Princess-ville

A New Life

2011-10-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

For those of you who know me well, you may notice some differences in my blog now and in the future. Let us say that I am celebrating a new life, the feeling of freedom, of healing from old woes. Thank you to those of you (you know who you are) who have facilitated this, from the bottom of my heart.

Red Flags

2011-07-19T15:29:00.001-07:00

When my gorgeous second husband, Chris, who was eight years younger than me, left me for a thin, blonde slut several years younger than him, I thought he was insane. So much for my realistic ego. This opinion of mine was nearly entirely based on his voice being odd to the point of unrecognizable when he phoned me at a hotel in Pennsylvania while I was going with my brother back across country from New York City where Chris and I lived to San Francisco where my family lived. Chris had refused to return calls for a week after he left me but when my brother and I made our first stop in Pennsylvania, I tried phoning him one last time. It was certainly the strange area code that made him call back, as for Chris the entire world was made up of New York City, the Bahamas and Europe. San Francisco, for him, was an alien world, rather like traveling to Mars rather than another spot on Earth. I remember one Spring Break when we were married and I decided to accept an invitation from a friend from Sarah Lawrence College and drive down to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina for a week. Chris had told me to call him along the way so when I stopped in Richmond, Virginia, I had given him a call. He had asked where I was and I said Richmond, Virginia. He had replied, “Where is that?” as if it was an astonishingly unknown place. But when he called the hotel phone where I was in Pennsylvania, he sounded like someone completely different. I answer the ring. He said loudly in a disturbed tone, “Where are you!?” I said some town in Pennsylvania (I can no longer remember its name) and then he replied, “So you’re abandoning me and going home to California?” This was after having told me a week before that he wanted a divorce, packed up then and there with the only explanation being “I’m troubled and confused,” and that he was going to talk to his therapist, not mentioning at all that he had been sleeping with the slut for six months already and was moving directly from our home to her apartment about six blocks away, having already cleaned out the bank account before telling me he was leaving and also having cancelled phone service and our apartment lease. So, I replied, “I’m abandoning YOU?” and hung up. But, sure now that he was insane, once I got back to my mother’s house in the Bay Area, I made an appointment to see a therapist in Mill Valley who was touted as being excellent by my therapist in New York, who was herself excellent. Now that I look back on that period of my life and see that I’ve mentioned therapists we had three times already, I sigh with nostalgia at the good old days when one could afford such things as a parking lot broker, an accountant and an excellent therapist to take one’s little stresses away.

At any rate, I went to see this new excellent therapist in the Mill Valley hills and explained to her that I thought my husband had multiple personalities and gave my evidence. She did, in fact, turn out to be a truly great therapist because she burst into laughter and replied, “He doesn’t have multiple personalities! He’s Italian!” She said not being Italian (she luckily happened to be) I wouldn’t understand the culture. She said he was not only Italian but based originally in Brooklyn, although with hard work they had pulled themselves up to the level of Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan, which didn’t actually matter as they still were who they were culturally. And it was clear from the details of our marriage that I told her that they were very traditionally Italian, indeed, and that meant that after about a year of marriage, he would cheat, I would be made to catch him, including that he would leave me for an inappropriate woman, someone whom he would consider low-class, and then I would be expected to break everything in the house, scream, highly emotional things like that and then he would show up begging to come back. I would be expected and allowed to throw public fits to embarrass him and then of course accept him back but what would have actually happened is he would have made a new rule: our marriage would be now defined as he cheats, I punish him, but he continues to cheat and I continue to punish him, now and then. He had, she said, what is called the Madonna/Whore Complex (one wonders if this was Bill Clinton's excuse when he said to the American people, "I did not have sex with that woman." Perhaps he didn't think he had, under the Madonna/Whore Complex rules). At any rate, the Mill Valley therapist said the problem was that since I wasn’t Italian, I never understood any of that was going on. For me, his actions meant he was actually leaving me, so, especially the apartment lease having been cancelled, I figured the best thing for me to do was to just go back to San Francisco and start over there, nursing my wounds nearer to my family. And this was why he exclaimed that I was leaving him. She said that statement of his actually did make sense under the circumstances as he understood them. And although he filed for divorce and got a really mean, hurtful attorney to do the dirty work, lo and behold if three months later he begged to come back and said he had left the slut. So sadly, I said no. Why did I do that when I loved him more than anyone ever before or since in my life? Because I no longer felt that I knew him; I felt that the man I married was just someone I had imagined him to be and that man was simply gone forever. So who would I be taking back? Just a stranger. In fact, the way I felt, the form of grief I felt, it seemed far more like the grief of the death of a loved one than simply that someone had cheated and left. The grief was so deep. I cried for two months in my mother’s back bedroom. I could hardly eat and lost a lot of weight (consequently, when I did go back to New York for a brief visit in court I looked trim and terrific in my lovely Anne Klein outfit, which was a consolation since he was sitting there with the slut and she was wearing an out-of-season tatty cheap artificial-blend tweedy suit and her hair had turned to straw from all that cocaine). Actually, I don’t think I’ll ever fully recover from it. I did love him so much and in spite of his hateful Italian mother, I was so happy to be married to him. Alas, life isn’t all we always hope it will be.

So, this brings me to the theme of this posting: red flags. The reason I began it with this bit about my second husband, Chris, is because after Chris left me when I went to see both therapists, the New York one just before I left New York and then the Mill Valley one when I arrived in California, I asked them both what my problem was, how had I made this happen, since of course I blamed myself. Both replied exactly the same. They said, “What is your problem? Your problem is you pick jerks.” Actually, I’ve enjoyed winning two arguments with men since then, when both of the creeps, at different times, of course, resorted to the low accusation of saying to me something to the effect of, in a jeering manner, “You go to a therapist so you must have a problem. What’s your problem, huh? Huh?” to which both times I suddenly felt quite relaxed and replied, “She said I pick jerks.” It’s so good to win an argument hands down from time to time.

At any rate, the point the two therapists were making is that I’m terrible at noticing red flags. But I’ve improved over the years, particularly by being given books to read by the therapist (being the queen of picking jerks) and having red flags clearly explained to the densest of human beings, me. You learn as you can, when you can, but if you finally get it, well, at least that’s figured out. For me, reading people is not my strength. Well, clearly. I do have strengths; what the unlettered would call “book learning”. Yes, I have that strength in spades, if I do say so myself. But what those same unlettered call “common sense” and tout as the greatest of all pieces of knowledge, I have zip of. I also disagree that it’s the greatest of all pieces of knowledge; it depends upon the setting. I realize now that the Ivory Tower is where I belong. Pile books around me and I’ll learn them without being prodded. Ask me to talk to you for hours on esoteric subjects, I’ll sit down under a tree and comply with joy. But ask me to spot the creeps, no, I flounder. What’s important is the saying on the little flag at the Renaissance Faire in the photo of me at the top right margin: Plato’s “Know thyself”. But it’s more than that; to this should be added, “Accept thyself and Forgive thyself for Not Being Everything Perfectly”. And once you know yourself, then place yourself in the proper setting where you will feel at home and be happy and excel. However, whether you live in a cocoon or a hobbit or on the streets of Manhattan in the middle of chaos, one of the most important parts of living well is learning to recognize red flags. Both therapists told me that once you are emotionally involved with someone, it is difficult for a therapist or anyone else, for that matter, to get you to realize you’re with a jerk. But if they can teach you or you can learn on your own to recognize the red flags of jerkdom before you get emotionally involved, then, then you are on safe ground. This has been very difficult for me to learn but I have learned some of it and the hard way and usually it’s just in hindsight. But I have a lot behind me that I can look back on so I thought I would share it here, bits of clues for red flags and how I learned to recognize them.

One of the most important things I’ve learned on my own, which the therapists didn’t mention, is that red flags count for potential friends, too, not just romantic interests. So, as I give the red flags below, I’m going to talk about both, recognizing red flags in potential mates and in potential friends because now that a lot of evidence is in, the red flags are actually the same for both.

PART I: THE FLAGS

1. THEY TELL THE WORST THING ABOUT THEMSELVES RIGHT AWAY

This is a fascinating red flag and one that both therapists told me about. I didn’t believe them when they explained it to me but I’ve seen it time and again since. It’s definitely true. What they explained is that when you meet a person who sees themselves as being a potential mate (and this goes for potential friends, too), they will nearly immediately tell you the worst fault they believe they themselves have. But here’s the trick: they tell it in an off-handed manner, as a joke or a non-sequitur and they do it way before you have any inclination or awareness (and they realize this) that there may be any future between you. Why? Because you won’t take it seriously at this point. For example, you might meet someone new while out with a group somewhere, at a coffee house or bar or meeting, as often happens. Everyone is talking and joking and the person suddenly adds as part of a joke just told, something like “Oh, I always beat my girlfriends.” It’s meant to be silly and is always told just like that, kind of in an off-the-wall way or jokingly or as a kind of weird non-sequitur, in order that it not be taken seriously. But here’s the interesting part psychologically. The person confessing this worst fault (and if a man says THAT, run like crazy because he means it) watches for the reaction to this confession by the target, the target being the person whom he potentially sees as a possible mate or girlfriend. If the target doesn’t register it and respond with her true opinion (which is typical under these circumstances, of course), that it is an unacceptable and evil thing but instead she just ignores it (which is also typical), he will interpret her lack of stated judgment to be tacit acceptance, even support of this horrible behavior! Seriously. How much I want to communicate the reality of this. He will think, well, she has just communicated to me that it’s ok once we’re together that I beat the hell out of her. For real. AND, later on, if they get together and one day he beats the crap out of her, he is quite capable of saying something to the effect of, “Well, I told you from the beginning I beat my girlfriends and you still hooked up with me, anyhow.” (to her too-late astonished shock). There’s a simple way to read this red flag: listen clearly, at the very beginning especially, to what new people tell you about themselves and no matter what tone they tell it in, including in the form of a joke, and reply with your real opinion. If the above statement comes out of some new guy’s mouth as a joke and even if you have been laughing up to this point, stop laughing, look him straight in the eye and reply clearly, “That’s disgusting and unacceptable behavior.” He will avoid you the rest of the time and never hook up with you, to your great luck. You just saved yourself a lot of misery.

Now, there’s a real positive side of watching for this odd early confession. And that is you can detect very early a potentially really great mate as, for example, if in the middle of a new, just met conversation, out of the blue, a little weirdly non-sequiturish or as a joke, he says, “I never separate the colors from the whites when I do my laundry.” Well, if you don’t mind that, you can bet, unless he really is a multiple personality and isn’t aware that his other self is a mass murderer, you’ve got a pretty nice, benign, gentle (since that is his worst fault) person on your hands and that’s possibly a very good thing in terms of the future.

You may be thinking, I’ve never heard anyone confess anything about themselves in a first meeting. Yes, I thought that. Now, it doesn’t happen at a first date. A first date is too late for it. It happens the first time you talk to someone new in a neutral setting, like in a group, as I said before, or if you bump into them for the very first time in a supermarket line, something like that. And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear it. Ever since the two therapists told me that and that was seventeen years ago, I’ve heard these early confessions again and again and again and every time I’m surprised. It’s amazing how that really does happen. And here’s the kicker. Potential friends do exactly the same thing, if they see you as a potential friend. And I’ve got a very good example that I’m about to tell you, one I heard clearly when she confessed it but I just chose to ignore it. Why? Because I didn’t realize that potential friends do it, too, but that’s only because I am really really stupid when it comes to common sense. It was completely obvious that this person would not make a good friend; in fact, that this person should be summarily avoided like the plague. But I ignored it. And she told me it several times afterwards and even though I grew to understand that she would use it against me one day, I continued to ignore it. What she said right off, and she said it as if it were a quality in herself that she admired in herself greatly, was that she was horribly revengeful if she felt that a person had done her any wrong at all! She told me this right when I met her as if it proved what a strong person she was and as the friendship grew she told me it several times again and started to give me examples, one of how she had waited four years, I think it was, to get a really cruel revenge on an ex-boss, how she had waited all that time just to hurt this woman as much as possible at exactly the right moment it would hurt the worst. And then later she told me how she had threatened her to-be ex-husband with various forms of revenge if he didn’t give her x, y and z in the divorce and that he knew she would do it because he knew how capable she was of really evil revenge! She told me how she sometimes carried around a small baggy of dry cement in her purse so if she wanted revenge on someone she could visit them and then ask to use the bathroom and pour it down their drains! When I told that one to the guy (she hated) who I was living with, he especially being a plumber and being a very good reader of people (he hated her), he exclaimed in shock that she was never to come near his house ever ever ever. Well, of course! But did I break off the friendship when she told me that? No, I sat at her kitchen table drinking iced tea listening and wishing she just wouldn’t say things like that. Then one day later on, when a passive-aggressive friend who was mad at me told her that I had forwarded one of her emails to her, which I actually hadn’t done, she didn’t wait to ask me about it; instead, she instantly told me that she had saved all my emails and was going to get enjoyable revenge on me with them! It was so instantaneous, the moment she thought I had done the smallest thing “against” her, as if she was psychologically just waiting for that moment to spring on me even though she constantly professed being my lifelong close friend! I suppose by her revenge plot she meant she was going to send some remark I had said about someone off-hand to them so they would never speak to me again but I don’t really care what her revenge plot actually was. The irony was that I hadn’t forwarded her emails to anyone so I just replied that I hadn’t done that and to have this other person send her proof of my doing that if she didn’t believe me and to otherwise fuck-off. It was about time. But, really, why did I get into a friendship with an openly extremely hateful, revenge-obsessed person to begin with? I ask you! Crap at reading red flags, that’s why. It’s not just that; also purposefully, consciously ignoring them, just wanting them not to be true; wanting to believe people are not like that, they don’t intend harm, not really; they’re just saying that to sound impressive in some twisted way or they’re in a bad mood or something. But this is not a good thing, to ignore these signals because there are people who really do intend harm, who are hateful and revengeful and mean it, even though that’s so evil and twisted. It’s especially weird and confusing when they profess and often on being Christians! This “friend” of mine would nearly daily send me cute sentimental Christian-message emails, little sayings, proverb-type stuff, Christian positive-thinking stuff and at the same time on and off bragging about being this superlative revenge-centered person! I know it makes no sense but human nature is like that; a puzzling paradox of contradictions.

2. TOO BIG OF A PRESENT RIGHT AWAY

This is a dead giveaway that the person interested in you wants to own you either physically or psychologically or both, rather than be in a relationship with you. It’s like the present they give you is a sort of example of the value of you as an object. I have personally experienced this from two men in my life and from a pseudo-friend. I remember after fully realizing the truth of this, I happened to go to a hotel to meet my best friend, a place in a great California town, Carpenteria. She was driving up from L.A. and I was driving down from S.F. and I was to go to this hotel where she was checking in to find her. I arrived a bit earlier than she did but since she was expected at any minute, I hung around the lobby of the hotel waiting. I happened to get into a conversation with the desk clerk, a young woman who was bragging about her new older boyfriend and how even though they hadn’t been together long, he had just bought her a new BMW for her birthday. She was out of this world thrilled and definitely by that present he had bought her for a goodly time and certainly she would be willing to overlook problems between them for a goodly number of days. I’m just surmising this, of course but I saw such a red flag when she said that. I wanted to scream, run, run for your life. But of course she wouldn’t have believed me. I hope I was wrong about him and that she is happily now with this great, generous guy. Do I sound cynical? I don’t really mean to be but I’ve been through a lot myself and experience tends to grind rose-colored glasses underfoot.

The too-big present is of course hard to resist and seems like a huge complement as it is intended to suggest to you that this person finds you so very attractive, desirable, a “keeper”, whatever. It doesn’t. It means now you owe them in a way that you can never repay because it’s tacit and it holds that ever-elusive emotional rather than financial value because it is given as a gift with no strings, supposedly. This is the furthest possible from what it actually is, which is a potential weight around your neck that you can’t slip out of. It means that you are not supposed to think about if you really want to be romantically involved with this person, or in the case of a potential friend, if you really intended, wanted or want to be close friends. In other words, the too large gift makes you feel too guilty to extricate yourself from the relationship when it starts to seem, as it very soon will, unpleasantly going wrong somehow.

Case in point #1

My later-to-become third ex-husband, well, rather, my third husband (the ex to come later, obviously) invited me to go with him and a close friend to her apartment to watch a movie. That seemed fine except I wasn’t quite clear what their relationship actually was so I was very surprised when he put his hand on my knee when she was in her kitchen for a moment. Being an idiot, as always, when that happened I made sure I assumed that they were just friends and she was super in favor of him dating me. She came to a shop I worked in after he and I were just married and while I was ringing up her items she intensely glared at me without blinking, however saying nothing. So who knows about that. At any rate, we three watched whatever movie it was and then he drove me home. He asked to see my place so I showed him the living room and kitchen, which were nearly empty of furniture, which I didn’t mind because the walls were covered in my maps and that’s what mattered to me. A few days later he called and asked if I wanted to go to Independence (a bigish town by Kansas standards), to Walmart (which is one of the only forms of entertainment that tragically exist in rural southeast Kansas), which was forty miles away. So I said sure, I had a few things I could buy there. Off we went and when we arrived he said how about I go my way and buy my things and he goes his way and buys his things and we’ll meet out front when we’re done. I said sure and wandered off to get the things I needed. When I was done, I went out to the front and there he was waiting for me with his cart, which had a few bags and a huge new t.v. in its box. I didn’t think much about it until we got back to my place and he took the t.v. out of the back seat and brought it to my door and said it was for me. I reiterate that this was the second date and both dates were not even real dates, just kind of hang out do stuff experiences. I couldn’t believe it and said no. I said I couldn’t accept it. I said he should just take it back to his place for himself. He said he had noticed that I didn’t have a t.v. though he did have a nice one and since he loved to watch movies and I had said I did (and since on the first date we had watched a movie so that seemed to confirm that), he figured he’d get me a much-needed t.v. and hoped he could come over and watch movies with me rather than inappropriately asking me too soon back to his place. It was so oddly stated that it was confusing (this is because it was all bullshit) and on top of that I hardly had even a moment to decide whether I even wanted a t.v., particularly since I had been so happy up to that point spending most of my time when at home with my books and maps and I don’t tend to like to watch t.v.; even now alone I don’t subscribe to any t.v. service. Why didn’t I have even a moment to think about it? Because it was in a huge box that was heavy and it was in his arms and he started saying how heavy it was and would I please let him in the living room so he could put it down. And once it was sitting on an appropriate table that he had walked directly to, he started opening the box and setting it up while continually talking about this and that so I didn't have time to think or get a word in edgewise. I just stood there astonished and confused about what to do. Hurriedly, he got it all plugged in and said he’d come over with videos (the t.v. had a VCR built in) so I’d have something to watch since I didn’t subscribe to cable or satellite t.v. Then he rushed out, saying he had to go and the door closed behind him. I had hardly moved from the spot just inside the door the whole time and as soon as that he was gone and the t.v. remained, this huge looming expensive monstrosity I wasn’t even sure I wanted and certainly wouldn’t have bought myself.

But of course it was a perfect opening for him to come knock on my door with videotapes as often as he felt like it, usually interrupting me working on my dissertation or studying my maps until he was there nearly all the time with those endless mindless movies, as he only liked to watch war movies and talk through them, explaining this or that about them to me, the weapons or vehicles or planes being depicted, the battle strategy, the desperate conditions. Bit by bit I looked at my maps less and got used to his intrusions and although I was conscious that I was less and less happy with my days, I didn’t know what to do about it since this great entertaining t.v. of his was right in the middle of my living room. I thought about telling him to take it to his house but I knew he had his own t.v. there and I knew he would be insulted and hurt by such a statement, or so I supposed. It was a quandry. It wasn’t until three years later that my therapist gave me a book that explained what he had done. He had purchased my compliance that day and the cost of it was the cost of a t.v. with built-in vcr. Instead of having to get to know me and me him, with having to earn my loyalty, interest and affection, he wedged the door open with a too-big purchase and I wasn’t able to ever manage to completely close the door to him after that. What made it work was that it was so sudden and so huge a present that I had no idea how to place it in terms of appropriateness with the resulting appropriate response. This is because it was inappropriate. Everything he did was like that, rushing it on me with complicated reasoning for odd behavior, giving me no time to consider what I wanted, ignoring, in fact, what I wanted until my life became entirely about him, until he had convinced me to quit my job because it was so far away, until I was living at his place, until the day I married him though I was aware that I maybe didn’t even want to marry him. Why? Because this type of abuser is great at sizing people up and when they find a person such as me who is terrible at sizing people up, who looks at people with glued-on rose-colored glasses and ignores red flags, they’ve got a keeper in their minds and what you want is never considered.

Case in Point #2

This is an example of when a too-big present is given by a potential friend, in my case that would be a potential woman friend but it can happen with men, too, I assume. This is also an example of what happens when you choose to become friends with a person who is passive-aggressive. Let’s call this potential friend Lillian. Lillian had even told me she was and knew she was passive-aggressive and gave as an example one time when her sister had just bought a new vase or pitcher (I don’t recall exactly – something large and ceramic) that her sister loved and that at that very moment Lillian knew she would accidentally break it and one day not long later she did. She didn’t mean that she would pretend it was an accident; she meant that she would actually accidentally break it, or rather, her conscious mind would not be aware that her subconscious mind had done it on purpose. Well, that’s the essence of the passive-aggressive tendency, anyway. She must have unexpressed anger towards her sister, I guess, as that is the only way that would make sense but I’m assuming as she never actually told me that. But did this admission of awareness of destructive, mean, passive-aggressiveness towards her own sister put me off about becoming her friend? Of course not! Well, it did a bit except that not long after that she gave me an inappropriately enormous present and gave it in a way that clearly demonstrated her deep desire to have a meaningful, long-term friendship with me. There’s only one word, or so it seems, for this kind of gesture: it’s touching when a potential friend gives you a too-big present. It touches your heart.

The present was this (some background is needed to give this the right context):
A year before, in 2008, I had gotten a fellowship to go on an archeological dig in Israel with a Harvard University archaeological staff. As the time approached to leave, I went to the doctor for the correct immunizations. While there, I told the doctor that I had been having a slight pain in my upper left side. She said it was probably nothing. I went off to Israel and was sicker and sicker the whole time there. I thought it was psycho-somatic as my mother had died only four days after I had gotten to Israel and consequently, because of finances, I couldn’t go home for her funeral. All my family was mad about it, except my brother, who had told me not to come back, that it was too far, too expensive, whatever. I felt very ill there, progressively so and had to miss all the lectures and even three unforgivable days of work because of it. I could hardly sleep, my side bothered me more and more and when I got back to California I went right to the doctor (a HMO so it was a different doctor this time) and said that I wanted to be tested for parasites; that I thought maybe I had gotten intestinal parasites in Israel. I got an expensive test for parasites that came up negative. The doctor said it was probably nothing and left it at that.

The year later I was in Kansas visiting Lillian among other reasons. My flight was for the next week, a Wednesday. I decided to go across the street to the health clinic for an affordable check-up. The nurse practitioner told me that because of my high blood pressure I should have a full physical and to make two appointments before I left. I made one for the next day, a Tuesday and the second for the following Tuesday. In the first one the same nurse practitioner told me a list of blood tests to have done right away so the results would be available to her by the next appointment. This I did and in the next appointment, during the check-up she told me that one blood test had come back with a strong positive for colon cancer. She said I had to as immediately as possible have a colonoscopy, that she knew a good doctor and could call him right then to schedule it. I said I had a flight the next day to go home to California and I would have it done there. She said she noted that I had no insurance. She asked where in California I was from. When I told her, she said that she was from a town ten miles away and had been a nurse there before moving to Kansas. She said the cost of the procedure I needed would be at least twice what it was in Kansas, that since I had no insurance I would get mediocre at best care and have to wait a very long time for it, too long for this very dangerous cancer. She said if I could just stay in Kansas, at least long enough to have the procedure, I would get quality care, they would accept a payment plan and that it would be far more affordable and would happen very quickly. She said she knew that if I went back to California I would just pretend it wasn’t happening and not get the procedure and that I would then surely die. She said to go talk to a friend about it and get back to her. I walked down the street back to Lillian’s somewhat disconcerted.

I told Lillian. She said I had to stay in Kansas and have the procedure done there. She said I could have her house as she owned two, one there and one in Washington (state). She said she had friends down the road that usually house-sat for her when she was in Washington for the summer but that they had abused her trust the year before by putting 4000 miles on her extra car and that she had been trying to find a gentle way of not letting them house-sit this year without hurting their feelings. She said she would tell them about my upcoming medical procedure and that I needed a place to rest to recover from all of this. I really wanted to just go home to California. I thought, well, I can see the truth in the nurse saying that I might not pursue it when going home but if I told my brother, he would no doubt make me pursue it (as surely he would have). But then we called my best friend, Patty, in L.A. and I told her what was happening then Lillian talked to her and told her her plan so that when I got back on the phone with Patty she said stay there, house-sit for Lillian, have the procedure done there, rest all summer, get well. All good advice. ALL good advice, right?

Except Lillian is passive-aggressive, which means she doesn’t know her own mind, or more precisely, she doesn’t fully acknowledge her own feelings but drives them down into her subconscious and then manifests them in odd, inappropriate, strange ways and what always accompanies that is a strange form of anger via these repressed feelings, an anger which somehow becomes the fault of the other person in the room right then in present time.

But the choice made sense. So I said ok on the condition that I didn’t just borrow her house but instead trade for it as the whole exterior badly needed scraping and painting and I was good at that and there were other repairs inside that I could do. I knew I wouldn’t abuse using the AC or her car and that I would take good care of the garden. So I accepted, under these understandings. She took off for Washington and I started taking care of the house and living there on my own. I got the colonoscopy within a week or so and it turned out to be not a moment too soon because there was a large polyp that was nearly blocking the left side of my colon, which is why my side continually hurt, especially when I ate. The biopsy came back as “a villous adenoma with some very aggressive premalignant changes,” and the nurse there and the nurse practitioner, in seeing the results, both said it hadn’t been a moment too soon. So I wasn’t feeling too good, pretty darn weak, in fact. But I was happy to just have tasks to do on the house to fix it up. So I started working on it and taking walks to build my strength; first little walks around town and over the months longer and longer ones until I could walk ten miles into the countryside. I took along a padded water bottle cover that had a shoulder strap that I had bought in Jerusalem and put a plastic water bottle cut to half-height in it with some water and along the walks I’d pick bouquets of wildflowers and get them into the water bottle quickly because wild flowers wilt almost immediately if they don’t hit water right away.

The guy who had owned the house before Lillian had fixed it up quickly and pretty slip-shodily for sale, one of the things being having painted over the peeling exterior with an oil-based paint that had hardened like a rock. The finish looked terrible as you could see through this heavy coating the bumps and hunks of old peeling paint. I only had a hand-scraper but I began by attacking the many pillars on the porch. It was pretty difficult going but I like that kind of work because I think about all sorts of things while my hand is busy chipping away. I can work out scenes for plays, personal priorities, ideas for organizing a lecture on ancient history, choices for working on one of the decipherments that I’m interested in, things like that. So it’s pleasant work though from the outside it probably looks interminably dull. However, the inner life is what I feel one should cultivate more than anything else, one’s thoughts on important subjects; I’m not talking about the usual meaning of inner life related to some religious belief. Belief systems are not that interesting to me because they are unprovable. I only find them interesting when they include bits of possible hints or directions of research in ancient history, as in Esther there are corroborations of events during the Achaemenid Empire. At any rate, there were things to do in the garden, too, especially having to take on the mowing since the guy (same guy in couple who used her car all the summer before without her permission) who had talked her into giving him $300 towards a riding mower on condition that he would mow her lawn when she was in Washington; he rarely showed up; actually twice the whole summer and that was when she intervened and phoned him after my many complaints. I gave up on him and instead would borrow a mower from a nice lady down the street and do it myself. And things like cleaning out the potting shed of piles of old yukky insulation and various other messes, taking to the curb the twenty garbage bags, two per week, that had been left in the garage, keeping the new wisterias alive and trained on to the veranda, rescuing, repairing and installing a nice old door on the potting shed, calling the guy to exterminate the termites, caulking the bathtub, finding and painting a new sink cabinet and installing a new mirror and other such tasks and sending Lillian whatever she needed via different emergency phone calls to me, all these things joyfully done.

However, during this time there would be calls for Lillian from friends in Washington and other places who weren’t sure she had left Kansas and each time they would act very oddly towards me, kind of rudely and referring to how nice she was to let me have the house. This attitude and these types of comments continued the entire time I was there in random phone calls to the house, all very mysteriously as far as I was concerned. There was no point in saying anything to any of them about it since I didn’t know them but I started telling Lillian that I was getting the impression that they thought I wasn't working hard enough on her house or something. She would counter that she had no idea why I had that impression since in fact I was working far more hours than I would have had to do if I had instead done the same work for money and then paid her rent. I said well, it’s just a fair trade and has nothing to do with the value of a dollar. She agreed. But the Washington friends' odd behavior continued. It wasn’t happening in town since people there, though at first a little suspicious of a stranger as is the Kansan nature, after a while started greeting me pretty warmly since they saw me scraping the pillars, mowing the lawn and things like that all the time and walking around their nice little town and in the countryside.

After several months I was introduced to a somewhat interesting plumber and finally moved to his place with him as he lived ninety miles away and it was taxing for him to drive up so often. Lillian told me to take her car with me and just leave it in his garage, just in case of an emergency, which I did. But after about a month, it was clear that it wasn’t working out with him. Lillian had mentioned many times up to then that she would like somehow to get that extra car up to Washington as she had bought it during the gas hike and no longer needed it and could make a much better profit with it in Washington since it was a Subaru, which is every other car in Washington but rarely adored in Kansas (the truck is the vehicle of choice in Kansas, of course). So when I wanted to leave the plumber and Kansas, too, I phoned her and said that if she really wanted her car driven up to Washington, I was happy to do it; that I had the money for the gas and could leave anytime. She said yes, that would be great, that she’d reimburse me for the gas. So I took whatever I had at the plumbers, went back to Lillian's and prepared to drive to Washington. I had too much stuff by then that I had collected at auctions so I called my brother in San Francisco and he said to drive to S.F. and drop it all off at his place and then drive up to Washington. I phoned Lillian and told her all this and said I’d pay for the gas for the extra mileage to S.F.. But she said she rented the rooms of the house in Washington and there were several available and if I wanted to come straight to Washington with all my stuff to move there, I could rent a room from her and get a job there and resettle. It sounded like a terrific idea and I said yes, indeed, definitely. I was really looking forward to this. She called again and we discussed the rooms and which one I would want to have and she gave me detailed directions of a really nice direct route via blue highways to her place in Washington.

Happily, I packed up the car and drove the nearly two thousand miles from SE Kansas to the far NW part of Washington, to a delightful town called Port Townsend, right across the Sound from Victoria Island, Canada. The car was packed full with my boxes of things but Lillian had said to bring it all so I did. Once I hit the peninsula in northwestern Washington I was particularly enthusiastic as instead of cows everywhere (I’m not that much of a fan of beef) I saw first a sign for oysters, then signs for clams then a sign about a shrimp festival! (I love seafood being from the coast myself). I felt I had come to a place I could really call home since it also had fog and huge trees as well as the lovely Puget Sound. I asked someone in Port Townsend to direct me to Lillian’s street and found it. I knocked on the door, she answered and I happily said there was a ton of stuff in the car and asked which room was going to be mine. It wasn’t minutes of me talking about how great it was to rent a room from her and how I was looking forward to finding a job there and having a new life when she said that I must have misunderstood; she never intended to rent me a room but she would gladly let me stay as her guest for awhile.

I’m letting you take that one in before I continue...let me call that Lillian's passive-aggressive full frontal attack #2. Lillian's passive-aggressive full frontal attack #1 I was still to discover though it had already happened. She had communicated to all of her friends there in Washington, though I’d bet it was not ever anything directly said by her, only intimated and then inferred by her friends, that I was a deadbeat who had been using her and that she had been this saintly benefactor to me by giving me her house for all that time for nothing in return. Every one of her friends I met acted either rudely or suspiciously or dismissive. If I even tried to tell them that no, we had traded, she had given the house and I had not only spared her from giving it to proven abusive house-sitters but had done a ton of work on it the whole time and far more work than it was worth at that. But there was no real way of communicating that after the fact to her friends whom she had known and lived near for over thirty years and who didn’t know me from Eve. I just had to take the attitude from them.

Passive-aggressive full frontal attack #2, however, was far worse. Had I not believed her about renting the room, I could have taken all my stuff to my brother’s in San Francisco and dropped it off before bringing the car up. But I had it all and it was a lot, suitcases, a guitar, my cat in his carrier and a bunch of boxes. In other words, I couldn’t fly home with it, it was also too much to take on the train considering I also couldn’t take a pet on the train and I couldn’t get a Craig’s List ride with all that stuff. She said how she was looking forward to making me a guest for six weeks! I said I didn’t want to be a guest for six weeks; I had intended on renting a room and finding a job and making a life. A few days after I arrived, at some cafe she asked me, coyly (which made me nervous to reply after all this revelation), “If you hadn’t have mistakenly thought I was going to rent you a room when you got here, would you have left Kansas?” She was probably gathering information about the success of specific forms of manipulation to screw other friends in the future. I hesitated, considering the land mine I was walking into and carefully replied, “Listen, I’m glad I came. I love it here. I wanted to get out of Kansas. But since you’ve asked, actually, no, if I hadn’t have misunderstood about renting the room (that was the painful part to say but since I was living at her house and trapped there for the time being, I had no other choice but to say this), I would have stayed in Kansas since it was a roof over my head.” She nodded quietly and ate the rest of her lunch. Ok, it seemed ok. An hour later suddenly there was drama. Suddenly there were tears running down her cheeks and she said loudly in a highly upset whine (we were still in public), “I can’t believe you said that. I can’t believe you said you wouldn’t have left Kansas.” Great, I thought. But yep, should have seen that one coming. Silently I thought, well, don’t ask the question if you don’t want the answer.

Then she informed me that she actually couldn’t reimburse me for the gas money from Kansas to Washington for three weeks. So that meant I had to stay with her for three weeks at least because that was a lot of money to me and I couldn’t leave without it and I couldn’t rent a room somewhere else there without it, either. I painfully resolved to just make the best of it I could. Port Townsend is a beautiful place and I really would have liked to stay there. I no longer thought about finding a job; I just wanted to go to my brother’s in San Francisco. I called him but he couldn’t come up to get me for a few weeks, which was finally the only way I could find to get to S.F. but he said he would at some point and ironically about six weeks later he showed up, stayed a few days and then packed up all my stuff in his car and we had a great drive together down the Washington, Oregon and California coast camping all the way just like the old days with our parents when we were kids.

However, while I was in Port Townsend those six weeks, Lillian and I bumped into or saw four different women in town that Lillian told me were never speaking to her again. Add to that the woman she had told me about before who was also never speaking to her again. I don’t think I know anyone else or have even met anyone else who has so many people who aren’t speaking to them. But it is now six as once I was able to extricate myself from her power reach, I’m sure there’s no reason I would have to want to speak to her again.

Why did she do these things? Who knows. Ask a psychiatrist. It’s certainly deep and serious passive-aggressiveness. But man can it be insidious and damaging. But you see, she told me she was passive-aggressive right up front with the story about her sister’s vase. I just didn’t take it seriously. That’s the point; when someone new tells you some odd confession about themselves right up front, listen. Only if you listen and then comment with what you really think about it can you avoid (at least some of the time!) wasting time getting to know someone who is going to treat you badly.

You may say to yourself, well, maybe Lillian just wanted me out of her house in Kansas and this was the only way she could think of achieving it, being a coward. The problem with this is that I was leaving anyway and my plan, which she knew, was to go first to my brother’s, drop off most of my stuff, continue up to Washington, be reimbursed for part of the trip and then grab a train back to S.F. That would have been so simple. In other words, I was already leaving her house in Kansas so she didn’t need to mess with me further. And while I was in Port Townsend she did some other unpleasant passive-aggressive things to me that there’s no point in going into further, except the really low one of once she knew I couldn’t get home with all my stuff, she started commenting that if I had too much stuff to take I could leave at her house several things that she coveted of mine like my very nice vegetable juicer as well as other things! I took my juicer back to San Francisco with me.

