[Above photo: Shadows and birch at Flagstaff Lake. ]

6 March 2023

[I forgot to finish and post this, apparently.]

Ad on Maine Public Radio. “Metamucil: Traps and removes waste from the digestive system.” Traps makes me think of the mice I caught entering my basement as the weather was cooling or of grizzled frontiersmen catching beaver for hats in an earlier era. I hope it doesn’t pinch the “digestive system” as it is trapping. And where exactly does it remove the waste to? What? Isn’t that redundant? Isn’t the waste going there anyway? Isn’t everything in my digestive system, at that point, waste?  It seems like a very misleading advertisement, lending a clean, mechanical precision to an already normal but rather messy process. Truth in advertising: Metamucil lends a bit of bulk, easing the “removal of waste” for those who require an assist. Perfectly fine, but why the embellishment? Nobody wants to talk or think about shit, I guess.

I was trudging back from the grocery store in a snowstorm when I passed the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. [Those who don’t want to read my atheistic take on it had best skip this paragraph.] If God created us all, he surely made it so we could reproduce. “Be fruitful and multiply.” And to entice us to do that, he made it fun and exciting, a better time, I imagine, than that experienced by an amoeba dividing. Why, then, have religious bodies made such a thing of virginity?  Why is an immaculate conception, a pretty weird idea biologically speaking, so revered? What of Joseph, not even a sperm donor? Here is one of life’s great pleasures, available equally regardless of socioeconomic status and costing nothing, and it is sinful? I think that it is miraculous, how powerful and positive sexual relations can be in drawing a couple together to care for and protect each other and their young cooperatively. It is, doubtless, a problem if a young woman gets pregnant before she wants to, before she has been able to ascend enough of the educational/vocational ladder to assure her independence from a man and to realize her gifts, if needed or desired. The same goes for unwanted pregnancies in older women. But sexual relations between equals in age and power seems to me like a good thing, at least after the time when giving birth wouldn’t be a personal catastrophe.  It isn’t like I grew up free of conflicts about this, fully liberated, at all.  Many of us didn’t, contaminated as we were by puritanical assumptions.  But from the vantage point of my age, venereal diseases (including HIV) considered, it seems to me that it would be much more in line with the reality of human desire and, thus, a good thing if we didn’t canonize negative attitudes like the desirability of virginity and the sinfulness of sexual desire.  And what is so wonderful about virginal priests and nuns? Wouldn’t they be more fully knowledgeable humans, and thus able to be of greater service, if their experience wasn’t thus limited? Pedophilia in the priesthood would diminish dramatically. Of course, those who don’t want to marry shouldn’t be forced to. Many of those would simply be handicapped by naivete in their pastoral roles.

I wonder if the snow, now heading for 24 hours continuously, is stimulating me, somehow?  It certainly is calming, on one hand. However, snowfall also makes me feel rapturous. I just love walking, skiing, snowshoeing through it, even shoveling it, especially as it drops from the sky.  How can we know that no snowflake is like another?  It’s a massive metanalytic assumption of many individual experiences. I showed my students in Myanmar the snowfall today, turning my computer to face the window. Many of them have never seen snow. They gasped when I said it had been -26C one night a few weeks ago, wondering what my electric bill must be. It promises to be a great weekend for cross-country skiing. Harold arrives tomorrow evening and we’ll drive to the Maine Huts and Trails site near Flagstaff Lake in western Maine on Thursday for 3 or 4 days.

12 March 2023

Only 14 days to take-off for the tropics! Of course, I have a million things to do. But I am well on the way. I bought some bright-printed light canvas and am sewing 14 bags for my students. I’ll fill them with a selection of toys to start them on their play-therapy journey. Each bag is an improvement over the last; they do, I’m afraid, look like the products of a 7^th grade Home-Ec sewing class. It’s the intention that matters, I reassure myself.  5 are complete, a day’s work. But I have an assembly line going now and am bolder, running many of the seams at high speed. I have a new appreciation for Sein Shwe, the tailors in Yangon who made my suit.  They should be designing 3-D printing applications or advanced physics schema, their spatial relations are so superior.

Two days ago I drove to Worcester, MA and met my [2^nd cousin once or twice removed] at the new and lovely Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross. She assembled an international team several years ago and has mounted a thrilling exhibit of the Chertsey Tiles. Chertsey Abbey was a powerful Benedictine site half-way between London and Windsor Castle. It either fell into ruin or was demolished centuries ago but among the ruins of the Chapter House were found magnificent tile fragments. They are now dispersed to many British museums.

Amanda’s team put together a computer reconstruction of the Abbey and the tiles for the first time, translated the Latin, and deciphered their provenance and meaning. Queen Eleanor [She must have been a hottie, as her sister became queen of France. How proud their parents were!] commissioned them in the 1200s. They recount the doomed love story of Tristan and Isolde, as well as telling the tale of the English triumphing in one of the crusades. Richard the Lion-Hearted, mounted on horseback, is shown defeating Sultan Saladin, although in reality they never met. Amanda also has written and edited a gorgeous coffee-table book about the exhibit, the Abbey, the tiles, and the Crusades, as well as gathering contemporary medieval pieces from the Met, the British Museum, and elsewhere for display. Particularly stunning are three pages of an illuminated manuscript from the Morgan, showing the Crusaders in fine detail and brilliant color. Originally there was no text to describe the scenes but gradually marginalia were added in Latin, Arabic, and a Jewish dialect that was a mix of Hebrew and Persian (?).

The exhibit is beautifully staged, complete with iPads which can scan QR codes at each exhibit, bringing up videos, more material, etc. A lovely thing is that Amanda, the consummate teacher, involved her students and their names are credited on each piece they created. This, mind-blowingly, took her years of intense work to imagine, create, and assemble.  Not surprisingly, it has garnered wonderful reviews from those in the know—art critics, medievalists, and other scholars—on both sides of the puddle.  She had a full ride for her PhD at Harvard and “had” to spend, as a part of it, three years sniffing around France and England, where she first became interested in the tiles.

She gave me a private tour and then I had supper at home in Shrewsbury with her family, a real treat. Supper included a delicious Thai curry, anticipating my trip. Many thanks, Amanda.

On the winter front, Harold and I drove through a storm, missing a turn and travelling for miles on unplowed, unused, snow-covered roads, burning up needed battery charge and minutes. We didn’t have time to fully recharge at Farmington; we’d have missed the gear shuttle and had to shlep our packs up 3.3 miles of hill to Poplar Stream Hut. As it was, we got lost trying to find the gear drop-off point, I backed into a snowdrift and high-centered the car, having to dig it out, and we nearly missed the shuttle. The point is that we didn’t have enough charge to drive up the road to return Harold’s rented skis at the Sugarloaf Outdoor Center and get back to Farmington for a re-charge at the end of the trip. A major ski area surely needs to have at least a couple of Level-3 chargers, no?  Blah, blah, blah. Despite a low level of anxiety, we managed it all. The skiing was mostly glorious; certainly the terrain, huts, and beauty were excellent. As was, again, the company. One day the snow was sticky and I had to walk much of the 11.4 miles to the next hut with little glide and snow stuck to the bottom of my skis. It was a problem I hadn’t anticipated and no amount of scraping and waxing provided a lasting solution. It was pretty exhausting, missing as I am 15% of my lung volume (Right upper lobe). I won’t expand on being 82yo.

