave.  She told the tale of Ms. Hemings accompanying Jefferson to Paris, where she was a free person, there being impregnated by him, and deciding to return to slavery in America for multiple and complex reasons with a remarkable grace and complexity.  That a black woman could speak of slavery and its evils so knowingly yet evenly amazed me. I confess I have wondered at times why the Blacks of this country haven’t organized and risen up to slaughter the Whites as we have them, given the cruelty, humiliation, and unfairness that they have suffered. Yet Professor Gordon-Reid seemed to be living at a level of grace and enlightenment far above my own. (Recall that the Black Panthers were a social service organization, providing meals, health care, and education to their communities; their smaller but better-known armed groups were defensive and violent only in response to violence visited upon them.)  I think that the Black Experience in this country has, of necessity, deeply tutored many in understanding, patience, and compromise.  We desperately need their skills and wisdom to help guide us out of our current political and spiritual crisis. 

The most striking and personally useful aspect of her interview for me was noting her ability to find and value truly wonderful qualities of a person without neglecting to give the bad sides their full due, elevating ambivalence to a virtue.

I mentioned hearing Professor Gordon-Reid to a friend, a senior Child Psychiatrist, yesterday evening. He laughed and affirmed my experience, saying he’d gone to Dartmouth College with her and how they spent a work/study term together in North Carolina.  And that everything wonderful said about her was deserved, in his experience. Such a small world of many little surprises.

Speaking of which, my 92yo sister visited for 3 nights on her way to the Island. She was considerably stronger than I’d imagined, going up and down the stairs in my condo many times per day. We walked, and I drove her, around Portland, seeing lovely parks and preserves. She was taken with it. My brother, Charles, came to supper one night and we reminisced with laughter and sadness, recalling how dysfunctional our family was, how that shaped us all, and how we still managed to have memorable times in our childhoods and do some good works as adults. Like the time Nan’s yellow shorts washed away with the tide as we slept on a beach near Sekiu where we’d fish for salmon the next day. And she, perhaps with cosmic justice, was the only one of us to catch a salmon!  I learned much about her life that I’d never known, including about her 1 ½ years in Europe after Freshman year at Stanford, as well as the family life in Brookline, before the Depression drove the family west to Seattle in 1939.

Despite short-term memory issues and struggling with her hearing, Nan is managing remarkably well.  We got into a couple of dust-ups but I think much of the fault was mine; her anger triggers my own, since I spent my childhood and youth placating an amazing yet very labile and often irritable or capricious mother.  I must work not to conflate her anger with that of our mother—a nice demonstration of Transference—that is, adding my own history to my interpretation of her anger—and act accordingly.

Several of my students in Myanmar are under incredible pressure and in considerable danger of arrest. One mentioned today that she’s not been eating, has lost 8 pounds, has been unable to sleep, and has been “overthinking” since a friend and fellow physician was arrested by the military 3 weeks ago. It made me realize, once again, how much they are all carrying. Thus, when a bomb goes off nearby their apartment or the electricity is on only 4 hours in 24, these things are added to already crushing loads. Our situation in this country, with our democracy at high risk, a regressive and complicit Supreme Court majority, many lying and corrupted politicians, and a powerful, determined, and emboldened Christian Right trying to drag us into “dominionism”—where they can order all of society, including the government, according to “their” Christian principles—is gravely threatened but Myanmar is already a disaster.

On a cheerier note, watching the fireworks over the Eastern Prom last night was glorious. It was a calm, warm evening. The extensive sloping lawns were blanketed with people—-on blankets—-and a great multitude of small craft with winking lights were anchored just offshore. A large demonstration protesting the Roe v. Wade abolition marched and chanted across the top of the Prom and then down its width  via the diagonal road. The fireworks began and seemed to last forever. Firework technology is now so advanced that the rockets explode in a veritable arboretum of blooms and unnamed galaxies, including the inevitable red, white, and blue varieties.  It was so nice to be with a large group of celebrants, all enjoying Independence Day peacefully, however different our personalities and persuasions.

Now to dig a ditch for my EV charging cable.