Those are personal examples of the too-big present red flag as well as the they tell you their worst fault right up-front red flag. I should not have accepted house sitting for her. I should have taken my flight home immediately and dealt with it there. But I thought when she offered me her house that she was the most wonderful, generous person I had ever known. It was such a joy to accept and to know someone like that; I was completely seduced. And that was because it was too big of a present. And why did I think of her like that even though I was working to trade for the house? Because it was in fact an extremely generous thing for her to do for me when I really needed it due to my health problem. So why did she mess it up with insidious covert meanness? Having thought about it a lot, I can only come to the conclusion that she must have a form of low self-esteem that needs to make people believe she is bigger than life, more generous than other people, more kind, etc. This is why she led her friends to believe she was handing me the house for nothing, so they would look down on me while elevating her in balance. She was making me look bad to make herself look better. The saddest thing about it is it undercut her actual real kindness and generosity of spirit. Ironic but there you are; human nature is so very paradoxical and complicated, unfathomable and often tragically so.

PART II: ONCE YOU'RE STUCK

Once you’ve ignored the red flags above and the other ones I haven’t mentioned but you, through your experience, have learned about, there are further bits of evidence of behaviour that will give away that you really need to extricate yourself from this person. There are also a myriad of these but I’ve listed below just a few to whet your palate, to inspire you to say to yourself yeah, I know of another one...

1. ALWAYS FEELING AT LEAST SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE AROUND THE PERSON

I won’t go into this in the kind of detail I have done for the first two red flags. But this feeling is definitely also a major red flag. It feels like you are perpetually walking on eggshells when this person is in the room and that feeling becomes stranger as you get to know the person for longer and longer a time. At first you can attribute it to not knowing them very well; that me hostess you guest kind of feeling. There also seems to be no source for the feeling. You are getting along; you like the person and they seem to like you yet it feels slightly stressful for some unknown reason all the time. You never just feel ok, like you can just be yourself. It’s almost like feeling you are being silently judged all the time; something like that. The friend or lover can’t be pinned down to be the cause though it doesn’t feel like that when you are around other friends or had felt like that with past lovers. You have two choices here: you can ignore the red flag and hope it’s just something elusive that has no meaning or you can take note of the red flag and either try to pinpoint what’s going on in this particular relationship that’s causing you to feel weird or you can take it as a plain and simple red flag and separate yourself from forming a too-close friendship or romance with this person, at least until from a bit of a distance you can observe maybe what’s going on by seeing them interact with other people before you get in too deeply. That’s the wisest thing to do but so much of the time, at least with me, there’s something appealing about this person and you really want to get to know them so foolishly you ignore these signals. You put on blinders. Then as time goes by you start to notice things like how you are the one who has to create enthusiasm in the relationship, that you are the one who has to invite, call, visit, create a fun time and it’s taking a lot of effort whereas when you are at their place you can never quite shake the feeling that you are still a guest, not a buddy who can sit back and relax in their company. Here’s the thing: it’s not worth it having a friendship or romance like that; in fact, if that’s what it’s like, it’s not a friendship or romance; it’s a power relationship and you’re the low ball. Get out of it. Find someone who doesn’t care about power over you, who just wants to be friends or lovers.

2. THE HOOK

Having grown up in the Bay Area in the late 60’s and early 70’s, I was lucky enough to at least be very aware of the radical feminist movement, if not participating in it as best I could while still a teenager. One of the things I was privy to was the invention of women’s groups, not the Tupperware type but the misery likes company type where women would form a circle or sit around in one of their living rooms and discuss a particular type of problem, like their love lives. I think, in fact, that I was a bit too young to hear some of the complaints that I did hear as they shocked me beyond my years sometimes. Yet, there is one refrain that I heard that I will never forget and I call it a refrain because it was just that: said over and over again by different women in different groups over the many years I was lucky enough to share my thoughts with other women. And that was the following statement: “He used to be such a nice guy but now he’s such an asshole.”

Here’s the thing, ladies. He was never a nice guy and didn’t turn into an asshole. He was always an asshole pretending to be a nice guy in order to hook you. It was actually a man who once revealed that to me. He said that assholes always get the good women because they know exactly what to say and do to seem really great. He said the good guys are the ones who don’t always get it right, who flub up a complement, who forget something that is important to you from time to time, who don’t get the right gift, who can seem kind of boring once in a while. Why? Because they aren’t a) pretending to be anyone other than who they are and b) because they aren’t watching you for clues to how they have to behave to get you. My friend said that a shithead knows that he’s never going to get the girl by acting like a shithead. Instead, he acts like exactly the kind of guy he perceives that you want until you are emotionally involved or he’s got you (with my fourth husband it was five minutes after the altar – he was terrific for two years up to that point then he vanished for most of the rest of the wedding and showed up at 11 pm on our wedding night drunk and abusive and stayed that way for the next eleven months until I left him, in constant and confused astonishment). Once he’s got you or got you emotionally involved, he just lets the act go and becomes “himself”. That’s when you start complaining to your friends that he used to be such a nice guy and now he’s such an asshole. Get it? If everything is perfect, something is fishy. My brother, my male friend and many guys I’ve known have told me over the years that men just shake their heads when they see some asshole they know with a really nice girl. They say to each other, how can she be going out with him? Doesn’t she realize what an asshole he is? The answer is no, she doesn’t realize it at all. Just like when we women see some really nice guy with a cold user bitch from hell. We say the same thing about him. Because it is the same thing. Get it? Good. The guy that’s perfect IS too good to be true. The awkward, nervous, odd-looking, not-so-perfect-seeming, genuine guy, on the other hand, could very well make you the happiest woman in the world. Maybe consider a second date with him.

3. THEY ISOLATE YOU

This is a really bad one and it’s happened to me and I know women whom it has happened to. Once the bad guy gets you, whether or not he is still acting like a nice guy and hasn’t dropped that act yet, he tries very quickly to isolate you from any or all of the following important things: your close friends, your family, your job, your own money, your pet and any property you own on your own. It doesn’t happen all at once but one thing at a time goes. He tells you how he loves his job and you don’t like yours and he knows how much you’d like to go back to school and he’ll support you while you’re doing it, like my second husband told me (then once I was a poor student again he left me for a working woman who brought in her own bacon and slapped it, too, from what I heard).

He messes with your friendships in two ways: he continually chips away at your good friends by bad-mouthing them every chance he gets and he tries to get you to make friends with women who won’t be good for you. This goes for the bad friend, too. A perfect example is when I had left Kansas and gone all the way to Washington and was "visiting" Lillian, the plumber in Kansas kept calling her house to try to talk to me. I told her over and over to tell him I wasn't interested or just hang up the phone but that I didn't want to have anything to do with him again, which was one of the main reasons I had left Kansas. Instead, she would pick up the phone and chat with him and repeatedly told me how much he missed me and how I ought to call him. Even after the entire summer had gone by after that when my brother and I drove across country on vacation, Lillian emailed me at my aunt's in San Francisco to say that the plumber was still calling for me and wouldn't I just call him back as he was so sorry about how he had acted and missed me terribly. So I finally called him and of course, me being a total stooge, I ended up back with him and spent several more months re-figuring out that he was a total asshole so I had to leave him again. When I left him again, Lillian emailed me smugly and asked how I could be so stupid to go back with him; hadn't I figured out the first time that he was no good? In other words, bad friends do this same thing as bad mates - they prefer you to be with a bad mate or a bad friend, respectively, apparently to keep you from succeeding at life or being happy or some other form of good choice or to feel above you as they can say that they make good choices and you do not. In other words, both undercut you whenever possible and that can be overtly or covertly but whichever it is, it is for their benefit, not yours.

The bad mate, in this case male, messes with separating you from your family by getting you to move just far enough away that there’s no consistency to when you get to see them or he “somehow” prevents you from calling on a regular basis by taking you somewhere or involving you in something when you are about to call them. And by asking you key questions about them that push your buttons on things that you either don’t like about them or they don’t like about you, separating you more and more emotionally from them and getting you to believe that he’s on your “side”. Ah, someone intimate at last who is on your side. Don’t believe it for a second if the cost of that is downgrading your other important relationships. His intention is to isolate you from potential influences against him.

If the bad guy that you haven’t yet realized is a bad guy can’t separate you from a good friend or close family member, he can come up with the most outlandish ideas that are designed to manage to get that person under his control, too. The plumber I was recently living with actually started suggesting to me, when he couldn’t stop me from talking many hours per week with my brother over the phone, that wouldn’t it be a great thing if we could convince my brother to sell his house in the Bay Area and move out to Kansas to build a house near ours on the plumber’s same property! I should point out that we lived in the countryside on thirty-six acres. He went on about how he didn’t mind at all letting my brother build a house on his property since it would allow me to be near my brother. In other words, had for some extraordinarily foolish reason my brother bought into doing such a thing, he would have been completely under the plumber’s power since literally his house would be sitting on land he didn’t own but the plumber did. Luckily, besides the many other reasons my brother wouldn’t consider doing such a thing, he suffers from horrible allergies so moving to Kansas from the Bay Area is absurdly non-feasible. This sounds ridiculous, that no one would buy into such blatant tries for power. But it’s never said in the form of an obvious power-grab. What the plumber did was each time I hung up the phone after having talked to my brother for a long time, the plumber would softly say how nice it is that my brother and I had such a close relationship and how sad it was that we lived so distant from one another, shit like that. But I was on to him for long before he started in on this track and besides, I doubt if my brother ever will want to even visit Kansas. My brother is a city-guy, a jazz musician with a dry wit and cultivated tastes. Hicksville isn’t his style. He is more the type with the falling-apart villa and the long-lost family fortune who wastes his life away lounging with the other beautiful people on the Italian Riviera. Kansas next door to the plumber? I don’t think so.

I’m making light of this kind of power-grab but it isn’t always as ineffectual as the plumber’s was regarding my brother. I know a woman whose father gave her a house before he died so she would have her own home and not become under the control of some rotten jerk. But after he died, some rotten jerk got into her sympathies with his health complaints and then step by step he isolated her in this way, getting her to get rid of something that she owned and then something else that she owned until he had gotten her used to this process and convinced her to sell her house that she never would have done otherwise and then of course to move in with him and once that was done, he promptly spent all the profit from her house, which of course she also let him do. Once that was done, he started cheating and doing anything else he felt like because he now could, since she had nowhere to go and no money to leave. This kind of thing happens all the time.

So the message is, don’t let your guy whom you think is a nice guy cause you or convince you to put him as a name on any of your own property or to sell off the property you have. If it’s impractical to keep two places, keep the money that is yours from the sale in a secure, separate account that he can’t affect and that includes affecting it via your softening of sympathies. Keep it in a long-term CD or something that even you can’t get at but will keep you financially and independently secure. When you two are in your eighties and he’s been great all this time, you can bring out the cash and say hey, I was saving this so we can be completely financially free now that we’re both as old as the hills. It’s called insurance. There are enormously successful companies that will testify it’s a good concept.

I know of the opposite scenario, as a case in point. A very nice older lady I know had a very happy, loving seven-year relationship with a man (he so very sadly recently passed away). She told me that he asked her to marry him and move in with him many times but she said no. She told him that she loved him utterly and dearly and was devoted to him but she would not let go of her own freedom. They were happy until he left this world and she has that bittersweet feeling of having had a wonderful relationship, however fleeting in this oh so too short life. She is sure that had she given up her independence in the form of her own home and her own property, their relationship would have changed for the worse, as power corrupts. Once he had power over her, who knows how it might have gone. Yes, maybe he wouldn’t have turned into a controlling power-freak. But what we do know is this: since she wouldn’t give up her own empowerment, he couldn’t and didn’t gain control over her life and their relationship was good to the end.

What flies in the face of this kind of thinking is the incessant, insidious messages girls and young women (and older women, for that matter) are constantly pounded with. It’s called man in shining armor. It’s called he will show up and sweep me off my feet. And it often figures into a woman’s idea of romance. We see it these days in the figure of Kate Middleton, the lucky commoner who captured a someday to become king. How lovely she is, how stunning, how happy, how perfect their relationship, etc. Yes, this may be true for her. Good for her. But it isn’t the rule. And what could be a more apt opposite example than the life after being caught by a someday to be king than that of Prince William’s mother, Diana? If that isn’t the alternative of what happens after the prince catches you, I don’t know what is. A magazine at the supermarket has Diana on the front cover this month saying it’s her fiftieth birthday this year. Excuse me, did I miss something? Must I say this? O.k, I will. She didn’t come anywhere near reaching fifty. She lived a marriage that was classic but classic in the sense of having married a total power-freak. She suffered; that’s what happened. As many women do. It is sickening for a magazine to pretend the what if she were around she’d be happily and beautifully fifty now. They pull the same crap over and over with Marilyn Monroe. But these were real women with real minds and hearts and totally shattered lives due to unhappy alliances. That’s all the truth there is to it. The message here is this: be wiser than that; be the architect of your own happiness; be empowered and stay an individual and share that, yes, with someone who respects you and treats you with care. Watch and heed the red flags, these listed above and all the others you and women you know know of. And be happy in your independence and wisdom and respect for yourself.

The Indus Valley Script: A Comparative Guide to the Sign List

2011-07-05T19:55:00.000-07:00

To the general reader, let me say a few words of introduction. Every writing system is made up of individual signs, as our dictionary in English is made up of the letters of the alphabet. In the earliest days of writing systems, however, the alphabet had not yet been conceived. Several other types of systems were invented that at last led up to the alphabet, that, to date, is the most efficient type of writing system with the number of total signs being only in the twenties. One of the earliest systems was conceived as syllables represented by individual signs, as it, presumably, was what was heard when spoken, such as separate signs for ka, ke, ki, ko and ku. Even when our alphabet is spoken, we do not call our signs by the sounds they make or their linguistic descriptions. In other words, we do not call a "P" by putting out lips together and puffing out a sudden bit of air, which is actually what does happen when one speaks the letter "p" in a word or sentence. And we do not call it a bilabial voiceless stop, though that is how many linguists would refer to it. Instead we say aloud, "Pee", just as we call the voiced velar stop "Gee" and the voiceless alveolar stop "Tee". In other words, we add a vowel to the letter when we identify it aloud making it into a syllable. One might say it's just easier to say that way. Certainly it's prettier and perhaps more pleasant. This is exactly what the inventors of script "heard" and so that is what they wrote down. And by having individual signs, therefore, for each consonant plus however many vowels existed in the language, one ended up with approximately 80-90 signs. This type of writing system is called a Syllabary, after the word syllable, obviously.

The Indus Valley Script, which is an undeciphered script from South Asia, is just such a syllabary. Well, actually, it's what we call a mixed script, in that there are give or take, about 400+ individual signs. It is mixed, or one might say, it is strongly argued at this point that it is mixed, of signs that represent syllables and signs that probably represent whole words and also signs that represent ancient methods of determining meanings, which I won't go into now.

As time goes by with an undeciphered script, different researchers at different times in different locales try their hand at deciphering it. One of the first stages in that process is to determine how many individual signs actually are making up all the inscriptions and how many of those signs there are. Because this same problem is attacked from several fronts, the list of the signs end up in differing orders, drawn somewhat differently in trying to re-represent them in articles, etc. This can cause irritation, confusion, as well as several other problems for archaeologists in the field and other researchers on the script. This is the subject of my article below. I wrote a comparative guide for archaeologists in the field, primarily, of the most important or most used sign lists. It was recently published in the Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers of Danvers, Massachusetts. The exact citation is: Price, Kate. 2011. A Harappan Signary Cross-Reference. In: Buchanan, Donal. 2011. Epigraphic Society Occasional Papers, Vol. 28, Danvers, Mass. pp. 34-83. It is reprinted with permission.

Note: Sorry the article is not up yet on this site. Since there is no official font yet for the Indus Valley Script, it's causing some technical difficulties inserting the article into this posting. Hopefully, those issues will soon be resolved.

A Single Woman: Tips for Saving Money

2011-06-27T17:29:00.000-07:00

I've come to the decision that I would like to write a series of postings called A Single Woman: with subtitles that follow, the one here on tips for saving money. A large part of this upcoming series is going to be on travel as I've traveled a lot in my life and nearly always alone, though not always, and I've thought for years that I would like to be a guide for just a few women my age, to places I know very well like Paris. I daydream that I would start these few select women months ahead, getting them walking in good shoes, getting them to eat the portion sizes of the French, teaching them basic French sentences for getting around. And when they had become strong from walking and their stomachs had shrunk significantly and they could say without laughing or flubbing it up, little phrases that began with such things as, "Je voudrais...", I would take them off to Paris to show them the kinds of things a woman years ago said to me "that deliver", meaning what a woman who has one chance in her life to go to Paris would like to see and experience that fit her dream of what Paris is like. The woman who said that told me there are two places in her opinion that deliver, Paris and Venice. I knew Paris well (in fact it was in Paris where she told me that) but had never been to Venice but I knew she was right about Paris so the first chance I got I went to Venice and man oh man was she right. And how.

But these thoughts are for another posting. This one is just about ways I myself save money, which is a subject I care a lot about, being actually quite poor although I rarely feel like it (because of how I live). My grandmother, Peppi (photo in right margin somewhere) once replied when I said that I was "poor" that I was not poor, I was broke and that there was a great difference between the two words (and their meanings, of course). She said to be poor is to feel hopeless or to be poor in spirit, a.k.a. mean-spirited, jealous, revengeful, hateful or to be anti-intellectual, as loving and appreciating culture, which is the richest thing we have, makes one satisfied and full and wealthy of mind and heart even when one's shoes are worn and one's belly quite shrunken from lack of copious amounts of unnecessary food. For my grandmother there was really no other food anyhow than good coffee and Key Lime Pie except during formal dinner parties, of course, when one went completely baroque with onion soup, mushroom omelettes, coquilles St. Jacques, etc. I thought at the time that her thoughts on poor vs. broke were brilliant as I still do and ever since, though I'm usually broke, I rarely feel poor and that's only when some hateful person is attempting to make me feel that way (and when that happens it's best to shake off their sabotage like a kitty shimmies when she gets even the slightest bit wet).

So, these tips are things I regularly do personally to save money and maybe you know them all already but I thought, well, I read these kinds of tips whenever I come across them and I do many things all the time to save money, so I may as well give my list, too. The keys to how I see saving money are three things: 1. figuring out what your actual personal choices and preferences are, 2. happiness lies in simplicity, and 3. ignoring what you're "supposed" to be like via relatives, friends, media, lovers, etc.; in other words, those who may or may not mean you well but who screw you up and confuse you more often than not. So, here they are:

Transportation

I don't own a car. The reasons are that I have lived in a lot of cities and foreign places where a car isn't necessary or is a real drag to have and because my car died in Utah last year though I hadn't driven it for a year before that for reasons I won't go into here and because I'm too poor....uh oh, I mean broke, to buy one, even a beat-up lemon. Often this is a problem but the more I live without one the more I think it isn't as much of a problem as it seems and by "seems" I want to point out something I'm going to refer to over and again and that's #3 above, that one is "supposed" to have a car or there's something wrong. But, not having a car is probably the biggest savings one can possibly achieve in one decision, as it immediately ends, prevents, avoids buying gas (and you know how much money you save not having to buy any gas at all) and oil, paying for lubes, repairs, tires, not to mention a car payment, not to mention insurance, not to mention bridge and expressway tolls, meters, parking lot fees and re-tagging each year. And all of that is more or less what is spent by everybody who owns a car, as you probably know, and that's not cheap. You know that. Let me say that again: that's NOT CHEAP. It's extremely expensive and puts you at the stressful mercy of OPEC and bad decisions by our presidents, not to mention that, hybrid or not, it pollutes the environment because even if it's not throwing crap into the air and no matter the model or shape or year, it's a bulky eyesore and there are so many and usually there's the noise pollution if not from the engine than from that irritating beep when smart keys are pushed to lock the car as one is walking away and the inevitable car alarm in the middle of the night, etc.

The bike, on the other hand, is a beautiful machine, so simple, so perfect, silently gliding along the pavement, taking little room, easy to maneuver, being able to cut across cemeteries, campuses, parking lots, running along the road or on an otherwise empty lovely sidewalk. With a good basket one can carry library books, great buys from thrift stores, groceries, you name it and if it won't hold all of it, your backpack can take up the rest. Instead of increasing your ever-settling fat ass it tones it. Your arms and legs get a tan. You feel the breeze and can screech to a halt and zip up to a tree or fence to leap off at a good garage sale. The repairs are $1 in quarters once in a while to fill the tires a little, that's if you or a friend of yours doesn't have a good pump. Maybe once in a blue moon you get a flat. Then you go to a store and get a very cheap repair kit and fix it yourself in the sink or the bathtub. The only real investment of money or concerted effort is for a good bike lock on a long strong bike chain so you can lock the main body, the front tire and the basket in one loop through some poll where you stop and there's always something you can lock it to. You zip past traffic jams to the front of the line, you can take alternative routes with sudden easy change of mind. And you get progressively more limber, stronger and thinner. And it costs: absolutely nothing. This is how I get around most of the time and the more I do the easier it is as I get progressively more limber, stronger and thinner. The only slightly unpleasant moments with it are when some sadly completely out-of-shape, morbidly obese woman (and they are growing, so to speak, in droves these days) glares at me from her expensive SUV as she races by with irritation over the traffic, getting there fast enough, whatever. I love the feel of the breeze as I ride along. I love going at such a pace that I can appreciate the architecture and trees that I glide past. I love that it costs me nothing. But, of course, some days it rains. Then I take the city bus.

Here, in the city where I live the city bus costs only 50 cents but it only comes once an hour and doesn't run on weekends. But once I got used to those two conditions by carrying a bus time schedule with me at all times to consult in case I feel like taking the bus and by organizing what I need to do to not have to do it on weekends or if it happens to rain. There are two bus lines, which makes going anywhere here pretty easy and convenient. They pick up at certain locations but will drop you off anywhere along the lines you want. So even with cumbersome bags from the supermarket, they'll drop me off right by where I live so it's fine. So in an entire day, if I take the bus, the total cost of transportation here is $1.

And then there's the most enjoyable mode of transportation and that's walking. It feels so good to walk for so many reasons: the spine loosens up and that's especially good if you do a lot of sitting at desks, which I do; if you make sure your backpack is light and that just means actually glancing through it quickly to make sure you don't have a bunch of unnecessary stuff in it. You don't go as far, of course, or you take much longer but you can greet people who are sitting on their porches or out walking, too or going by you on a bike and that's always very nice. It's so good for your health and creates a real appetite by the time you get home for real, nutritious food. You just don't want crap or fast food when you've walked a ways. Your body screams Salade Nicoise! Hot and Sour Soup! Shrimp Cocktail! Cold Chicken! You walk in the door directly to the kitchen absolutely ravenous and start to cook like mad. You throw it all together and sit down and start to devour your food and very soon you feel your body relaxing with satiation and you lean back against the back of your chair feeling just plain good.

Where To Live

It's very important to consider the 3 key things in this, the main important one is who are YOU? What kind of life do you personally want to experience each day and that has so much to do with choosing where you live. Recently, I was looking around to rent a place. I had a budget that would allow up to $425 for rent alone. Around here that would get me even up to a two-bedroom house. The typical American thing nowadays is to go for the top figure if not go over it and try to get the most square footage possible. I think this has been highly influenced by the corrupt real estate agent, the cliche one we all know about who shows you the houses you don't want at more than you said you could afford. We are supposed to always want more. But why? If you know yourself well, it's better to choose what you would actually prefer. So, I thought a lot about what I myself would actually like and what that was was to live very close, as close as possible, to the world of a university campus. I love that kind of setting with the enormous lawns and old trees, the great library, the flow of students walking with books, all of it. So I rode my bike around to look in that neighborhood. Now, of course, near the campus it's a bit more expensive. So I found, instead of a one or two bedroom, which actually I find annoying (I find it annoying to have to walk to different rooms to do different things), a tiny studio apartment with a nice deck right by campus for $350 including utilities except electricity. I was thrilled but not surprised to discover that the guy who lives in the place below me is a music student at the university who is planning on being a composer. He comes up to visit me. I give him cappucino or sun tea and he tells me about his compositions, plans, theories and invites me down to hear fantastic music. My apartment is so tiny I decorate it thinking of it like it's a sailboat - you know, where every space has to have a little drawer or hook or shelf, just to contain the simplest of needs. The landlord paid for the paint when I offered to paint it myself and let me choose the color; the prettiest periwinkle blue. I can't afford to make the deck instantly perfect but so what! I'm enjoying the process of its evolution. So far I have one comfortable wicker chair, a side table, some Japanese lanterns and my clothes line, as one of the ways I save money is to do all my laundry with Woolite in my sink. Some people would hate doing that. I don't mind it at all. I bought a generic Woolite and a bag of clips at a dollar store for $2. That's the total cost of doing laundry for a long time for me. Of course, here where it's hot and humid, electricity can cost a lot so I just think about it a little before flipping on the AC button. My apartment faces east-west so in the morning I open the western window and curtain and keep the eastern curtains closed though the windows open for air. In the afternoon I reverse it. At around 3 p.m. is when it starts getting dripping hot never-the-less and only then I close the place all up and flip on the AC. I just got my first full month's electricity bill. It was $25. My furniture and things had to be super well planned when I moved in since the place is so small, so much so that I told everyone helping me move to unload everything on the street and deck and only when I spotted the first piece of furniture that was to go to the far end of the room did I let it be taken in and then only the next thing that went all the way across the room and so on until everything was in. So piece by piece we brought the furniture in according to a plan and it worked great. The musician below me says he really likes my place; that it's so cozy. It is that! I searched through lots of thrift stores, shops and garage sales for all the little boxes and hooks and baskets I needed in order to have a functional bathroom in my very tiny bathroom and now it's all done. Yesterday I calculated how much I spent entirely on making a perfect bathroom. It came to $7.50. Why? Because it's so tiny I don't need or can fit anything but the prettiest necessities and I buy them mostly at thrift stores and garage sales. It saves money to have a tiny place. And I walk out my door and I'm five minutes from campus and all the things that go with that, right by bus stops, near my friends' pool where I can swim often and two blocks from where good friends live. It's great and it's all because I really thought about who I am and what I really wanted instead of what I was supposed to want according to everyone else and then I just searched for it.

FOOD

I have a $200/month budget for food from the grocery store. If I want to go out to eat, that's more. There are three supermarkets, two far across town so to get to them I have to ride my bike very far or take the bus and then there's the supermarket that's very close. The one very close someone recently described for me as "the store on the rich side of town" meaning that it's much more expensive than the two across town. This is true as I've compared specifics that I myself often buy, like shrimp. Across town at the two stores a bag of shrimp costs $5. The same bag of shrimp at the one near me costs $7.29. That's one and a half again as much and that's a LOT more. However, naturally, the one near me, being targeted to the rich side of town, has much higher quality food, a lot more organic and unusual items and really really nice produce. It also has a nice coffee place with good AC, a good bottomless cup of coffee, super comfortable chairs and hardly any patrons, where I can hang out and read to my heart's content without ever being bothered. When I priced everything and found the close one was truly far more expensive, instead of a knee-jerk reaction of some sort, I thought about it and came to some decisions. The first was that the best thing to do was to make smaller portions when I do my cooking and the way I chose the size of the new smaller portion was to just consider the sizes of the pieces in my old china. I mean, have you ever really looked at the size of a bowl in a set of old china? Nowadays we'd use it for a condiment. But I use it for my entire breakfast now. I also decided to try (and this is the hard part) to give up sugar and salt. So I literally haven't bought anything with either. It saves a lot of money to give up salt and sugar as that includes a lot of prepackaged stuff and also anything with sugar is way more expensive. I make my own sun tea on my deck. I cook or prepare cold food just about every single day rather than eating out, I don't make side dishes hardly at all. If I want a chicken dish I just make that. I don't make anything else to go with it. But I make it with good olive oil, nice white wine, good herbs instead of salt so when it's done it's so savory that my body and mind are very happy and don't crave more. I don't make or eat or buy desserts. If I want dessert, I have a cappucino or slices of apple. I don't buy general bread - I buy good bagels or a nice baguette or tortillas that I dip in hot salsa, instead. Thoughtfulness is the key here. What actually tastes good to me. I don't add salt or sour cream to things, anything like that, once the food is on the table. I cook them well and tasty to begin with. They don't need anything more.

I do all this because I'd rather buy my food at the close, quality store than stuff myself with large quantities of cheap, mindless food because I can buy more for cheaper at the far stores. That sounds obvious but most Americans do the latter. Most food available at a supermarket is so filled with additives that it's pretty much tasteless and the neurons don't recognize it as nutritious so your brain demands much more. It's pretty amazing, actually, how fast you feel full when you're eating a fresh, nicely and lightly cooked with good ingredients meal. The brain just registers yes, that's what I was hoping for! By doing this I've discovered that there are many entire aisles in the supermarket that are unnecessary to even walk down. It is really sad how much stuff sold at supermarkets is so bad for the body, practically poison. And for the few items I want, like shrimp, that cost too much more at the expensive store, I take the bus across town once in a while to buy them. That way my bags are not too heavy bringing it all home and I've saved money where it's clear I can pretty easily.

Sometimes, like everyone else, I feel like eating out and unless I've been asked out on a nice dinner date that means somewhere pretty cheap and that usually means fast food. So if I decide I want to do that, I ride over to the street that has a line of fast food choices and consider carefully cost vs. nutrition, which is something you actually can do. The other day I was choosing between the all-you-can-eat pizza place (salad and pizza) or a place that offered a nice tuna sub with lots of fresh veggies. The all-you-can-eat pizza place cost $5.99 plus drink plus tip plus tax. That would end up, what, about $8 or so when I actually got out of there. It was for a lot more food, of course, since it was all you can eat. I thought to save some money I could drink their horrible chlorinated iced tap water. The tuna sub was $3.75 plus if I paid for drink plus tax, no tip needed. Far more nutritious yet far less actual food since I'd only get one sub. So I considered it, there on the street on my bike, halfway between the two shops. Then I thought to myself, "Why on earth would I want to stuff myself with all I can eat?" Isn't this just the worst idea? How did we Americans come to think this was a good idea? It's a terrible idea. So I went to the sub place and could afford a nice, brewed sugarless ice tea with my very tasty tuna sub and it cost altogether a little over $5. I saved money and didn't add a bunch of fat on my body.

The other thing I do is I read little articles on the web on nutrition advice, new medical finds re: food, comparison between healthy vs. unhealthy food choices at the supermarket, between brands, etc., not obsessively, just when the articles happen to pop up, which they often do. There are so many good ideas, warnings, bits of food philosophy, new discoveries in them. It's worth the short bit of time to read them and they often have tips to save money on food at the same time increasing its health benefit.

ENTERTAINMENT

This is the one where it is important to really think about who you are and what you actually find entertaining. I think entertainment comes in three forms: pure entertainment vs. the relaxing vs. the restful. If you break it down into those three categories you can discover to your surprise what you considered entertaining is actually restful or what you thought was restful is actually relaxing, etc. It helps to define which is which because you feel best when you get a bit of all three and if you don't know which is which for you, you can load up on one and miss another entirely and you can blow a lot of money doing that because you don't feel rested enough or entertained enough or relaxed often enough and you don't know why.

For example, personally I know that I don't rest well when I sleep (because I always have a plethora of dreams and wake up between them) but I do rest well if I watch one movie without commercials. Movies aren't usually all that entertaining for me, unless there by accident happens to be a good one, but they are always restful. If I watch one movie I forget about all my troubles and lose myself in the world of the movie and two hours later I feel far more rested. So, I don't need to subscribe to Dish Network or cable because I don't want or need to watch random shows that use up too much of my time, which can end up causing me stress. The key for me here is to watch a movie to get a good rest. At first I subscribed to Netflix but then I put it on suspension for a while seeing if I could find other sources for movies. My friends said I could borrow whatever DVD's they had and I did that for awhile until I ran out of ones I wanted to see. Then I found a lot of good DVD's are at the public library and that's of course free, too. And today the public library told me that anyone who lives in this town can get a library card to the university library, which for me is pure heaven. Besides all the great books (as I raced to the university library and immediately applied for a library card), I now can check out their extensive collection of DVD's as well as use interlibrary loan for all the research I do. So I'm in bliss this afternoon over that. And it costs nothing. But see, that's just a personal thing for me. When I run out of those DVD's I'll use Netflix again but the point is just because Netflix is only $8.56/month, it still is $8.56 a month in real money. Why spend it if you don't have to with a little thought and planning and knowing who you are and what you actually find entertaining, or rather for me, restful?

I've talked about how one movie a day for me is more restful than it is what I'd personally call entertaining. When I thought about it, for me entertaining is actually reading and researching the subjects I love most. And I have a huge collection of my own books. I gave myself even permission to re-read books that I had very much enjoyed before but it's been awhile. I've re-read three of them now and enjoyed them immensely again and all three are on ancient history and I've found that I learned details that I had overlooked when I first read them, concentrating then on the bigger aspects. Another thing I've mentioned above that I find very entertaining is decorating my place and planning the evolution of my deck, which is inexpensive since I buy everything at thrift stores, which is more fun anyhow since it's always a treasure hunt and a discovery. And swimming. I love to swim and since I get to now pretty often, nearly daily, that entertains me to no end. And the last is petting and playing with my very beautiful but very arrogant cat, Arthur Pendragon. He's terrific fun.

Another great entertainment for me is good conversation. On the weekend I often call my brother who can pontificate to no end, having a photographic memory and an excellent analytical mind. We typically can talk from about 5 to 8 hours at one go so I call him on the weekends when I have unlimited minutes. We never chat, gossip or talk about the weather. It's real stuff, real subjects, politics, economics, history, philosophy, psychology, literature, music, art. I usually have to recharge my phone in the middle of the conversation! I subscribe to Skype, which is $2.99/month for unlimited U.S./Canada anytime. I rarely talk on the phone otherwise. So clearly, you see, this is a very personal choice and that's the whole point. This is what entertains me; it's not what is typical nor should it be as we are all individuals, whether or not we like to follow trends.

Another thing I've thought about doing for a long time that I recently put into action as great entertainment that costs very little: I've talked to several people here about having an old-fashioned conversational salon, as was done in old Paris and Vienna in Voltaire's day and then the days of the Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists, where people come together to a place, which would be my new place, to talk about real subjects of great interest. We all agreed this does not include arguing over politics in the typical American way of the polarity of Party-driven memorized scripts with nearly no actual knowledge or information save what one barely scrapes from Fox News or NPR, both extremely biased bottom-of-the-barrel reporting. We talk about what we actually know about and if the others don't know anything about the subject, they don't argue based on ignorance; they listen. A major part of this is enjoying listening to each other. Listening to someone tell about something they know a lot about and love is becoming a lost art. But not here. We are enthusiastically reviving it. So the other day I bought 6 margarita deck glasses at a garage sale for $1.25 and I have a large set of 1920's champagne glasses and I have a large sun tea maker and can make damn good appetizers if need be. One of us wants to be a micro brew master some day and he brings us bottles of great stout and India Pale Ale that he and his dad brew at his dad's house. So we drink a bit and talk a lot. Recently one of them taught me to play chess and I beat him first game! He's determined to whip me next try. He and his girlfriend held a mystery play party a couple of years back and at their new really terrific home they are planning another one. That ought to be great. They also love to play board games and have a lot of them. It's just so old-fashioned but then again, all of us are mad for the computer so we have nothing to be ashamed about playing board games or chess once in a while. And these entertainments cost nothing. The little soirees are for just a few people at a time, as that is all that can fit in my apartment so the alcohol or tea or treats for that comes to about $10 max.

The last thing under entertainment, subtheme: relaxation, is I love yoga. I bought a good yoga DVD online for a few dollars and practice it in the privacy of my tiny living room, which costs me nothing. The stretches feel sublime. Another form of relaxation that costs me nothing is I find that I feel really great all day at home if I wear one of my bathing suits. I mean I put on one of them in the morning, even if I'm not going swimming and I wear it all day long. I watch a movie in it, lying backwards on my ottoman with my legs across the top of the upolstered chair, my head on my favorite golden pillows. I cook in my bathing suit, I work on fixing up the deck in it and get a tan on my legs and back while doing it. I read in it, rocking in my good rocking chair. I pet my cat in it, hang out listening to music in it. All day long, every day mostly that I'm at home. Why? It just reminds me of summers when I was a kid, that's all, and it makes me feel so good. It feels like summer should feel, like it's fun and will last forever and there are no worries. And it's free. And often I zip over to my friends and actually swim in it. It's all good and it all costs nothing.

So, I've named here just a few things I do all the time that saves a lot of money and it all comes down to the three themes I mentioned: really personal choices, simplicity and ignoring what you're "supposed" to like and be like. I don't know if this is helpful, these little tips, for anyone or inspiring at all but I hope it is, a little, if only to communicate the simple message that it's all about knowing and the discovery of who you are yourself that leads to the joy of saving money. That is really the most important thing in everything one chooses to be and do, after all. Just like your body and mind feel full when you eat nutritious, fresh, nicely cooked food in small portions, your body and mind feel satisfied and happy when you figure out who you are and what simple things please you.