We got our exercise, our companionship, and a shot of beautiful Nature in the Maine woods in winter. Flagstaff Lake, on which one of the huts is located —they are lodges, not huts— is immense and ski-able. On my next trip I’ll go to that lodge and stay there, skiing on the lake and adjacent trails and not feeling the pressure of travelling 11.4 miles to reach shelter.

It’s lovely to see Tucker Carlsen’s and the other Fox hosts’ lies and hypocrisy unmasked—“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”—even as Gary Linecker, an immensely successful soccer player and now a very popular BBC sports commentator, has publically opposed the Conservative government’s position and has spoken out on behalf of vulnerable immigrants, risking his job. Honesty and decency will prevail, the arc of the universe bends toward justice, etc.

It is so easy to break things, so difficult to create them. Instead of bemoaning social grievances and trying to erase transgendered people, could the other side just come up with some positive policy measures? How about revealing their budget, instead of just whining about Biden’s and banning books?  Likely they don’t have one, just like DT never had a “wonderful” health care plan or an “amazing” infrastructure plan. Just tax breaks for the rich and corporations.  The word performative keeps popping into my mind. Such wicked nonsense.

[Above photo:  The female Downey Woodpecker is having a rest between bites.]

26 February 2023

No sooner do I decide that my current life is too boring to memorialize here than it, or my mind, takes a turn and I am back noting the events of the week. Ari spent Tuesday night here. She’s driving Jon’s new pickup truck with two kayaks atop to California to meet him. Surprise, it’s snowing in Los Angeles!

After I eased into the barber’s chair, Siobhan (name altered for privacy) eyed me and said, “I wear the necklace you gave me to bed every night.” Uh oh, is my mind really going? I’ve perhaps seen her in the barbershop once before. There are 3 women shearing the men. She’s not cut my hair previously. When I protested, she persisted, “No, you know. The stone that is supposed to make me dream. It really works.” Then she proceeded to talk entertainingly about UFOs, weed trips, and so forth. It was a nice break in an otherwise unremarkable day. She was bright and quick and might, with different life circumstances, have been a physician or nurse, a pharmacist or an astronomer.

As I sit at my writing desk in the bay window of my bedroom, a Red-breasted Nuthatch is working over my suet/seed feeder. She’ll soon be replaced by a larger cousin, the White-breasted. Then the Downey Woodpecker couple will visit to feed.  Either he encourages her to go first out of gallantry or she demands it out of a sense of entitlement but that is their reliable sequence. There is a small flock (6 or so) of darling birds that don’t eat at the feeder but roost in the two trees outside my window. It’s a challenge for me to identify them. My best guess is Eastern Wood Pewee. But I may be all wet. Their feathers are fluffed out to insulate them as it was 2F last night. It is supposed to snow, heavily or heavy snow I can’t discern from the weather forecast. Since it is cold, I’d guess heavily. Harold and I shall head to the Carrabassett Valley for 3 or 4 days of cross country skiing next weekend. I love the winter and braving the cold.

Last Friday morning I drove, always an experience in my short-range EV, to Vasselboro to Lindsey’s house on Webber Pond. Pond to lake is like cottage to mansion in Maine. “Oh, my father built a summer cottage on the coast south of Camden.”, cottage here meaning a 7 bedroom waterfront mansion. Webber Pond has an island in it and although it is shallow, it is pretty big. Vasselboro as a town name is another thing. We’ve got China, Paris, Mexico, Madrid, Rome, and Berlin. With all the grand names from which to choose, why Vassalboro? A vassal is “a holder of land by feudal tenure on conditions of homage and allegiance”.  It has even been used as “servant” colloquially.  It certainly implies lesser status, if not inferiority. I couldn’t query the town fathers/mothers on its origin.

We loaded up his Ioniq, a longer-range EV, and headed to Medawisla, an Appalachian Mountain Club lodge northeast of Moosehead Lake. As we drove, the rain came down in sheets and we despaired. Later, recharging in Greenville, we munched on smoked mussels and mixed nuts and felt the temperature drop so precipitously that the wet pavement became a sheet of ice.

The rain hadn’t reached the lodge and everything was snow and COLD. The lodge itself is 5 years old and stunning, with a large sauna in which to relax after a day on the trails. It was easily the equal of any we visited on the Haute Route in France and Switzerland, albeit the views in the latter were much more dramatic, sited as the “huts” were, high above timberline in the Alps.  The meals were likewise tasty and filling, although when exercising outdoors a pine needle curry on steamed meadow grass with a side of mulched maple leaves could cause salivatory excitement.

Generally, these settings serve as a filter and most of the people you meet are enthusiastic, engaging, and in love with expoloring the outdoors.  One evening a volunteer naturalist, Jeanene, taught us to identify animal tracks and the next morning as we skied the trails we saw fresh tracks of deer, rabbit, fox, mouse, lynx and moose in the newly fallen snow. The trails were well-groomed and my stamina—for Lindsey is 20 years my junior—was adequate; my technique, with regular adjustments for the balance challenges of the aged, returned. I imagined what I might have done racing back then with the equipment I had now. My boots were work boots into whose soles (souls?) I drilled holes to accommodate the rat-trap binding pins of the day. The ski bottoms were wood and only would glide if waxed to match the snow temperature. But it was great to plow along at 16yo, passing others, following my competitive urges. I had pretty good endurance then and it wasn’t so bad last weekend. One day we covered 14 miles in 3 ½ hours, the last stretch a long glide down a narrow winding trail to the lodge. Then we took saunas. I foolishly joined some others and rolled in the snow wearing only wet underpants.  It’s a great way to diminish your self-consciousness about your spotty, sagging body. Later it was tea, chatting, and reading as we awaited supper. In short, it was a special time with fun people in beautiful surroundings.  To be repeated.

We’d have a big snow on Mercer Island (near Seattle) once a year. School would be closed for the week.   We would take our Flexible Flyers and sled all day, every day. It was the BEST! I recall throwing snowballs at our neighbors’ cars as the fathers would come home from work. All were good-humored about it and we got to feel wicked without feeling terrified of the consequences. Once as I threw one I realized just as it left my hand that the passenger window was open. It flew into the car and hit the driver. He stopped and scolded me, gently; we all knew each other, living as we did on a dead-end road in the countryside.

Then there was the time my family rented a cabin at the base of Mt. Baker over the Christmas week. My father, I think, had to return to Seattle to deliver a baby and one evening we drove him down the mountain to the bus on a snow-covered road as the snow silently fell. On the way back, for it was just we three brothers, we pretended that we were spies being pursued by evil Nazis, eluding them in the snowy dark through our stealth, daring, and craftiness. Such fun!

A most memorable experience was when Chas and I drove home from Harvard over Spring Break, kissed our mother, and headed to Winter Park for the week. We had limited funds but had some camping gear. We shoveled the 3 feet of snow covering the floor of the timer’s shack halfway up the main ski run and slept there. There were openings for doors and windows but nothing blocking the weather. We had a Primus gas stove and cooked I don’t know what. I think we may have eaten a bowl of chili in the lodge before taking the last chair lift up and skiing to our little home. The best was when it snowed at night and we would get the first run in that light-as-a-feather Colorado powder.  Our mother had forbearance and certainly supported all of our outdoor adventures. I’m so glad she moved us to Colorado after dad died, rather than to New York where she would have preferred to do her psychiatry residency.