The Joplin Tornado

2011-06-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

I live in a small Kansas city thirty miles northwest of Joplin, Missouri. On the day of the devastating Joplin tornado, my friend Chris and I were sitting in his living room watching a movie. Sirens suddenly started blaring outside. I asked him what they were for. He pulled the curtain back and glanced out the window at the pouring rain. "They're for a tornado," he said. "We haven't had a tornado in seven or eight years. I guess we're about due." He let go of the tornado, we shrugged it off and went back to watching the movie.

It wasn't until the next morning, since we don't subscribe to any television service, that we found out that during those moments a category 5 tornado was tearing through one third of Joplin. After we saw the photos of the destruction we both agreed that we would never ignore a tornado siren again.

Several days ago Chris and I and a friend of his named Skylar finally got it together enough to go over to Joplin to volunteer for disaster relief. The photos I've inserted here and in the margin I took myself as we worked. We just drove into Joplin to see if we could help with anything. I had been listening to a fantastic Joplin-based talk radio station all week, KZRG, which had dedicated itself entirely to coordinating donations and volunteer information. It was so inspiring, people calling with whatever they could give and it was so sad, others calling asking if anyone had seen or knew of someone who was missing. Phone numbers were given on the air by citizens of their own cell phone numbers with offers of rooms, heavy equipment, tarps, medical supplies, everything. So Chris and I and Skylar went over.

We drove in from the north, as Chris usually did. The exit on to Range Line Road, the main shopping street, was normal. Traffic, buildings, shopping, residences, all the same as always. But as we drove further down Range Line we started to see volunteer organizations set up in parking lots, semi's unloading food and water, tents with tables of everything needed. Soon we came upon the area where we usually went to shop. Hobby Lobby was ruined, Walmart and Home Depot destroyed, missing. And then on the west side of Range Line we came upon the main track of the tornado, the residential area six miles long, three quarters of a mile wide. Total devastation. It took six minutes and when the tornado touched down it slowed down to twenty-one miles per hour, which meant that it didn't just knock houses down, it ground them up like hamburger. We drove into it until we saw volunteers working. We had brought gloves because we knew it would be a day of picking up pieces of people's lives. The first place we stopped was a church. It had been on the edge of the wind. Everyone who had been inside had run into a hallway to huddle. The windows had blown out and the hall had turned into a horrific wind tunnel. We helped shovel sheetrock into a dumpster. The stained glass windows were utterly shattered and we just had to walk across them with the wheelbarrow. Everyone had to wear protective masks because of the insulation and mold in the air, because it had rained all week after the tornado.

When that was done, we drove down just a block or two and stopped again. A crew of about fifty volunteers let us join them for what they called debris pick-up. The debris had been people's homes. There was no piece of any house that I myself couldn't pick up; the houses were just shredded. The photos here are from the streets where we did that work. When we arrived they were working on the guts of a house; we picked up and piled in separate stacks on the curb wood, metal, plastic, electronics, appliances, organic materials.

Then we came to a section of houses that hadn't yet been touched by the volunteers. The first thing we were told to do was search for the owner of the first house's belongings. This was the saddest part for me because what hadn't been destroyed by the tornado was wrecked by the week of rain. It was a house where a woman had lived. I don't know if she survived it. If she had been inside, I don't see how she could have. Everything was broken, soaking wet, ruined. I found her bible, covered in a cotton and lace hand-made cover under a pile of broken glass and splintered wood. We all diligently and as lovingly as possible piled her ruined things on a bit of cement slab in the hopes that she might be able to return and find something that mattered still. Then we picked up the debris that had been her home. Then we moved on to the next house.

Two houses were completely down and shredded and the one inbetween was completely gone, including parts of the cement walls of its basement. Down the street one house stood with only its roof damaged, right in the middle of the destruction, spared by an eddy in the wind. We came to what had been a space between houses but both houses were across it in an enormous pile. It smelled bad. The FEMA guy was there and said that it was possible that there were still victims underneath places like this. He said they had sent dogs across but there was no guarantee. Later a policeman told me that the reason was that they didn't have enough sniffing dogs that were trained to find human beings so they had had to resort to using a lot of drug dogs and they didn't necessarily point out victims. We started to pull up the debris there. And underneath one part of it I found someone's kitty. He was a big black cat who had been trying to run across the space between houses. He was full out stretched, clearly running like a madman for cover. He didn't make it. We called over the FEMA guy who went to get a garbage bag. I wrapped the poor old kitty in an orange sopping wet winter vest I found near him in the rubble and as gently, as respectfully as I could, I placed him in the garbage bag the FEMA guy held open.

As we worked, cars, vans, pick-ups drove up, many of them offering us water, food. One older couple stopped by me in their little sedan and said they had just gone out to eat and had ordered an extra lunch. The lady handed me a warm styrofoam container that was heavy with a good lunch. I handed it on to Chris, who was hungry. Some of the cars were from organizations giving food and water and some were just individuals doing what they could, like that wonderful couple. One young guy stopped later on. He was driving a small pick-up and he had filled the back with as many coolers as he could fit in it and filled them with ice. He said, "I've got the good stuff, come over here!" He had bought with his own money as many bottles of Gatorade as he could fit in the coolers. I had been drinking bottle after bottle of water and couldn't seem to quench my thirst. But when I drank one of his so-kindly given Gatorades, my thirst quenched. I must have been losing electrolytes like everybody else; it had to be around ninety degrees out there or more. It reminded me of when I was working on an archaeological site in Israel, how the crew heads had made us stop once an hour to drink Gatorade, telling us that once the electrolytes start to go, you quickly need medical care. That guy must have known that and it must have cost him a lot to buy all that Gatorade. But that's what it's like in Joplin right now.

At least one half of what it's like. On KZRG I heard one man call in to say that his rental house was still standing and his renters ok but the roof was ruined and he had called all over to buy tarps to cover the roof to stop the rain but what businesses still had tarps were charging $1500. He asked if anyone had any tarps. The talk radio hosts were angry. They said two types appear during disasters, the people who help and the people who gouge. They told him to give his phone number on the air and wait and see; someone would call in with tarps for him. It wasn't minutes later that a man called in saying that he was the head of a big maintenance building for AT&T. He said they had thousands of tarps and all kinds of other materials and anyone who needed any of it could just come and take it, for free.

The CNN and Network news cameras have gone. Obama has come and made his canned speech, which blocked extremely necessary disaster relief traffic all that day but his visit was necessary to insure FEMA money kept coming in. Missouri's Governor Nixon has gone home after making one of the most heartfelt but strong, positive speeches that I've ever heard. So many volunteers have had to go back to their own lives. But Joplin is still so much in need of volunteers and donations of all kinds. I have attached a link to an organization that is still coordinating work on site, www.joplinrelief.org. If you click on the photograph of the tornado's path in the right margin here, it will take you right to that site. It is a Christian-based site and although that might put you off with its strongly sentimental Christian angle, they are doing the work that needs to be done and can be trusted to use whatever donations to actually do the work right there in Joplin, where donations are actually intended.

I wrecked my back that day and had to be driven to a very good chiropractor over in Humboldt, Kansas, Dr. Rob Weilert, who worked on me last year and did a terrific job. I'm still icing my back and can't ride my bike for seven to ten days. It hurts still but it was worth it. All you hear on the local Joplin radio now is how they are going to build Joplin back better than ever. There's no complaining at all. The strength of heart and mind and determination are there. It's one of the most important experiences I have ever had just doing what little I could do to help these hurt people, those few hours that day picking up bits and pieces in the hot sun.

Symbols, Myths, Old Stories

2011-04-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

It doesn't matter where I am walking or what I am walking upon. It can be gravel, dirt, grass, pavement, asphalt or glass. It doesn't matter what shoes I am wearing. They can be knee-high boots, tennis shoes, high heels. Nearly every time at some point on a walk, along the way I realize I have a pebble in one or both of my shoes. And I walk a lot, when free some days wandering up to ten miles. Everywhere I've ever lived I've walked all over the area, exploring. I just don't know how the pebble happens. My second husband, Chris, used to despair of it. "How can you get a rock in your shoe when you're wearing boots? How can you get a rock in your shoe when we're walking down the street in Manhattan? I never get a rock in my shoe!" He'd say one of these statements regularly as regularly we would walk somewhere and nine times out of ten there would suddenly be a pebble in my shoe. This morning I was walking to campus and lo and behold, half way there I felt a pebble in my shoe. It's one of those strange mysteries in life. I see it at this point as a metaphor or a sign or a symbol of my life, though I haven't exactly pinpointed of what it is symbolic or metaphoric. I find contemplation of the possibilities pleasant. Perhaps it is a reminder of something that I've forgotten and can't quite pull to consciousness. Perhaps it is a symbol of struggle, as I have experienced a lot of that. Perhaps it is to remind me to stay down to earth, grounded so to speak. Perhaps it is a symbol of constance, that no matter what happens in my life I have this thing I can depend upon.

This morning it reminded me of how, in contrast, I never remember my grandmother ever stopping to shake out a shoe. I don't think I therefore inherited this odd characteristic from her. Though I hope and pray that I inherited other of her characteristics as she was the most wonderful woman in my life. She was the daughter of the chemical engineer, the scientist I have written about earlier. Her proper name was Natalie Freeman and she was born in Noank, Connecticut in 1901 of a very old, distinguished family. Her family tree is a scroll that when one end is held up high in the air, it rolls down to the floor, eighty-four unbroken generations, going first back to Plymouth, then to Merry Old England, then to France with the first Plantagenet, back back until the Icelandic Eddas confirm her ancestral names in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. But she was more than a line of DNA. She was lovely from the beginning, poised, sophisticated, witty, urbane, the essence of the Old Money flapper.

Her father, Nat Freeman, had married the daughter of a senator from Michigan. Her name was Bessie Walker. After their children had been born, Nat moved them all to Boulder, Colorado where he had interests in the chemistry of mining. One of my grandmother's sisters contracted what was called then "consumption" and the family doctor said it was wise to move her to a temperate climate. There was argument between Nat and Bessie if this were really a good idea. Bessie won it and moved them all to San Diego, California to take up residence in a wonderful old hotel called the Ulysses S. Grant. I called the hotel a few years ago and they assured me that it had been recently remodeled to reflect the glamour of that abundant period. My great-grandfather Nat spent most of his time back in Colorado and then extensively in London, particularly when the little girl died anyhow. Bessie and the children didn't mind, enjoying life in the hotel, where the children all grew up to adulthood. They reached majority smack dab in the middle of the 1920's and took to a life of high rolling with the best of them. All of her stories were of antics and none of them had the slightest degree of strife. Things like how she and one of her sisters would sneak into their brother's room and carefully turn all his dresser drawers upside down, holding the clothes as they slid the drawers back in so that when he came back and opened a drawer, everything would fall out. It was a life of laughter, dancing and delightful easy free-spirited fun. All the flappers had nicknames and my grandmother's was Peppie and her sisters were Dot, Dye, Speed and Baby, to name a few. They played music, my grandmother several stringed instruments like her mother They dated inappropriately, drank martinis like they were going out of style, went to dinner parties where the invitations were carefully planned for the perfect balance of personalities, boys and girls and occupations, including always one good-tempered alcoholic priest. Banter was the conversational norm with serious subjects like politics and investment a tolerated second.

Then the Crash of 1929 happened and my great-grandfather came to San Diego to break the very bad news. Most of the capital was gone, only a little left that he would change into real estate in the form of part ownership in factories in Belgium that a couple of decades later would be confiscated by the Fascists. For me, a perfect portrait of what their perspectives were like was that day he arrived to tell them their lives were changed forever and the reaction his daughter Baby had over the news. Baby decided then and there to help the financial wound by going down to the restaurant where she had received room service her entire life and ask for a job. In those days there was still very clear class consciousness so that the maitre d' was astonished to hear her request but with great embarrassment and awkwardness, knowing what was happening, granted it. Unfortunately, she was fired the same day and as the story goes, the reason given was, "She couldn't even cut pie." From her photograph at that time that I cherish, she doesn't look at all like she could cut pie and doesn't seem to need the knowledge. She's still called Baby though she's past her nineties.

My grandmother married a sailor on a lark, an event that was quietly remedied. Then she married another one, a sailor who then became a merchant marine and that one held. He was my grandfather Paddy O'Reilly. At Thanksgiving when she was ninety-seven years old, I happened to be sitting by her as the table was cleared. Everyone else had left the room. She turned to me and asked, "Do you remember your grandfather?" Of course! I said. "Well," she said quietly, "I married him but he was just a pretty face." The pretty face knew he probably wasn't going to be able to keep her, especially going off for weeks to months at a time at sea. So each time he came back he brought her furniture from the Far East until her whole house was attired. She left me her dining room set, which I adore, particularly because most of my memories are sitting at that table with her. She took up delivering the mail from one town to another in her Cadillac. My mother remembered how she loved to speed down the road, the back seat of the Cadillac filled with bags of cash being mailed for pay to service men, with at least one child in the front seat with her, flying along a particular road next to a parallel rushing train with her goal to pass it and cross the tracks before being crushed. Great fun.

One time Paddy arrived home from China, bringing with him two silk upholstered chairs, which were unloaded in crates on the pavement in front of their house. They sat there a little while as she decided how to place them in the house. My mother and one of her brothers, Ollie, were playing in the garden next to the house. My mother was six and Ollie was nine. They had a jar and were catching spiders. Ollie saw a small spider, cupped his hand around it and was dropping it into the jar when it stung him. He got it into the jar and closed the lid before he went into convulsions. My mother ran to the house and the ambulance arrived within a few minutes. But by the time it got there he was already dead. They raced him to the hospital where his chest was cracked open. The spider's venom had made his heart beat so hard and fast that it had ripped into shreds. Luckily, they had the spider who had done this. The local experts were baffled saying that this particular spider only lived in China. It must have caught a ride to California in one of the upholstered chairs my grandfather had brought to Peppie. Imagine. When she was ninety-eight, I asked her what the most difficult thing was that had happened to her in her life. I said she had lost her fortune, her parents, her spouse, one of her children. She had lived through two world wars. Without hesitation she said it was losing her child. No question. She said they're right when they say that's the worst that can happen.

But she didn't hold it against Chinese furniture. She adored everything Chinese, in fact, and spent much of her time in Chinatown when the family moved to San Francisco. She had a favorite bakery on Grant Street where we would go, she and my mother and me, taking a seat at the back table to dine on almond cookies and cups of tea. She made her own dresses and typically of the same pattern, just over the knee skirt with a dropped waist and a straight bodice, with or without the little jacket depending upon how much material she had. And the material was usually Chinese silk. When she got very old, after my grandfather had died, she could no longer zip her dress up all the way by herself. So she would walk around her home with a half-zipped dress, the lace at the top of her lovely slip showing. Her stockings were of the sheerest with garters, her shoes pumps with six-inch heels. By her 80's when she walked her ankles would tremble. This terrified my second husband, Chris, who invariably held his hands out oddly as if at any moment he would have to catch her falling. But she said if she wore flats she felt like she was falling backwards and finally a doctor she happened to go to confirmed it. He said her hamstrings had atrophied, that the "natural" position of her foot had actually become perfect for the six-inch heel.

She always dyed her hair black and rolled up the long parts of it in circles at the back of her neck and pinned them criss-cross with hairpins. The front she'd iron on an ironing board in the classic Marcel look of the 1920's. She only made me promise one thing to her in all the years I knew her, that I would always dye my hair. She said when a woman's hair went grey or white, when sitting in company, her part of the conversation would be ignored. It was not that people intended to ignore an older woman or be mean; she thought it was simply something automatic, generated from the primal lobe, that once a woman was past child-rearing age, she no longer had reason to exist and therefore became invisible. She said apparently this was given away by the color of her hair or lack of. So I promised her and I intend to always keep that promise, not because I think anyone would ignore what I have to say but because it links me back to her, something we share.

When I was a teenager I was a hippie, clad in patched bell-bottoms, covered in peace signs. She took me to a finishing school in the city and enrolled me but I refused to go. Then she hired the head of the school to come to our house and I was required to learn to hold a cup of tea on a saucer without spilling it, to walk as if gliding on air, this sort of thing. I hated it. I wish I hadn't. I did retain, however, the good practice of the nicely penned thank you note. That has done me well many times in my life. I wish I shared other things like that with her as I still wander around in ill-fitting jeans and pebbles in my practical shoes. She was so beautiful, so poised, so old-worldly in the most relaxed way you never see anymore. It was natural for her to dress for dinner and she was just comfortable like that, surrounded by perfume bottles and objets d'art. When she was turning ninety-five and I was thinking of a birthday present, I realized that no doubt since my grandfather had died so many years before, no one including me had ever given her a lady's present. We always gave her Chinese ornamental things. So I bought her an ivory silk Christian Dior slip at Sacks and had them wrap it beautifully in a huge box with plenty of white tissue. We had a gathering of family for her birthday and she was loaded down with gifts. But when she opened mine, she lifted the layers of tissue with delicate fingers slowly and then caught her breath when she saw the slip. Her eyes were teary when she thanked me. I was so glad I had had a brief moment of consciousness in thinking of doing that.

When she was ninety-six she performed her violin at some gala. Later, mixing with the crowd, she left her violin sitting by her chair. Someone stole it. Two weeks later I visited her. I was still furious over it. She asked what the matter was. I replied that I was still furious that some low-life had stolen a ninety-six year-old woman's violin that she had had her whole life and had been given to her by her mother who also played. She said oh, that she had just forgotten about the theft. How could you forget about it! I exclaimed. Then I saw her slight smile, the one where she knew she knew something I did not. I suddenly realized that she must have a philosophy. She really didn't seem like the type of woman who would have a philosophy but there it was. I asked her. She said she did. She said it was that if something bad happened and there was something that you could do about it, no matter how difficult that action was, no matter if it took courage or great effort, you had to do it. And she had lived through WWII, remembering the French Underground. She was referring to that kind of level of difficulty, even if it came to something like that. But, she said, if something bad happens and there is nothing you can do about it, let it go. Just like that. I knew the moment she explained it to me that it was a great, sensible, wise philosophy but it took me years to be able to adopt the practice, inside and out, myself. I have adopted it now. Many of the stories I tell you in this blog I would not be able to put into perspective if she had not given me this wisdom. It does work. It creates a happy life in spite of toils and tragedies, pain, confusion and fear. It reminds me of the Existentialists' position, which is apropos considering the years she lived.

When she was ninety-eight my aunts thought she should see a doctor for a check-up. They took her to one of their doctors since she had none of her own. The doctor asked her when the last time was that she had had a check-up. She said never. He asked then when the last time was that she had seen a doctor for a medical problem. Never, she said. She had never been sick once in her life. He said but don't you have children? I had five, she said, all at home, no complications had occurred in their births. He examined her, tested her. When it was done, he came out to talk to her and my aunts. He said that her heart was strong, her lungs were clear, she could see and hear and had no sign of senility. He said she will probably live to be 120 years old. My aunts report that she looked at him with surprise and said she hadn't even realized until that moment that she would soon be one hundred years old. She looked perturbed and said that it wasn't ladylike to be one hundred years old. A few days later she took her usual beauty sleep nap in the afternoon. She didn't wake up, just drifted off from life painlessly on her own accord.

She loved the sea. She loved to swim. During the war, she made my grandfather build her a house on the top of a hill so she could see the San Francisco bay. But even that wasn't enough. She then asked him and my Uncle Art to dig her a huge swimming pool. She borrowed a pick-up truck and drove it to a tile manufacturer and asked them if they had any broken tile they didn't want. They pointed to the back of the warehouse and said she could have as much as she wanted. She shoveled a big pile into the truck, bought four ball peen hammers, drove home and dumped the tile in the backyard by the now cemented-in hole for the pool. She gave each of her children a hammer and told them to divide the tiles into piles of colors and break it all up into tiny bits. Of course they had a ball doing that, my mother told me. Then Peppie went to the butchers who gave her a lot of butcher paper. She drew line-drawings of fish on the paper and cut them out and used them to trace the shapes of fish on the sides of the pool. Then she mosaic'ed it all and had a statue of a leaping fish placed at the front of the pool as a fountain. She was a direct descendant of a woman from French history named Melusyn de Lusignan, who was purported in legend to be a fountain nymph, a siren, not a human woman. All I know is that she and my mother and my aunts swam only underwater, as I do, and could glide without making a ripple. A few years ago when the cardiologist told me that the left side of my heart was enlarged, he said something that I found amusing. He said, "You are as healthy as a fish out of water." I said what? He said, "When you're underwater you're as healthy as a fish since when you're swimming underwater your heartbeat drops by half and relieves your heart. But when you're on dry ground, you're as healthy as a fish out of water. So I'm giving you medicine for those times." He had no idea how I was taking that information or how amused my mother would also be by it when I told her, especially as my particular blood pressure condition is inherited, from my mother's line. It's called Essential Neuro-Genetic Hypertension and it's controlled by my taking every twenty-four hours a synthesized venom from an Amazonian snake called the Jararaca. It drops my blood pressure to normal. My mother took this medication, too, as does my aunt. When I swim I think of my grandmother Peppie and her sisters and her long family line and the mysterious Melusyn as I feel the warmth of the water and tickle of the current and think sometimes about the little pebbles in my shoes. Perhaps the pebbles mean that I shouldn't wear shoes at all, just keep swimming underwater musing about sailors, grand hotels and Chinese silk.

The Epigraphy Society Occasional Papers Issue 28 is Now Available

2011-03-26T08:53:00.000-07:00

If you've happened to read the little bio about me in the right column, you'd have noticed that I work as an editor for an annual epigraphy journal in Massachusetts. It is a very fine, well-established journal that I'm very fortunate to be a part of, dedicated to articles on undeciphered scripts and related material. Issue 28 has just come out and the Editor-in-Chief, Donal Buchanan has sent me an announcement of it, so I've copied that announcement here for you to read, if you like. And I've added a photograph of the cover of Issue 28 in the right column. If you are interested in finding out more about The Epigraphic Society, you can click on that image of the front cover and it will take you to The Epigraphy Society webpage.

Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications

Donal Buchanan, ESOP editor, 97 Village Post Road Danvers, MA 01923 donalbb@comcast.net

26 March 2011

Dear Friend of Epigraphy,

          Volume 28 of ESOP is now available for sale at $35.00 plus $5 shipping & handling. An electronic version on CD is available for $20 (plus $5 s/h). Close to 2/3rds of our yearly output of ESOP is provided to the libraries of educational institutions all over the world and we are working to increase our subscriber base in order to fund future publications.

          ESOP seeks to be a publication in which both professionals and amateurs can feel comfortable appearing. This aim has been achieved to a greater degree with recent issues and 28 is an excellent example of this trend. Two professionally trained epigraphers, Kate Price and Steve Bonta, present excellent articles on the Indus Script and analytical and organizational problems involved in its decipherment (ye Ed steps in with some ideas of his own on the use of Corner Symbols in that script). Louis Buff Parry writes on the Sarmation Hypothesis. John Ruskamp discusses the appearance of a Chinese character among Amerindian rock writing and Richard Bishop returns with two short articles dealing with the Paraiba Inscription. Agostino Sferraza of Spain covers finds of ancient European coins in America. Robert Lebling writes on “The Susquehanna Stones— An Enduring Enigma”. James Guthrie, returning with “Barry Fell on Pacific Inscriptions”, shows how Fell’s early work presaged modern findings about ancient ties between the Old World and the New. M.G. Boutet discusses “Origins of American Proto-Ogam” and Buchanan presents “The Coin Inscriptions of ‘Eldorado’—A Lesson in Epigraphic Caution”. Norman Totten winds up the issue with his Last Word, speaking of “Vikings in America”.

          To order our publications, you can contact the editor at the addresses above, or check our website, www.epigraphy.org and search the menu under “ESOP” and choose “Order Issue”. Choices are available online so that payments can be made by credit card through Paypal. Please remember to include your postal address.

          We are also offering for sale a DVD of Volumes 1-27 in PDF format, with searchable abstracts of contents (covering only 1-25 at this time). It is available for $100 plus $5 s/h. In addition, we have produced 2 CD's covering Volumes 1-15 and Volumes 16-27 available at $50/each plus shipping (for those of you who need to fill some holes in your collections of ESOP). These are offered to raise funds for our very non-profit Society. The editorial staff has already started work on volume 29. Individual volumes of ESOP are available for $15 each (+ $5 s/h). We also have for sale ($15 + $5 s/h) “The Numismatic Phoenix” by Norman Totten (an excellent PowerPoint presentation on the Phoenix and the worldwide spread of the use of its image by many different nations of the world).

Aditya Behl

2011-03-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

In the last posting, Working on the Indus Valley Script, I mentioned someone who is very dear to my heart, Aditya Behl. I said how he had been supportive of my work. But he was much more than that to me. Aditya passed away in the summer of 2009 of a bleeding ulcer. He was such a brilliant, sensitive person with constant worries about academic tasks that he had to complete that had little to do with the work he loved to do, translation of Sufi literature and poetry.

We met, as I said in the previous posting, at a mixer for graduates and new professors from the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of Religious Studies and any other related field. The mixer was at my good friend Walker's apartment, a breezy floor-through parlour of a large old Philadelphia house that ran from the ample front porch to the wooden stairs down to the back yard. Walker, as usual, was rushing around making sure that everyone was happy, presenting pies he had made himself and conversing vivaciously with everyone in his erudite vocabulary and that ever slight sarcastic smile. I hadn't been to a party before at Penn, though I had already lived there a year. I had wanted to just stick to myself for awhile when I arrived, having a lot to think about regarding the past four years at Cambridge. But this was the first mixer of my second year and Walker convinced me to at least drop by.

After being there a while, I wandered into the first room and sat down on the rug where some people, none of whom I think I knew then, were sitting around. One of the people sitting on the sofa was Aditya. He introduced himself to me as a new lecturer in the Religious Studies Department, just arrived from U.C. Berkeley. He was very sweet in his manner and asked me nicely for my name and what my interests were, why I was at Penn, that sort of thing. He listened so well, looking at me with his kind, intelligent eyes. I told him how I had worked on the Linear A script and now was piddling around with the Harappan script. He didn't comment much at the time but a few days later he contacted me. He said he had been thinking about what I had said and asked if I wouldn't mind coming over to his office to show him my work from Cambridge. I was happy and complemented and said sure. I went over on the day of the appointment and started to show him and explain four years of beloved labor.

That began regular visits to his office. After one or two meetings, he began to ask me to coffee at a cafe next to the Penn bookstore. So we'd talk about my recent work and then wander over to the cafe. One day he said he wanted me to meet his sister and her husband, that they were visiting and would be there soon. Just before they arrived, he said he had an errand to do and with his usual joyful flair, ran into the Penn bookstore and bought a copy of his own recently-published book, Manjhan Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance (see the full citation at the bottom of this posting). I had followed him into the bookstore but he gestured smiling for me to stay away. He wrote something into the book at the cashier's and had them wrap it. He handed it to me and said, “Read the dedication on the inside cover!” and then hurried to meet his sister who was watching. I opened the present and then the book. I thought just now of figuring out a way to explain what he had written. But this is my memoir and so instead I have scanned it, as I still own and treasure the book, and have inserted the scan here, for you to see. He writes "Kat ap Rhys". Ap Rhys is the correct Welsh spelling of my last name and he liked knowing and using it rather than the Englishized version of my name that our family now uses.

I was astonished, standing there in the Penn bookstore with Aditya smiling at me from a ways away, reading for the first time those words he wrote me. His sister seemed to be extremely curious about it and not necessarily all that pleased. But she was so beautiful it amazed me and I was glad to meet her. I really can't remember the rest of that afternoon at all. I hadn't known him long and there had never been any flirting or anything said to indicate any personal feelings between us. On the other hand, I wasn't surprised because Aditya was a man with an open heart, with so much verve for life, with such fascination for poetry and language and literature and other people and music and even my little yellow parakeet, Lily. He volunteered immediately to take care of Lily when I was away visiting family in California and when I came back he didn't just hand Lily over but told me in wondrous tones how he and his sister and brother-in-law had fallen head over heels in love with Lily. He wrote poems and sometimes sang a little song about her. He was absolutely unafraid to utterly embrace life.

Then I began to have dreams about him. I had four dreams in total and each built on the one before. They were spread apart over two weeks. In the first dream I was in a village with houses made of white-washed mud bricks or plaster with flat roofs and ladders going from inside the homes up through an opening in the roofs. My sister and I were on the roof of our house. It was a very hot sunny day. The men of the village were down below on the street, gathered together, carrying all sort of weapons in their hands. My sister and I looked over the edge of the roof. Aditya was among the men. He yelled up to us that they were all going to go out beyond the village and try to hold back the enemy that was approaching but if they were killed, we should flee into the forest just behind the village. We watched as the men rushed away down the street towards the outskirts of the village. It didn't seem like war at all. It was such a quiet pretty day. We sat down against a short wall next to the top bit of the ladder. Then we heard noise in the distance and my sister got up to go look over the edge. Just before she reached the edge, suddenly she bent over and fell face forwards off the roof to the ground below. I lept up and ran to the edge of the roof. Her body was strewn upon the ground. I ran to the ladder but when I got to the bottom I heard screams and the sounds of fighting and someone yelled for me to run. I ran.

In the second dream I was running and had almost reached the edge of the forest. I could hear the fighting come into the field behind me. It was fierce with screams and loud confusing sounds. I was too afraid to keep running so I laid down behind a large rock only a few feet from the tree line. Suddenly Aditya came around the rock and squatted down. “Go into the forest!” he yelled to me and pushed my back to make me go. I got up and ran toward the trees and as I entered the forest I turned and saw him stand up and start to fight with a man, both of them with daggers. I ran and ran into the forest then fell to hide behind a huge tree in its shadowy darkness.

In the third dream, I was still behind the tree huddling. But it had become much quieter. It seemed like it had been a long time. I got up cautiously and snuck gingerly towards the clearing. The entire field was littered with bodies. I started to walk into the open but fell.

In the fourth dream, I heard Aditya say my name. I was lying in the field at the edge of the forest. I opened my eyes and saw him standing over me. He kneeled down and picked me up and began to carry me across the field in his arms, stepping carefully over the fallen fighters. My head was hanging down to the side and I could see each man as he stepped over them. Suddenly I saw that the man he was just stepping over was himself, his own body, stricken in the field. I realized that I was only a spirit, too and that his spirit was carrying mine across that field.

Very struck by these dreams, I still did not tell them to Aditya. I didn't know how he would react and I had decided already that his dedication in his book to me was simply a warm kindness. Then one day when I met him at his office, he said, how about lunch instead of coffee? I said ok, sure and he said he knew a place very nearby. He took me to a fantastic modern restaurant behind the Penn bookstore called Pod. It looked like a scene from Woody Allen's movie, Sleeper. It was all white with futuristic curved white furniture. It was extremely expensive, which I knew from seeing the expensive cars parked in front of it every night from my dorm building, which was just across the way. Aditya suggested a drink. I rarely could afford to actually have a real drink so I said absolutely, sure. The drinks were so cool-ly modern that they didn't have usual names. They were simply named by colors, blue, red, orange, yellow. He said why don't we try blue? I said ok. The waiter brought two blue clear drinks in martini glasses. We ate several courses of great, I think it was Japanese if I recall correctly, cuisine. The first drinks were strong and so we became happy enough to then think it was funny to order a round of red and then orange and although it's fuzzy at this point, I think even yellow.

Sometime during a very long lunch, Aditya said there was an Indian film playing on campus at 7 p.m. and did I want to go. I said sure but it's only four. He said he had to go to his place first and wanted to show me his home, anyway. I said ok, why not. He said then we'd come back to the film at seven. Now maybe this sounds like it's heading somewhere typical but believe me, it is not. Aditya never did anything typical. Obviously, we shouldn't have driven anywhere in that condition but there it is, we did. We went to his little house somewhere in Philadelphia somewhere around the Fine Arts Museum, I think it was. It was a nice, two-story little house with oriental carpets and quiet furniture. He had a large stew of some sort in a big pot sitting on the stove. He said he was making me something to eat, meaning that he had expected to bring me there before he even left the house that morning. He turned the burner on and started to heat up the stew. He said he wanted to show me photographs. We went down into the basement where he had several albums of them. He showed me pictures of his family and of when he taught at U.C. Berkeley. He told me about his terrible arranged failed marriage to a woman brought to him from India and how, although he grew up in New Delhi, he had gone to college at the University of Chicago and then taught at Berkeley so that he was not the same person who left India as a youth, and he had some personal issues as well. It is not my right or place to discuss them here. Suffice to say that he was tormented about who he was and what he wanted due to horrible experiences in his youth.

We went back upstairs and he asked me to place little metal statuettes he had of different animals on the corners of the carpet and then to sit on the carpet. I thought, ok, why not. I only remember the little metal goat, probably because I was born in the Chinese Year of the Goat. He stirred the simmering stew and asked if I wanted another drink. I think we drank vodka and also white wine, if I recall correctly, but the mood stayed very quietly soothing and calm. He came over and sat facing me on his knees on the carpet. Then he asked me to go up to his closet on the second floor and find a shirt that I liked that he could change into. It was odd but interesting so I said ok and went up and found a very nice shirt. He went to the bathroom and put it on and then said he would find me a shirt of his to wear, if I would agree to wear it. I said ok. He chose a white dhoti and I put it on. I have it still. I came back downstairs and sat down facing him on the carpet. He asked me to then go get a pair of scissors. I went up to his bathroom cabinet and found a small pair of nail scissors. Back at the carpet, he asked me to cut the buttons off his shirt. He held the buttons one by one out from the shirt so I could cut the threads. Then he handed me some other sort of buttons like cufflinks, that had little apparatuses to hold themselves to the shirt. He asked me to put these new buttons on the shirt so I did. By then I was starving and it was way past 7 p.m. So he went to the stove and put the stew into two wonderful rough like stoneware brown bowls and brought them back to the carpet. He put one of the bowls in my hands and said not to drink any of the stew yet. He didn't call it stew but I can't remember what he called it. I was so hungry but he said no, not a sip. Then, holding his bowl in both hands, he began to speak in Sanskrit. He chanted a long time and then to my relief he said to drink the stew, all of it, not to leave one drop. I was happy to finally have the now cold stew.

Then he said just a moment and he got up and went to a box on a table and got out a slim string of fresh water pearls and a cameo brooch. He brought them back and presented them to me, saying how I was whom he had searched for, that I was all these wonderful womanly things. Even pretty drunk I couldn't believe him. I was ten years at least older than him and not beautiful in the least. Even his sister was a goddess compared to me. But he said he knew it clearly. He said I was to go upstairs and sleep in his bed the rest of the night and he would sleep there on the carpet. He insisted so I climbed the stairs and went to sleep.

In the morning, I woke up wondering what the hell! I could hear him in the bathroom showering, and pretty freaked out, I put the pearls and cameo on the table downstairs and crept out of the house, hurried down the street and caught a bus back to my dorm room. The whole way back I thought ok, that was some sort of Indian ritual but what kind? I wasn't a specialist of Indian rituals; I hardly had paid them any attention in classes. Ritual just isn't my cup of tea. Or perhaps I should say, studying ritual isn't my cup of tea because I rather enjoyed actually being in one. As soon as I got home, I called my friend Mehta who was from South India and did know about Indian rituals. As soon as I told her some kind of ritual had happened at Aditya's house, she asked me to describe it. When I was done describing it, she exclaimed, “Oh my god, you've married Dr. Behl!” I couldn't believe it! I was furious! She asked to please not tell him she knew about it since she was in his department (I wasn't) and he was her supervisor so she just couldn't know this. I said ok, hung up, stormed to the library, grabbed a free computer and emailed him. I demanded that he explain why he thought it was ok to do a marriage ritual with me without telling me what it was! I said he had to write me a statement on email taking it back, saying that it didn't take because I didn't know about it. Several hours later, he wrote me back, very sorry, saying that he didn't ask me to marry him because he thought I'd say no! I said yes I'd say no but how is this better? He said he was very sorry but he didn't exactly take it back. That was Friday. A few hours later his sister called me. She said he had issues, that he really didn't mean to give me the cameo and pearl necklace and she questioned me harshly in detail about the ritual the night before. I was not pleased with her, particularly as I had not tried in the least to claim the ritual stuck or that I should have the jewels that I had left behind. I don't think I've spoken to her since. But six years later when I was working at a small museum in Utah, on the day of my birthday, he mailed me the fresh-water pearl necklace with a note saying to read section 361 on page 150 in his book, that it referred to me and the pearls.

On Monday afternoon I was sitting at my carroll in the library when Mehta came rushing up. “I just had an appointment to see Dr. Behl about my work and he looks terrible!” She said he looked like he hadn't bathed since Friday and had slept all weekend in his clothes. She said he wasn't even shaved and he would get fired if he got any worse looking. She said I had to go see him. I said no way. She said I had to or he would get fired for sure. Reluctantly, I went over to his building and up to his floor of offices. Not glad, I walked cautiously down the hall toward his office. His office door was open. I walked quietly up to it and stopped in the doorway. He was sitting at his computer. He looked up. He did look awful, indeed. I said, “What are you doing?” He replied quietly, “Looking at movies that are playing.” He looked so miserable. I said, “I want to see Beautiful Mind.” He said, “So do I. It's playing. Do you want to go?” I said, “When's it playing?” He said, “In an hour.” I said, “Okay.” He got up, walked past me into the hallway, shut and locked the door and we went off on a date to the movies. It was just like that. Surprising. Simple. Unexpected, again. There were just no barriers.

We drove downtown somewhere and went in to see the sad and wonderful film, Beautiful Mind. It was so incredibly apropos, for both of us. He took my hand in the dark and we held hands, both weeping through parts of it. Then we went back out to the car. He was supposed to drive me to my dorm room but suddenly I realized he was again headed towards his house. I said stop the car. He pulled over. I said I am not going back to your house. He turned towards me and told me that he knew that we had been in lives together before, more than one. He said he knew it and being Hindu, he was fully convinced. I considered a moment and then said that I knew it, too, and I told him my four dreams. He said the thing is that his parents had told him not to bring a white woman with him back to India. I'm sorry to have to quote that but that is exactly what he said, word for word. I said, remembering also how his sister had reacted, that I wanted a life without strife (writing that now it seems so absurd) and I proposed an agreement. I said what if we agree to be perfect for each other with no impediments in the way in the next life? For real, I said, like boy and girl next door, happy families for us, a restful, easy life together. He said yes, he could agree to that. And on a handshake we became fast friends. There was a lot of gossip about us so we kept from spending too much time together. But Aditya was unable to keep his cards always close to his chest and one day when we were walking across campus with hundreds of other students and faculty walking on the paths around us, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, turned to me and threw his arms around me and hugged me for the longest time.

Then I stupidly left after I had just finished my M.A. and was starting my Ph.D. at Penn to go do my Ph.D. in Paris. It was entirely for financial reasons, as always. Penn cost me in student loans $90,000 for a two year master's degree. The institute in Paris charged me 280 euros per year for a variety of small fees. My financial aid was messed up from the day I arrived at Penn, so badly that my transcripts are still frozen in dispute. But that's for another posting. I have too much to say about that to write it now. But Aditya and I kept in touch by phone and email and letters ever since then. One day he phoned me and said he was going to be in San Francisco to do a speech at the Planetarium. I was back in the Bay Area then and he asked if I would come to the lecture and we could hang out the rest of the afternoon. I did and was so pleased to watch him doing such a good lecture up on that stage. He invited me to the luncheon afterwards with the docents who had arranged it. He didn't leave my side the whole time, walking and sitting beside me and I could see the docents' curiosity. Then he took me to Japan Town to a little grouping of fine Japanese antique shops and asked me to choose for him a souvenir, anything I thought would be right for him. He said he thought I had exquisite taste, a statement I have used in argument with various tasteless individuals since. I chose a really interesting arm rest. It was wooden and was exactly like a good wide arm of a wooden chair except there was no chair. It was to place on the floor next to a pillow seat so one could rest one's arm while reading. He loved it and bought it on the spot. He was just so nice to me.

We had so many long phone conversations over the years that followed. Literally hours long. He told me about his many invitations to speak as he became more and more well known for his wonderful translations. He told me about his translations as he did them, his discoveries about them, his theories about them and his painstaking love for this work. He told me about the interesting people he met, about his various love affairs, and not the least of all, about his eternal worries, about the great academic load of work that tortured him, about guilt anytime anyone wasn't pleased with him, about the music he loved, about his dreams. And I told him about everything that was happening to me, about all my own worries and dreams, about the work I was doing on the script. And we shared our troubles, and there were many, always, for both of us.

Aditya had many loves, in his work and in his personal life. I was in no way the only person he had passion for. But he did care for me and these days, though I know that he is deceased, I know it but I don't believe it, if that makes sense. His physical self as Aditya Behl is back to the dust but his spirit exists. I'm sure of it. And I wonder sometimes, if I will, on some day in the near or not so near future, wake up somewhere else in someone's else's family, with a gentle-hearted boy growing up in the house next door.

The full citation for Aditya's book is: Behl, Aditya and Simon Weightman. 2000. Manjhan Madhumalati: An India Sufi Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Working on the Indus Valley Script

2011-03-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

I was working every day in the mornings at the Elk Falls cafe, starting up the long process of writing my Ph.D. dissertation. The title of the dissertation had been approved by my school in France so all I had to do was write it. The title was, Une Description Morphologique de l'Ecriture Harappeen, or A Morphological Description of the Harappan Script. The Harappan script is also known as the Indus Valley Script. It just depends on who is talking about it. Some archaeologists call a civilization after the first city found within it. Since Harappa was the first city found of the Bronze Age civilization that existed in large part in the Indus Valley, which is currently in India and Pakistan, it is sometimes called the Harappan Civilization. But many people refer to it as the Indus Valley Civilization. It's not all that important which one uses as anyone who works on the culture knows both. And it's really not worth arguing about.

I've written in an earlier post about how at Cambridge I worked on the scripts Linear A & B from Crete and how I did a lot of my work at the Ancient India and Iran Trust Library so I got to know everyone who worked and read there, which were just a few really interesting people. Among them were two trustees, Bridget and Raymond Allchin, the well known archaeologists. Since I was primarily working with John Killen in the Classics Department on Linear A and he was having me read everything possible on decipherment work done regarding that and having me take Classical and Mycenaean Greek from himself and John Chadwick, I decided the best thing would be to expand to learn cognate, contemporary languages; in other words, languages that were related to Myceanean Greek and within the same general time period. Sanskrit was the obvious main choice so I sat in on beginning Sanskrit for a year and then enrolled for a second B.A. I studied Classical Sanskrit for a couple of years there as well as South Asian Archaeology from Professor Dilip Chakrabarti in the Department of Archaeology and various support courses on ancient India. In my last year, my college arranged for me to take a bus to Oxford University on Thursdays to have private tutorials in Vedic Sanskrit (the oldest known form of Sanskrit) and the dialects of Middle Indian (the Prakrits). So it made sense when I applied to Penn that I continue to study some aspect of ancient South Asia.

I didn't think it was wise to apply to work on undeciphered scripts, as that is not an orthodox subject at most universities. Cambridge is an exception because, well, Cambridge is an exception to a lot of established academic traditions, in a good way. It is recognized there, though that is lessening as it becomes more "Americanized", a.k.a. standardized, that different students learn in different ways, some learn well from taking courses, some don't at all and those might learn well by sitting in the library for three years or by taking related courses outside their department. Whatever works is the unspoken mantra and it does work. One good example is that the shy are not forced to "participate", which is practically a rule and often a requirement in American colleges and extremely counter-productive to the point of torture for the meek. There is no single right way that all are supposed to adhere to in order to excel at learning. What matters is that one understands one's own mind and that is aided by regular visits to one's "tutor" who in England is more like a life counselor. This tutor aids the student in figuring out what they want to learn and what is the optimum way to accomplish it. I remember someone one day in the library talking about using 100% of the brain. He didn't mean literally 100%; he meant understanding one's brain so that one can organize methodologies to learn in the most efficient and natural way possible. At Cambridge, minds are so very much respected for their fragile yet incredible potentials.

An example of the Brahmi script

I took Dr. Chakrabarti's advice to apply to work on Brahmi inscriptions at Penn in order to become a Brahmi translator for a conjunction of reasons. Brahmi is the most ancient script known in India that can be read, older than Sanskrit but younger than the Indus Valley/Harappan Script. Most researchers who learn Brahmi are Buddhist scholars, since a large part of Buddhist scripture is written in the Brahmi script. They will go to a museum where they know a specific Buddhist manuscript is, translate it and leave. But there are hundreds of manuscripts written in Brahmi that are rotting in museums all over India, due to the dampness of the climate. And a very many of them are not about Buddhism. Dr. Chakrabarti said there was a great need for general Brahmi translators, dedicated not to translating one particular document but to translating and conserving as many Brahmi manuscripts as possible. And it qualified as an orthodox university subject. I applied and was admitted to Penn to learn just this.

When my time at Cambridge was coming to a close, Bridget Allchin did a very nice thing for me. She told me she and Raymond knew the head of the Department of Archaeology, Greg Possehl, at the University of Pennsylvania. They emailed him and told him a little about me and that I was on my way there to be in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and they gave him my email address. He emailed me and invited me to come over to the archaeology department to meet him when I got to Penn. My reputation, both good and bad, had preceded me to Penn, including whatever it was that Asko Parpola had told people in London and Cambridge about my work on Linear A that he had seen.

An example of the Harappan script (citation at bottom).

I got to Penn and started my master's degree in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, specializing in South Asian Studies. Since I had an invitation, on one of my first days I went over to the Department of Archaeology to meet Greg Possehl. He was not only head of the department but an archaeologist who had specialized in the Harappan civilization and he had written an important book on the Harappan script. So right away the subjects turned to the work on Linear A that I had been doing and if I wanted to consider working on the Harappan script. I was barely familiar with the script, only what I had read in Parpola's publication. But Dr. Possehl loaned me several books of his on the subject and set up my taking the Ph.D. core courses in his department along with my courses in my own department. The reason for taking archaeology courses was that an undeciphered script exists on inscriptions that are found on various types of objects and those objects are part of the material record that is excavated by the archaeologist, so a large portion of research that one reads on any undeciphered script is in archaeological field reports. And one has to be able to understand the lingo and the theories and the goals behind the discussions in order to fully grasp the meanings.

I was working in my own department on Brahmi inscriptions but after a short time news about my work on Linear A and working with Greg Possehl filtered over to my department so, one by one, my professors told me I could adapt the point or theme of standard assignments to do something on the Harappan script. This was because I was now in a department that studied South Asia, where by definition the interest is in all things South Asian, not in the department that did classical studies, which included languages and scripts on Crete. Penn is not Cambridge. Penn is orthodox and standardized. When in one department, that's what one studies and that is all one studies except for perhaps a course or two on the side. What matters is not the mind but the requirements for the degree. One can branch but it has to be somewhat formal, such as taking South Asian archaeology courses in the Department of Archaeology if one is enrolled in South Asian Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. No wandering all over the campus and living in the library. That's English.

It was just a paper here and there on the Indus Valley script until I happened to meet a new professor my second year from the Religious Studies Department, Aditya Behl. He asked about my work, which I told him. A few days later he emailed me and asked if I would bring my work over to his office to show him. I did and that started regular meetings where I showed him whatever paper I had done or any work I had done on the side on the Harappan script. After a few months he told me he had met with my supervisor and the head of the Sanskrit department, who was then Ludo Rocher, and discussed with him my work. It was nearing the time that Professor Rocher was to decide the specific subject of my master's thesis. Professor Rocher contacted me to make an appointment and I went to see him. To my surprise he told me about his meeting with Dr. Behl and that he had decided that I should do my thesis on the Harappan script. I asked him, but what about Brahmi? He said no, that decipherment was most definitely “my work”. However, he also had decided that my comprehensive exams to complete my M.A. would be customized in three parts: one part ancient South Asian history, one part ancient Indo-Iranian linguistics and one part South Asian archaeology. He said there was a need for historians of India and these exams were set so that I would be qualified for work as a historian. I complained that I had never taken and there had never been offered any course actually on South Asian ancient history. He said yes, that history had fallen into a crack between religious studies and literary studies and that was specifically why he wanted me trained as a historian. He said better head to the library. So, I wrote my M.A. thesis on the Harappan Script and I studied for my exams and I'm very proud to report that after teaching myself in the library as much as I could find on ancient South Asian history, Dr. Rocher emailed me after my exams to tell me that my history exam was superb. I ought to frame that email it makes me feel so good still. So, that is the long and short of why when I finished my M.A. and applied to l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the research institute in Paris, to do my Ph.D. I was accepted to work on the Harappan Script.

citation: the image of the Harappan script is taken from: Price, K.M. 2011. A Harappan Signary Cross-Reference. The Epigraphy Society Occasional Papers, Issue 28 (pending). Danvers, Mass.

The Americar

2011-03-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

I was walking down a dirt road one day in Elk Falls, Kansas, just exploring the town and the roads that headed out, searching for good potential walks, when I turned a corner and stopped short. In front of me was an old Ford Bronco sitting in the middle of the road with the hood up and a guy with his head underneath it messing with the engine. But that wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was that the whole car was hand-painted, with a brush, in red, white and blue, stars and stripes in the pattern of the American flag and on the back were small hand-prints in blue.

I walked up to the front and recognized the guy who had his head under the hood. It was the soon-to-be mayor, so I asked him the obvious question, how did this car get painted like that? It seems that a friend of his, an art teacher from another Kansas town, had gotten in a fender bender some years before. On the morning of her appointment to take her car to be repainted, as she was getting ready she had the t.v. on. Suddenly it was reported that planes were hitting the World Trade Center. It was the morning of September 11, 2001. She sat down, shocked, and watched the news, missing her appointment. Then she changed her mind. Instead of making a new appointment, she took her car to the school where she worked and had her art students paint it in honor of the victims of September 11th. It was their handprints that were on the back of the car.

I begged the mayor-to-be for three months until he finally sold me the car. I loved that it was a tribute and a work of art and I figured also that if I broke down anywhere, especially in the Midwest, there were a lot of guys who would stop and help me. I very happily drove that car for the rest of the years I lived in Elk Falls and then back to California and around there for a year until the second year there it couldn't pass the California smog test. I couldn't afford to fix it so very sorry and sad I sold it to the State as part of a state project to get old smog-emitting cars off the road. I miserably took it to the crusher, which was part of the program but once there I asked to speak to the manager. I told him the car's story and said it shouldn't be put to the crusher and suggested that maybe he'd put it out front as an advertisement for his shop. A few weeks later a friend mentioned that she had seen me in Walnut Creek, a nearby town. I said no, I hadn't been to Walnut Creek in a long time. She said she had been sure it was me because she saw my car parked by a shop there and my car definitely could not be mistaken for any other car. A few days later someone else told me the same thing, again in Walnut Creek. So, I was very glad to discover someone at the crushing yard decided to take its salvage title and fix it so it could run again on California streets.

Whenever I would drive the Americar to somewhere else in Kansas, everybody on the road would wave and once in a while somebody would hoot and hollar. It was a gas driving that car. Actually, I thought there was something odd about the gas. One of the first days I had it I drove fifty miles over to the town with the supermarket and 3/4th's of the way back, I filled the tank at a small service station. The next day when I got back in the car, I noticed that the gas gauge said it was nearly empty. I looked under the car. No leaks. I couldn't figure out how I could have used that much gas just getting home the rest of the way. I phoned the soon-to-be mayor and complained that he had told me it got good gas mileage. "It does get good gas mileage!" he said and considering that he owned the mechanic's shop and was about to be mayor, I figured he was telling the truth. So, the next week I did the same thing. I had filled it up earlier so I again drove fifty miles to buy groceries and almost all the way back, I filled it up again. The next morning again it was down to one quarter tank. I saw my next-door neighbor out in her yard and walked over. I told her what was going on and added that it was like somebody was stealing the gas. She replied, "Somebody is stealing the gas!" and told me about a guy in town, Billy Rattail, who was stealing gas, cords of wood, tools, whatever he could get his hands on in the middle of the night. She said everybody in town was getting mad and folks were even putting up threatening fliers in the post office about him, cause everybody knew it was Billy, they just couldn't catch him. She said he had the nerve to stack a cord of stolen wood right in front of his house and the guy he stole it from could easily recognize it (one of those mysteries of the Midwest of which I have encountered many). She said to buy a locking gas cap and that would keep him out, that he only stole what was easy to get. So I wandered down to the post office and asked the people hanging out gossiping and yeah, they confirmed it all right and they pointed to an angry flyer telling Billy to get out of town or else. Once I knew this was going on, I understood what people were complaining about in the cafe every morning. So I'd sit in on these discussions, being mad myself, especially because he punctured the floater in my gas tank when he was trying to siphon my gas. Everybody who wanted in on the discussion would crowd into the really big booth in the cafe and start talking. The men would complain that the sheriff was doing absolutely nothing about it, on and on about how the sheriff ought to do something. One day, there was a sweet looking little old lady sitting quietly at the table. After the men had gone on about the sheriff doing nothing, in her little squeeky voice, she spoke up. "I think we ought to tar and feather him and send him out of town on a rail," she said. Right on, Girl! I thought. The only one there with cahones.

Then one day the cafe was all aflutter with news. Early that same morning at 4 a.m. when Shirley LaDoo had gone out to get in her car to make her usual long drive to work in Wichita, her husband had naturally walked her to the car to wish her a safe trip. But once she had driven off and it got quiet, he could hear something funny-sounding down the road. It was still really dark so he walked as quietly as possible down to see what was going on. And lo and behold he spotted Billy breaking into the Elderberry's weekend house. He hurried home and phoned the dispatcher and told her the sheriff needed to get out there quick to catch Billy red-handed. The dispatcher asked if he could call back later because the sheriff didn't like to be woken up before 8 a.m. A couple of weeks later, one of the deputies started handing out yard signs saying he was running for the office of sheriff. He won.

The Americar did have its moment of glory. I was married by then to my third husband, Pat, who had been in Vietnam. When September 11th was approaching, we found out that there was going to be a parade to commemorate the day so early that morning Pat put on his fatigues and we drove out to the parade and signed up to be in it. We were right behind the high school band. Pat was uncharacteristically nervous waving at the cheering crowd as we puttered along behind the band. At one point a guy in a Marine T-shirt yelled, "Hey, how come only the Army is represented!?" I yelled back, "Jump on the hood, Marine!" He didn't though. I didn't know Marines could be shy. As we passed the judges' seats, the voice over the loud speaker yelled, "And here comes the VFW car!" Pat and I looked at each other. We hadn't registered it as the VFW car. But the Americar just had that aura. So we both grinned and Pat waved happily.

The San Onofre Nucear Power Plant Protest

2011-03-19T18:43:00.000-07:00

We are all watching the terrifying and horribly sad on-going crisis and disaster at the damaged nuclear power plants in Japan. We hang on every word from their government, our government and our news agencies, wondering if they know or are transmitting the truth or if they are blocking critical information. There are snippets of descriptions of nuclear plants in our own country and slight assurances that our plants are safe and that some of them are being inspected just in case. But without more information than that, I'm sorry but I don't feel all that assured. So, there is one nuclear power plant that I would like to briefly describe here without the usual PR, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, California. I want to talk about it because I was in a protest that failed to shut it down thirty-one years ago. I'll tell you why we protested and I'll give you some information on it that has come out since that protest against it.

It was in June of 1980 and I was one of the 15,000 people who protested there, in front of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant. There were two main reasons. The first was that this plant doesn't have cooling towers because it pumps billions of gallons of seawater directly from the ocean every day to cool the rods and spent fuel. Very often debris has to be removed from blocking the pipes that has come in with the seawater. Bechtel who built the plant stated and states that the plant can withstand a 7.0 earthquake directly under the plant and that the plant actually isn't directly over the fault line, anyhow.

The fault line they are talking about is called the Cristianitos fault line and it isn't considered to be active. And although it doesn't run directly under the plant it does run directly under the pipes that go from the plant to the ocean. All its cooling comes from the ocean through those pipes. It is a technical point that the plant isn't literally directly over the fault since it is within yards of the fault. I live with a plumber who laughed when I asked him if the Cristianitos fault isn't actually dead and happened to quake, if the cooling pipes could break. Pipes in an earthquake? he replied. No doubt at all they could break.

A news report from Channel 7 ABC News Los Angeles on January 19, 2010 reported that loud sirens went off at the San Onofre plant for thirty minutes due to the discovery of imperfect welds made by robots and pinhole leaks in the pipe that carries water to the reactor in case of an emergency. Workers who did the repairs reported that the leaks were in a place that was difficult to get to. The weld repairs had to be done several times over to get them right and the reactors had to be taken out of service for several weeks in Unit 2.

There are three units. Unit 1 was commissioned in 1968 and closed in 1992. It's now used to contain spent fuel and like the spent fuel in Japan, is surrounded by 6' walls of concrete. Unit 2 was commissioned in 1983, Unit 3 in 1984. In other words, they are both nearly thirty years old.

The North County Times reported at that same time as ABC News that plant officials were reprimanded for lagging sixteen days before they reported a safety issue that required the shutdown of the mechanism that cools one of the spent fuel pools. These spent fuel pools can only handle 23 hours with no new water being sent in before the existing water will reach the maximum allowable temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 1977, Bechtel accidentally installed backwards a 420 ton reactor vessel at the plant. In 2008, Reuters reported that from 2001-2006 a worker was discovered to not have made the hourly fire patrols he was required to do. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission admitted that his inaction was one of "a series of lax behavior" by the workers there. They also discovered that Southern California Edison, who operates the plant, was adjusting customer survey results in order to generate higher incentive awards for investors. The NRC required Southern California Edison to "develop special training for its employees that emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong nuclear safety culture to prevent deliberate misconduct by workers."

We also were there that June in 1980 to protest that the San Onofre Nuclear plant violated two California State regulations. A plant was not allowed to be built within a certain distance of a certain population level. The San Onofre plant violated both regulations but when the plant violated the first regulation, that the population near it had grown too large, the State government had adjusted the law, increasing the allowable populations numbers so that the San Onofre plant was allowed to continue operation. When the community had grown too close to the plant, violating the second regulation, the State government had again adjusted the law, making the radius smaller, so that the San Onofre plant no longer violated it. Currently, eight million people live within fifty miles of the plant.

I think that the point is that it doesn't really matter what the odds are that we won't experience a quake or a tsunami or human error that would cause a partial or complete meltdown of the San Onofre plant or even significant leaks, bringing about devastation of San Diego County. The point is that if any or all of the factors above were to occur and a disaster like what is currently happening in Japan happened here, there would be a large portion of California that would be poisoned and uninhabitable for twenty thousand years. A wise saying goes, to gamble well one should gamble only what one can afford to lose. I don't think we can afford the possibility of destroying forever any part of this world.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

2011-03-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! This is my second favorite holiday (New Year's being the first) for two reasons: because I am 1/4 Irish and because today is my half-birthday. Actually, three reasons, also because today is my best friend's birthday. Her name is Patricia and she is a terrific flamenco dancer whom I've known since I cast her in a student film at USC in 1979.

Today is my half-birthday because I was exactly six months old on March 17th and my grandfather, Paddy, thought that made me the luckiest child on the planet. My family, loving a good reason to celebrate, had a party to commemorate it. After that, they probably would have forgotten about it except two years later my brother was born and exactly six months to the day his half-birthday fell on Valentine's Day. That cinched it. For every year on my half-birthday they would present me with half a cake and one present. My cake would either say, "Hap...Birth...Ka" or "py...day...te!" I only can recall now one of the presents I received. It was a red stick horse with white trim when I was six. I remember opening my mother's closet door and there it was, leaning against the corner. I loved that stick horse. I rode it everywhere until it was ragged. St. Patrick's Day is the perfect day for me to be half a year as I am a jubilant person who tends to be happy in spite of anything with most definitely a gift for the good story. Or rather, I should let you be the judge of that.

My brother Brian would appropriately get his half a cake and present every Valentine's Day. It was such a terrific tradition in our family, the best part being that one doesn't get older on one's half-birthday, that Brian and I have kept up the tradition ever since. This past Valentine's Day I sent him a CD I made of photos of our summer vacation last summer as a present (we drove seven thousand miles last summer across the country and back). A couple of days ago, he sent me a present via Pay Pal and I bought with it business cards to give out about this blog.

It is a good idea to celebrate whenever you can. I come from a town in the San Francisco Bay Area called Benicia, an old settlement that covered a small flat area by the edge of the bay, at least that was true before the huge wave of immigrants from the Midwest flooded in in the '80's to purchase and inhabit a swath of cheaply-built but very expensive, ostentaciously bland track homes covering the hills above the old town, hills that used to be lovely wild grassland for miles and miles. When I was in high school, a friend hiking out in those hills on a search for brown bats found for some inexplicable reason a perfectly working old black Singer sewing machine covered in paintings of roses sitting right in the middle of an open field. He gave it to me and I still have it. I used it a couple of months ago to sew the kitchen curtains in this house where I live. But sadly the Midwesterners who moved into the track homes above the old town brought with them their Midwestern work ethic, their vivid desire for large loads of money and their corrective behavior. I say sadly because when they came they changed an old California town with its own uniquely long-developed personality into a carbon copy of any other mind-numbing yuppie grid of Barbie dreamhouses. Before they came, our town was nearly entirely Irish and Portuguese from way back, mostly from the Gold Rush or Prohibition. In fact, it was Benicia where the guy famously got drunk and blurted he had found gold at Sutter's Mill, causing the Gold Rush to begin. The entire main street was originally saloons and bordellos so that the antique stores that followed were actually bordellos with a lot of great furniture from the Far East, brought to the girls by appreciative sailors. And in a lot of the basements along the old main street still are speak-easies hidden since and during the 1920's with walled up tunnels that ran under the street.

Those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in Benicia before the bedroom community on the hills are now called Old Timers. We prefer the old part of town, which is on the flatland between the old arsenal and the swamp (excuse me, I mean the State Park), running up to the bay, the Benicia we "know". We prefer the old, perhaps somewhat lazy but good good lifestyle we led before the others arrived, where our houses were a bit dilapidated and where we sat around at our local coffeehouse to talk philosophy, soak up coffee and play chess and music and read poetry aloud. One of our best mayors was a poet. My mother was a poet. She would wear a bright red shawl I got her in Scotland, pinned at the shoulder with a huge silver brooch. She would read her poetry aloud with flare, often tears streaming down her eyes in punctuation.

I mean, after all, what does "a good standard of living" really mean? Does it really mean to work constantly and compete with the Joneses and force your kids to be very short clones of track home adults, unimaginative, humorless and obsessively ambitious? I once took care of a couple of kids up there in the bedroom community on the hill. The boy was eight years old. He was a smart, enthused kid who would tell me innumerable facts about military history so one day I told him that when he grew up he might consider being a military historian because he had a real talent for it. I said it just to make him feel good about himself. A few days later he told me that he had decided not to be a military historian when he grew up. I smiled to myself and asked why. He replied, "Because they only pull down fifty thou." For me, that says it all. When at home, I avoid that part of town if possible.

In contrast, they used to say in Benicia when it was still just the old town that if you didn't have an Irish last name it was because it was your mother who was Irish. This of course was true for me, my mom's last name being O'Reilly. The Irish in town tended not to actually go to church but the Portuguese did and very often on Sundays suddenly there would appear a parade down the main street, usually with small Portuguese girls dressed in elaborate gowns celebrating yet another saint's day. The Irish were the audience, as always sitting around on the sidewalk outside the coffeehouses, as the strange pretty parade would soberly glide past.

One year when I was a teenager or so, I was walking up the street. I saw some guys I had known most of my life sitting by a cafe talking. As I neared I glanced into a newspaper machine. I fumbled for some coins and bought a paper. Rushing up to my Irish friends, I said, "Did you see the news! They caught a wanted IRA guy who was living incognito around here for years!" One of them turned towards me and said, "I don't know anything about it." I said look, look, it's in the paper! He grinned and replied, "I don't know anything about it."

Back then it was said there were five hundred garage bands in town and I believe it. Everybody seemed to be able to play something or at least sing. The owner of one of the coffeehouses' brother had been lead guitarist for David Crosby's band. His name was Carl and the young would-be guitarists would flock around him every day to talk about music. My brother was a professional trumpet player and one day the owner of the coffeehouse asked Carl and my brother if they would play a benefit for his place because he really needed to earn a bit more money. They said sure and showed up the highly advertised day. The coffeehouse was packed and my brother, Brian, and Carl got up to play. After a long session that was terrific, they sat down at my table for a break. My brother turned to me and slightly whispering said, "Guess what. Carl and I don't know a single song that the other one knows." I couldn't believe it. We in the room all thought they had sounded terrific. Brian said, "We didn't practice once; we just figured we'd show up and we'd know plenty the other one knew. But Carl's rock and I'm jazz!" He started laughing. "Man," I said, "one person told me you sounded like Miles Davis." "Cool," he said, still laughing.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! Have a pint and talk a bit of the blarney, hang out in a cafe all day watching the parades go by. Go out and look at the budding green of the wild grasses. Have a wonderful day.

Memory and its Aftermath

2011-03-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

In June of the year I was three, nearly four years old, something happened that caused my father to have to go back to Michigan, where he grew up, for several months. My mother was going to stay home with us, my brother and me, but quickly she changed her mind and took us to a small farm not far from where we lived, to a widow who had started a small business taking care of children on the farm after her husband had died. My mother had taken us to be cared for by her before, for short periods of time, and she had done a wonderful job of it. My brother is a year and eleven months younger than I am so he was a baby still.

My mother dropped us off with the woman at the beginning of June and came back to pick us up in September. My mother wasn't what you'd typically call maternal. Her sisters called her spoiled. One example is she had asked my aunt to breast-feed me when I was first born rather than having to do it herself since my aunt had had a baby a few months before and was feeding him. It's interesting that, because I have never had what might be considered a normal bonding with my mother although I love my aunt dearly. It is an interesting test of the concept of bonding between child and "mother", since we all know now that the first days and weeks are among the most critical in a child's development. In other words, I think I must have bonded with the woman who was breast-feeding me rather than the woman who preferred not to.

At any rate, as my mother used to tell the story, she drove back up to that farm that September day a few months later. There were always a lot of children running around the farm, of course, but that particular day a horrible waif-like dirty child ran up to her when she got out of the car. She being somewhat squeemish, tried to hurry to the front door but the child followed her. She knocked on the door and it stood next to her waiting, too. The farm woman opened the door, my mother entered, the waif-child rushing in beside her. The farm woman went to another room and came out with my brother, who was all clean and cute as a button. My mother was very pleased. Then she asked where I was. The farm woman pointed to the dirty waif-child and with surprise in her voice, said, "That's her."

Apparently, the woman was clinically obsessive-compulsive, one of those people who wash their hands incessantly. Her particular problem in this case was that if a child were still a baby, unable to do anything for itself, she cared for it non-stop, cleaning and preening and dressing and re-dressing it, which of course did not (one isn't sure of this, of course) harm the baby in any way. But if a child was a toddler, which meant that therefore in her opinion it could do things for itself, she ignored it entirely. In other words, that June day that my mother left us, as soon as she had driven off, the farm woman had booted me out the front door, shut it and never bothered with me again. She hadn't washed me or fed me or cared for me in any way in all those months.

My hair was matted to my head and had to be shaved. My skin was covered in an infection caused by filth called infatigo. My belly was swollen with a combination of malnutrition and a poisoned liver. I was otherwise extremely skinny. My mother was of course horrified and had me take her immediately to where I had been sleeping. I took her to the barn and pointed at a pile of hay against one of the walls. The hay was disturbed since it had been my bed for a long time and sitting on the hay in a row against the wall were my few rag dolls. All of their heads had been cut off by the farm woman's son, a young boy who wouldn't or couldn't speak and who ran like a crab around the barn. I had torn some piece of cloth from somewhere to make a bandage to reattach the head of only one of the dolls, my ballerina rag doll. I don't know why I only repaired one of them. Maybe I only had enough cloth for one. But I do know why I chose the ballerina to be the lucky one. It was because my father was a dancer. I have kept the ballerina doll all my life as evidence that this was not just a story, that it really happened to me.

My mother asked what I had been eating. I showed her the beetles that ran around in the hay in the barn. Their acidic nature had poisoned my liver and I was a very pale, somewhat sickly child and always very skinny, growing up. It is an odd thing that years later when I was nine and met my best childhood friend, who was one of the beacons of my youth, her father had had the same problem with his liver that I had. He was from the Philippines and had been forced during the war to hide under a bridge for several days to escape the Japanese and to survive he had eaten bugs.

This story about my disaster was told as an anecdote by my mother from time to time without apparent awareness of the seriousness of it. It wasn't until I was in my mid-twenties that I dared to ask her why she had not turned the woman in to the police. My mother was very much of a drama queen though authentic emotion was rare in her. But when I asked her that, it was like a dam that had been nearly overwhelmed for years had suddenly broke. She burst into tears and said it was because she was afraid authorities would have taken me from her if she had turned the woman in, that they would have said she was a bad mother.

I suffered from bouts of jaundice on and off, which increased when I was in my late teens until at last at eighteen I was hospitalized. After many tests I found a good doctor who put me on a special diet. It worked. When I was at Cambridge decades later, since I lived in England where there is socialized medicine, my doctor one day said I should have my liver tested considering my medical history. It was tested and it came back that my liver had rejuvinated, entirely due to that diet, which I kept to religiously for the entire twenty years between the good doctor giving it to me and the test I took in England. I learned that from my father, the value of preventative medicine and natural cures. He being a dancer as well as having been a hearty mountain man, he had a philosophy of health. He used to tell me that since we are biological entities in a biological world, it's amazing that we are ever healthy considering all the possible factors. But, he would say, if something happens to make the body ill in any way unless it's from birth and even then, to always consider it a form of imbalance and to find a natural way if possible to re-balance. I have followed that advice all my life and several times it has done me significant good. The key, he said, is to not take illness personally but instead to care for it as you would a finely tuned instrument as the body is, in fact, only an instrument we use to do things, to function, to sense. Do not attach your ego to the body. It is not where you truly live.

My father told me this when I was a young girl as well as many other pieces of his philosophy. He kept me close to him after coming home that September and discovering that this had happened to me. He watched over me carefully from then on, teaching me survivalist techniques and telling me the ways of the world and how to deal with it, as he saw the world as a truly treacherous place and no doubt feared that being sixty years old when I was born, he would not be around necessarily to watch over me for all that long. Thankfully, he lived until I was in my late twenties.

Decades later, when I was married to my second husband, Chris, we were living in Bronxville, New York where I was taking my Master of Fine Arts Degree at Sarah Lawrence College. I had gotten a job in the summer between my first and second years as the graduate accomodations contact. People in town who had a room or apartment they were willing to rent to a student would call me, I would make the listing and then when newly admitted graduate students would call me, I would give them the listings to find a place to live. I, of course, snagged what I thought was the best one for Chris and myself. It was a huge Victorian not far from the college, owned by a statuesque former model, now in her seventies, named Dorothy. She lived most of the time an hour south in Manhattan but kept the Victorian as a holiday house. She had furnished the first two floors but there was a finished attic with several rooms including a nice little kitchen and a bathroom that she wanted to rent. The rent was cheap because she also wanted someone living there to avoid robbery of her house. We grabbed it. It was fabulous. There were several great oil paintings of her in her model years on her walls and she was beautiful, that's for sure. You could still see it in her, even in her seventies. She was a very nice woman, who had also employed a totally built Polish man in his late twenties as a handyman as she had serious appreciation of beauty. She told us to use the rest of the house if we wanted, not just feel trapped up in the attic (though the attic was really nice). She said have parties, use the big kitchen, just enjoy ourselves. She was the one who showed me how to use objects for other than their original purpose, an ink well to hold two old marbles, a glass jewel box for push pins, wooden fruit inside a bird cage, a hand-blown bowl for my pearls. She had incredible, old-world taste, her home style luscious, lovely and comfortable.

One afternoon I was lying on a settee reading in a very warm and bright glassed-in sunroom just off Dorothy's bedroom on the second floor. I must have fallen asleep just about the time a burglar broke a window in the pantry off the first floor kitchen and climbed in. My husband Chris was working at his desk in the attic and I was quietly napping so the burglar must have thought no one was at home. There must have been an odd way he hurried down the hall next to the sunroom where I was sleeping, as quietly as he could on the balls of his feet or something like that because it caused me to suddenly have a dream of the barn all those years before. I saw that son of the farm woman running in that terrifying odd slightly bent-over crablike way across the barn floor towards me. I woke up at first my voice choked but then the scream began to peal out of me. I wasn't even aware that I was screaming until Chris rushed into the room, fell to his knees and threw his arms around me, saying, "Kate, Kate, you're dreaming, you're dreaming!" I opened my eyes but I was still in the dream and saw that boy running across the floor of the sunroom. My scream must have scared the bejesus out of the burglar and he must have shot out of there because we only found evidence of his having dropped things in the hallway and the broken window later on.