The challenge of surviving comfortably in the snow is still exhilarating. During my year of medical residency at the University of Washington, Poki and I drove with a fellow resident, Mac Griffeth, and his wife, Hella, to the base of Mt. Baker. Mac had a Land Rover and we managed to high-center it in deep snow half-way to our destination, so we continued up the unused forest service road on skis. We were heading for a natural hot springs but never reached it. Finally, exhausted, we pitched our tents in the snow. I tried to build a fire to cook supper. Mac and Hella—he was from Tennessee and she was a delicate Danish flight attendant—got into their tent without food and fell asleep. I persisted, watching in disbelief as the fire melted the snow and gradually dropped to 4 feet below the surface. I then built one underneath the branches of a tree after scraping the snow away to ground level. Only many years later did I learn the trick: build the fire over several layers of evergreen boughs. It works like a dream.

The snowflakes are now falling in earnest and the birds have fled to more protected spots, I suspect. I have so many wonderful memories of snowfall and activities related to it, from winters in Seattle, Denver, Boston and New York, that I find it difficult now to imagine living in the tropics, although when I was in Myanmar, especially, it was unpleasant to think of having to wear coats and shoes. So fickle and so adaptable.

[Above photo: A view of the Rockies from the western slope, from a hill above Woods Lake.]

12 February 2023

As the title suggests, I am moving on. I have learned as much as I want to from writing my public diary and random thoughts on a Sunday morning. Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, and Judd Legum, plus the NY Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post provide plenty of perspective on current events and, frankly, my life at the moment is not particularly interesting, and certainly not varied or exotic.

I’ve taken a brief (Winter semester) story-writing course and I am intrigued by the exercise of trying to craft an engaging tale while limiting my words. I am going to write 5, as a start, short—-1000 words or so—reflections on my life. I also may use these sketches as scaffolding for a more ambitious project. Setting myself a weekly obligation will help.

A Cowboy’s Life

He stood up, realized nothing was broken, dusted himself off, and heard with some alarm as Blaze left the trail, slowing without a rider as he smacked into trees. George had been at a full gallop but, realizing he was about to head steeply downhill, attempted to slow the beast. A rein broke and, in a flash, he jumped off, hoping to avoid the catastrophic somersault which undoubtedly awaited him if they hit the slope together at a gallop.

The horse was new to the ranch. He was a large, 5-gaited, red-gold American Saddle-bred, a mix of Arabian and Thoroughbred. He’d only been used in a ring and without those external confines just wanted to run. Headstrong, no one else dared to ride him and George, being 19yo and correspondingly foolish, enjoyed the challenge—-and the notoriety.  Blaze was his horse for the summer.

This was his third year working on Frank Buckley’s ranch in Middle Park, Colorado. He had completed a year at Harvard and had a summer job installing sprinklers in Denver but when business slowed, he was let go. He asked Frank if he could return one last summer and Frank was glad to have him.

The ranch was a project for Frank, not a money-maker. He owned a ski shop in Denver and during the school year ran the Eskimo Ski Club. George and others raced for the Eskimo Ski Team all over the state. The old farmhouse was sited in a meadowed valley with peaks on 3 sides and a creek running through it. It must have been a few hundred acres but it might as well have been a few thousand, as there was no one else nearby. Frank employed 3 or 4 late-teen boys each summer to help run the place: fencing, building, and, at the end of the season, haying. Turning off US 40 onto the ranch road, which was a rutted 4 mile dirt affair, you passed the Swenson spread.  Once he’d seen President Eisenhower fly-casting into the Frazer River, apparently a friend of the Swensons.

That summer, his last on the ranch, George minded the 30 head of horses. Teenagers would come from Denver for the weekend, stay in Winter Park at an old log “hotel” from the late 1800’s he and others had refurbished the previous summer. Bob Carruthers, a wiry, tough-as-nails Denver University hockey player from Winnipeg, was hired to lead the rides and supervise kids in the hotel.

Bob provided a side-drama. His beautiful blond girlfriend, LeAnn, would visit and spend a few nights. Then her mother would show up in her mink and her Cadillac, berate Bob and try to drag her daughter home.  Bob and LeAnn were likely in love and certainly in rut.

Even though the pay amounted to about 13c/hour, it was a glorious way to spend the summer.  The boys paraded around in their Justin cowboy boots and tried chewing tobacco but, dizzy and nauseated from that, settled for rolling their own from little sacks of Bull Durham carried in their shirt pockets. They never inhaled, of course. The bartender in nearby Frazer tolerated that they were under-age and let them nurse a beer while devouring salty bar snacks and playing pool. The bar was never crowded so they could strut their stuff; if real cowboys had come in, they’d have melted into the woodwork.

Their bodies got hard from the work—lifting, digging, pulling, carrying, stretching, and riding—and their skins tanned. Frank liked George and the latter was generally responsible. Frank let him drive the old Lincoln, and later, the Cadillac, to Denver on occasion to visit home. On most trips George spent considerable time washing and waxing whichever car he was driving, partly to reinforce Frank’s good opinion of him.

He returned to the ranch after his sister’s wedding in Denver with two bottles of champagne he’d stolen from the garage.  He and his friend, Chuck, shared the first. George wanted to open the second but Chuck, wisely, said he’d had enough.   George, with a certain bravado, drank the other alone. He was then violently ill for the rest of the night, sleeping with his head propped on the toilet bowl. Word got to Frank the next day. He never spoke directly to George about it, but Frank made him jog for two miles on a dirt road while the other boys rode in the truck. And George spent the next two days operating the small John Deere bulldozer clearing downed timber in the back 40, a noisy, dusty, and physical job. He learned a life lesson, trying to grow up.

Haying at the end of the season was the best. For two years he drove the massive old Minneapolis-Moline tractor, pulling the mower and then the side-delivery rake. There was no seat and no steering wheel, just a large metal platform on which to stand and pull the brakes that were used to steer it.  Frank would hire a local rancher with a bailer and the boys would follow him in the field, each with two metal hooks to grab the bales and toss them onto the following wagon. They’d boast to each other how much their bale weighed, heavier if it was “green”. The smell of the hay was nearly as intoxicating as a woman’s hair and, lacking girls at the ranch, they thought a lot about the scent of women.

There was a romance. One of George’s best friends in high school was “going with” a classmate, Lucy. Craig worked nearby at a dude ranch and was envious of the life and work at Frank’s. Lucy let it be known that she liked George and he spirited her away from Craig, somehow, even though that summer they hardly saw each other.  He and Lucy had one memorable ride during which a bee got into her brassiere. He offered to help her but their relationship hadn’t yet progressed to that stage. His memory of wooing her is shrouded in time and mountain mist but, come September, Lucy was his girlfriend, not Craig’s, and he felt guilty.