But I couldn't wake up from the dream. Or was it a dream? It didn't seem at all like a dream. In fact, it was nothing at all like anything I've ever experienced in all my life. Chris was holding me. My chin was on his shoulder and I could see beyond his hair into the sunroom. But for a moment superimposed upon the sunroom and then suddenly segueing into being a totally different place, as if I were absolutely physically transported back, I was once again in that barn. It felt like I was floating, very high up in the air near the ceiling. I could see the whole barn beneath me and far against the wall, a small girl crumpled on a stack of hay, rag dolls against the wall. Then I saw a light burst through the roof in a solid beam that shot straight down to the little girl's body. I saw the beam of light lift her body up just like a puppet on strings until her whole torso was pulled up. Her face fell back and I saw that light pour into her eyes, nose, mouth and ears. Then just as suddenly it was gone and she fell back down to the hay. Abruptly the vision stopped and I was back in the room with Chris' arms around me, the sunroom back to its sunny afternoon self, Chris saying soothing things to calm me.

Who is to say if it was the burglar's footsteps reminding me of that deranged boy in the barn that caused me to suddenly and vividly remember deep lost flecks of that time or if I were only dreaming a dream I was not at first able to awaken from or if, in fact, I was somehow transported back to witness something that had actually happened to me that saved my life when I was nearly four years old. Most likely it was a manifestation of a psychological state based on early childhood trauma. What is interesting to me is that the whole scene was silent. It is interesting because I was still having deaf periods at that age. I had been born with fused canals in my middle ears, which had caused extreme pressure and then serious damage to one ear, which some medications and an operation were in the process of trying to repair. That the scene was silent therefore suggests that it was a primal moment, re-experiencing a suppressed memory and probably related to the inability to scream at first, which was probably related to the fact that I was still functionally deaf when the event originally occurred. But that would then mean that the experience I had in that sunroom was significantly healthy, finally being able to express how I felt about it in no uncertain terms.

Who Do We Americans Want to Be?

2011-03-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

Watching the news about Japan, worried and horrified and praying for the Japanese people like all other Americans, I was moved beyond measure to see our own soldiers arriving with aid and strength and fortitude to help as much as they could. I don't know about you, but this is who I want us to be. I want our reputation across this world to be one again of compassion in the form of compassionate acts, not acts of war. I want us to be loved and respected again as we once were, not accused constantly of meddling in the problems and affairs of foreign countries as a means to satiate our own unstoppable greed. When I was at Cambridge University, many days every week for four years I was lambasted by such accusations by fellow students from all over the world. I apologized, I explained, I defended and I felt bad the whole time. I don't want to feel bad anymore. I don't want to just say I support our troops. Of course I support our troops, our terribly brave men and women who risk their lives. But if they are to risk their lives for those in desperate need outside the U.S. I want them to risk radiation poisoning to save those people pounded by natural forces, not guns from people yet again at war.

Meanwhile, while Japan is in such terrible need, the Arab League has endorsed allowing the Western NATO Alliance to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. For those of you who haven't yet read the description our own Defense Secretary Gates gave the House Appropriations Committee last Wednesday of what a so-called no-fly zone actually entails, here is a part of it. Gates said, "A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That's what you do in a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that's the way it starts." He also warned the committee against starting another war in the Middle East and called an end to "loose talk" about steps like a no-fly zone that would be the equivalent of an act of war. He said also that enforcement of a no-fly zone, if it was imposed, would be expensive and difficult and would stretch U.S. resources thin in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, ironically, France is lobbying members of the U.N. Security Council in favor of the no-fly zone, though Germany, Russia and China are against, Germany specifically bringing up soiling our reputation even further as meddlers in the Arab World. Russia has responded by blocking Gadhafi and his family from carrying on any financial transactions in their country. The Prime Minister of Turkey has said, "Military intervention by NATO in Libya or any other country would be totally counter-productive."

Meanwhile, however, Senator John Kerry, who is the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the Pentagon should be prepared to go ahead with it. And now we know that the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the U.S.S. Ponce, both warships, have passed through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean towards Libya.

Three conditions have to be met by the Western NATO Alliance before they can or will approve violating Libyan air space. The first condition was met when the Arab League on Saturday called on the west to create the no-fly zone. The second condition is that proof has to be had that help is needed. That proof would typically be of humanitarian suffering or atrocities. But Human Rights Watch says there have been reports of arrests and missing people in Tripoli but there is not a lot of actual evidence of it. So far. The third condition is a Security Council resolution. If the Security Council approves the no-fly zone, and here's the kicker, though the world screams its opinions, the bulk of enforcement of the no-fly zone would fall on the shoulders of guess who. Need I say? I will. The U.S.

I say it's time we Americans shouted from the rooftops, "JUST SAY NO!" Come up with other ways and we all can think of plenty of them. Secretary Gates said that as part of the no-fly zone scenario we would definitely be killing people. Let us not use the world "casualties" any more. We would definitely be killing more people. NO. NO. There has to be a turn-around, literally. Turn around those warships. Figure out another way to be the greatest country on earth. If we still are, that is, as we descend so far into economic devastation now there's no certainty at all we can actually recover. We just keep thinking we probably will. But history and ancient history has consistently showed one "empire" after another so full of their own certainty that they ignore the clear and present danger signs and they fall. Every single civilization. How will we be an exception to that if we continue to spend every dime to kill foreign people and risk the lives of our own best youth?

No. We go to Japan and help as much as we possibly can. Yes. We offer assistance to those who need compassionate humanitarian aid. But we must stop jumping into war as if there is no other solution and so quickly that no one even realizes what is happening before it is too late. We must once again become a loved nation, a compassionate nation that creates peace in the world by being an example of what peace should look like. We need to use our brains to create solid, real solutions not our brawn to go beat-up the bad guy. We have a chance to climb out of the horror of war and fear of economic collapse. But we must think to be able to do it, not just react.

Cafe Conversations

2011-03-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

A few years after arranging to work on my Ph.D. dissertation back in the U.S., not being able to afford to continue living in Paris, I sat in a cafe in that tiny town in Kansas in the far room at the back table every morning working on the dissertation. Customers would wander in, have a meal, hang around talking for a while and then go out. Then some others would come in and so on, just as one would expect. They got used to me being there though now and then someone would ask what I was doing every day in that booth, usually in the form of a smiling kind of jab. Like, one guy always asked me every time he came in, "Ya doin your homework again? Ha Ha Ha!" I'd just say yeah and keep working. One day another guy like him asked what I was working on. I contemplated my answer as I watched him chewing his chicken fried steak with his mouth wide open, his timid, beat-up little wife quietly sipping her soup bent way down over it. I replied something about how I was working on an analysis of an undeciphered script from South Asia. He held his fork steady in mid-air, his mouth still open for a second. Then he said, without swallowing, "Oh, well, I never wanted to get into that myself." I was like, right.

After a while, some of the conversations I heard just got too good to be true, particularly since I have written and published a lot of short stories in my life and plays and dialogue is one of my favorite sports. I used to teach short story writing, once upon a time, in a New Age bookshop back in California and I taught dialogue writing by making my students take the bus all day long and just write down snippets as fast as they could of real dialogue that they heard. It's hard to keep writing fast enough so there are usually breaks between the snippets but it doesn't take long to get the hang of how it really sounds. You'd think we'd all know how dialogue sounds since we do it and hear it nearly every day of our lives. But you take the regular guy, if he tries to write it, it sounds stiff and formal, all wrong. But get it right and anybody can recognize it. It's funny, that.

So, once nobody paid me any attention anymore, I started writing down what they said verbatim, just once in a while, when it was great stuff that I couldn't resist. I just pulled my file filled with these snippets and I thought I'd share one with you today. I love this stuff because it's just exactly what people actually say and how they say it, including the odd breaks and changes of subject. This is one of my favorites, taken straight from two guys sitting at a table near me in that cafe one day (I've altered the names):

Verbatim I

Waitress: Anybody havin dessert? They're good. I tested them both.

B: I'm having both. I'm a big guy. I can have both.

A: How long you say you live in Ark City?

B: Ten years. Rebuildin old barns.

A: Well there's a guy there. He was married to Violet Beaver at one time.

B: You ever been to that Winoka rattlesnake hunt?

A: Never been. I'd like to sometime.

B: When they go out and catch em. Just open the door, I could smell em. I don't like snakes anyway. They find the biggest one. Broke the record last year. Then they have a big rattlesnake fry.

A: Eel's pretty good. You just cut the head off and turn it inside out like a sock. Real oily. Good. We used to catch em. We'd stretch that hide over a pitchfork handle. Dad would make shoestrings out of it.

A: He was a wiry guy. Liked things like that.

B: It went on for like a week. Eel, yeah, tastes like catfish.

A: I hauled some hot oil into an old truckstop. Slept. They had snake hunts there. Went down 51. Went back to Urban, Texas. I'm sure that's the highway we took. I took that oil up to Utah for drilling mud. But it set up like a caste. Couldn't get it out. They said I had to go up to Chicago. I wouldn't. They said I had to. Hell, I wouldn't.

B: Chicago, Illinois? I heard that was a bad place to go.

A: Yeah. I went south to that hot place plant. Southwest of Enid. Tryin to think of the damn milepost out there. Can't think of it. There was this guy - Pistol Olysses - he lives out there.

B: Twelve hours on a drillin rig you feel like you have jet lag.

A: I got two good tomato plants. Frost got em.

B: Frost didn't get mine. I live on that hill. Must be the wind blew it off.

A: I'm goin to go down to the rodeo. Might see a lot of people down there.

B: I'm goin fishin. I got to fix my rear seal - leakin. Then I'll spend two or three four days.

A: Yeah. They got that wild hog deal - judge em. They got 104 acres.

B: A year before that, what when the hogs got loose, '53 or '57. They was haulin those wild hogs out in boats. Still see a hog there sometimes that's been hidin.

A: You know those sandstone deals on houses? Old Preacher Lovely puts that on.

B: He dropped dead two nights ago. Funeral's Tuesday. He was in to that Tee Pee stuff. Gen-u-iine black powder man.

A: He was a hay-haulin son-of-a-bitch. I'll tell you what - he'd take those bales as fast as you could put them to him. He weighed about 180, I guess. I mean, two of them was puttin them to him and he was stackin them right. Just got out of the Army. I was about 6 years old.

B: Last flood here was '76. Burnback Walkway - he was still alive. He had a bunch of pigs in the barn - got them in the house. Lost the rest of em. I drove by a few days later. He was tryin to get them out of the house.

A: When that water gets a-flowin it gets a-flowin.

B: Three acres ain't enough for some people.

A: You can't do nothin with three acres.

B: All right. Well, better get goin.

I got to know most of the people in town sitting at that table, at least the ones who ate out from time to time, though they didn't really get to know me much, just that I was this oddball from California who was sitting there doing homework when she should have been out feeding cows or baking pies like the other women. Usually I just pretended to mind my own business when they were talking and worked on my dissertation but sometimes I just couldn't not listen. Usually it was entertaining, sometimes irritating like the time I finally yelled at two preachers and a barber sitting in the next room calling Iranians "A-rabs", informing them that Iranians are not Arabs and in particular their language is not related to Arabic. That just irked me. Surprisingly, after that they often asked me to validate information they had and not at all facetiously, so that was interesting.

But there was one series of conversations, all on the same guy for the same reason, that went on for a couple of months and it was just finally so great a story that I actually wrote a short story about it. It's one of my favorite short stories that I've ever written so I'm enthusiastic about including it in this blog. I hope you enjoy it. The story is based on real events, the style is my own:

Bear Hunting

This land has passive victims. It’s easy to hunt them. You buy a license, it’s $18 for a fish, $20 for a turkey and for a deer $10 on your own land and $50 not on your own land. Clearly, all of these creatures aren’t the brightest bulbs in the socket, the sharpest pins on the corkboard, though they bet on being the swiftest beasts in the forest. If not, they’re dinner. Kind of makes you stop and think. Basically defines dumb luck, if you want to look at it that way.

It’s not too stressful a hobby. Buy a gun, drive a truck to a muddy parking spot, wear orange so you don’t end up shot, wander around at dawn hoping something will run right out in front of you, drag its head to a taxidermist and butcher the rest to chow down on during the short winter between frozen pizzas and trips to Macdonald’s. Of course it’s cheaper and easier to buy a frozen turkey at the grocery store but let’s not go into that neck of the philosophical woods.

The best part is the bragging. And getting to dress up in clothes that make you look like a five-year old in the school play Babes in Toyland where you get to be the tree.

There’s a guy in town that is pretty good at this. Call him Spike. Spike is an enthusiastic hunter. He has the outfits, the hardware and the licenses. Been at it since he was a boy and the way he tells it, he can really nail that kill if he’s got a mind to.

So last season Spike decided to branch out. He found out about a hunting party he could buy his way into up in Canada north of Alberta in the Northwest Territory. Really out in the boonies, even with a native guide to keep them on track in those grizzly mountains. The target? Bears. Well, bears and all the wolves they also felt like offing. Wolf glut is what was said. Kill as many as you like. Well, you can imagine that Spike was rarin to go. He convinced his wife it was a good idea by buying her a new SUV which cost about the same as this tasty expedition. Still, she took out life insurance on him and his eighteen-year old son started hanging out with him a lot instead of hanging out with his girlfriend. After all, Spike’s never walked on tilted ground before and as for the altitude, well here we’re below sea-level and there it’s the mountains and Spike is a good eighty pounds overweight if he’s an ounce, lodged mostly where it started, in his belly. So that they figured if the bears didn’t dismember him and the wolves didn’t share him then it was likely that he was going to have a breathing problem. He didn’t think so, of course. He talked about it in the local café, described the bear he was going to get. Then it became two bears, how he was going to have them stuffed for his already multi-headed living room and eat the rest.

It was enquired how he planned to bring two dead bears back to Southeast
Kansas from that mountain path in Canada but that didn’t seem to him to be
a problem. You see he was in his element. He was Spike, the big game
hunter, leader of the pack of would-be macho men in Deer Falls and his name would be heard far and wide, his reputation set for life. As the big day approached, he described the details of the plan, the flight he had booked from Wichita up to Canada, the guns he was going to take. Townsfolk began to worry he was actually really going to do this and not wanting to hurt his feelings or anything, they tried subtle ways of psychologically suggesting to him that maybe deer or turkeys weren’t the optimum preparation for wolves and grizzly bears. He didn’t seem to mind the gentle criticism; took it in his stride. Rhetorical questions were laid before him such as would it be difficult to follow a native guide on a pathless climb through the forested cliffs and musings like was it really true if you peed around the boundaries of your camp it didn’t matter if the fire went out while you were sleeping? People worried about Spike, after all. They’d known him for years, all his life and theirs, in fact, and the little slights and annoyances of the past didn’t
really matter too much against the possibility of Spike’s being torn to
ribbons by an eight-hundred pound behemoth of the wilderness. His wife
started looking a little worse for wear as the day approached, her hair a bit frizzier than usual, her pallor pale, in direct relationship to Spike’s improving ruddy complexion and his jollier-than-ever guffaw. Until at last people became resigned. He was just going to go if he was going to go, that was obvious. His wife and son began to accompany him to the café for breakfast, lunch and dinner and say thanks to God for what they had before them. His wife often pointed out how good their steaks were and how beef came from cattle which were penned and slaughtered just miles from here (as were the vegetables on their plates, too). But Spike didn’t pay her any mind. He just said she was being silly while his son ate quietly, staring down at his food. It’s bad to be eighteen, a single child and figure your role model wasn’t going to last too much longer.

People began to speculate if his body would ever even be found. Did bears eat the whole person or did they just cut out the pancreas and take the hands like the Japanese did them? Nobody was really sure until the post mistress who was the one in town who subscribed to all those popular magazines said she knew for a fact from an article she had read in the National Geographic that what the bear didn’t finish off those wolves would and use his bones for toothpicks at that. Everyone agreed there would have to be a memorial plaque put up in his honor even if the body was never recovered. He was the bravest man in town even if he was also
the stupidest and that meant there ought to be something that had his name
on it permanently. They thought of naming a street after him if they ever
got any of the street signs that the county had long ago promised them.
Maybe the old abandoned gymnasium next to the torn-down high school could be given in his name.

But speculation about the future was nothing in the face of the reality of the ever pressing present. The big day was coming. Five nights before his leaving date the café began to fill up with townsfolk a little more than normal, everyone come to hear him tell his plans and see their old friend probably for the last time. They figured by now at least it would be a good story, how first the bear had ripped his arms off, etc.

Then the eve of the big day came and everyone came to sit near his table where he and his family ate their last dinner together. He was off the next morning, he told them all. Flight left at noon. He was coming back with two grizzlies, they’d see. It was going to be magnificent. He’d probably be elected mayor after that.

The next day around two p.m. a few people thought they saw Spike
driving down his street. Couldn’t be. His flight was gone, he was on his way to his destiny. But people came down to the café that evening and put their heads together. More than one swore they saw him driving around that
afternoon. Then the postmistress came in and said yep, something had gone
wrong with the flight from Wichita and he was driving to Canada instead. In fact, he had already left and told her he figured it would take about thirty-six hours of continuous driving to get there but he was up to it. Everyone asked but what went wrong with the flight? Wouldn’t they take his guns? No, that wasn’t it, she said. She looked uncomfortable. They all knew: sworn to secrecy. But to swear the postmistress to secrecy was like giving a dog a bone and hoping he wouldn’t chew it. So they just kept asking her, well, was the engine bad on the plane, stuff like that, just wearing down her resolve until they could see sweat appearing on her upper lip as she ate her grilled chicken with a trembling fork. The room got kind of quiet as they waited for the stress of it to break her.

Finally, she put down her coffee cup and said to the multitude, “All
right, but this can’t leave the room.” They all said they wouldn’t tell a soul.

“He got the flight on time,” she said. “Then the ticket counter girl asked for his passport.” Yeah? They all said. They held a steady quiet.

“Well, he didn’t have one,” she said. “He didn’t know he was supposed to, that’s all. The ticket agent didn’t seem to understand why not. After all, he had booked the flight months ago and had his ticket in his hand for weeks. There had been plenty of time to apply for a passport. So why the heck hadn’t he done it? “But it’s just Canada!” he had exclaimed.

“So those flight attendants wouldn’t let him on the plane and he couldn’t get his money back. They said with a voter’s reg and a driver’s license he could cross the border in a car so that was why he was driving.”

Some said it was the hand of God that had blinded him to the need to apply for a passport, that it was to save his family a loss and that Spike was just pig-headed and wouldn’t see the sign. Instead, to the further concerns of his wife he had taken off in the car north.

Maybe a week went by. It seemed like a week anyhow. Then they heard Spike was back. But he didn’t come back to the café. People waited. Then it filtered down from the post office what had happened. Well, Spike had gotten there all right, drove like a sleepless maniac right through all the way to Canada, gotten through the border with his Kansas driver’s license and up through Alberta which no one else had ever seen, up to the Northwest Territory and found the hunting party. It was an amazing bit of
tracking. But God had stepped in again and had started the rain just as he
arrived. And to make matters worse every one of the other men had each
already bagged a bear. No kidding. But once that rain started they didn’t
see a single more bear in those woods the whole week. And no wolves either. So Spike just hung out with the guys swearing he was going to come back next year and this time he was going to make sure the sleeping bag he bought at Wal-Mart was not one made for a ten-year old. The men had
nodded and wished him luck.

Spike’s now been farther north than anyone else around here. He’s
running for mayor. Folks say he’s got a good chance.

Calling It In

2011-03-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

I finished painting the little cottage and got a job as a dishwasher in the cafe. It wasn't hellish work as such a job is rumored to be since there weren't all that many customers. Mornings I would walk down to sit there a couple of hours drinking cups of coffee and starting to put my dissertation together. The cafe changed hands often as there just wasn't enough traffic to make it profitable yet the locals wanted somewhere to eat a big breakfast, drink a lot of coffee and gossip. The dining rooms were painted blood red for some reason with those high up, wrap-around shelves that held old-timey stuff. One bathroom was painted pee yellow and the other bathroom was painted...well, brown. I decided not to ask about the color scheme. It was supposed to be quaint. The first owner that I encounted was a woman who was a for real con artist. She came into town out of nowhere and said she wanted to buy the cafe. Somehow she got all the men in town to renovate the whole thing and a friend of hers from Wichita to do all the work running the place and she got a house to live in, all of it on the promise that when an insurance policy that was coming to her arrived, everyone would be paid. She even got an old lady in town to buy her a washer and dryer. I thought I had spotted her game right off when she walked up the hill one day where my redheaded landlady and I were sitting on a stoop dividing an overgrown aloe plant into several small plants. As she reached us, I was just finishing putting the last small plant into its new pot. We greeted her. I think it was the first time either one of us had met her. She noticed the aloes so we said to take one. There was a flat of equally small plants, one slightly larger than the rest and the main big one. She took the main big one without hesitation. The redhead and I glanced at each other. The redhead said hey, take another one, we have so many, just to see what she'd do. And if she didn't take the one slightly larger than the rest, leaving us with only the tiny ones. For me that said it all and I tried to avoid her for the rest of the time, which was easy enough since she was hardly ever in the cafe and when she was it was to sit and chat with people she had buddied up with.

A little time went by, I felt pretty settled in. I created my habits and being a habitual person, that was good, it felt relaxing and right. I'd walk over to the post office in the morning to get my mail and hear a bit of gossip. One day a very small old lady was there when I walked in. She said hello and what her name was and where she lived and as I walked out the door she followed me into the street and told me about one of her sons who had sadly died a few years before but who had been the great entertainment of the town. He rode a unicycle around and I believe sometimes donned a clown suit, too. If he wanted beer, which I understood was often, he'd ride the unicycle six miles to the next town, buy two six packs to which he would rig two long straws. One straw would go into one of the cans of beer in one of the sixpacks, the other straw in a can of beer in the other sixpack. Holding the sixpacks in each of his hands, he could therefore ride back balanced and drink the beer, first a bit from one of the cans, then a bit from the other, constantly rebalancing. She told me many of his famous antics, which many people later retold me, including how a few years before he died he had started a grass fire, as all the farmers around there did in the Spring but the wind had picked up, the fire had burned and consequently he had burned the family house down accidentally and most unfortunately, all of another one of her son's Vietnam War stuff, uniform, boots, papers and purple heart. She also told me how a third son was being rushed right that moment by van from New Orleans up to Elk Falls, having been in some sort of toxic spill accident on his merchant marine ship. Her fourth son and daughter had raced to Elk Falls from wherever they lived and then driven like bats out of hell down to New Orleans because he wasn't expected to live. And he had said he wanted to die in Elk Falls. With that bit of disturbing chit chat I walked down to the cafe to try to concentrate on my dissertation.

Over the next couple of days I heard more and more about the race back to Elk Falls in the van from everyone who came into the post office or cafe. At one point her daughter had called and said they thought he might die in the van and they knew they wouldn't be allowed to drive a body over state lines but they were going to do it anyway, just to make sure he got home. The next day I heard they had gotten him home and that he lived three hours, just long enough to say goodbye to everybody. A few days later I was sitting in my living room reading when I heard honking outside. I went to the door and looked out. My redheaded landlady yelled from her car, "Get something black on. You're going to a funeral!" I asked whose? She said the name of the old lady's son who had lived three hours. I said but I don't know him and only even met his mother once. She said it didn't matter because everybody in town was going to the funeral out of respect. So I threw on something black and went with her.

As soon as I walked into the funeral parlor I realized the family in mourning was Catholic. Can't remember why. But having been brought up Catholic myself, our rites always stand out rather ornately against down-home Protestant stuff. Knowing the proper thing to do at a Catholic service, I went up to the family afterwards and gave them my condolences. One of the brothers took my hand and with a glint in his eye, said, "Who are you?" I said my name. He said "I thought I knew everyone in Elk Falls." So I explained a bit and then asked if I could have my hand back. He said no with a grin and invited me to the feast that followed. Now, I've never been able to get used to the idea of everyone stuffing themselves with a cornucopia of chow right after a funeral. It makes me feel guilty since the deceased isn't able to eat, too. I prefer the more old-world after-funeral Catholic ritual where everyone gets drunk. I remember, in fact, an interesting business I saw in Dublin, Ireland, one day in some other year. The sign said, "Murphy's Undertaker and Pub". It probably was a pretty thriving business. Drink until you die and they prop you up in your usual chair and drink to your wonderful old self and nobody has to go anywhere. I feel that I have the right to make light of the Irish, being one quarter Irish myself, descended from my charming, 100% Irish, gift-for-gab mother's father, a saucy sailor who thought I was the luckiest kid on earth, my half-birthday falling on St. Patrick's Day, dear Grandfather, Paddy O'Reilly.

At any rate, I went to the feast and talked a bit to two of the brothers, including the one who had held my hand, noticing he seemed more interested in me than in his poor dead brother. But who am I to judge. I went back home with my redheaded landlady and all but forgot about it.

Once Spring was strong afoot, I started taking longer and longer walks in the beautiful countryside. Every week different wild flowers would appear and pretty soon I was carrying a bottle of water in a bag that had a strap for my shoulder so I could gather wild bouquets, putting them in the bottle of water to bring home for my table. One day at the end of such a jaunt I went into the cafe to have a glass of tea. The brother who had held my hand was sitting at a table. He asked me to join him and that started a year or so of dating. His name was Pat and being of Irish descent himself, had that same bigger-than-life charm that I remembered from my grandfather. He would stand when he talked and move his hands in allegience with his words, filling the empty space with grins and laughter. Granted he dressed a bit oddly, always in fatigues and old Army boots he got at some Army/Navy store, but everyone granted him the right having fought a year in Vietnam. He never let anyone forget it, either, carrying a sort of cloud of it ruined my life floating above his head at all times. I know I shouldn't sound facetious but a lot has happened since. At the time, I bought it hook, line and sinker. I've written before about how my dad was a veteran of both world wars and what a good man he was and how badly I felt that he saw how terribly the Vietnam vets coming home were treated by the hippies, being spit on and the like. And my uncle had died fighting in France, my grandfather was in the Navy as was my uncle, just like most of us, lots of our male relatives fighting for us. So I thought that was an incredibly important thing, for a man to have the guts to risk his life for his country. All of that. I still do but I no longer think of soldiers as having one face. I think of them as individuals now, with the same rules of how to treat other people as the rest of us have to live by. But that's now. Then I just listened to his stories and felt so sorry for him, for what he had gone through in Vietnam and how difficult his life had been since. Pat told me that he had actually been one of those guys that had been spit on, that he had arrived at Oakland straight from Vietnam to be immediately accosted rather than sung as a hero. It was that more than Vietnam that had scarred him for life, he said. But the year in Vietnam was no picnic, either. He had been a machine gunnist and at first that was all he told me. But the darkness was there in him. It was evident in the clothes he wore and how he dwelled on that one year thirty years before, all the time. He had a job as a nurse's aide in a veteran's old folks home, so again, all day long at his job he worked with guys like him. It was clearly an obsession that he wasn't one tiny bit able to let go of, even after all those years.

One day I said to him, "You know what I want? I want a dog." It was just a remark off the cuff. The next day a hideous, drooling black dog with an awful scar of a gash in his head appeared on my front step. I love animals but still very much needed to shoo that one away. He wouldn't go so finally I had to physically push him down the step and across the yard and yell GO! Pat was laughing the whole time. He said I had called it in. He said I had asked for a dog and the heavens had delivered me one. I said, but I don't want a dog like that! He said, well, the heavens don't know that - you have to be more specific. So I looked up at the sky and said, "Heavens, I want a beautiful dog." The next day as usual I walked down to the cafe and lying right up against the front door was a lovely old golden retriever. I said aloud to myself, "What a beautiful dog!" but thought nothing of it as it certainly belonged to someone in the cafe. I had to lean over him to push the door open. I said from the doorway to the people sitting at the table inside, "What a beautiful dog. Whose is it?" That con woman who owned the cafe but was rarely there was among them said, "I do. I'm giving him away." She said that he was a prize dog (who had literally won many prizes) but had gotten too old to win prizes so if somebody didn't want him she was going to have him put to sleep so she could get a new prize puppy. She told me all this as I was stradling him in the doorway. I suddenly realized that the heavens had answered my request. "I'll take him," I said. She seemed very surprised and started to give me more details. I interrupted her, completely sure of my decision and repeated, "I'll take him." She said he was eight years old but by his nearly white face everyone said, per her usual schtick, that she had just said that to make him more appealing and that he was for sure at least ten. One guy said I was crazy to take him because I'd just grow to love him and then there'd right away be vet bills and then he'd die. That is in fact what happened over the next few years but they were great great years. Dakota (the name he had when I got him) was so fat when I got him that he couldn't put his front feet up on my Ford Bronco's front floor mat. But his coat was perfect. She said he was constantly kept inside and preened, being a show dog. I thought, no, enough of that, he's retired now. I let him run and roll in the grass, he chased many tennis balls, down dirt roads, into ponds and once we got back a year or two later to California, into the bay every day. He walked with me each morning down to the cafe where he'd sit around outside for a while and then walk home, or so I thought. Then I found out from the post mistress that he was walking from the cafe up to the post office where she'd give him a treat and only then home. He died in my arms painlessly several years later. The best dog in the world.

After a while, the locals started getting wise to the con woman and pretty soon she had gotten the old lady, mother of all those boys, to send her off to Taos to live with her closest friend who owned a terrific house. I can't remember why this was but everyone was glad she was gone, though many wouldn't admit having been taken by her. Even I was, though I had thought there was no way she could have done it, by adopting her dog. But I figured I was for sure the winner in that one. The guy who had sweated and slaved running her cafe then bought the business from her, though she had actually never paid for it herself, something unfortunate having happened to the famous insurance settlement. But he was an energetic, happy guy, glad to have it to himself. Very soon afterwards, his wife retired from being a telephone information switchboard operator and moved down with him to run the cafe together. They made abundant, tasty buffets every night, had little books of local history on the tables and greeted everyone by name. The odd part was that although they were from Wichita, only ninety miles away and in Kansas, the locals called them "outsiders" and gossiped about them behind their backs. My redheaded landlady often had coffee clatches at her house where she would show off her lemon meringue pies and the photos of her granddaughter and never once did she invite the nice telephone operator lady, who, of course, never knew this. Nor did she or her husband know that people were purposefully not going to the cafe or driving to other towns to go to other cafes, only because they were considered outsiders with therefore no right to run the only local cafe. It didn't matter that no locals wanted to run the cafe right then. It was the strangest thing. Bit by bit the couple started figuring it out, at first wondering why no one came in, with evolving reasons as they pondered it week after week, then settling on that the locals must just be cash poor being farmers. Then worried. Worried for a long time. They changed the buffets, changed the days the different themes for the buffets would be on, fixed up the front a bit more. No change.

I needed to earn more money than I was getting as a dishwasher and then one day somebody happened to tell me that there was no zoning in town, that any building or spot could be a residence or a business or anything. I checked it and it was true. I had noticed that a lot of the women read romance novels so I started asking everybody else if they liked to read and most of them did so I wrote down a list of what books they would buy if there were a secondhand bookshop in town: romance, mysteries, how to, gardening, children's. I asked my redheaded landlady if I could turn my living room into a bookshop and she said sure. Considering my shop would be the fourth store in town, I thought it would do great. I designed and built the bookshelves out of discarded wood and went to all the thrift stores, buying up all of the categories above of books as well as car manuals, some biographies, general fiction. The potter in town cut two pallets in the shape of giant open books and I painted them and sandwiched them around two four by fours driven into the ground, painted bright blue on top of which were little black lanterns and the pages of the open book sign read in pink, "The Petite Bookshop". I painted all the shelving pink, added a tiny sofa that I upolstered and little table and put a coffee maker behind where I sat. I envisioned it primarily as a bookshop for women as they were the much larger percentage of readers, who would come in to my shop and sit and read if they chose, even becoming another chit chat hang out like the post office. I ran all the books through Amazon.com and put in each book a card with the full price per Amazon listed and the price charged, being half. I hosted an open house with cookies and coffee and invited the woman I had known from Enid, Oklahoma, to read from her sexy romance novel that had actually been published. Several people came, ate the cookies, listened to her read. It was a great start. Then no one ever came back in. Well, no, that's not quite true. The few little girls that lived in town came in often, happily bought books, which they kept bookmarks in so that I would know they were reading them. But no adults.

One day I was sitting one morning in the cafe working on my dissertation. As usual, nobody else was in the cafe except the nice couple that owned it. The owner guy came over to me and sat down to talk. I said nobody was coming in my bookshop and I didn't know why. He asked if I happened to be carrying any Harry Potter books. I said maybe, yeah, I think one or two. He said, oh, no, you can't do that. Why not? I asked intrigued. They're considered demonic, he said. Haven't you been to the church lately? It's the big thing to hate right now.

So that Sunday I went to the local non-demoninational church. And when the preacher asked if anyone wanted to stand up and name someone who needed praying for, one man stood up and said, "I'm askin' you all to pray for my cousins. They're lettin' their kids watch Harry Potter movies!" There were groans of dismay throughout the room and everyone (well, mostly everyone) prayed mightily for the mistaken sorry souls of that unfortunate couple.

A few days later I went down to visit a couple I liked very much who happened also to be fundamentalist Christians, the only ones I've ever met, in fact, who live by what they preach. Truly generous, kind, compassionate, friendly people. However, as I bridged into the subject of church that past Sunday, I asked why it was that Harry Potter was a bad thing. I said, after all, Harry Pottery fights evil so I didn't get it. I got my answer, and how. "Only Jesus fights evil," was the reply. "Harry Potter is trying to take Jesus' place." I sat there a moment trying to take that in and then gingerly replied, "Um, well, no, Harry Potter is not trying to take Jesus' place because Harry Potter is a fictional character!" That didn't seem to make sense to them. But suffice it to say, with those devilish Harry Potter books on my shelves and me being a serious outsider, all the way from the worst place on earth, California, nobody came into my cute little shop and three months later I closed its doors.

No More War!

2011-03-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

This morning I woke up, sleepily turned on the t.v. to see aircraft carriers headed towards Libya with an anonymous official stating that this doesn't necessarily mean there will be U.S. military intervention. But isn't this how so many of our wars since Vietnam have begun? It was speculated what might happen if one of our jets from this aircraft carrier were shot down by Gadhafi. We can only imagine from past such scenarios about what might happen. A child takes a gun to school to show-off. How high are the chances that somebody's going to accidentally get killed there?

This country is nearing economic devastation. The opposition forces in Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, have stated that they are against foreign military intervention. So why are we doing this? Why are we considering arming random opposition forces? Why did Hillary Clinton just state that the U.S. is "ready to offer ANY kind of assistance that ANYONE wishes to have from the U.S.", regarding Libya? Of course it's horrible that Gadhafi is gunning down his own people. Of course we oppose such actions but why do we need to go into a foreign country, particularly a Middle Eastern country AGAIN with the true possibility if not probability that something will happen, which could be nearly anything, to get us back once again into another war, just when we are supposedly pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do we continue to respond in this same way? Isn't there anyone in our government that can create a NEW U.S.A. that figures out other means for successful intervention than endless war? Apparently that wouldn't be our leader whom we had such high hopes for.

I wrote previously about how I had stopped to visit Elk Falls, Kansas on my way by train from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and being tired and having an invitation, I had decided to stay in Elk Falls to rest and write my dissertation. I had been asked if I would like to housesit a mobile home that was for sale to keep it nice and appealing for prospective buyers and I had agreed and moved in to the trailer with just an air bed and a desk and a lot of National Geographic maps. I also had my notes and source books to begin working on my dissertation. The title had been approved, which was, "A Morphological Description of the Harappan Script", which means I was going to analyze every sign in every context in which it appeared. In other words, with a sourcebook that listed every inscription written in the Indus Valley script that had been found, with over 800 pages of lists of undeciphered words, I was going to analyze the behavior of every sign in every word and give the results, which would be a list of spelling rules. A good example of what I mean is if I said to you, assuming you are a native speaker of English, "There is a word 'djekra'. Just guessing, would you say that that is a word in English?" I doubt there is a native English speaker out there who would say yes. You would say no. Why? Well, one reason is because English doesn't have any words that begin with "dj", unless they are borrowed from some other language. That, therefore, would be a spelling rule in English: No word begins with 'dj', or, D+J is not a permissible initial consonant cluster. This can be done with an undeciphered script because it is simple observation though a lot of it, a LOT of it. But one by one these observations can be noted and the end result is a grammar of an undeciphered script, which is a stepping stone toward a decipherment.