Frank’s wife, Nancy, was a petit, dark beauty. She had a pronounced limp, perhaps from polio or congenital hip dysplasia. It was disfiguring and complicated the boys’ erotic fantasies about her. In addition, she had a scalding tongue and seemed to dress Frank down regularly. It diminished Frank in George’s eyes that he seemed to accept it.

The glorious, lingering memories of those times were complicated for George as, moving on to college and his later life, he felt he had never let Frank know how much it had all meant to him, how much he admired Frank for taking the risks he did with the boys, and what a fine example of a man Frank was for so many. George wondered if he’d had a similar effect on others, if he’d been important to them in ways they hadn’t mentioned to him.  So much of life goes unsaid.

[Above photo:  Sand crabs on the beach in Mozambique. Move quickly and they will disappear in an instant, into a hole or the surf. ]

5 February 2023

The title refers to my experiences, November 2021 and this January, of having great visits to New York and returning with the plague. Well, it was covid last time; this pass it is merely a cold. But such a cold! I won’t describe the symptoms, but suffice to say I was ill enough that I tested myself for covid twice, 4 days apart. It is interesting, given my WASPish New England background despite spending most of my life on the other coast, that my response is as if Jonathon Edwards wrote my script. He was the early American Connecticut River Valley preacher who described life’s process as [walking over rotten boards with the flames of hell licking at your feet and good deeds will not save you].   Not a fun guy at the beach or a party; I’d not invite him to the island for a visit. Not much given to pleasure.

It is worth it and I’ll return to NY whenever. I forgot to mention the mariachi threesome on the Red Line. They play and sing wonderful songs that bring hope and inspiration to the subway denizens, timed perfectly for one stop. They get off the train, enter another car, and try their luck again. I gave them $10, which is more than usual, just because my fellow travelers looked so glum. About ½ are on their phones, the others mostly stare, dead-eyed, attempting to avoid contact with anyone else. Then there was the guy—-straight out of Oliver Twist—in dirty ragged clothes, a malnourished wraith, who played a very strangely modified version of ‘Greensleeves” on a battered violin.  I encountered him twice and he played the same improvisation. His situation looked impossibly sad to me.

On a brighter note, it has been cold here, because of a polar vortex or some such, for a couple of days. It was -14F the other night. I’d turned my thermostat down for the night from 67 to 57. When I arose the house temperature was 57. I turned the thermostat back up and by 6 PM it had risen to 65 only. And I have a fairly new, excellent German natural gas furnace. With the outside air so cold and a pretty good breeze (the windchill correction was -35F) I easily found all the air leaks—around light switches, some of the windows, and the back door. I taped them and stuffed the back door with a dishtowel and folded paper towels in the cracks  and placed a door draft stopper at the bottom. I’ll do a real fix when the weather warms up. Then I lowered the thermostat at night only to 62F.  More than you want to know, of course. Frostbite would occur on exposed skin in 10 minutes at a windchill of -35. It is fun to see dogs in their winter blankets racing around.

You know when Joe Biden looks really tired and old, like a sort of vacant, pale fuddy-dudddy, his cerebral cortex glistening and smoothed out (if seen at autopsy)? My discount Senior Metro Pass just arrived and I look like that in the photo. I almost jumped! It had been a bit of a hassle getting to the Battery Park office—-rush hour subway, rain, wind flipping the umbrella inside-out, a walk—but, wow, I’m truly getting to that time of life.

I watched “Putin and the Presidents” (5 of them) on PBS last night. I can see how, especially training in the KGB during the Cold War, he might be given to paranoia.  I view his fears of us invading him as a projection of his desires for empire. However, our Adventures in Statesmanship in Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Chile, and many, many other countries likely gave him reason to think we might, on a whim, head to Moscow. It is remarkable to see how Shrub first thought he could read Vlad’s soul, and later realized that S-thing seemed to be missing. And what a mistake it was that Obama didn’t go military (with a lot of weapons, if not boots, at least) when Russia annexed Crimea and part of the Donbas.  Bullies don’t stop until they are stopped. We’d best not blink or cease our support of Ukraine or he’ll be back into the other republics.

News Flash: The female Downey Woodpecker is just now going after my birdfeeder with a vengeance. I suspect it was too cold for them to move around the past few days so she must be hungry.

Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker has been stepping it up recently, with George Santos, Kari Lake, Kevin McCarthy, and Matt Gaetz all providing plenty of material for laughter. I watched the first season of The Sopranos over the past week. I enjoyed it a lot, thought the psychiatrist was a terrific actress, and had to reflect on how similar to Tony’s sidekicks Donald seems. We who cannot lie easily and with a straight face—no facial twitch as a tell or gaze aversion—are at a certain disadvantage in trying to nail those who do it with ease and aplomb.

A Chinese balloon floating over our country gathering snapshots. It seems kind of quaint in these days of spy drones the size of horseflies and images from space telescopes of galaxies millions—or is it billions?—of light years away. I suppose if the balloon is supporting equipment the size of an 18 wheeler, it’s doing something nefarious.  Predictably, some GOPers are squealing that the Chinese never would have dared to do this if Trump were president. Turns out, they did it at least 3 times during his presidency. Toward the end of the Frontline documentary about Putin, members of our State Department were aghast to see him, as we can on the video, play the Donald like a piano. It’s the problem with being consistently driven in the same direction—unless it is toward the truth—, you are easy to read and to manipulate. Donald so predictably wants to be one of the Big “Thug” Boys, a Xi or a Vladimir or even a Kim Jong-Un, and so desperately wants them to like him and accept him into their clubhouse, that it is easy to outflank him and get him to do their bidding.

It’s almost 3PM. I went nuts doing laundry and cleaning the upstairs this morning so I haven’t yet had lunch and I am starving.  It is so satisfying to empty the dust cannister of the vacuum after going over one floor of the house. The amount of hair shed—human, dog, you name it—is astounding. But who would imagine a little dust here and there would add up to a small hill!  On that uplifting note, Stay warm!

[Above photo: An unexpected sight as I walked to the bus stop for Portland. It revives the age-old argument:  Is it moral to establish museums {generally for the wealthy} as long as we have child hunger, an underfunded educational system, and seriously ill Americans with no provision for medical care, for example?]

29 January 2023

New York fills me with such mixed emotions and conflicting thoughts. It is amazingly fun and yet wouldn’t exist without a struggling class of underpaid workers who do menial, often physically damaging, jobs to keep it alive. It is mostly hard surfaces, but allows a feeling of joy and renewal when the contrast of Nature is encountered in a park.

I had a remarkable time, seeing friends and going to a recital (Keyboard Conversations—Jeffrey Siegel), a terrific play (“From Riverside to Crazy”), two films that are each so much better than the Academy Award nominees (“Turn Every Page”, a documentary about the relationship of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, his lifelong editor, and “Saint Omer”, a gripping courtroom drama about a Senegalese immigrant who killed her toddler), the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney, and a pass through MOMA.

In addition to visits with old friends, I had supper with one of their children who is a jazz composer and performer. I haven’t seen him for years and he was a portrait of integrity—if that means being true to form, in his case meaning warm, kind, thoughtful, and quick of mind. I also took the Staten Island ferry and SI railroad to visit a Burmese Child Psychiatrist and her family for supper.