Other than this on-going obsession, I was pretty happy to settle for at least a while in such a tiny town. There was no traffic to speak of, no pollution at all: no water pollution, air pollution, no trash in the streets or gutters or empty lots, no billboards, no non-natural noise. There were great wild animals (twice I saw a mountain lion just crossing the road lackadaisically) and a plethora of beautiful singing birds. The town was hilly, not flat, with lots of trees and vegetation, a nice river running right through town complete with a waterfall, a historical iron bridge running across it. The operative word is scenic. And quiet. And laid-back. People mostly were farmers, some ranchers, some drove long distances to Wichita or somewhere else for work. There was no crime to speak of except the guy that kept siphoning gas tanks in the middle of the night. I could walk down to the local cafe and sit there all day over my dissertation and cups of coffee without anyone caring since it was never crowded. I could take long walks in the safe, beautiful countryside, sit in a lawn chair at night under the extraordinary spectacle of actually zillions of stars like it's supposed to be in the night sky. I could swim in the river and under the waterfall and only fear the large catfish and pointy-billed gar rather than pollution. I could walk down to the pottery or quilt shop to see their latest creations. People would say hello, albeit a little suspiciously, their cards a little close to their chests, but it was all right, not threatening or anything. Altogether, it was so relaxing there and I thought I could really turn out a solid dissertation under these conditions.

Then I stayed longer. That was the mistake. Some places are great to visit but are not good to stay to live in, as the saying goes. The mobile home sold and I was about to leave when the redhead's husband, the gentle man I have told you about, asked me if I'd like to rent their old house for $100/month and stay. It was a tiny cottage with just a bit of an L-shaped back room that could be used for a bedroom. It had a small living room with a nice wood floor and a little adjoining kitchen. The trouble was that it was completely packed with whatever they had left behind when they moved next door and with boxes of storage from various periods in their lives. It was also completely filthy and desperately needed painting, the whole house. At first, having lived in many fixer-uppers I said no, no way. Then the redhead said that they had lived in this little house for thirty years, how they had raised their kids there and were never going to move from Elk Falls. They loved their new house next door and it was part of the same piece of property so they were never going to sell it, they were never going to move. She said if I'd clean it all up and paint it all, I could live there for as long as I liked, it would be all mine and for only $100/month. I took the bait and started working. It took eight hours a day for two weeks just to get all the stuff out of there and cleaned. It took a couple of weeks more to paint it, including painting the outside. Once it was done, though, I was glad I had chosen to stay and settled in. Someone suggested that I apply for a substitute teacher's license to teach at a K-12 school in the next town, which I did. I started subbing there and was quickly asked if I'd rather take a job as a para (teacher's assistant) in the Special Ed Department. It didn't pay as well as subbing but it was full-time so the end result was certainly going to be higher pay and at a regular amount that I could budget. Without any background at all in Special Ed by my own education or experience, I accepted the job. I was given a desk in the highly funded Special Ed Department and told to teach several subjects to 1-8 students with special needs. I thought, hey, I'm creative, I'm smart, it doesn't bother me that these children are a bit odd, as I would say I definitely also fit in that category. In fact, since I was given carte blanche to teach them as I saw fit, I thought of it as highly preferable to being straight-jacketed into typical public school, mediocre, rigid, antiquated teaching practices in the regular classroom (not that I have an opinion about it). I took it on with gusto.

The first period I taught one boy English composition. He was somewhat retarded and it was expected that he would work the farm with his dad and was just passing through school for no particular reason except the law until he was sixteen. However, he told me right away, for a reason I will never know, that he wanted to write a play. Having been a playwright in New York, I said if he wanted to write a play then he would have to do it as it is really done, with acts, scenes, character lists, etc. He agreed. He decided that he wanted to write a murder mystery and the killer and victim would be people there in the Special Ed Department. That was fine, if not amusing. Every day I would sit with him as he wrote his play, his face in full concentration, determined. He would start to write. Immediately he would ask something like, "How do you spell 'the'?" I would reply, "t-h-e." Then he would say, "How do you spell 'man'?" I would reply, "m-a-n." He would ask me how to spell every single word all hour long as he wrote every single day and every single day he would ask me how to spell many of the same words. But I thought, hey, why not? What matters is his determination to write a play and I'm sitting here getting paid. Why shouldn't I tell him how to spell the words? So I was happy with that. And lo and behold if after several weeks he finished a three-act play that wasn't bad at all being a high school kid's work. And as soon as he had finished he said he wanted to write another one. I was so impressed that I wrote a letter to his parents and said once he graduates and becomes a farmer, how about hiring him a secretary and buying him a tape recorder because this boy really wants to write and lots of professional writers record their work and have a secretary to transcribe it. I don't know what happened, if they heeded my suggestion or not. Actually, I really hope they did. He loved writing plays.

One class, the biggest one I had, was U.S. History. Eight kids, all with mild to severe learning disabilities, two retarded. I was told just to teach them any way I wanted to and it didn't really matter since they couldn't learn anyway (really). I thought, well, uh-huh, we'll see about that. They were in the part of the book (which was the regular class history book) that taught the period of history that included the Revolutionary War. Right away I could see that they weren't able to retain information but only for sure in terms of the typical way that information is taught and assuming that they could not take in information in any unusual way since they couldn't take it in the "normal" way. Considering I've never been a fan of normal anyway, I decided to do an experiment. What they especially couldn't do was listen for very long, follow a rational line of argument and remember it. So I looked around for something else to try. The school library had a few shelves of videotapes, some that were Hollywood movies and some that were Nova, National Geographic and other PBS programs. There weren't a lot of choices on the Revolutionary War but one was The Patriot with Mel Gibson. Now, of course, "normally" no teacher including me would teach the Revolutionary War with the movie The Patriot since, do I even need to say this, it's rather historically inaccurate. At least presenting accurate dialogue between real historical characters is not its strong point. However, it does have a strong point, and holding a B.A. in Cinema Production from the University of Southern California, I am well aware of what that strong point is. It amuses me often, in fact, when people complain that a movie like that isn't historically accurate as that is not the goal or purpose of any Hollywood movie. The goal and purpose of a Hollywood movie about a "real" dramatic event is to show the emotional truth of it, how it felt to be there experiencing that particular event and to relay those feelings vividly to the audience so that the audience feels them vividly, too. The Patriot is successful at that. You feel how terrible it would be to see a young son shot by an enemy in front of your eyes, you feel how it would feel to suddenly want to join forces and fight the enemy. So, having no rules to follow, I showed my class the film. There are, actually, a few "facts" about the Revolutionary War in the film; at least the costumes were accurate, the settings, the props. It was about a war that had happened and had generalized characters that reasonably fit within what was a possible scenario. And the important thing was that every one of my eight kids was glued to the screen without a peep or barely a blink the entire two hours of the film. That was interesting. At the end I asked them to describe the film to me and enthusiastically they told me the whole story, the names of the characters, their relationship to each other, how they felt and what had happened in detail. In other words, they retained it all and they did it by remembering it through their hearts not their heads because the film had done what it had intended to do. It had fired them up. And once fired up, they could retain the information it gave.

So I tried something a little more close to teaching history. I checked out of the library a several part series by PBS on Napoleon. For the ordinary student I would guess it could well have been deadly dull as it dragged along, several long episodes with a male voice-over that droned on and on, slide shows and drawings and bad reenactments of Napoleon and his forces over the entirety of his campaigns and life. But my kids acted exactly the way they had with The Patriot. They were silent, focused, in fact rapt with attention for each and every episode. It happened that a few days after I had showed them the entire series, I was sitting in the cafeteria at the teachers' table when a teacher sitting next to me asked me sarcastically why I bothered to attempt to teach learning disabled kids since they couldn't learn anything. One of my girls was nearby. She could not retain that 1 + 1 = 2 (literally) that another para so patiently taught her every single day. I called her over. I asked her to tell me why Napoleon lost his Russian campaign. She replied happily that it was because he was afraid he had lost his luck because he had left Josephine and because of that, he didn't begin the battle at dawn as he usually did but at 11 a.m., nervously waiting for assistance, which didn't show up. That actually is one of the reasons Napoleon lost the Russian campaign and I dare any of the history teachers in that school to get an answer that perceptive out of any of their "normal" students. The girl who gave that answer was able to imprint the information via experiencing the information in the form of drama, in other words, emotion. It's as good a route as any and what's the point of "patiently" telling her that 1 + 1 = 2 over and over when she could not access it to her memory that way? It would be like writing it out on a slip of paper and showing it to the bottom of a "normal" student's foot every single day. I'm not trying to be mean regarding those special needs children. I'm saying that from my experience they were not the ones who were dense.

Similarly, one day the superintendent of schools sat down at the teachers' table in the cafeteria with us. He turned to me and said, "So what's so great about New York City?" in a derisive tone. The town where the school was had few paved streets, one beat-up grocery store and a dilapidated series of buildings down the only downtown street. All the teachers there turned to me half-smiling to see what I would reply, if anything. I looked at him scathingly and replied something like, "What's so great about New York City? The greatest man has achieved in art, theatre, engineering, business, landscape design and architecture, to name just a few off the top of my head." Although I felt really good about saying that, I probably didn't win a lot of brownie points with him. I mean, I'm assuming.

The head of the Special Ed Department and my boss was a woman proud of her looks. She would come in late every day, then preen and put on make-up and fix up her hair in front of her full-length mirror then sit down at her desk, hang around for a short time impatiently, tell the boy whose desk was right up against hers for punishment such things like if he didn't keep reading silently (he was learning disabled and had a hard time concentrating without help) she was going to tear off his head and stuff it down his neck. Then she'd make an excuse to leave, be seen driving her Mercedes-Benz around town, maybe go home for awhile, bring her little dog back, then go to lunch, then hang around a bit, then leave again and so on. Every single day. She did basically no work, maybe a few reports here and there that were certainly fiction as she had no idea what the paras were doing to help the kids in there. Needless-to-say, it was difficult for me to entirely disguise my disgust. The boy with his desk right up to hers wasn't a bad kid. What she hated about him was that he really really really wanted to be a fireman. He talked about being a fireman every chance he could. His dad and uncle and everyone else in his family I think were firemen. He had wanted to be a firemen all his life and knew everything there was to know about it. He was seventeen and couldn't wait to graduate just so he could become a fireman. I thought he was so lucky to know exactly who he was and what he wanted to do. How many kids and adults, for that matter, do? But she could not stand hearing him talk about it all the time. So she insulted and berated him continually.

One day during a planning period when the kids always just came in and hung around as they liked the room, which was large with cabinets and tables and a sink and stove, kind of like a home away from home somewhat, a girl rushed in and told one of the boys that his best friend, a girl, was in the girls' bathroom sobbing and wouldn't stop and wouldn't come out. She said he had to come and get her, that they thought she would come out if he asked her to. So he went and got her and brought her to our room. There was a lot of noise in the hallway while this was going on; in fact, the school was in an uproar. The girl from the bathroom told us that she had just been in one of the history classes. She said that her male teacher was very mean to the athletic girls, she being one of them, calling them names if they got something wrong, things like that. She said the reason was that they would not have sex with him like the ditzy, girly girls would. She said she had raised her hand to answer a question and had gotten the answer wrong and he had laid into her (bad pun; I apologize) saying how stupid she was. She had gotten so upset that she had stood up and screamed an accusation that he was having sex with some of the high school girls. Everyone in the class heard it as did the entire classroom next door as the doors to both classrooms were open. He had run at her, she had jumped from her desk and run out of the room. He had pursued her down the hall screaming at her until she escaped by running into the girls' bathroom. For the next several hours, nobody was in the normal classrooms. There was a lot of yelling, there were demands by the principal that a long list of people come one by one into his office and those that did came out and told everyone what was happening, including coming into our room and telling us. The boy who had gotten his friend out of the girls' bathroom and his best friend were especially perturbed, to say the least. They couldn't stop talking about it. When they went out I asked the other para if she thought the accusations against that male teacher were true. She said she was sure they were because the year before when her own daughter had been his student she had asked her if it were true and her daughter had said yes. It seems this had been going on under their noses for at least three years, not much longer than the time that teacher had first arrived. Then I asked my delightful boss if she thought the accusations were true. She said yes, she thought they were, too. I forget her reasons but I remember they were convincing. I went back to my desk and sat down, stunned, flabbergasted. The two boys came back into our room and after they had talked to the other para about it until she was tired, came over to tell me again about it. And here's where I made a terrible mistake. In my defense, I had never been around kids in my life before. I don't have any children, neither does my only sibling, my brother. I've never known anyone who had children. I've only picked up a baby twice and both times it was to very nervously request that someone take it back as I knew it would be bad if I dropped it.

I had given my history class a term paper assignment, since even though the powers that be thought it was ludicrous, they expected me to test and assign my students the same set of things as the regular kids. I had decided, since none of them could write well at all, to assign them family trees. They all lived with or had extended families nearby, every generation, in fact, and I thought, since one's own history is in fact history, it would be nice if they learned how to chart their family trees. It would be fun and useful, too, as writing a term paper on some subject would not be. One of the boys I lent my miniature tape recorder since he said he was going to go visit his grandmother and wanted to tape whatever she told him about their families. I had cancelled the assignment, however, after two of my students came to me and said they didn't know how to put their father on their family tree. I had said ok and shown them how. Then they said they didn't know how to put their brother on their family tree. I said ok and showed them that. Then they said they were confused so I asked why. They said it was because they didn't know how to put their father or their brother on their family tree. Oh, I said, buying time, trying to figure it out. Hesitatingly, I asked again, "Why?" They said because their father was their brother. It took me the rest of the day to figure that one out, which I don't want to go into here. That other boy in my class still had my tape recorder but I let him keep it for awhile because he still wanted to tape what his grandmother said.

But then that day of the pandemonium happened. And the two boys came up to my desk to tell me again all about it. One of them was the one with my tape recorder but that wasn't in my mind. I just couldn't believe that a lot of people had known that this teacher was having sex with his students and they hadn't done anything about it. There were a lot of kids in the room, not just our kids. I asked them if they knew why nobody had done anything about it. One of them said it was because the teacher in question was "new blood". What she meant was that there is so much interbreeding in Elk County, being the poorest county in Kansas with only a total population of 3000 people, that there are more and more kids being born all the time with birth defects and retardation. They said a lot of the mothers were hoping that teacher might accidentally make one of their daughters pregnant and have to marry her and since he was from out of the county, the child would not be damaged. In other words, he had "new blood". Take that one in for a second like I did hearing that that day. Because, in hearing that, I just went off. I said how wrong it was in no uncertain terms. I said the teacher ought to be caught admitting it. Unfortunately, the two boys in front of my desk were listening. Apparently later on that day they tried to get him to confess, having my running tape recorder hidden in their coat or something. They were caught doing this by the now incredibly vocally irate (guilty, hello) teacher, who turned them into the principal where the two boys told him that I had given them the tape recorder and told them to catch him confessing. Needless-to-say, I was fired and actually, rightfully so, since I was so stupid I shot my mouth off to high school boys who very angrily wanted to protect their sisters and girl cousins and friends from this fiend. I without complaint packed up my desk and gratefully went home unemployed, so glad to be out of that cesspool of a school. Obviously, I'm not very good at complying with the powers that be.

I heard what happened after I left but it was in the form of the favorite sport, gossip, so I can't say whether it was true or not. Suffice to say that that teacher left the school under less than prosecuting conditions.

Companion Planting: a guide to the organic placing of veggie plants for best quality and yield

2011-03-06T17:29:00.000-08:00

It's almost time to plant the Spring garden (hurray!) so I thought I'd write today about a subject that I have found interesting for years and particularly in the last several years living in rural Kansas. It is a clever method of planning one's vegetable garden known as companion planting. It's the science, if you will, of planting certain plants next to certain others and it's one of the secrets of great vegetable gardening. The reasons are many, including the balancing and sharing by plants of the soil nutrients, the ability of some plants to ward insects off other plants, and I think most interestingly, the change and enhancement of flavors due to placing certain plants next to each other while they are growing. It's also the best organic way that costs nothing extra to get a high yield and deep flavor from your garden. So, here is a short list and description of the best order to plant veggies in for the best results:

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are the main topic of conversation in rural Kansas all summer long because for some odd reason Kansans care deeply about the flavor of their tomatoes. This is only odd because they rarely discuss the flavor of the peppers or the lettuce that they are also growing. One suspects, even, that sometimes fish stories are told in the local cafes about the size of certain gardeners' tomatoes. Never-the-less, there are several plants that are great to plant next to one's tomatoes and this itself can be of great consideration, which companion plant to choose. I give you the best possibilities, those veggies that will complement tomatoes by complementing the soil beneath them together: carrots, broccoli and kale, all of these being in the cabbage family, asparagus, celery and onions. The best herbs to plant next to tomatoes are basil, which increases the flavor of both the basil and the tomatoes, beebalm, borage, which repels the tomato worm, spearmint and pennyroyal mint, which repel aphids and ants and bugs that love cabbage. Marigolds are great planted by tomatoes because they also repel insects. A lot of kitchen gardens around here have marigolds inbetween each tomato plant for this reason. Parsley also keeps insects off tomatoes because insects adore parsley so it's best to plant parsley in a pot or a spot a ways away from the main garden. A lot of insects love parsley so much they'll choose to go eat it and leave the main garden alone.

But make sure not to plant your tomatoes next to your potatoes as each will hurt the other's quality and yield.

Beans/Peas

One important thing to know is that bush beans and pole beans like different plants next to them. Bush beans are the easiest to plant because they like the company of many types of plants whereas pole beans are much more finicky. So if you don't want to plant both bush beans and pole beans and the prettiness of climbing beans is not a factor then the best choice is bush beans because there's just more flexibility with them. Still, there are plants that do best next to bush beans and vice versa. They are: peas, strawberries, anything in the cabbage family, potatoes, radishes, cucumber, corn, carrots and celery. But not tomatoes. So if you want to plant your carrots next to your tomatoes and your bush beans, plant the carrots between the tomatoes and the bush beans.

Pole beans are really best just next to carrots and peas. Think of pole beans as lithe ladies in a club who only deign to socialize with the carrots and peas.

Like with tomatoes, beans do well next to marigolds. So, like the carrots, it's a good idea to plant a row of marigolds between the tomatoes and beans. A second plan would be a row of interspersed carrots and marigolds between the tomatoes and beans with basil in the same row with the tomatoes. These combinations also make a very pretty garden. And when the tomatoes are ripe, it's so nice to pick a few leaves of basil while picking the tomatoes and cook them together, very tasty indeed!

Peas do well next to potatoes, spinach, radishes, sweet peppers, beans, cucumbers, corn and strawberries and they also love being next to chicory.

Don't plant onions or garlic next to your beans and peas, though, as the haughty beans and peas don't like garlic's or onion's company. Instead, the beautiful, tall cosmos flowers complement beans and peas so planting cosmos near the end of your garden near a fence and the beans and peas beyond them right against the fence is a great option, especially because cosmos repel most of the insects, too.

Lettuce

Lettuce is the best choice in a kitchen garden when one needs to be choosy due to lack of space since a fresh salad all summer from one's own garden of course usually includes a crispy lettuce and the price of a head of lettuce is enormous compared to the price of one package of lettuce seeds. The best package of lettuce seeds to choose is a mixed lettuce pack. The reason is obvious: when the mixed lettuce comes up they will do so at random, rocket next to iceberg next to green leaf next to romaine and one has the base of every possible tasty green salad one would wish for, all in the same row. You can just choose a few leaves from one or several of the plants - no need to tear up the whole plant - just let it keep producing more leaves. It's a super healthy way to create summer lunches and it's so fun to have a garden party and be able to tell your guests that the salad came right from your garden and it's really nice to know one's fare came from an organic, old-fashioned, ripened on the vine, so to speak, home garden.

Cucumbers

Cucumbers are best planted next to radishes, peas, sunflowers, basically all the herbs and those that have already been said, the bush beans and lettuce. It's interesting that these are the same vegetables that we normally expect in a green salad. This is probably because over the centuries it was these plants that thrived together in a small garden though I may just be inventing some folk history.

Like the tomato, the cucumber doesn't like to be next to a row of potatoes so if you choose to grow potatoes, keep them on the other side of the garden.

Onion/Garlic

Onions and garlic are special, as you probably already suspect from their strong flavor. While we like their scent, there are a lot of bugs that don't. So if you plant onions and garlic entirely around the outside edge of your vegetable garden (except next to the fence where you plant your peas and beans), there are many insects that will refuse to enter it.

Plant onions next to tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, cabbages and strawberries. Seeing a pattern? It's getting easier to know what seeds and plants to buy, too, isn't it.

That's a subject in itself, which plants are best to buy as small plants and which as seeds. Since the cost of seeds is far less than that of individual plants, you can get the most out of your money if you buy seeds that will in fact grow and thrive easily. The best I've found (as many seeds are difficult to germinate and grow from tiny) are basil, lettuce, nasturtium (though one must be nasty to nasturtiums, soaking them for at least three days before planting and then torturing them with too much water and then not enough - they love this kind of mean treatment!). Corn grows great from seeds but many people don't want to grow corn since it takes up a large part of the garden and grows so hugely that your neighbors, seeing the crop grow way higher than your fence will begin to suspect you're about to buy a cow and raise chickens (of course if you live where I do, that's hardly unusual). But fresh corn is great and if you have room and are the hardy type yourself, it's very satisfying to pull off that first ear of corn knowing you grew it from a tiny seed. Though that reminds me of the time I had a job at a corn shucking factory in northern Washington State. The company had figured out it was cheaper to just not have a roof on the building than build a sprinkler system over the corn. So we all had to wear raincoats and rainhats (as it rains constantly in Washington, for those who don't know that already). We women stood on each side of a huge conveyor belt. The corn with all the green stuff around it would go into a machine and then shoot out half and badly-shucked corn on to our conveyor belt where we were supposed to grab it and finish shucking it and then throw it back on the belt. It got to be sometimes just like an I Love Lucy episode when the partly-shucked corn would suddenly shoot out in droves on to the belt and we couldn't grab it and shuck it fast enough. We also had to wear ear plugs because the factory was so loud it would damage our eardrums and being all night long, since I was on the graveyard shift, it was freezing cold! Needless-to-say, my entire professional shucking career lasted one night. The next day I got a job as fry cook for the local A & W Root Beer hamburger place. But I digress.
Where was I? Oh yes. Melons also grow well from seeds but they do take a lot of room. But a watermelon or even better, a canteloupe or musk melon are really pretty plants that grow viney along the ground and fresh organic melons are so very juicy and delicious. Just don't plant too many unless you have a huge space for your garden.

Sweet Peppers

With peppers there is only one plant that is especially good next to it and that is the gentle pea. Sweet peppers are of course great in a green salad so it's a good plan to plant the peppers at the edge of the garden with the peas climbing up poles or fences next to it and next to that any of the wonderful plants that also do well next to peas.

Spinach

Spinach adds that beautiful deep dark green to the lighter greens in your garden. It does well planted next to any of the lettuces, radish, peas and strawberries.

Potatoes

There are a couple of problems with growing potatoes. Unless the soil is perfect they tend to grow kind of disappointingly tiny and since they're so cheap at the supermarket, it's kind of a let down to try to grow them. The other problem is that a lot of plants don't do well near potatoes and in a small garden this can be a big problem. The plants that don't like potatoes are tomatoes, cucumber, squash and sunflowers. Potatoes do well next to beans and peas if you want to give them a try.

Asparagus

Asparagus is my favorite veg and I remember how well my dad used to grow it. It makes a very delicate, lovely plant, too, very nice in a garden. Plus it's an expensive vegetable at the grocer's so it's worth giving growing it a go. The only problem is that it takes a few years to begin to yield a satisfying crop, really about four years, though maybe three if you're lucky. So if you're into instant gratification from your garden, don't depend on the languid asparagus. But, if you don't mind waiting and can see your asparagus the first few years as a very nice decorative plant for your garden, in a few years you will have succulent, fabulous organic asparagus to cook.

The asparagus does very well next to the tomato though not any other plant. It can also be planted alone in its own patch in another part of the garden as it does grow best as a patch and is very pretty alone, very tall and wispy fine. Parsley does well with asparagus so if you want to plant the parsley, as suggested above, a bit away from the rest of your garden, you can plant it at the base of the asparagus, since the asparagus is far taller, and they will look wonderful together, the lofty asparagus at the back with the low, lacy parsley in front.

Herbs

Besides the obvious delight of fresh herbs to use in your cooking, the greatest value of an herb garden are herbs that are really terrific at repelling all kinds of insects and luckily some of the most tasty herbs repell the most insects. Those that do this are oregano, coriander and marjoram. The other best herb to grow to repel insects are the various mints. The only thing to consider with mint is that it can take over the garden, springing up where you least expect it. It's very aggressively intrusive so the best thing is to plant a mint or different mints in pots and place them near the garden.

Chamomile is great next to cabbage and onions. Basil is great next to tomatoes and also asparagus. Chives repel aphids so it's a very good plant next to your roses. Chervil grown next to radishes makes your radishes taste hot!

Like I said, basil grows well from seeds. Sage grows pretty well from seeds but it's slow so if you don't want to wait, buy small sage plants. Basil will shoot up from seeds. Chives can be grown from seeds but the shoots are always so very thin so I'd start my chives from small plants. Oregano and thyme, also, are best grown from small plants.

Beneficial Flowers

In California, where I'm from, you don't very often see a vegetable garden that is filled also with flowers (not just flowers around the edge but intermixed with the vegetables and herbs) but in Kansas this is a regular sight and it's really beautiful.

Marigolds, like mint, can take over but do grow well in pots and repel many kinds of insects but it's pretty easy to keep those portly marigolds in line and I usually plant them without worry between my tomatoes and basil. Petunias repel insects that eat beans so a patch of them near your beans is a good idea. Cosmos are terrific. They grow very easily from seeds, bloom for months and months until late autumn, reseed themselves or you can gather their seeds when the flower petals wilt and plant them elsewhere. The seeds look like tiny straight spears, revealed when the petals are gone. Cosmos have very delicate, pretty leaves and grow tall so they're great, for example, next to the side of a house or fence. When I first bought my house in Enid, Oklahoma and, like a lot of people who just bought a house, had hardly a dollar left, I spent a dime on one package of cosmos seeds, tossed them along the bare side of the house by the gravel driveway and man, if they didn't grow as tall and thick as shrubs in record time and blossomed the whole growing season. It's amazing how huge an amount of beautiful plants one small package of cosmos seeds can create. They're one of the best buys out there.

Coreopsis and geranium are also great bug repellers. They're best started from small plants.

The easily grown from seeds morning glory is great to plant with the pole beans or climbing peas and will provide an abundant of lovely climbing blooms all summer long. Morning glory also repels insects from both melons and corn. Asters are a usual flower in a Kansas veggie garden as they also repel most bugs as does the chrysanthemum and calendula.

Bees

The last but very important subject is bees. Bees, of course, are essential to a garden, especially if you have fruit trees. There are many plants that attract bees so it's very good to have some of them in your garden. Bee-attracting plants include mint, marjoram, lemon balm, hyssop, coriander, catnip and basil and of course, flowers.

In closing, I want to tell you about a really wonderful seed catalogue. It's from the Seed Savers Exchange. I found out about it myself when I was helping my friend Lila look on the web for information about the Cherokee Trail of Tears because her great-grandmother was Cherokee and was one of the those who had been forced to walk that long terrible path from the Southeast to Oklahoma. Part of the article we read talked about the Trail of Tears Bean, which is also called the Cherokee Black Bean. It said many Native Americans survived only because they brought that bean with them. We discovered from that this terrific seed source called Seed Savers Exchange, which is a group of people who harvest precious, heritage seeds for sale, one of them being the Cherokee Trail of Tears Bean. I've put the link to their catalogue site in the right column if you're interestd. I love just reading the descriptions of the seeds they offer. The French gourmet vegetable seeds are the ones I love the most.

Linear A & B: A Brief Description

2011-03-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

I thought since I have begun to talk a little about undeciphered scripts, I might explain them and the contexts in which they fit. I apologize to anyone who feels that the following discussion is too basic. I don't know certainly who the readership is of this blog so I thought it might be best to talk about this subject to the intelligent general reader. In another posting I might talk more specifically about my own work or on the subject more in depth.

The word 'history' actually means a period or periods of time and place when human beings left behind written records. Where a group of people had no written records, no writing, that is called prehistory. The general notion of the meaning of the word prehistoric is of dinosaurs but that's not only what it refers to. Any period without the written word is prehistoric.

But as we go back into ancient history we come to certain seemingly impassable walls, where cultures existed that had writing but are so far in the past that the knowledge of the script they used, the language they spoke and who in fact they were and where they originally came from is lost. There are different reasons for this depending upon which culture we are talking about. The script I am currently working on, the Indus Valley Script, is one example, an undeciphered script from South Asia created by the Indus Valley Civilization, which spanned over a million and a half square miles and lasted over five hundred years and which went at last to ruin, the cities becoming deserted and the people blending into the surrounding village systems. That occurred hundreds of years before the people who spoke Sanskrit arrived in South Asia, causing a break in continuity, where the new arrivals did not know about the civilization before them. All knowledge of the Indus Valley Civilization was lost until the end of the 19th century, when bits of archaeological finds from their civilization began to be discovered including objects with inscriptions in their unique script, a writing system they had invented and employed but which was lost when their civilization ebbed. This is an example of a period that is often called proto-history. It is not prehistory because there are in fact written records from that time and place and it isn't really history since we have no idea what those records say. If the script and therefore language becomes deciphered, then the Indus Valley Civilization will fall within the definition of history. Until then, it is a period of time with unreadable written records, a.k.a. proto-history.

Another example is the culture of original inhabitants of Crete, people we have oddly termed the Minoans, oddly since the name is formed after King Minos, who was Greek. One thing we are sure of, the Minoans were not Greek; they immigrated to Crete hundreds of years at least before the early Greeks arrived. The Minoans created a civilization from the ground up, developing on Crete from Neolithic or basic tool and shelter makers to palace builders, international traders, an extremely developed culture that included the invention of a writing system. But in about 1450 B.C.E. (B.C.E. is a modern term meaning "before the common era", a P.C. adaptation of B.C. in order to avoid identifying the modern era as related to Christ; we should not notice too closely that since the dates themselves are identical, "common era" in "before the common era" is therefore also dated from Christ's birth; but nevermind, you see the point, as my archaeology teacher at Cambridge, Dilip Chakrabarti, used to say)...at any rate, about 1450 B.C.E. a massive earthquake hit the nearby island of Thera as well as Crete, which was added to by an eruption of the Volcano on Thera causing a large portion of Thera to sink beneath the sea with a resulting tsumani wave that pummeled Crete. There was massive damage in the main cities and certainly enormous loss of life. Akrotiri on Thera has been excavated and it was discovered that lightweight volcanic ash had fallen, solidifying two hundred feet of pumice upon the suffocated culture. The Minoan civilization was centered primarily on these two islands and from the evidence it appears that this culture previously to the earthquake had enjoyed a peaceful existence, having no defensive walls around their cities, with lively frescoes of sport and with pottery decorated in light-hearted renderings of the natural world. It was a thriving culure that lost their spirit with the devastation, the designs on the pottery dramatic evidence of their change of heart, the joyful marine animal designs being replaced by uninspired geometric patterns on a dark dark background. There is enough evidence to know that many years before the earthquake and volcanic eruption the early Greeks had arrived in the mainland and some had traveled and settled on Crete but as a minority part of the Minoan Civilization, with their own customs and language, what we might now call an ethnic part of a larger culture. But when the Minoans experienced the disaster of 1450 B.C.E., it was not long afterwards that the Greeks began to become more powerful until they had full control of the mainland and the islands, including Crete. There are legends about what happened to the Minoans after that. Some were reported to have moved to southern Turkey, becoming the Lycians. Some researchers believe the descendants of the Minoans became the Etruscans. There are many theories. The script they invented, which is called Linear A, became adapted by the Greeks into a slightly different script that suited the Greek language. That adapted, later script is called Linear B.

Around A.D. 1900 or as we now term it C.E. 1900, meaning Common Era 1900, a man named Arthur Evans began excavating on Crete. He found the Minoan Palace at Knossos and with it inscriptions written in both Linear A & B. At that point it was believed that the Greeks had not arrived to that area of the world until several centuries later and that, therefore, neither script had anything to do with the Greek language. Both were considered to be unknown scripts used to write unknown languages.

To begin work to decipher them, objects with inscriptions were separated into two, one with inscriptions in Linear A and one with inscriptions in Linear B. Linear A was inscribed on a much smaller number of objects than Linear B so most decipherers chose to work on deciphering Linear B first. In 1950, an American woman, Dr. Alice Kober, made a significant breakthrough, discovering that the language that was written in Linear B was inflectional, meaning that it had endings, like in French or Spanish. This was a major step towards the decipherment. The reason is that all the known languages of the world have been categorized into what is called language families, which are groupings of languages that are "related" to each other. Relationships of languages can happen in two ways, due to time or due to place. Firstly, in terms of time, it is where a group of speakers continues to live in the same place for so long that the little constant changes that naturally occur to any language as it is spoken over time become so numerous that there is a break in understanding, for example, the difference between Old English and Modern English. Even just as far back as Shakespeare, as anyone who has taken courses in his work has noted, although only 400 years in the past, his English is very different from English now and can be difficult to fully understand. Secondly, in terms of place, when speakers of a language move to a different part of the world and lose contact with their earlier home, the languages in both places will continue to develop separately until first they become two dialects of the same language and finally if enough time passes, they become different languages. They become different dialects when each regularly employs different words for common meanings and/or when the accent and therefore pronunciation of words is significantly different but speakers of both can with minimal effort understand each other. They become different languages when they are mutually unintelligible. When I was at Cambridge it was often sarcastically remarked that American has become a different language from English but I would say that that's not yet accurate, though it certainly has become a different dialect. There were many things in English in England that had different words to describe them than in American English and also many of the same words used in England and America had different meanings. Some examples are: the word "vest" in America means that sleeveless pocketed thing that goes between the shirt and jacket but in England "vest" means undershirt. If you want to talk about the thing that goes between the shirt and jacket in England you have to use the word "waistcoat". In England "pants" mean panties whereas in America "pants" means trousers. In England "jumper" means pullover sweater whereas in America "jumper" means a little girl's dress. When I hadn't been at Cambridge long, I happened to phone my brother. I told him the examples above. He said, ok, how about this: an American guy and an Englishman were invited to a party and someone asked them what they were going to wear. The American replied, "Pants and a vest," and the Englishman replied, "A jumper."

At any rate, I was talking about language families. A single language family is made up of all of the languages that originated from the same language in the past and are therefore related to each other. The largest language family in the world, for example, is the Indo-European Language Family, which includes, among many others, English, French, German, Hindi, Greek and Farsi, all of which came from the same original tongue, a theoretical language that we term Proto-Indo-European. One of the strongest features of Indo-European languages is the use of endings, such as suffixes in English applied to nouns, such as "ness" in happiness and verbal endings that indicate whether a verb is describing first, second or third person (I, you, he/she) in French, such as "j'arrive" means "I arrive" but "tu arrives" means "you arrive". Notice that in "j'arrive", the end of arrive employs an "e" but in "tu arrives" the end of arrive employs "es". In some inflected languages, such as Spanish, it is not necessary to say I or you or he as the ending already indicates which is meant.

Language families are defined in part by features, such as if they employ suffixes or prefixes, what order the words must have in a sentence and the list of sounds that are used to speak the language. If they are related languages belonging in the same language family, they will share many if not all of the same features and not have features that are used in languages that belong in a different language family. When Dr. Kober discovered that Linear B was using endings, she identified which language families the script might represent and which languages families it did not. This was a significant step forward.

Dr. Kober very sadly and unfortunately died of cancer before she could complete the decipherment. Her work was adopted and acknowledged by an English architect named Michael Ventris, who completed the decipherment a couple of years later, in 1952. He discovered that the language written in the Linear B script was Greek. Up to that point it was believed that the Greeks had arrived much later. The earliest written records up until then were by Homer (the Iliad and Odyssey Homer), whose own dates are still controversial, some researchers claiming he lived around 1190 B.C.E and some claiming around 850 B.C.E. Either way, at the very least there is therefore a three hundred year span between the Greek that Homer used and the Greek of the people who lived at the time of the devastation of Crete used. It was believed up until then, also, that the war at Troy, described by Homer, was a myth. But when Linear B was deciphered and it was discovered that the Greeks had come to Greece so long before it was first supposed and this discovery combined with the archaeological find of the layered cities of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in the late nineteenth century, it was determined that the description of the war at Troy was very real indeed. In other words, the decipherment of Linear B aided significantly in taking the history of Greece several hundred years back in time, changing myth to fact, identifying major events in the past to be taken seriously as actual history. This is the most important result of ancient language decipherment.