She left Burma after medical school for London, where she completed psychiatry training. When her husband, also a medical graduate who had been imprisoned after the 1988 uprising, was unable to pass the medical entry examination, he moved on to the US and started a series of sushi shops. She, with their daughter, later joined him, having to completely repeat her training in General and Child Psychiatry. They purchased a home on Staten Island and raised their daughter, San Su (after Daw Aung San Su Kyi). 

The latter, who joined us for a delicious meal of Shan Khao Swe (a special Shan-style noodle dish) cooked by her mother, is a freshman at CUNY in the Macaulay Honors College with a full scholarship, teaching violin and viola on the weekends when she isn’t playing bass guitar in her rock group or playing first viola in the student orchestra. She is pre-med and wants an additional degree in public health. She is sweet and smart and has an incredibly lively mind. Ah, these scary immigrants with which the GOP tries to frighten their base!  My only fear for her, as I have felt previously when seeing brilliant demonstrations of immigrant hunger, is can she turn it off and relax or are the dogs of success/failure nipping so hard at her heels that she must continue to sprint even after arriving at what would be a glorious destination for anyone else?  A pretty long sentence.

Armed with a Senior Metro Pass, I travelled all over. Oh, I also spent a couple of hours at the Strand, sifting through their used books. I generally buy used books online from Thriftbooks but there is nothing like rummaging around stacks. I loved Moe’s in Berkeley, a 60 year institution there. Moe himself was a pretty difficult guy, argumentative but always stimulating. He used to poop regularly in the Claremont swimming pool early in the morning. A friend who swam there realized it after a while and, while sympathetic to Moe’s desire to relax in the pool, threatened to call the Public Health Department and Herb Caen at the Chronicle unless the Claremont forbade him to swim there. Moe allegedly had deep pockets and a fierce squad of attorneys, inducing fear in the Management. But they faced it and banished him.  This is a true story. The Freudian in me can see his middle finger aimed at the wealthy Claremont clientele as inextricably linked with his anarchism and feisty temper.  Lots of anger in there.  Moe Moskowitz died in 1997.  His daughter runs the bookstore now.

It will be interesting to see if Jim Jordan and the House Oversight Committee turn up any dirt on their revenge mission. I suppose everyone has something they aren’t proud of or wants to keep secret. I sense it will be a Dagwood-sized nothing sandwich, stirring up a lot of dust, wasting taxpayers’ money, and trying to distract the Public from seeing the fear, mendacity, and vacuousness in the GOP “platform”. Why, exactly, would the Rothchilds be interested in setting forest fires in California? I think they like money and power and it seems like quite a stretch, aside from their somehow having access to “space lazars”, to turn that into gold. Rumplestiltskin’s approach was more likely to yield gold than burning down the Sierra foothills.  I don’t doubt that Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name to make some $. He seems a pretty troubled youngish man. But Joe cannot control his son, no more than any of us can.  And why is George Santos still in Congress, Kevin?

Time for a walk. Ari and Jon may drop by tonight.  I must walk off my desire to hiss and spit.

[Above photo: Christmas is such a many-layered holiday. ]

22 January 2023

I’m taking the train from Boston to NY, now just past New Haven. It isn’t the Acela, so it stops briefly a few times and takes ½ hour longer. The Acela presents as sleek but if anyone has taken the TGV or the Japanese or S. Korean bullet trains, the American rail system is kind of pathetic. The Shinkansen, for example, is welcomed into and out of the station by a uniformed employee in white gloves with a stopwatch, after gliding through the countryside at impossible speeds. The KTX (Korea) drifts along at 180mph. Likewise the TGV. On all three, it is difficult to view much because the towns and fields pass quickly. I do, the view notwithstanding, prefer them to the bus, even though the latter is reasonably direct and comfortable. All beat driving.

I have an abiding affection for Boston both from my personal experience there in college and as the site of my mother’s family home. All of my sibs were born there. It is quaint and quirky. Polly and I bought a new, largish flat-screen TV yesterday, mounted it on a wall bracket and then set out for the Fine Arts Museum to see the Cy Twombly exhibit.

We walked to the Government Center T station, since Haymarket is closed due to the construction of a parking garage. On my last visit a piece of heavy equipment fell several stories at the site and I think the operator was injured or killed. Government Center is next to Boston City Hall, an example of “Brutalist” architecture. It looks like a huge Humvee or other military vehicle, all broad hard lines and sharp, well-defined corners, with deep recesses. Ugh! Not representative of the kind of government I’d like to see.

The T is special, even with its old cars. We took the Green Line “Heath”, which stopped directly in front of the MFA.  The entry line was longish but moved rapidly.

We moved almost as rapidly through the Twombly exhibit. My god, the emperor’s new clothes. What a bunch of junk. The most interesting piece, other than the many antiquities displayed to remind us of the sources of his inspiration, was a photo taken by someone else, showing a handsome couple, Twombly standing in the foreground and his wife, an Italian heiress, reclining on a chaise in the room behind him. He is dressed in a white linen suit, impeccably groomed, and looking as vacant and performative as a peacock. She was similarly shod. One could only imagine how dry their relationship must have been.

The “paintings”, for there were very few that would so qualify, were his scribbled lists of words or short sentences. I mean, really. If I have to read an extensive explanation to extract any feeling or meaning from a work of “art”, and there appears to be little of skill or subtlety involved, it is of no interest to me. In truth, it felt like a 2 1/2yo child’s bathroom productions: “Aren’t it just amazing?” “Marvelous?” The “work” seemed intensely personal and pretentious. Only one of many reasons that I could never be an art critic: my intolerance of laziness, of lack of skill, and of a vision so diminished by self-obsession. Well, I do appear to have had a pretty strong reaction to it, after all!

In adjacent rooms were wonderful canvasses by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Courbet, Degas and that crowd, which salved my pique.

My trip is brief. I’m going primarily to support a friend, at her request, who is having an ablation for atrial fibrillation. She’s had the a-fib for several years but recently passed out in a restaurant, which alarmed her. I’ll also visit with Harold and Connie, hopefully see Marcy, and have supper at a Burmese restaurant in Brooklyn with a Burmese child psychiatrist and her husband+daughter. She is supportive of the Opposition and is in contact with the psychiatrists whom I teach.

Unfortunately for me, after I left town, 6’ of snow fell. Another 6’ is predicted for Monday. Here it is merely overcast, or occasionally drizzling. However, before I left Portland, I saw a male Downey woodpecker with his jaunty red beret, a pair of nuthatches, and a largish blue bird (I’d call it a scrub jay in California.) making good use of my feeder. Who knows what’s next?!!

I do wonder how well the slight of hand will work for the GOP this time around: that is, when trying to disguise their desire to keep power by any means, enrich the wealthy, and shrink social programs (SS and Medicare) by making a lot of noise: Hunter’s laptop, Joe’s sloppiness with documents, lies about lowering taxes, LGBTQ rights, churchiness, firearm freedom, control of women’s bodies, and various random issues.  Their infighting and the Speaker’s obsequious compromises promise to make for good newspaper sales. I hope the media can begin to quietly address these with facts, not overreact, and can re-direct the conversation soberly to the issues that are of fundamental importance to the people of this nation. In psychotherapy, this would be called “Containment”.

Now we’re at New Rochelle, 20’ minutes from Penn Station. I’ll seek the “Quiet Car” whenever I travel by train if I’m unaccompanied, although this one was not so quiet:  the guy in front of me was playing “We are the champions of the world” loudly enough that I had to talk with him and the young (?Indian) couple behind me were snuggling and she giggled, loudly and constantly, for about 20 minutes. I’m not sure what tickled her but likely him. They departed at New Haven, possibly Yale undergrads. Happy to see them happy but better to giggle in a coach with other ground rules. Am I getting cranky, or what?

[Above photo: An intruder upon discovering suet a la carte during snowfall.]

16 January 2023

I read a witty one today: Kierkegaard—“It’s good to live in a small town, for if you find that you don’t know what you are doing, someone else does.”

I stand corrected, although I take a tiny bit of pleasure in having realized my mistake before the corrections poured in. Warblers migrate and aren’t hanging around in Maine in the winter. In addition to the single visit I observed from a nuthatch, my regular bird friend is a female Downy Woodpecker. She sat on a branch, glancing around, for 10 or 15 minutes. It gave me time to maneuver slowly around my room, retrieving my bird book and stepping back from the window far enough that my monocular could focus. It was confirmed by a friend who knows his birds and said he often sees Downies in our neighborhood, with their occasional, larger, cousin, the Hairy Woodpecker.

As I was reading emails at my desk, an immense grey squirrel discovered my hanging feeder and lowered himself (herself?) down from the branch on which it was hung, nibbling away at the suet. His fur was remarkably thick and he looked very well-fed. I extended my pole, opened the window, and poked threateningly at him. He moved off but clearly wasn’t frightened, just irritated. Back to the feeder several times but I was more persistent and he finally dropped down to the ground and lumbered away.

Why do I favor a Downy Woodpecker over a Grey Squirrel? I think of rats with a fluffy tail, for squirrels are rodents. I think of the damage red squirrels do to siding and shingles, trying to enter and build a safe, protected house in which to store acorns and raise their families. I think of Squirrel Nutkin, from Beatrix Potter.

However, birds are marvels. We can all walk and climb trees, albeit not with the speed or grace of squirrels. But we cannot fly. We can fly in airplanes, which is a bit like saying a beetle can fly, although not even. I think much of our affection for animals comes from how we anthropomorphize them. Squirrels are prosaically industrious and busy, cute survivors.   Birds are magical, lighter than air. Both have remarkable physiology. It would be much more satisfying to me to befriend a bird, any bird, than a squirrel. And so it goes. They both are doing the same thing, I think: eating, avoiding danger, perhaps courting, and reproducing.

It is not surprising, given his gaffes and impulsivity, that the President is now tarred with harboring Classified documents. But there is no equivalency between his, or his aides’, sloppiness and their prompt return of the small number of them when requested and DT’s intentional removal of vast numbers of them, refusing to surrender them, lying about keeping some, and shrieking “Political targeting!”.  It will dog Joe, however, giving Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz something to howl about [rather than actually make constructive policy for the American people]. 

I also read an Opinion Piece, I think in the Times, listing Joe’s lies.  I cannot retrieve it but went to PolitiFact and they have cataloged his frequent untruths. I wish he didn’t and think less of him for doing so. He is clearly flawed, but I generally agree with his decrees and the legislation he supports. He is on the right side of history and progress. He appears to be trying to restore order and civility and stand up for working people. Unlike his predecessor he doesn’t reveal intentions of self-enrichment. At least he wants to improve racial discrimination, address human-made climate change, diminish economic inequality, repair infrastructure, decrease child poverty, and give some of those struggling—-immigrants, college students, the poor—a break. Kevin, on the other hand, is a hapless climber, for sale to the highest bidder.

I watched the two-part series on Frontline about Israeli-developed (and supported) Pegasus spy-ware. Wow! It can know where you are, see what you are doing, and steal all your data.  Big Brother is here. I want to ditch my smartphone. There is no real protection, I think. What Man has built, Man can work around. Move to the country, turn off your phone, plant your garden, raise your chickens, and explore the local bays and inlets in your kayak.

I had a culinary mishap, but not a total disaster, on Saturday. I invited 5 people for supper and decided to make a paella. I love eating it; now was my opportunity to construct one. I bought a paella pan at La Roux Kitchen on Commercial Street, gathered clams,  mussels, and shrimp at Harbor Fish, purchased dry Spanish chorizo and arborio rice at Micucci, and acquired an onion, garlic, a red bell pepper, fire-roasted diced tomatoes, vegetable broth, parsley, and saffron at Hannafords. I had plenty of time, scrubbing the clams and mussels, peeling and “de-veining” the shrimp, making a broth of the shrimp heads and peels, infusing the last with saffron, and so forth. I cooked the sofrito, added the rice, then the broth, and arranged the seafood with artistry, garnishing it all at the end with chopped parsley. I heated and served the chorizo separately.

One didn’t tolerate gluten or dairy. Another didn’t eat meat or meat products. A third, I only learned by observation, avoids shellfish. Jesus! The mishap was that my Blomberg gas range, apparently an expensive one, has a malfunctioning thermostat. 350F on the dial is, by the oven thermometer, 300F. After discovering that, I turned it up to 400F. It reached 325F.  The outcome was that, since we all had to leave for the theatre at 7PM, I had to serve it prematurely. The periphery was reasonable cooked but the center was not. We drank lots of wine and had lively conversation. The paella did look spectacular, however, and what’s left is terrific if microwaved in portions for 5 minutes. George’s Test Kitchen: Paella Valenciana (with modifications) ver. 1A.

I am about to go for coffee and a walk with a friend. There are 4 inches on the ground and it is snowing like crazy. I totally love it!! The aesthetic experience of watching and walking in a serious snowfall is glorious! 

I hope all of you in Northern California are staying dry and avoiding mudslides.

[Above photo: The aftermast of the USS Portland, a much-decorated cruiser in WW 2, Fort Gorges, and a tugboat shouldering its way across the roads between Portland and Peaks Island on a sunny January day.]

9 January 2023

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breath were life!” Ulysses by Alfred—Lord Tennyson

I have booked the house and the flight to Thailand and obtained the required (by the Thai government) health insurance to cover me in case I contract covid and require hospital care while there. I have begun to search for papers, books, and videos, as well as to assemble my curriculum and lectures. Since I am not certified in PCIT (Parent-Child Interaction Therapy) and our time is limited, we’ll focus on Play Therapy and Facilitating Play Between Parents and Children.  The whole idea of assisting parents to recalibrate their relationships with their children is transparently sensible. I am amazed that in the 100+ years since Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein began to use play to assist unhappy children to express the roots of their troubles, which in most cases lay in their relationships with their parents, that we have been primarily focused on the child, rather than on their relationships.

To understand this failing, I look to my own training and practice.  I learned to look at the child, to attempt to understand and relieve their conflicts and confusion.  Working with the parents was definitely of secondary importance. In part this may have been because it was the more difficult work.