Michael Ventris had planned on working on the decipherment of the earlier script, Linear A, when he had finished dotting the i's of his work on Linear B. But, very strangely and sadly, he too died, in the next year, 1953, in a car crash. Since then many researchers have attempted the decipherment of Linear A, the script invented by the Minoans of Crete to use when writing their language, which is to date, also unknown. But no one has yet succeeded.

A bit should be said about what the two scripts are like, as neither are an alphabet. In the earliest period when writing systems were first being invented, the incredible thinkers who came up with this idea attempted to identify what a spoken word was in fact; in other words, what were the smallest bits they could hear that made up any word. They could not or did not see it as individual consonants and individual vowels as our alphabet represents. They heard syllables as the smallest units, ka being separate from ke being separate from ki being separate from ko being separate from ku, and so on, each consonant attached to as many vowels as they used. That may sound cumbersome but when we say one of the consonants in our alphabet, we do not reproduce the actual sound of it that we use when that consonant is being said within a word. For example, if we were to say aloud the word "potato", the first letter would be pronounced by a slight puff of air being produced by pressing the lips together and then releasing them. Try it. But if you were to say aloud the name of the letter "p", you would actually say, "Pee". But you would not pronounce "potato" as "pee-otato". If you said aloud the name of the "t" in "potato", you would say aloud "Tee". But you would not pronounce the word "potato" as "po-tee-a-tee-o". Instead, the ancient original inventors of script chose to write words in terms of the syllables they could actually hear, so that if they were to write the word "potato", they would have spelled it as they heard it, by three signs that represented the three syllables, one for "po", one for "ta" and one for "to". And therefore, instead of 26 signs or as people generally call them, letters, they would have the number of consonants they used times the number of vowels they used. The Greeks who wrote in Linear B, who were the Mycenaean Greeks, used arguably twelve consonants and five vowels as well as five signs that represented simply the five vowels and fifteen signs that represented more complicated sounds or syllables, such as dipthongs and therefore the list of signs in Linear B that represent sounds in their language was seventy-eight signs long, give or take. They also created signs that represented whole words, such as 'wine' 'oil' 'grain' and many others, to use in accounting and trade, which are called ideograms or logograms, but that is not part of the discussion here. The Linear A sign list is seventy-five signs long and it is because of this number of signs that researchers assume that Linear A also is a syllabary. The way it's usually put is if it's 20+ signs, it's an alphabet, if it's 80+ signs it's a syllabary and if it's 10,000 signs it's Chinese. There are other types of scripts, the abjad, the abujida but that's for some other day, maybe. The point that has interested me is that Linear A remains to date undeciphered.

The Chicken or the Egg

2011-02-26T13:03:00.000-08:00

Who's to say how we find our interests. Is it nature or nurture or does something pass by us when we're young that just happens to stand out? Perhaps we have innumerable talents but only one or two are accidentally watered and pruned and given the nutrients that let them grow.

My mother started her working life as a substitute teacher at a high school one town away from where we lived behind my father's dance studio. Pretty soon she had been hired as a full-time English teacher, quickly became the head of the English Department and ran the library that consisted only of books lining the English classroom. Funds came from somewhere, perhaps actually the State back then, which shows how long ago that was, to build a brand new library building with all the money needed for decades to order and process all the books needed to fill it entirely. She was the natural choice for the job as librarian and so she began a very happy career as the high school librarian and spent the next thirty years doing all that was needed to create the library from scratch. A couple of years ago, not long before she died of cancer, I took her at her request to the funeral of a good friend, a teacher she had known for so long. The baffoon faculty member sitting in front of us, thinking he was saying an accolade for the deceased, stood up and stated how wonderful this teacher was, so much so that the library should be renamed for him. I never got along with my mother but that stupid, insensitive statement made me feel rare sympathy for my poor old mother sitting right beside me. I actually felt her twitch when he said it and there was nothing I could do to fix it. Calling him out for it in the middle of a funeral just wouldn't do. So she and I said nothing about it. I wonder if she realized the ape in front of us was just trying to participate.

So from the time I was very small until around ten or so I hung out in her library when she had to watch me. She would let me figure out how to busy myself while she worked, which my father also did when he was watching me, and in her library there were many things to take my interest, the stacks of newspapers in the back, the angled bins with art prints laminated on to poster board, my very favorite being Fumee d'Ambre Gris by John Singer Sargent, which she let me check out to hang in my room for weeks at a time. I renewed that print so often I doubt many other students ever got to see it. There were all the new books being processed, the card catalogue that was always being added to, piles of cards on her desk to be typed up, the most interesting part the last line, which read, "See also..." Up to this day I think of human memory as what I call "the filing card system", one experience reminding one of another in some odd little way though it may be years and thousands of miles apart.

One day when I was four years old, I suppose a period when she needed to actually give me something to look at, she handed me an old book from her personal library at home and said to look at that. It was a heavy though slim hardback with a worn blue cloth cover. It was called Everyday Life in Ancient Times: Highlights of the Beginnings of Western Civilization in Mesopotamia Egypt, Greece and Rome, written by Gilbert Grosvenor who was the president of the National Geographic Society in 1951 when the book was published. I still have this book. The inside of the front cover has her name in light pencil, Margie O'Reilly and in pen Marguerite O'Reilly and below that her married name, Marguerite Price. The most captivating part of of this book were the many colored drawings of what ancient people in the Mediterranean and Middle East must have looked like when they were going about their daily tasks. She let me keep the book because she said it was clear I cherished it. One picture in particular that I gazed at many times when a very young child was titled with a quote from The Odyssey, "Cherish the Stranger in the House, and Speed Him as Soon as He Has the Mind". It was a rendering of what the Palace at Knossos must have looked like in the second millennium, with a man bringing a chariot in through the gate into the open plaza with Minoan frescoes on the far wall, two men speaking with the Minoan priestess in the foreground. Decades later when I was packing up my own library of books from my den, preparing to put everything into storage so I could move to England to specialize in working on the Bronze Age undeciphered script, Minoan Linear A, I found that book on a dusty bottom shelf. I stopped packing the books and settled down on the rug to look through that old book that I didn't even know I still had and had forgotten all about until I saw it there. I leafed through the pages until I found that drawing I had loved. I sat there wondering if it were this drawing that had led me to the point where I was embarking on a life of work in ancient history or if it had been something I was meant to do from birth, that when I opened that book at four years old it had simply struck a harmonic chord. It's an interesting point of which I have pondered from time to time.

I packed up that book with all the others along with all my furniture and everything else I owned and put it all into storage where it stayed for fourteen years. I got on a plane for England, walked into my college at Cambridge to throw down my suitcases and made for the Lecture Block, which housed the faculties of Classics, Linguistics and Orientals, all of which I utilized during the next four years, the most important being the offices of Drs. John Killen and John Chadwick of the Classics Faculty. I had chosen to apply to Cambridge specifically because I had already taught myself the deciphered script, Linear B, which represents Mycenaean Greek, I knew the history of its decipherment and that John Chadwick had been the philologist who worked with the breakthrough decipherer, Michael Ventris. He was still teaching though only a class here and there, perhaps a seminar or two, but Dr. Killen had been his first student who had done his Ph.D. on Linear B just after it had been deciphered and he was still a full-time instructor. When I had written to the head of the Linguistics Faculty, Peter Matthews, asking if he thought it was a good idea for me to apply, he had written back that he had gone over to see Dr. Killen in Classics and showed him my letter and Dr. Killen had agreed to work with me on Linear A. I was told, though it may not be true, that I was the only student he had ever agreed to work with on Linear A officially. Once I had been at Cambridge several months, I asked a faculty member in the Linguistics Faculty, Viven Law, if she knew why they had admitted me to pursue this unusual goal and if she knew why Dr. Killen had, too. She said they had just had a feeling about me, that though they didn't know me yet, there was something that made them feel compelled to admit me.

I had applied to be admitted to do a M.Phil leading to a Ph.D. within the Linguistics Faculty ("faculty" is the term for "department" at Cambridge) but I was unlucky to have arrived only a year or two after a major change in structure of the degree or so I was told. Forever into the deep past, the degrees were rather customized for each student, those courses could be followed that very particularly suited the educational aims of each student, which could cut across faculties if that was deemed useful. But things had changed a bit and those that disagreed with those changes said that Cambridge was being "Americanized" as the changes had been to standardize every degree by required courses. The consequence was that I had to take the courses and do the work required for them for all of the first year linguistic requirements as well as take courses in the Classics Faculty in Classical Greek, Mycenaean Greek and private work every two weeks on beginning the long preparatory road toward original work on the decipherment of Linear A with Dr. Killen as well as take a highly challenging oral and transcriptions exam in phonetics and the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) required by the new acting head of department, challenging for me because I had been born deaf and although my ears had been operated on, still to this day I have less than normal levels of hearing. Needless-to-say, I blew part of what was required, though I think I'll talk about that on some other day. Today it's going to be about my favorite subject, ancient undeciphered scripts.

I was so lucky to be able to get to know Dr. Chadwick for a couple of years before his death and take whatever seminars and a course that he offered on Linear B. One of my first days there, I encountered him in the hallway in the Classics building. He knew who I was and stopped to greet me. He said that the problem with Linear A was that the corpus was just too small to be able to decipher it. He said, "We just have to go dig up more!" That, yes, is one way to go about it. The other is to take what inscriptions we do have and work with them. But the point was taken; the corpus or the entire body of inscriptions that have been excavated is small and so frequency analysis, which is a common way to go at it, is less than fully useful. Most decipherers up to then chose to work with fourteen signs that were shared in Linear B and the script it descended from, Linear A. Linear A was invented by the Minoan people, the original inhabitants of the island of Crete. Linear B was an adaption by the incoming Greek population from Linear A and there are fourteen signs that, by shape and design, are identical to ones in the Linear A script. This does not mean they share the same values, meaning the same sounds, what most people would term "letters". In other words, does the circle with the cross inside it represent the syllable "ka" in Linear A because that is what it represents in the Linear B script? Perhaps and perhaps not. Either is possible. In the history of scripts that have been adapted or taken from earlier scripts, some have taken the values of the earlier one in its entirety, some only some of the values and changed the values of the rest of the signs and some have been assigned totally different values. But that is where the science was at that time and by and large still is today. In other words, with the arguably seventy-five probable syllabic signs (signs that represent sounds) in the Linear A script and the arguably eighty-seven signs that represent sounds in the Linear B script, in general only fourteen were being used to work on deciphering Linear A.

I met with Professor Killen every two weeks to work on Linear A for the next four years without exception through an often otherwise tempestuous Cambridge experience, leaving the Linguistics department in a major fight, joining the Orientals faculty, doing one of my best courses in the Archaeology Faculty, spending the majority of my time alone in the libraries and finally going to Oxford in my last year for two advanced tutorials. Through it all, even when I was most miserable I was the most myself I've ever felt. I read for my courses and worked on what I needed to do to prepare for the serious challenge of Linear A from dawn til late at night seven days a week for the entire four years, including Christmas, New Year's, my birthday. One Christmas Day, the first year I think it was, the coldest winter I spent in England, the River Cam was frozen, the streets were covered in snow and ice. My room was very cold as the heating of my college always seemed to break just after most of the students went home for the holiday vacation and somehow miraculously came back into fully functional order the day before they all returned. There were minimal victuals offered in the dining hall and we didn't have cooking facilities in our rooms. I pushed my bike walking down to the little grocery store in town, got some bread and a few other things to make in my room as a tiny Christmas dinner and was pushing it back up the hill along a street almost devoid of other people. It was so cold. I had no presents, no decorated tree, no family, no friends yet since it was my first year and I was headed back to my chilly room to study Linear A the rest of the day alone. Suddenly I stopped still in the street and looked around, almost as if it were a paradigm shift. I realized it was the best Christmas I had ever had.

Professor Killen had me prepare for work on Linear A by first reading everything there was on the decipherment of Linear B and to master the script in his and Dr. Chadwick's courses. That took a bit of time. When that was completed, he had me read all the published work to date on attempts at the decipherment of Linear A. Deep into that period, he said to me one day, "Well, now I think it's time you read Carratelli." I said, "Well, yes, I know of his work but it's in Italian." Professor Killen thought a moment and then replied, "Well, yes, but unfortunately we just can't get beyond these things." Starting to slightly panic, I replied, "Yes, well, yes, but I'm sorry but I don't read Italian." He smiled and said gently, "Well, yes, but unfortunately we just can't get beyond these things." Extremely embarrassed I said dejectedly, "Yes, but I don't speak Italian," my ragged educational background looming over me horribly. He just gazed at me smiling. I realized that I actually was going to have to read a book in Italian within the next two weeks along with all my other work. I rode my bike to the University Library and checked out the Carratelli book and yes, the only copy was in Italian. I took it back to my college computer room, signed into email and opened the book. I wrote to Dr. Law in full panic, telling her the problem. I knew she could read Italian but I couldn't ask her, of course, to translate the whole book for me. She replied, well, how about I just type out the first paragraph from the book to her and beneath it write what I thought it might mean. I did that. She replied that what I had translated was exactly what it meant so that was fine and I should just go ahead and read the rest of the book. Later on sometime I asked her why Professor Killen had done that and if he knew I would be able to read the book. She said yes, they both knew I could, it was only I who didn't realize it. That was exactly in a nutshell what Cambridge was like. It wasn't so much challenging as it was an incredible constant wake-up call to finding who you were and what you could do.

A couple of years in, I happened to read a book by Asko Parpola, the great Finnish philologist who has worked on the decipherment of the Indus Valley Script of South Asia his entire career. It had just been published by Cambridge University Press and was titled Deciphering the Indus Script (1994). In it he mentioned one methodology that might be used (fig. 6.11, p. 98), based on Harris, which was to write out inscriptions in a kind of crossword puzzle shape, criss-crossing where signs were identical in various words. In this way, it might be possible to determine the presence of prefixes, infixes and suffixes. I took the passage to show Professor Killen and said I wanted to try it on Linear A. He agreed it sounded fruitful. For the next year or so, I applied the technique to the entire Linear A and B corpora. In effect, it released us from a reliance on sound. No longer were we working with just those fourteen shared signs. I could graph every inscription in the same criss-cross way, whether or not the signs were shared in the Linear B script. We were making real headway with this technique but still were hampered by the limited corpus of inscriptions written in Linear A.

That summer Vivien (Law) arranged for me to housesit for friends of hers in Paris. She had agreed to do it herself but had discovered that she was suffering from breast cancer so asked them if I could do it, instead. Being her close friends and therefore trusting her, they agreed without meeting me. I took with me a letter Vivien wrote to the concierge of the building where I was to live that summer, my books and a few summer clothes and boarded the train. From Cambridge I took the usual train to London, jumped on the tube to another station and from there boarded the bullet train to Paris. Four hours approximately from Cambridge I was standing in the Gare du Nord in Paris. I took a cab that day through Paris to my summer apartment but I never took another cab. I walked all summer through the city and found that summer all my still favorite places. The apartment was in Mouffetard, which is a very old neighborhood hidden behind the Pantheon on the Left Bank. It had a long hallway with French windows and when it was breezy, the floor to ceiling sheers would billow all along the hall. There was a deep lavender bathtub and I could open a window just above it as I soaked as the only view from it was of the rooftops and chimney stacks. One evening in my lovely apartment, I was sitting at the small table in front of the French windows above the street with my Linear A notebooks in front of me. It was dusk and the full moon was rising and swallows were flying around in front of it. From somewhere in the near distance I heard the sound of music approaching. I slightly stood to look down the street. A musician had just turned the corner. He walked down past my building, playing La Vie en Rose on his accordion. I think that was the best moment of my life. Certainly the most relaxing. I sat watching the swallows cross the moon listening to his accordion. I was thinking how we had abstractly increased the corpus of Linear A by no longer being reliant on sound. I thought, what if there were some way we could no longer be reliant even on the sign. The moment I thought of the question I thought of the answer. It is the unusual question which is, in fact, the most difficult to come up with. Once the question is posed, often the answer is nearly obvious. Yes, of course there was something else that could be compared besides the signs: the relationships between the signs. I wrote out a methodology that evening for examining just that.

After a couple of years, we realized that we needed to contact Asko Parpola to tell him that we had been working with a method he had mentioned in his book and ask him how he wanted to be cited if we published the work. I found him on the web and wrote him. He responded with enthusiasm and told me that it was his daughter, Paivikki who had devised the suggested methodology. Not long after that, he happened to be in Cambridge because of their publication of his book. He phoned me out of the blue one wintery Saturday night. He asked if I would meet him the next morning at the Anchor Pub, which was on one of the bridges across the Cam, to show him my work. I agreed happily. It wasn't until he hung up that I realized that no way was the Anchor Pub open on Sunday morning. But he hadn't left a phone number. The next morning, I bundled up for the very cold walk to the bridge by the pub. I was early arriving, the pub was indeed closed so I waited on the bridge in thick coat, mittens and hat, with chattering teeth. From around the corner Asko emerged wearing for a coat only a light windbreaker, which was hanging open. He is, of course, from Helsinki. As he approached me I asked if he weren't cold. "Cold?" he replied, apparently surprised. "It's not cold!" We stood there in the middle of that bridge with all of my notebooks from the past years open on the stone railing, the wind whipping across the pages, but he was right, it wasn't cold at all. I didn't feel the wind, only the thrill of sharing my work with him.

At the end of my fourth year, totally out of money and pushing what little I had left to stay until late August, I finally told Professor Killen that I had to leave, that I was moving to Philadelphia where I had been accepted to do the M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. He seemed astonished that I was leaving and asked me not to. I said I had no money left, no work visa and therefore no where to stay. He asked how could I leave when we were having breakthroughs, when the work was really getting somewhere. I said I was just too poor to stay. He asked how long I would be gone, how soon would I come back to resume the work. I didn't know how I would be able to come back but I said two years. The M.A. would take two years. Reluctantly, he agreed that I could go. But I knew then that it was unlikely I would be able to return. Poverty when one is a student is a very real thing. I never have returned except once, to visit Vivien Law a few months before she died of cancer. I made an appointment to see Professor Killen but the appointment was somehow mixed up and when I knocked on his door, he wasn't there. He wrote me how sorry he was about that later but after a couple of years of correspondance when we both realized that I was indeed unable to return, our letters diminished. Every single day since I have wished I were back there, working with him, riding my bike everywhere, reading from dawn to dusk. They were beyond measure the happiest years of my life.

Room to Think

2011-02-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

The redhead's trailer, nearly empty of furniture, with only a beat-up table and chair that I randomly placed in a back bedroom and a camping air bed that I laid on the living room floor, suited me just fine. It was cavernous compared with the dorm rooms I had lived in for the past six years at Cambridge and Penn and I wandered through its rooms thinking of Henry Miller skating in his home when one of his wives had cleaned him out of everything. My dissertation proposal had been accepted by my supervisor and the administration at the research institute in Paris. I had the outline, six years of experience with the subject and the methodologies, my notebooks from Cambridge and Penn, several clean legal tablets and a few good pens. But I had to think for awhile before I began, not to plan what I was going to write, because I knew that well, but to let the memories of my past six years in other rooms sift down a bit in my mind like the sand in an hour glass.

When I had first been accepted to Cambridge, I had received a letter from my prospective college asking which level room I wanted, level 1, 2 or 3. The only categorical differences between the levels, the letter stated, were the relative sizes of the rooms with accompanying prices. The letter, however, gave no indication exactly what dimensions of room the levels represented. So I waited until it would be morning in England and with great organization phoned the St. Edmund's college office. A sweet English lady's voice answered. I asked what the dimensions of the rooms at each level were. "Wha?" she replied. I repeated, "What are the dimensions of the rooms in the different levels? I need to know so I can decide which level to choose." "Well, we've never actually measured the rooms," she replied. I thought about how Cambridge was going on 800 years, though St. Edmund's College was only around a hundred or so. "You've never measured the rooms when the only difference between them for the price differences is the size?" "Noooo," she said thoughtfully. I paused, considering. "Well, can you describe how big the level 1 room is, then?" "Well," she replied, "It's quite snug." I told this to my mother who said I'd better pick level 2 because when she was in college her dorm room was so small she had to stand on the bed to close the door. However, when I got to England, to my level 2 room, it was lovely, one large room but with an arch separating it gently into two, the smaller part with a small sink and a make-shift closet, the larger part with a single bed and desk and a non-working fireplace painted white. The entire length of the room had windows in small panes all along one wall. Every morning the maids came down the hall. I always had the same maid. She was an older woman who always wore the thinest gold cross around her neck. She would rap softly, I would say to enter. She would come in, take out my trash, clean my sink and on Fridays bring me new sheets and pillow cases and change my bed for me if I preferred or leave the starched folded sheets for me to exchange for the week's old ones at my leisure. She was very very very polite and as I was invariably reading, she would tip-toe around the room tidying it up and might ask me how I was in a tiny whispering voice. I would say fine and ask how she was. She every single time I did that would look shocked, say that she was fine very nervously and then thank me several times for asking her. If I were leaving the room, which I often did so she wouldn't feel uncomfortable with me there, I would say goodbye and then she would again thank me and say goodbye and if I then said goodbye again, she would thank me again and say goodbye again. She absolutely always had to have the last polite word to be happy. She would not stop thanking me until I shut up and left. There were points, being an American, that I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, straighten her up and yell, "You are a human being! You don't have to be obsequious!" But of course I never did say that to her.

The college library was just down the hall from my room so I often went there to read when the maids were at work. Only once did I hear them criticize a student and I heard them talking together often. They never commented negatively if a student were messy or unclean, which did happen on occasion like the day the student next door to me moved out and when the maids went into his room they discovered that he had never changed his sheets but piled them in the closet in a year-high stack. The sheets on his bed were so filthy that they had the outline of his body but I didn't hear them say a word about it except in surprise. But that one day that I did hear them criticise a student, what they said was that a certain male student down the hall was lazy and didn't study all the time like he should. That was our job as students at Cambridge and our only job, to study. Three miles was the farthest we were allowed to live outside of college or be expelled. We couldn't work even the smallest part time job or be expelled. We didn't even have to know what time it was. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and two teas were announced by a bell. When the bell rang, we had only to walk away from our work, which would not be disturbed while we were gone, dine and then go back up to continue studying. Once I complained at the University Library that it should not close at 6 p.m. nor be closed on Sunday. The librarian replied that if they did not do that, many of the students would live in the library. I, myself, like many others, walked from place to place with a book in my hands, reading as I walked. I memorized Sanskrit roots even while riding my bike from college to lecture block. We were only not allowed to read in the dining hall. There we dined exclusively. On Tuesdays and Fridays we dined formally, receiving a note in our post box informing our place at which table and the attire required (black tie, white tie, evening gown, cocktail dress) and the time, which was invariably 6:30 for 7 in the Common Room. Over the formal evening wear we were to wear our academic gowns, or as we call them in the U.S., our black graduation gowns. At six-thirty we would gather, students, tutors, dons, faculty and the Master, in the Common Room to have port or sherry and chit chat. At precisely 7 p.m., the butler would come in, bang the gong sitting in the far corner of the room and announce in a pleasant British accent, "Would you please follow the Master into the hall." We would all then set down our ports and sherries and follow the Master of the College into the dining hall, taking our seats at our assigned places. Dinner was always served with several wines at candlelight. There was the requisite etiquette, how to use the knife, forks and large spoon properly, how to lean without interrupting one's conversation when the waiters came with the platters of extraordinarily dull-flavored dinner. One leaned to the right to be served on the left and leaned to the left to have one's dish removed on the right. One never spoke or made eye-contact with the waiter and vice versa. When one was finished, one simply placed the knife and fork on the plate at a 45 degree angle to the right, the signal for the waiter to come up and take the plate without speaking. It was so lovely a way to dine that it irritates me to this day when a waiter or waitress comes bobbing up in an American restaurant saying, "Hi, I'm Dave. I'm going to bombastically interrupt you several times during your meal to ask if you want more coffee and then forget to give you the check so you have to wait far too long, trying ridiculously to flag me down." Instead, at dinners at Cambridge one would hope to eat as swiftly or as slowly as the Master because when the Master was done, you were done. The butler would come into the hall, bang the gong that sat in the corner of the room there and say, "Would you please follow the Master into the Common Room for coffee." All silverware was set down, everyone stood up and all followed the Master back into the Common Room to have dishraggy scented coffee in demi-tasse cups and chit chat again. Once I asked one of my faculty who was the master of one of the other colleges why we had to have so many formal dinners. He said that America is a heterogenous society so we eat any way we want depending on where we're from and even in formal occasions this is considered fine. But England is a homogenous society and those that graduate from Cambridge and Oxford are expected to fill the top spots in every sector of government and business and it wouldn't do to go to a dinner and not have perfect table manners; one represents Cambridge for the rest of one's life, after all.

My second year I was assigned to live in an old mansion my college owned next door. The room assigned me had been the butler's pantry so huge drawers and glass-fronted cabinets wrapped around two walls with a large window on the 3rd and the door on the fourth. The room was squarish and I suppose rather small but so comfortable in its old-world style that I loved living there. I could wander the house to the shared kitchen, to the room with window seats that we used as the Common Room, use the pay phone at the bottom of the staircase and the weightroom on the ground floor, if I so chose. The lawn was expansive and being next to the college, one could easily walk to the tennis court or through the apple orchard behind the college. My room was so bright due to the large windows and with my framed photos of my ancestors to keep me company and a bit of personal decoration, it was, as the secretary had said, quite snug.

My college, St. Edmund's, was too small to guarantee rooms the third and fourth years and they assumed by then a student would have learned enough about the town and the colleges to find their own. My third year I took a room in a house across town that was owned by my college but housed one other student and two working people from the town. It was a plain row house, two stories. My room was on the second story at the back next to a cherry tree. It had gold wallpaper and an odd sundry of antique furniture and several beat-up Oriental rugs on the floor making me consistently feel like I must be sharing it with W.B. Yeats. One morning sitting at the desk by the window just as the cherries were ripening, thousands of bitty little birds suddenly landed on the tree. They were so small they could cling to the leaves, hanging upside down to reach the cherries. They ate all the cherries from the entire tree in just a few hours. That was the year my cousin Tiny died suddenly of a heart attack. His brother Herb phoned me and told me. That afternoon a dove landed on the window sill just next to my arm on the other side of the glass by my desk, stayed there three days and then lit off, never to return. I can only assume it was Tiny paying me a last visit. One of my roommates, one of the working people, was called Colin. He was stout and proudly from Scotland with that thick brogue he used to continually scoff at Cambridge University. The first day I ever saw him he strode into the house and stopped suddenly at the open kitchen door. I was squatting in front the cabinet door under the sink. I said, "When do we take out the trash?" "On FRRRRRRRRRRRiiiiideeeeees," he replied. "You must be my roommate from Germany," I said. He looked at me with an astonished glare.

My fourth year I found a room in a house owned by an Egyptian who ran a restaurant in town. One other person lived there, an extremely home-sick motorcyclist from Buenos Aires. They were pleasant enough but the house was nearly outside the three-mile limit and too far for me to ride in the rain every single day. A member of the Linguistics Faculty, Dr. Vivien Law, who had become a friend, found me a house on an estate in a nearby town. The woman who owned the house had just lost her husband who had been a professor at the Scott Polar Research Institute. She was disabled and although she had servants, they went home at night. Consequently, she wanted someone to simply live on the estate and I was the lucky choice. I was given a cottage next to her mansion, which had the name of Laundry Cottage. The house was enormous with two huge staircases that criss-crossed each other in the entry hall. The estate was magnificent, with a formal rose garden complete with a sun dial, ivy-covered brick arches, a good sized vegetable garden right outside my kitchen's dutch doors, a hedge maze at least nine feet high and so enormous that at its center was a tennis court. It had been the family home of the great English writer, Graham Greene, of which the lady of the house was extremely proud. She lent me right away a novella Greene had written which mentioned the house. It was about a pond on the premises. When I had finished reading it, I asked her where the pond was. She said unfortunately she didn't know but suspected that it had been out in one of the long-ago sold-off fields just beyond the dry stone wall. I wrote a novel a few years later called just that, Beyond the Dry Stone Wall. It's a murder mystery set in East Anglia, not exactly a new idea but I put my spin on it. The characters are one might claim fictitious but the places are very real indeed. I've put it in the right column of this blog if you'd like to read it. I can't really give it away but I will sell the .pdf of it for $5 for anyone who'd like to have it.

The sad problem with this perfect setting was that the busses didn't run on time or didn't show up at all so after a couple of months, I had to again move. By then I had gotten a tip from a friend, who told me that Trinity College owns so much property you could walk on Trinity land from Cambridge to Oxford and once they've placed all their own students in rooms, there are plenty of rooms to be had and they can only go to other students, for tax reasons. I went straight to the accomodations office at Trinity and was assigned a very interesting room in one of their houses very near a private library that I often spent whole days in, the Ancient India and Iran Trust Library. It was started by a professor from the Orientals Faculty at Cambridge, Sir Harold Bailey, who didn't want his enormous personal collection of books, all on ancient India and Iran, particularly lingusitically, to be stored in one of the deep lost sections of the University Library, or so I was told. So he began with a few other trustees a private library. They bought a lovely manor, built shelves, catalogued the books and kept the garden up. I would ride my bike there from my rooms at the Trinity house and read all day. The reading rooms downstairs were usually empty except for me, an ancient black cat named Walter and the Curator James Cormick's two small terriers, Tilly and Daisy, who guarded the library aggressively with their mighty yaps dashing from window to window, room to room if anyone rode up on their bicycle. Every day at tea time, James Cormick would come out into the hall and ring a small bell, calling everyone to tea. The first day I sat there reading, I heard the bell but ignored it. After a moment, Cormick stepped into the doorway and looked at me meaningfully. "Tea time," he said merrily, indicating that I must in fact come to tea. It was like that every day. No matter who was there, what we were working on, we all stopped and had tea together, either in the main front room on the beautiful long cherry-hued table or in the lovely garden. One day when he rang the bell, I put my books down and came out. Cormick was standing gazing out the front door. "I think we'll have tea in the garden today," he said wistfully. I looked out the door past him. "But it's raining!" I exclaimed. After a contemplative moment, he replied, "Oh no, it's just drizzling." All the tea things and all the library patrons and trustees who happened to be there strolled out to the furniture on the lawn a bit distant from the mansion where we had a very nice tea and conversation under the rain on that fine cool day.

The room in the Trinity house where I lived that fourth year was in a 16th century Tudor in a room they called "a priest's hide". A priest's hide or hole was a tiny hiding place built by Catholic sympathizers for priests in fear of their lives from Cromwell. The room I was in was clearly not the actual hide as it was at the back on the ground floor by the garden and had large leaded glass-paned windows and French doors leading out to slabs of paving rock set into the lawn long ago. There was a huge fireplace with a magnificent mantle, though I was of course not allowed to light it and I suspect if the priest's hide had been anywhere it had been somehow in part of the structure of that fireplace. It was the door to my room that was particularly interesting or should I say doors. From the hall by one of the downstairs kitchens, there was a plain door that looked very much like a door to a broom closet. When opened, the tiny room inside looked also just like an empty broom closet. Until one took one step in, then suddenly and strangely enough, one could see to the right a very slim hall that disappeared in an optical illusion when one took that one step back into the hall. Shimmying down the thin hall, one came to a tiny, hand-made, rustic door and it was through that door that lay my room. Needless-to-say, the room was so quiet and peaceful, with only the sounds of birds out my lovely old windows and open French doors. I could read from dawn to late at night without a single interruption. One morning, for a reason I can't remember now, I attempted to leap over my single bed to efficiently reach my desk. As I landed on the other side, my little toe on my left foot hit the wingback chair and broke. I staggerered into the hall by the kitchen, starting to go into shock. There was a young, very pale man standing in the kitchen. I told him I had broken my toe and was going into shock and needed to be taken to the hospital. He blushed crimson, looked extremely unnerved and replied, stuttering, "Well, first how about I make you a cup of tea?" I slid down the wall to sit on the floor trembling as he made the tea. Surprisingly enough, that cup of tea helped very much. I felt my fear calm, my nerves cool and in much better spirits rode with him to the hospital.

My dorm room in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania the next two years was a bit plainer but just as cozy. I lived on the top floor of a sixteen-floor graduate building directly behind the Penn bookstore. The building itself was on a hill so I could see all the way across Philadelphia to the airport. I was there on September 11, 2001. One of the actions the city took to handle the disaster was to close the airport. Instead, the U.S. flew jets over the top of our building. It was so strange to see no more planes at the airport but hear jets rush right overhead that I dreamed several times our building was being hit by bombs. My room was very skinny, almost like a hallway so I pushed the bed directly under the windows which ran the width of the room at the end, the door at the far other end. I pushed the desk up to the bed so if I were lying down or sitting at the desk I could see out my windows and particularly at night, the lights of Philadelphia and the stars together with it were marvelous. I was lucky to be able to keep the room for both years that I lived there doing my master's degree.

So the next year, suddenly and unexpectedly in Elk Falls, Kansas, the redhead's trailer was something very unusual indeed. It had several bedrooms, a long hall, a large open kitchen combined living room, all in train-car boxy pre-fab and radically more spacious albeit tacky than my single rooms of the past six years. Someone gave me a pile of National Geographic maps of the Mediterranean and Middle East and having vast amounts of wall space, I covered the walls with them. I could stride from room to room to look at whichever map was useful as I began to consider writing my dissertation.

Culture Shock

2011-02-20T06:07:00.000-08:00

The first week in Elk Falls, Kansas was culture shock. Well, actually, probably for a bit longer than that. I had spent four years in England only going back to the U.S. for one two-week vacation to my family's in San Francisco the first year. I had traveled a little during those four years but kept it limited, being a broke student, the first Spring Break taking a train to Scotland, the fourth year traveling with a friend by car and ferry through Wales and Ireland. Inbetween little jaunts to London off and on, I went to Paris as many times as I could afford including one great summer housesitting for a friend of a friend in a lovely, breezy apartment in the Mouffetard neighborhood. But other than that I lived in Cambridge, the first two years in rooms in my college, St. Edmund's (I'll explain later the Cambridge system), taking meals in the dining hall with faculty and students every day and evening. If you want an easy picture of what that was like, imagine the dining hall in Harry Potter movies. I hung out with the others in the college common room where we read the newspapers and watched the tele and in the college bar (every college in Cambridge has a bar; drinking and England are synonymous) learning the wisdom of Guinness. I went on endless long walks through Cambridge and beyond into the countryside. There were few Americans in my college and I suppose they littered the general Cambridge campus some but I rarely saw or met any. I was the only female American at my college and I believe all the men were there as rowers or rugby players. I saw them in groups from time to time. Once I remember feeling very homesick suddenly in the college library when a few of them were joking with each other in the corner, causing every one else to irritatedly hiss, "SHHHH!" But other than that I lived in a sea of old world Englishness non-stop for four years. Besides the English students at my college, there were more than fifty countries represented and at that time my college had only two-hundred and fifteen students, I think it was. It needs hardly be said that I was therefore continually surrounded by complaints and criticisms about the U.S. and Americans. For a long while I deflected these comments until I finally started to listen. You can't get to know and become friends with brilliant, interesting people without starting to take what they say a little to heart. It's good to self-examine one's society and maybe not a bad thing at all to have a little help from experts, or so they saw themselves, albeit having never been to the U.S.

Straight out of Cambridge I took up residence in Philadelphia for the next two years at the University of Pennsylvania, Departments of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Anthropology/Archaeology. Again, I spent all day every day at the university, ate in my dorm room or in the cafes on and near campus and everyone I knew was either student or faculty. The farthest I ever went off campus was to take the bus downtown to walk through the historic district or go to the symphony but usually just hung out with other people from Penn in cafes, bookshops, seminars, the library. I visited my family in San Francisco a couple of times but mostly it was Philadelphia. I worked in the University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology and in the main university library, totally surrounded by all Penn people.

From there I flew straight to Paris to spend four months on the Left Bank at my school, l'EPHE, or wandering around Paris on my usual long walks. When I left Paris, I flew home to the Bay Area. And then I took that train to rural Kansas.

So the first week with my friend in Elk Falls was something. One day she asked if I wanted to go out to lunch. That being a typical thing for me to do back in England, Philadelphia and Paris, I said sure. We drove six miles to another town called Longton. I remember what I was wearing that day just because of the reaction I got when I walked into the Longton cafe, black velvety loose hip-hugger pants, a shortish black T-shirt that left my midriff bare, the latest black Parisian sandals and I believe a cute little black hat. As we got out of her car I gazed in astonishment at the several saddled horses tied up at wooden posts in front of the cafe. I looked at her and asked something about that not being for real. She looked back at me with a bigger smile and said yes, it was real all right. I trailed her into the cafe, the invariable tinkling bell ringing as we entered the door. I was as shocked by the people that I saw as they were to see me. At the far booth sat four cowboys, including one woman cowboy, from head to toe in actual cowboy clothes, the hats, the country and western shirts with the snap buttons, jeans, beat-up leather chaps, boots and even spurs, I kid you not. And covered in dust. It could have been a dirty Marlboro commercial. Or should I say soily. They stared at me stopped-still, forks in mid-air. I stared back. My friend grabbed me by the arm and yanked me toward our booth on the other side of the room.