There are instances, of course, where the focus needs to be primarily on the child. I think of a child who has experienced trauma outside of the family, for example, or whose development has been arrested by unconscious wishes and consequent guilt and conflict. However, since they are imbedded in their families and relate to their parents—who are of much greater valence to them than the therapist— most of their days, how the parents listen to and behave with them is of greater consequence than “insight”.   These are the issues we’ll be looking at. I suppose the rub occurs when parents are unwilling to engage in a change process. But that is always a challenge in working with children. As always, I am excited to learn for myself, even if I am not directly doing therapy.

I had given up on a visitor to the feeding station that I established hanging from a tree limb facing my writing desk. I’ve now seen several feathered things nibbling away at the seed-impregnated suet. The one I’ve observed most frequently is a black and white bird. He, for I think it is a male, is quite skittish. I’ve noticed him going up and down tree limbs looking for insects, like a nuthatch. My conclusion, after studying Birds of North America, is that he is a Black and White Warbler. Now that I have seen the pictures of him in the book, if he re-appears I can note his markings with more discernment.  My brother and sister-in-law are nurturing a group of Bluebirds at their feeder in Brunswick. Birds are captivating!

My hernia repair is healing remarkably well.  I took a 5+ mile walk yesterday with some hills and experienced no pain—well, minimal. Most surprising to me is that I had no fatigue and my legs weren’t the least tired. In addition to a 4 day cross country skiing outing among the Hut To Hut cabins in the Carrabassett Valley of Western Maine with my friend, Harold, the last week of February, I’ll do another for 3 days the prior week at an Appalachian Mountain Club hut with a friend, Lindsey. Praying for snow!

Watching Kevin McCarthy contort himself to achieve—what?—recalls the Gary Larsen cartoon of the Boneless Chicken Ranch. Even as schadenfreude suffuses me with its bitter warmth, I’m aware that while this bodes ill for the GOP, it promises to be bad for our country. As the current administration attempts to address serious issues facing the people of our country, including climate change, voting rights, crumbling infrastructure, economic inequality, pandemics present and future, child poverty, immigration, and racial/sexual discrimination, not to mention a full portfolio of foreign troubles, a feuding House of Representatives led by Speaker McCarthy will focus on issues like voter fraud, banning abortion, crushing Big Government, placing religion into schools and government, demonizing LGBTQ rights, book bans, and fear-mongering about immigrants. Plus, trying to strike back at the Democrats for the magnificent (and popular) job they are doing, as well as for the January 6^th Committee investigation.

Recall that there were 10, count ‘em, investigations of Obama and Hillary Clinton for misdeeds re. the Benghazi tragedy pushed by the “outraged” GOP. 6 of them emanated from congressional committees. NONE of them found wrong-doing. What an incredible waste of time and resources—the money I pay in taxes each year, for example. Kind of like DT’s 62 voter fraud suits, of which 61 were lost and 1 succeeded on a minor technicality having nothing to do with voter fraud. And we’ll see more of the same, since the GOP’s aims—-small government, no regulation of corporations, eliminating Social Security and Medicare, and tax relief for the wealthy—are a hard sell to the American public. So it’ll be 2 years of stirring up fear and confusion, not unlike what Mao did in facing unhappiness at home: distract by starting a border war.

I purchased a copy of the Jan. 6^th Committee report. It seems like a remarkably consequential document, related as it is to our only attempted coup. Anyone who says we cannot get our act together should look the text over.  David Remnick’s Forward and Jamie Raskin’s Afterward make it a worthy purchase.  And, as much as I disagree with her politics and certainly think her father was quite evil in his self-serving ways, Liz Cheney is a bright, courageous, and principled woman who deserves a medal. She has said that her work on the committee is the most important thing she’s done in Congress, despite losing her place at the table.

In a lighter vein:

Church Bulletin

“Thursdays at 5:00PM, there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers’ Club. All wishing to become Little Mothers will please meet with the minister in his study.”

It is sunny and cool. Reminders of our first actual snowfall are still visible, although most streets and sidewalks are clear. C’mon, Maine, do your Winter thing!

[Above photo: A reefed old-timer in a stiff breeze on Casco Bay, with Peaks Island in the background.]

1 January 2023

I love language slips, malaprops, and written struggles, especially since we are all going to participate in them if using a language other than our mother tongue.  An equal-opportunity humiliator. I recall my friend, Andy, addressing the Board of Directors of the Alviso Family Health Center in 1970: Speaking of his embarrassment at his poor command of Spanish, he began, “ Estoy muy embarrassada.” Which translates as “I am very pregnant.”  All laughed and the tense balloon deflated instantly.  Or the sign on the storefront in Malawi: “Difficult to understand investments.” I’ll take 100 shares, please. I recently purchased an inexpensive radio [Retekess TR604] for the basement, to hear music or NPR when I am building something there.  In the instructions it suggests: “When fall across thunderstorm, please do pull out the AC plug.” In addition to a better translator, they could use a product-naming focus group.

Apropos, I hope we all can experience laughter, with others and at ourselves, in the coming year. And love. Power and money aren’t very satisfying substitutes, for me at least. Perhaps I just haven’t tasted either on a grand enough scale to be hooked, but I think not.

My daughter, her partner, and [their] dog visited for the last 3 nights and will be back tomorrow for yet another. He’s buying a very particularly chosen small new Toyota pickup truck.  Locally they are only available at one dealer in New Hampshire so he’ll go Tuesday when the banks are open and purchase it. He’s downsizing from a huge Ford F-250 with a massive and elaborate camper on the back.

When they are here, it is a bit like a cyclone. “What just happened?” But I love having them, even if I don’t get much else accomplished during their stay. We have long walks, play Bananagrams, talk, and eat. Pearl is a smart sweetie but I’d forgotten how pervasive the remnants of a shedding dog are. Wear a black coat or sweater? Forget it.

They greatly enjoyed the new Avatar film. It is a challenge to imagine how our country can shift from a focus on individual rights, competition, acquisition, private property, etc. to a more communal, shared, harmonious, and supportive state of being. It will be necessary for us, however, if we want to survive on Earth, to value the flora, fauna, and general context of our lives and to work together to benefit everyone. It sounds very utopian, like a pipe-dream (I think of old men in opium dens in Shanghai, dizzily content in their fantasies.).

Yet, I think we must stop fighting.  The environmental, let alone human, costs of war are so high. If only the UN had teeth and could remove and imprison leaders who perpetrate violence without just cause [incontrovertible evidence that the target is preparing an unprovoked attack or has assumed illegitimate power.].  On the meaning of many of the words in the last sentence we’d struggle to achieve consensus, I realize. But there are occasions, such as the military coup in Myanmar, the invasions of Iraq and Vietnam, our support for the Contras in Nicaragua, or the Russian invasion(s) of Ukraine which seem obvious. And the perpetrators obviously cannot be part of the decision.  However, our country is, not surpirsingly, unevenly willing to be bound by international rules or conventions.  We haven’t even signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1980) or agreed to the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (since 1986), although most other nations have.

The back story of the license plate my friend had made for me at Walpole Super Max includes the three who created it: a drug king pin, a gang member in for homicide, and a spree killer. I’ll treasure it. I can only imagine the back stories on each of them: sordid tales with neglectful, drug abusing parents, lack of love and care, domestic violence, perhaps physical or sexual abuse, likely poor.  Whew!

Our current spell of warmth is eerie. It is 67F inside and the furnace has been off for 15 hours. It is sunny and glorious outside. I fear the backyard forsythia will mistake it for Spring and bloom. Perhaps we’ll then get two blooms or maybe it will kill the poor plant. I don’t know.

I’d best go for a walk. I seem to have no idea how to proceed here today.

[After the walk.]

I read an amazing graphic novel—Ducks—by Kate Beaton. It is a memoir of two years she spent working in the tar sands of northern Alberta. She is from Cape Breton Island and loves it there but, like others from the maritime provinces, was compelled to leave home for a decent-paying job. In her case, she wanted to pay off her college student loans. 

In a striking blend of line and word, each amplifying the other, she tells a sad tale of environmental devastation and misogyny, of rape and injury, and of occasional kindnesses. It is a remarkable coming-of-age tale. Happily, she is now married with children, a successful artist, and living in Cape Breton again. The two Maus books are the only graphic novels I’ve previously read, unless one can count R. Crumb—more a lascivious comic book, I think. Mistuh Natural: “Hey, Louise, yer nipples is stickin’ out like thumbs.” That sort of thing.  Graphic novels are a compelling genre, employing the combination of limited writing and drawing to achieve story, meaning, and depth of feeling.  They make truly powerful writing without graphics appear even more amazing.

There is a well-done piece in today’s NY Times about Elise Stefanik’s meteoric rise among the Republicans, propelled by going all-in with The Donald et cie. A determined wish to acquire power certainly can lyse our personal integrity and morality.

My surgical scar is healing, the steri-strips are gradually falling off. I continue to have to restrain myself from lifting heavy objects or exercising too vigorously. How do fibroblasts know that when there is an incision they must step it up? It troubles me to assassinate the mice in my basement; they are so similar to us in their incredible physiology, albeit lacking opposable thumbs, consciousness, and math skills.

Happy New Year to all, with lots of love and laughter! And good health!

[Above photo: Winterberries (?) by Jordan Pond with The Bubbles in the background. I see why a chorus girl might have a stage name of “Bubbles”. ]

25 December 2022

My Headline of the Week is the following from the (Singapore) Straits Times: “Rapists Over 50 Shouldn’t Be Spared Caning.”  I’ll let you parse that but it does highlight how differently we generally view the rights of women versus how they are considered in that economic wunderland.

As the temperature drops (12F this AM) and the days lengthen (8 hours 56 minutes today, here), the warmth of the holiday season settles on many of us. It warms me to read of the Ukrainian civilians in Kherson successfully coordinating their expulsive efforts of the Russian military with EU and US national intelligence services. They courageously risked their lives to visit violence and death upon their invaders. It will, of course, deform them to some extent, killing others even if it is The Enemy. I feel for the young, untrained and poorly equipped Russian conscripts.  They must be stopped but most of them would likely be much happier at home, having a meal by the fire with their families and girlfriends/boyfriends. Even killing someone who is immediately trying to kill me would change me for life in ways I wouldn’t like. We are victims of ourselves and, especially, of those more powerful than us.

Modern medicine, if done well, is amazing. My brother, Chas, whisked me to the Maine Medical Center outpatient surgery on Friday. Despite a power outage, which I would have missed if I had blinked since the generator came online instantly, I was in and out quickly. Since it was a re-repair, the surgeon had to open my groin. As the slight burn of Versed tickled my vein, I tried to see how long I could talk. Pretty quickly my words, and resolve, slurred and I had a nice nap. Chas brought me home and fed me a meal, spending the night. Susan, his wife, contributed a wonderful vegetable soup, apple crisp, and seasoned, roasted pecans. Now, two days later, I have little discomfort. I’ve only taken Tylenol twice and the Oxycodone has gone unused. Nausea, constipation (the great enemy of hernia healing, I learned), and feeling stupid—-why wouldn’t I want that? 

I did have opiates when ill in 1970. Poki and I had been knocking about in northern Guatemala, camping in hammocks on a tiny island in the middle of Lake Peten Itza in anticipation of visiting Tikal. I developed what I thought was a strep throat. We went to a pharmacy and I purchased injectable penicillin, since I couldn’t swallow. When I tried to find a private corner to inject it, people thought I was a heroin addict and refused me. The pain worsened and in 2 days I lost 20# since it was hot, I couldn’t eat or drink anything, and I had to spit out my saliva.

We took a motorized canoe across the lake to the regional clinic. The young doctor, probably freshly minted and reluctantly banished to the provinces for national service, examined me and promptly prescribed erythromycin capsules the size of soccer balls. He wasn’t paying attention to my primary complaint, since my Spanish was pretty good. Meanwhile, back at the restroom, Poki was surrounded by dirty bedpans and heard the girls in the adjacent room at the autoclave, re-sterilizing needles and syringes: “Oh, I dropped this one on the floor.” “Don’t worry, just wrap it up.” Poki rushed back to tell me not to get an injection.

To finish the story, we caught the next plane from Flores to Guatemala City and, from there, a prompt flight to San Francisco. In the air I composed menus of dinners I wanted to have when I could again swallow. Somehow roast pork with applesauce and roasted new potatoes with buttered peas topped the list: familiar food from my childhood. It was straight to the ED at Stanford and I was hospitalized for a week or so on iv’s while they determined that I had a primary coxsackie virus pharyngitis.

At bedtime each night I was given a shot of Talwin, a synthetic opiate. Wow! I glowed from the tips of my toes to the split ends of my hair and felt more free of care than I ever had. I looked forward to the evening and those shots. They scared me, as well, since they made me feel better than anything—good sex excluded. I could reproduce those feelings at will 2 or 3 years later.  I get why 106,000 people died of [largely fentanyl] overdoses last year. I recall when the Federal estimate of heroin addicts was less than 10,000. The Sacklers et al surely changed that. At the same time, alcoholics numbered more than 10 million and were implicated in 30,000 fatal car accidents per year. Alcohol was legal and heroin possession would land you up the river. Better lobbyists, I guess.

But this is a post on Christmas day! To interrupt my solitude, my friend, Polly, has invited me to zip to Cape Elizabeth for a meal with her daughter’s family and then zip back.  [Her other daughter’s boyfriend, who supervises the guards at Walpole State Prison and who I like a lot, had the prisoners make me a personalized license plate.]  Since my incision knits better if I am horizontal, it will be a quick meal.

Speaking of a meal, I tied two broom handles together and added a carved shim so I could lean out my 2^nd story window and hang a cage with suet and seeds in it on a branch. It has survived 40mph wind gusts and is unreachable by squirrels but I have yet to see a bird nibbling. Wrong season?

I am grateful for my life, as complex as it sometimes is. I’m happy to be the owner of a warm, attractive, and pleasant place to live rather than one of the intruders entering my basement to exit the cold.  Crunchy peanut butter seems to be their fentanyl and I’ve now caught 8 mice.

Thankfully Congress is on recess and the Washington hullabaloo is settling down to simply serious forensics for now. It was amazing to read an article on battlefield tactics in the Times today. Our restraint at direct involvement of US troops, even when they seemed necessary, has been a terrific call. Things are looking up here, except for all the groomers and commies and lascivious math primers in Florida!

I hope you have a lovely day.