For the next week, I walked around Elk Falls while my friend went to work. There were two paved streets that intersected a few doors down from the post office. All the houses had wood siding, mostly painted white. There was a general sort of non-denominational protestant Christian church where most of the people went to sing their hearts out to an accompanying dulcimer and there was a Methodist church for everybody else (who were of course Methodist). Elk Falls isn't flat though it's in Kansas, it being in the southeast corner of the state in an area called the Flint Hills. It's hilly and wooded with scrubby short trees and thick, ragged, dry-looking underbrush. You can't walk barefoot because there are miniscule nearly microscopic awful little bugs called chiggers that will enter your skin through your feet and travel up the insides of your legs to roost under your skin at your groin, creating itchy torture. You can't walk in the woods because ticks will drop from the limbs and leaves on to your hair and shoulders and come off in droves on to your sleeves from shrubs you even slightly brush past. There are no laws except state laws, no police at all though the sheriff and his three deputies are twelve miles away in Howard. They typically wouldn't show up or at least not overly quickly. However, there was only one thief in town whom the angry robbed populace posted hateful hand-written fliers about in the post office and murmured how he should be taken out of town on a rail in tar and feathers. For gossip, the only entertainment, some hung out at the post office and some at the cafe. The volunteer fire chief, in particular, preferred the post office and he would tell great stories every day there, mostly about an old guy he said he once knew named Al. One time he recounted how Al and his buddy had seen a flier saying there was going to be an auction over in Wichita. They got in Al's old truck and drove up there though they hardly ever went there. Wichita has a lot of one-way streets and accidentally Al happened to get on one going the wrong direction. The cars coming at him were honking and veering to the edge to get by. A cop noticed the ruckus, spotted Al and pulled him over. The cop strolled up with a smile to Al's window and asked him, "What do you think you're doin', Old Timer?" Al replied, "Well, we were goin' to the auction but it must be over because everybody's comin' back."

One morning I was sitting reading in my friend's living room when the screen door suddenly yanked open and a large middle-aged woman with red hair thundered through. "I heard you want your hair dyed," she bellowed. I had never seen her before. I couldn't find words to reply. "Well, I'm here to do it," she said, seeming somewhat surprised by my silence. "I was just at the post office," she added to illucidate. "Ah!" I replied, "Um, ok." Sheepishly I followed her into the kitchen to the sink, hoping my hair was not going to turn out orange-red. She happily told me the stories of the day and dyed my hair a very nice dark brown. She admitted that she could bake a lemon meringue pie in a toaster oven and invited me to come on over and have some. I thanked her kindly and we drove the two blocks back to her house. For some reason everyone in Elk Falls drives everywhere in town, though the hamlet by definition is tiny. I could walk from anywhere to anywhere in maybe ten minutes past pretty houses (some are junky but no matter) on non-exhausting hilly lanes shaded by trees and other delightful foliage. There is no litter at all, the air is clean, the sky blue with chubby white clouds, most of the dogs unleashed and friendly, no noise except the incredibly loud noontime town whistle and the tweet of the abundant birds. I have no idea why anyone would bother to drive there, particularly since exercise is a good idea, all the food being deeply fried in lard and salt and the only other things of sustenance granulated sugar and watery coffee. Oh, and I forgot, tomatoes, the main topic of conversation for months. But I'll get to that later.

That first week I went with the friendly large redhead to visit her home and have a piece of lemon pie from the toaster oven. She showed me her new house that she and her husband had built next to their old house. The new house had intended to be a restaurant but when it folded, they moved in, leaving the old house to pack with storage and inhabit by brown recluse spiders. Her husband was very slight and thin, a gentle man filled with goodwill. He volunteered whenever he could to help fill in pot holes or any other town task that needed done. At one point he bought a very beat-up small old Toyota pickup for $100 that he just adored. It didn't matter much that the truck didn't run well enough to drive out of town because it was perfectly good for getting around within town. For his birthday one year I gave him a used repair manual for it. After he opened the present, he held the book lovingly in his hands with a wide, sweet smile on his soft, wrinkled face. But back that first week, his wife the redhead and I settled down on their two-step stoop that first day I met her and gazed down the street for a while to where the post office sat. Then she took me over to see her trailer that was for sale on the next lot. Suddenly on the walk back to her house she stopped. "Listen," she said, "You look real tired. I need somebody to stay in the trailer, you know, make it homy cause I'm tryin to sell it and it's hard to sell a trailer if nobody's livin in it and makin it look homy. I wouldn't charge no rent. Just utilities. You look like you need some rest. How about take a break from that city life of yours and stay here a while?" The funny thing was, I had just been realizing how tired I was after six years of constant study and how nice it was just to be able to stroll down a dirt road watching the hawks soar and the sunflower fields turn as the sun passed by them. And after all, I had to find a place where I could settle in and write my dissertation. I accepted.

A Valentine's Day Wedding

2011-02-14T13:25:00.000-08:00

Today is my wedding anniversary to my second husband, Chris McHugh. Was getting married on Valentine's Day a cliche, campy? No, it was classic, it was lovely; it was fantastic. I could never have wished for a wedding more suited to who we were and what we wanted.

My first husband, Fred Hatt, and I had done the conservative thing, oddly since we both were students and artists. But there were our families and it was the first wedding for both of us. So we rented the white chairs for a whole lot of guests, bought a giant tiered cake, rented his tux, bought tons of champagne, food, plates, etc.. It was nice having it at Palisades Park in Santa Monica but there was so much stuff to buy and rent that it cost so much that we had to compromise on the quality of everything. Thus, the cake looked good but had no flavor, the champagne was the cheap kind, etc. Kind of disappointing. Seemed more like a movie set wedding than a real one.

So nine years later when Chris and I were going to get married I said how about we do it differently. How about we need far less so we can pay far more for the things we do need. He said yeah, sounded good. That was the last year of the 80's and first year of the 90's and Chris and I lived in New York City so this was very possible, to find quality in anything we wanted. He bought a gorgeous designer suit and a killer silver tie. I bought a champagne-tinted suit from a little shop in Soho. The jacket bodice was Irish linen and the sleeves were Irish lace. The skirt was entirely lace with lining, straight, mid-calf, perfect. I bought a lovely wine-hued hat and his aunt and uncle had delivered to me a lovely bouquet the morning of. My shoes were also in linen and I had them dyed to match the suit. I invited only one good friend, an actress from Hooper, Nebraska, Lori Gustafson, and he invited his best friend, Danny. We ordered the cake from Dean and DeLuca (which needs little description; suffice to say everything is fabulous) and instead of a huge, typical wedding cake we bought a small, single-layered chocolate raspberry delicious cake with soft white glazing decorated with a few simply lovely white flowers. We bought one bottle of the finest champagne we could find. On Valentine's Day, 1990, I put the cake and the champagne, four pieces of china, silverware, four champagne glasses and cloth serviettes into a picnic basket and Chris and I, Lori and Danny boarded the commuter train north from New York City to Groton, Connecticut. My grandmother on my mother's side and scads of generations before her had been from a small town next to Groton called Noank, on the Atlantic. It has a small pier, fishing boats, pretty houses. My grandmother's name is hand-written into the 1901 birth record book in Groton where vital statistics from Noank are recorded. Chris and I applied for our marriage license in that same old office. Then we walked to the Justice of the Peace's home, which was a white clapboard house with doilies on the furniture in his living room where we were married. He had been marrying people in that house for decades. Then we four walked down to the pier where we opened the picnic basket, took out the china and the silverware, the serviettes, the lovely delicious little cake, the champagne and champagne glasses. We each had one quarter of the cake and one glass of champagne that crisply beautiful day on that little pier with the blue sea and sky before us. We toasted to love and happiness. Then we wandered back to the train where Lori and Danny boarded the train heading back to New York City and Chris and I boarded the one for Boston. We had booked the bridal suite in one of the best hotels in Boston, the Bostonian, for three nights. There was a fireplace in a perfectly tasteful room and room service would bring extra pillows, logs for the fire and roll in a table any time day or night covered in a heavy white tablecloth upon which well made and well served, anything you could think of ordering. It was just perfect.

I met Chris about a year after Fred and I divorced. I had been sending my plays off to New York and L.A. for a few years when Fred and I lived in Oklahoma. I happened to join a grassroots women's writer's group in NYC. Everything they offered was affordable, including seminars and conferences. One conference was to introduce new writers to literary agents and artistic theater directors. It cost only $10. I sold our piano for the plane ticket and stayed a few days with my friend from college, Meredith Jacobson. I was a total rube, the only one at the conference in an aqua business suit off the rack from an Okie clothes shop, holding in my hand my newest play, The Beekeepers. I found the artistic director I thought should take it and cornered him, shoving the play in his face, saying take it, take it, it's good. He, horrified, waved me off with the hand that wasn't holding the martini, saying, "Make an appointment make an appointment!". Since I was only going to be there two more days, I found a pay phone in the hall, called his secretary and made an appointment to see him first thing the next morning. The next morning I only had to walk one block to his office. His company, Dramatic Risks, was housed in the R.A.P.P. Arts Center in the Lower East Side on Fourth Street between Avenues A & B and Meredith lived in a tiny studio apartment on Third Street between Avenues A & B. She was just starting her business as an extras casting agent. She and I had gone to USC Cinema together, same year, graduating together. I remember the second I dropped my luggage on her floor, she said, let's go to the galleries. She had a gallery guide in her hand for right there in her neighborhood. We walked out her door. In both directions and all over that neighborhood were galleries for new artists and off-off Broadway theatres.

When the artistic director of Dramatic Risks, Mark Grant Waren, showed up at the theatre building, to his surprise and no doubt chagrin, I was waiting, play again in hand. He took it but refrained nicely from being too sarcastic about my chances. I, elated, went back to Meredith's and then back to Oklahoma. A few months later a theatre in Hollywood called First Voices accepted one scene from The Beekeepers as part of a New Voices set of staged readings. I went out to L.A. and stayed with my friends, the actress Patricia Purwin and her husband the lighting designer, Ed Layton. The afternoon the scene from my play was going to be performed, Patricia's phone rang just as I and Patty and Ed and several friends from USC Cinema were about to walk out the door. It was Fred on the phone back in Enid. He said a letter had come from the Dramatic Risks Theatre in New York. I said oh, don't open it now! He said, yes, that he should, that right now was the perfect moment since I was on top of the world. I said all right reluctantly and he opened the letter. "You've been accepted!" he yelled into the phone. "They're going to put on The Beekeepers!" I turned to everyone standing in the room looking at me, the door open for us to leave. I held the phone up in the air in triumph and yelled, "I'm bi-coastal!"

I was invited by Dramatic Risks to be a playwright-in-residence for the upcoming summer. There was no way I could afford such a thing and told them, sadly. I would need an apartment, at least a room, and a job, right away. I said I couldn't do it. They phoned me back an hour later and said they had a job and a room for me. It seemed the R.A.P.P. Arts Center leased their huge building from the Catholic Church next door. The building had been an insane asylum, a convent and an orphanage. Now it was a theater complex and a stipulation in the lease required that one person live on the premises and work as the facilities director, renting the spaces for reheasals and performances. That person had to be the one to make sure everyone was out and all the doors were locked at night, locking themselves in. They gave me the job and the mother superior's old cell on the top floor. I found some furniture in the basement that suited the room fine. There were workshops every day. A publicist who did pieces on theatre wrote an article about me being this up and coming new playwright; it was published in the New York Daily News. My play, The Beekeepers, had a staged reading with a full audience. Life was good. Then the summer came to a close and I had to go home. But they asked me to stay on as a permanent playwright in their troupe, which cleverly consisted of both playwrights and actors in teams of two; if the actor got a role, he'd mention his playwright partner to the director; if the playwright got a script accepted, she'd mention her actor-partner to the director. I phoned Fred and asked if he wanted to move to New York City. You bet! he said. He was a painter, after all, and what better place than New York City for a painter? I went home; we split up the tasks. He was to fly to NYC as soon as possible where it was arranged that he could stay with a fellow playwright of mine, Stephanie Wilson, in Harlem. He was to find a job and an apartment. I was to pack up everything we owned, sell it, store it, get a rental agent for the house, put what I could stuff into our Volkswagon Rabbit and a UHaul trailer, force our two cats and dog into the car and drive it all to NYC by November. We both succeeded. Fred found a job in a film post-production house and sublet a garden apartment on a side street next to Brooklyn Academy of Music from a performance artist who had a long-term lease on the garden apartment and the parlor floor directly above. I drove the 1474 miles with two screaming, panting cats and a happy dog all the way to Brooklyn. When I arrived, Fred had been sleeping on the icy floor of the damp, half-underground apartment. But he was so happy and I was glad to be back. It was, after all, New York City where everything was possible.

A few days later I answered a two-line ad in the New York Times. It read, "Private eye needs researcher. B.A. required." An old hard-boiled private eye named Ed Goldfader had landed a job as Vice-President of a stock-holding recovery firm on Lower Broadway on Wall Street. He was V.P. of the research section, which meant twenty-four people who traced the current addresses of missing stockholders. Ed hired me and two other women, Bonnie and Naomi, on the spot. He wasn't one to bandy or dally. He was decisive and fair and I liked him a lot. I started working the nine to five, good regular job, pay ok, interesting, goal-based projects, bagels and coffee delivered every morning. It was in an old stately skyscraper with a marble lobby, a grandfather company on two floors. We tracers were on the 26th and the V.P.'s and contract negotiators on the 32nd. I loved the job. I was promoted twice in two years. I found two hundred missing stock holders and a few private missing persons on the side for Ed.

On weekend nights I worked at the Manhattan Brewery selling T-shirts. Everyone I knew from Dramatic Risks as well as actors from other troupes worked there. Hardly anyone worked there who wasn't an actor or writer. My friend Lori was a hostess who seated people. My actor-partner, David Blackman, a fantastic actor from Australia, was a bouncer and let people in at the door. Every moment we had free we talked theatre. One night two drunken yuppies came up to my counter and one bought the other a T-shirt for his birthday. The birthday boy was Chris McHugh, the guy I married a year later. He was giggling continuously, as he always did when drunk. His friend Danny bought him the T-shirt then they went and sat down. A little while later Chris came back, asking for my phone number, giggling. I figured it wouldn't hurt to give him my business card from my job on Wall Street so I did. Two weeks later he called, impressed. He had thought I was just a T-shirt salesgirl.

He was the most romantic, fun guy I've ever known. I was crazy about him from the moment I laid eyes on him. After, I don't know, several months of him buying me arm fulls of flowers from kiosks that we passed on the street and hanging out together more and more and more, he took me on a date to Club Med in the Bahamas for a week. My girlfriends at my company asked me, "How can you have just practically moved here and already have landed a straight, HIV negative, well-employed, single, gorgeous guy?! We hate you!" When I told them about the upcoming date in the Bahamas, well...they just shook their heads. Just lucky, they said. Chris and I took off for Paradise Island a few days later, went snorkeling, swimming, dining on the great recipes of the chefs of Club Med, wandering around the wonderful old town of Nassau. One night in the Italian restaurant on the Club Med resort, we were seated with another couple, which is the way they do it there. I went off to get dessert and when I came back they were looking at me funny and Chris looked pale. I glanced back and forth at them and then noticed that the whole restaurant had gone quiet. He had told everyone but me what was about to happen. He slid awkwardly to his knee on the floor in front of my trembling chair, held out an incredible ring, a cylindrical emerald pierced by a gold pin that was set on either end into a gold band, made at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exact copy of a ring from King Tut's tomb. He asked me in a shaking voice to marry him. I sat there dumbfounded. Then I heard loud pounding behind and around me. All the people in the restaurant had begun pounding on their tables. Then they started yelling, "Yes, yes, yes!" I looked into his eyes. Not just yes but hell yes.

It's a Hamlet not a Village

2011-02-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

My train was a couple of hours late, arriving in Newton, Kansas at around 5 a.m. My friend was sleeping in her car and staggered around helping me get my luggage, her hair wild, her eyes blinky. It had been a while since I'd seen her, a few years, more than that. I think the last time was when she and her daughter visited my second husband and me in New York City for a few days and he and I got into a terrific argument about how to get them back to the airport (while we were driving them there) and by the time we finally screeched up to the drop-off curb at Kennedy they had almost missed their flight and both lept out of the car, completely freaked out as only Midwestern women can be having been trapped in a small sedan during a down and out fight between a native New Yorker and a Californian who can express herself.

The plan was two weeks R & R. She had somewhat recently moved to this tiny town, which she proudly called a village, boasting this as she did anything that made everyone realize she was a Democrat (surrounded of course by Republicans, it being rural Kansas). It was that recently invented catch phrase that attracted her, "It takes a village." She had it written on a placard by the cafe and just loved it. She was one of those yuppies who finds a place they think is ideal and then does their best to change it, thinking the natives will be overjoyed that at last someone superior to them has arrived to direct them on how to fix all their errors in thinking. But a couple of days later when I was telling a colleague in England on the phone about it, he asked what the population was. When I said around ninety, he replied that settlement types are defined by population ranges and that at that small, Elk Falls is not a village. It's a hamlet.

So we drove a couple of hours toward Southeastern Kansas, Elk County to be exact, the poorest county in Kansas, which is saying a lot, with a total population (of the whole county) of 3000, most of them related and in often untasteful ways. Thus, there is a somewhat larger percentage of retardation and learning disabilities than in the rest of the country. And regarding the general population, after having lived in that county now for four or five years, I usually so graciously say that if there is an intelligence curve in the U.S. and clearly there is, if the smartest collection of people are in, where, arguably Boston? New York? then the other end of the rainbow is smack dab right in the center of Elk County, Kansas. Is that wrong for me to say that? Non-PC? Perhaps. Live a day here in my shoes and then tell me if I'm wrong. I dare you. It's possible of course that I'm a wee bit bitter. But that's to be seen.

As we drove back those two hours towards her new rented house in the "village" of Elk Falls, our conversation awkwardly fell on her son. I had known him since he was twelve years old in Enid, Oklahoma, when she had hired me to be his tutor. I don't know exactly how many years had passed since then but he was a young man in his twenties now. She started telling me how well he was doing. Her voice was anxious, strained. I didn't know how to respond and mostly didn't.

I had met her in the early 80's through her husband of the time, who was my chiropractor. He said his wife was writing a smarmy historical romance novel and had joined a local writer's group. I had majored in screen writing at U.S.C. (L.A.) and had switched to writing plays and short stories since graduating a few years before. I thought the writer's group sounded fun. I phoned someone, went to a meeting and joined. It was pretty entertaining. My chiropractor's wife would brazenly read aloud passages on blow jobs with a tiny nervous woman sitting next to her who was writing a book about her love of Christianity. A colorful cowboy who was trying to break into the western novel market, Johnny Quarles (and who was successful several years later), was a member. He and I worked at the same radio station where he was a sports announcer and I was the morning drive-time D.J Since I had been sent to the workshop by her husband, my chiropracter, the smut writer and I became friends quickly. Those were actually really good days, in Enid, Oklahoma. I was in my mid-twenties, writing like mad. My first husband, Fred Hatt, and I hadn't been married long and we were pretty happy. He was and is a painter and I have always had a lot of respect for that about him. I had met him at U.S.C. where he had a double-major, cinema production and painting. In Enid, he worked at the radio station, too, where he at first did morning drive-time until we switched so that he did afternoons (since he preferred to sleep in, being an artist) and I did mornings. Fred is still a painter and has lived and painted in New York City now for, let's see, at least twenty years. I've posted one of his paintings that I own and his website on this blog, if you'd like to see his work. I'm glad that when we divorced he was nice enough to give me several paintings, mostly the ones he'd done of me in those early days. I have them proudly hanging still. The one I've posted is of me sleeping with my guardian angel looking over me. And I just love his parents still; I visited them several months ago and although decades had passed and I had been married a few times since, they were wonderful to me. Harold and Martha Hatt, of Enid, the best in-laws a girl could hope to have. Harold was a Ph.D. in Theology and Philosophy and taught at Phillips University in Enid. He was originally from Vancouver and had taken his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne, his dissertation on Sartre's Being and Nothingness before it was translated into English. He had taken his young family to Paris when Fred was around 11 or 12 and Fred told me his dad had taught him the history of philosophy every night while they washed out the family's socks, their assigned daily chore. Harold loved puns and you couldn't laugh at them or it would encourage him. He would make more and the more he did the worse they got. There are a lot of great stories about Harold. Martha was from Picayune, Mississippi and still called her father "Sir". Her uncle had been from Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner had been the post master. She had asked her uncle one time what Faulkner had been like. He replied that he was a lousy post master.

The thing that was great about Enid in the early 80's is that the S & L Scandal hadn't kicked off a depression in the Midwest yet so things were still pretty good. Fred and I were able to qualify for a house that only cost $34,000, which my mother said with shock was the price of a car. The house was a pretty Queen Anne cottage and had been part of a gardening club in the 1930's so all Spring, Summer and even in the Autumn, all kinds of flowers and flowering shrubs popped out of the ground without our sightest effort. It was two-story with a great porch upon which I hung the requisite porch swing, painted red. The neighbors were friendly, we had fun jobs, I was writing and Fred was painting with plenty of room in that big house. And all of our friends owned their own houses, too, which was unheard of back in L.A. One friend, John Vater, lived on an enormous estate in a stone cottage near the formal rose garden and pool. His little house was filled with anthropological treasures he had gleaned from all over the wild world. Two of our friends, Gary and his significant other owned a great Victorian house with a turret. My chiropractor and his wife had a large modern house on the expensive side of town. We had dinner parties all the time and we'd all go from house to house and each house a totally different style, period, ambiance. We had plenty of time for everything, long conversations about art, culture, politics. We could garden and walk, have as many pets as we wanted, decorate our houses, work on our art. My New Ager aunt would call it a conjunction, where all kinds of good things came together. I still have a lovely silver and jade brooch that Gary made me for my 30th birthday and a great photo of me blowing out my candles. But perfect worlds don't last long. Perfect anything doesn't seem to last long, in fact, as my father had told me. Cherish those moments and I do. After the bloom faded, Gary's significant other cheated on him and got AIDS. When he was close to dying he held a gun to Gary's head and said if he had to die he was going to take Gary with him. Thankfully, he didn't pull the trigger. Gary survived, his significant other didn't and Gary had to live with HIV that he had caught from his cheating partner. Too sad, he moved north. John Vater also died of AIDS and had his ashes sent to friends on the four corners of the earth to scatter. I got one of my plays accepted in New York so Fred and I joyfully moved there, though we divorced not long afterwards. And my chiropractor started cheating on his wife with his best friend's receptionist. My friend, his wife, lost it. She followed him around semi-crazed suspiciously noting his movements. I rode with her once when she couldn't be reasoned with. She knew he was at a spa with this twenty-years younger receptionist. At the spa, she lept out of her car and raced in, catching them, making a scene. It unraveled worse from there. But she had cheated on her first husband, her children's father, to get him so karma wouldn't be wrong in giving it right back to her, right? The chiropractor said his wife spent too much of his money. She said he had a sex illness like Bill Clinton. She said he'd never marry a trashy girl like that with bad grammar. But he did. And so her kids, her son included, endured a second messy, hateful divorce. Her son whom I had tutored when he was twelve, who was clever and practical and headed for being great at business. Until he lost his second dad whom he adored, too. Then he started acting out. Once he was in college he drank, gambled, lost his car to gambling, failed college courses in a degree she wanted him to take. You'd think she'd get it but she didn't. When I was living in England those four years at the end of the millenium she'd email me how spun out he was. She had intentions and he was not fulfilling them. Two men in her life had disappointed her and he wasn't going to be a third. Then she started saying that she thought he was schizophrenic and I started to panic. She worked as a psychiatric social worker and was used to terms like that. And she wasn't one to be able to look at herself, to see a pattern in her own abuse of substances, her own disloyalties, her own over spending, her own crazy behaviour. No, it had to be him. So one day she wrote me that he had gone off yelling at her in the house and had damaged some of the furniture. In my opinion the poor boy had had enough of double-standards, of bottling up what he needed to say to her. And when he finally did, he did it wrong. He told her that he heard voices. Maybe he did or maybe he knew it was the one thing that might scare her into starting to listen. Instead, she called the men in white coats and had him committed. She signed the papers that he, in her opinion, was a paranoid schizophrenic.

So we rode in the car in the early morning to this hamlet of Elk Falls. Idyllic, she said it was. It was tiny all right, only two paved streets that crossed. A pretty river with a nice waterfall. A bit forested, not what you'd expect Kansas to be like, slighly rolling hills. Three businesses, not counting the post office: a pottery shop, a quilt shop and a cafe, as downhome as it gets. No police, no laws, no zoning, no licenses needed for anything. Local guys filled in the pot holes in the street, the cafe changed hands every few months or so because it never made much but everyone wanted to keep it open. I walked over the whole town the first day; it didn't take long. After a couple of days my friend said how about going with me up to Wichita? She had to get some new training and I could spend the day with her son. She said now that he was on heavy psychotropic drugs for life he was fine.

She dropped me off at the airport in Wichita where I was to meet him. He was supposed to drive up to the drop off curb and pick me up. I waited three hours and he still hadn't showed. So I phoned him. He was still asleep but lept up the moment I called. Hadn't heard the alarm, just like the slightly disorganized young man I had once known. We hadn't seen each other in years and I was nervous, thinking maybe she was right, maybe schizophrenia had kicked in in his early twenties, as it is in fact apt to do. Then he drove up. In his beat-up car, with pizza boxes and empty pop cans on the back seat, grinning from ear to ear. He was that same boy I had tricked into loving reading by giving him Sherlock Holmes instead of the Silas Marner they were doing in class. We spent the whole day together going to all the thrift stores he knew in Wichita. We had a great day talking about the old days, laughing at mostly everything. After several hours we pulled up to a parking place at Macdonalds. Instead of going in to get something right off, we sat there a minute. The time had come to bring up difficult subjects. He sat directly forward, looking straight out the windshield. He said, "I'm schizophrenic." I said, "I don't believe it." He turned and looked at me, shocked. "Everyone believes it," he said. "I hear voices." "I don't believe you," I said and I said it in the tone I had used when I had tutored him into not cutting his nose off to spite his face and instead get the grades he could really earn. "I know all about everything," I said. "And I think you lied that you hear voices. I think you told your mother that to hurt her as much as you could for all her betrayals. But she turned it right back on you and betrayed you again, one more big ass time and now you've got this on your medical record for life, now nobody would believe you if you said any different, now you're stuck with it." He sat staring silently out the windshield at the brick wall of Macdonald's. Tears welled up in his eyes. Then he said, "Well, thank god for Disability."

Skipping to Kansas

2011-02-11T13:53:00.000-08:00

I had taken three degrees in fine and performing arts then switched to historical linguistics where I then spent four years at Cambridge University and two at the University of Pennsylvania, got my M.A. in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and had been accepted to do the Ph.D also at Penn. My brother and I had gone to Paris for several weeks to celebrate my M.A. and while we were there he suggested that instead of doing the Ph.D. at Penn, which was extremely expensive and as I was on all student loans, how about if I applied to take the degree at a French school? I had been to Paris many times in my life, most recently while I lived in England so I had friends there, had learned street French on my own pretty well and was getting very familiar with the city, at least the center, touristy, cool part. My brother thought Paris was fantastic, particularly when we discovered that he was the spitting image of Louis XVth in the portrait that hangs in his bedroom in Versailles. But I'll get back to that. So I went back to Philadelphia, started the Ph.D. there and thought about it. Lucien, a friend of mine in Paris, volunteered to take a dissertation proposal around to professors who could be prospective supervisors. Lucien is a retired physics teacher so he knew the how-to of it. I wrote up Plan A and sent it to him. I got a few emails from somewhat interested parties saying they had seen or read my proposal and then I got one from a professor at l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, a research institute housed in the Sorbonne. He said he was intrigued by my work, interested in working with me and had admitted me to l'EPHE. I just needed to come back to Paris. I accepted, sold everything in my dorm room at Penn and hopped a plane for a new life in France.

Unfortunately, though l'EPHE had been a separate school from the Sorbonne since the late nineteenth century, it had never applied for a U.S. Department of Education code number. Imagine the gaul. Outrageous for a prestigous French school not to have thought of that. At any rate, no matter how I argued with SallieMae there was no giving me student loans without that code number. The administration at l'EPHE seemed perplexed then confounded then somewhat horrified. They couldn't believe it. I couldn't get the student loans I needed just because they hadn't applied for a number? How can we Americans live like that? One of the secretaries compassionately handed me a number torn from a slip of paper, probably from her dry cleaning receipt, saying kindly, how about using this one, will it do? I tried to explain the official nature and non-random specificity of such a thing as a U.S. Dept. of Ed code number to no avail. I tried to explain that we Americans are used to being treated like a number but they seemed to think that was an odd way to live. At any rate, my supervisor and the administration went over my letters of recommendation and my transcripts and I met with my supervisor a few days later. He said it had been decided that I had had quite enough coursework; it was clear I knew what I was talking about. All I needed to do was write the dissertation and if I couldn't afford to stay in Paris because of this number lack, I could go home or anywhere else and write the dissertation, as long as I stayed in touch with him via email and snail mail. Sadly, I had to agree. But where to go? Back to Cambridge was desirable but without my old student visa and no work visa, it wasn't feasible. Back to the U.S.? Maybe Philadelphia where I had just spent two years doing my master's degree and where I had just left? No one would have hardly realized I had gone anywhere. I could get an alumnus library card, go to the seminars, probably get one of my jobs back at the university. Looking back, I wish I had done that. But there was also the choice of going home to the Bay Area where I had spent very little time in the past six years. I could see my family, hang out at my favorite coffee houses, go to my favorite bookstores, see old friends, maybe settle back there. I figured at least I could go visit them for a bit and decide for the more long term while I was there. As always I was dirt poor. When you go to college you don't experience poverty at the level at which you actually are. You have student loans, a tight schedule, work study jobs, dorm rooms, automatic comrades who become friends. You don't feel poor. You're busy as can be, engaged in studying subjects that are challenging and fascinating, you have hard deadlines, you have clear goals, you don't think about the ordinary things of life. It's a heightened experience, a safe, velvety life, that Ivory Tower.

So I went home to the Bay Area, moved in with my mother and brother for awhile. My dad had passed away several years before. My brother was at that point playing his horn in musical theatre, if I remember right, and my mother, having retired from the library early had set to traveling a lot with AARP. She went to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Kenya, a cruise on the Med, Egypt, bringing me back a variety of objets d'art to my intense and worried specification. When she was about to embark for the safari in Kenya I forced her to read a book on African masks and then tested her at the airport before her plane took off. When she returned she said with disgust that she had brought me two and both were horribly dirty and ugly. I was of course elated. I sneered that she brought my brother a cheap, brightly-painted new touristy mask, worth of course zip. At some point my brother and I got into a heated argument and I moved into the city with my aunt and uncle. My aunt, who is married to my mother's brother, is Portuguese, from the mysterious Azore Islands. She believes that they are the tip of what is left of Atlantis and she twirls crystals with her New Age group each week, though she left the Azores with her parents to move to Boston quite young, sports a thick Boston accent and wears gloves and a cute little hat to Mass. It was interesting to be with them for a couple of months but I wasn't getting a lot done on my dissertation. I decided it would probably be best to take the train back to Philadelphia and do the work there. I booked a berth on Amtrak for Philly.

I've taken the train many times across this country and when I can I go first class. I traveled from the Bay Area to New Orleans when I was in my twenties second class but it's even hard to go that far in one seat when you're young. But there's more to it than that. When you take Amtrak second class you have to jam your luggage whereever you can, you have to sleep in your seat, albeit that it usually will drop back pretty far and is relatively comfortable. And yes, you can walk through the different cars. But the key difference is the food. A second class ticket is for just a seat. You can book a place in the dining car but it's beaucoup expensive. Or you can pay $8 (at that time) for a microwaved soggy burger in the bar car (doubt if it's cheaper now). You can bring on food but a bag of pretzels can get pretty bland pretty quickly. However, if you take first class and get the smallest berth, three meals a day in the dining car is included in the ticket. You can find deals and discounts and figure out the best day to book first class to get a ticket way cheaper, just like you do with a flight. It doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. It does cost more but is it ever worth it. You can check many pieces of luggage and a porter in a red cap will drive you with your carry-ons right to the first class car if you'd like. He'll help you carry it to your little tiny wonderfully snug room. The little berth has two beds, one high up that folds down and one that becomes two chairs and a table during the day. There's a tiny bathroom and a tiny t.v. The dining car sits between second class and first class so you can leave everything in your room and not worry about it being bothered. Instead of having to go stand in line to make a reservation in the dining car, the porter comes to your room and asks you when you would like to eat each meal. While you are off to breakfast, he'll make your bed and leave whichever newspaper you'd like to read on return. When off to dinner, he'll turn down your bed, whether you'd prefer the table and chairs turned into your bed or to climb up to the higher bed where you can lie there in your jammies with extra pillows, watching the view go by from the windows and sleeping like a baby, the train at night like a gently, regularly rocking bassinet. The porter leaves soft drinks and coffee and tea always sitting ready for the free taking at the end of your car. Your car usually has only about ten rooms and after the train starts, most of the people open their doors and after several days they've gotten to know each other. One of my closest friends I met in a first class car from San Francisco to Philly when I was still at Penn. And the three included meals in the dining car are divine. The tablecloths are thick and starched white, there is heavy silverware and china, you sit with interesting strangers in interesting conversations watching this country's magnificent countryside pass by the window. The meals are terrific and everything is included in your ticket except wine and tip. It's fabulous. When you take a flight you pay way too much money to be manhandled, frightened you might crash, jammed into a tiny seat, forced to eat plastic food and to listen to screams of babies and snores of bloated fellow passengers just to get from A to B. When you take first class Amtrak the moment you step on the train you're on vacation. Three or four days later when you reach B you don't want to get off. I could take a vacation that was only being on the train for several days and never getting off and it would be heaven. When you're on first class Amtrak you feel like Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. I swear to God.

So I bought my ticket to Philly. Then I happened to talk to an old friend whom I had known when I lived five years in Oklahoma. She had moved to a tiny town, a hamlet, actually, of only 90 people, in Southeastern Kansas. She said, hey, why don't you buy a ticket here instead of Philly. I'll pick you up and you can take a couple of weeks R & R, which you probably need for sure, and I'll take you back to the train when it's over and you can jump back on the train and buy a ticket to Philly. I thought that was a terrific idea.

Chain Child

2011-02-09T07:34:00.000-08:00

From the first day of summer vacation from school until Labor Day, every year that I was growing up, we spent out in the wilderness surveying. Sometimes it was one big job and sometimes two but never more, which meant either we camped all summer in the mountains or in the desert or or a combination of the two. Dad taught and tested me on how to survive under dire conditions, one dire condition at a time. When I was eight we spent half the summer in a place called Saline Valley in the Mohave Desert. He had a 1952 Mercury that he had bought new. It was seriously made of steel. Years later the brakes went out and I rolled hard into the back of a brick service station. So worried what Dad would say when I brought it home wrecked, I got out and gingerly walked to the front. There wasn't a scratch on the fender but there were hunks of brick broken out of the wall. So back when I was eight, in the middle of the horrific desert of Saline Valley in the middle of summer he instructed me to climb under the car and mark where the tires were, then put the car in neutral, then push the car by myself a few feet forward. Then he handed me a shovel and said dig a ditch between those marks a couple of feet deep. Then I had to push the car back over the hole. He said if ever I was driving in the desert and ran out of gas or the car overheated or died for whatever reason, I was to dig a hole just like that and spend the day in the ditch under the car where there was slight coolness and constant shadow, write help on the roof with something, and just wait. I argued that I wouldn't be stalled in the desert alone in the car since I was only eight. But he said you never know. Better to learn now. I had to find something in the car made of plastic, anything, even part of the seats if necessary, then shape it into a funnel, tie it or tape it or bind it. Then take a cup or a bowl or anything that would hold a little water. Put the cup on the hood of the car by the windshield wiper and place the funnel against the angle of the windshield with the tip end in the cup. Balance it carefully like that and leave it. He said plastic is so dense that it sweats in hot sun and the tiniest bit of water will bead up and slide down into the cup. At sunset I was to get out of the hole since snakes and scorpions would adore that hole at night. I would have about a quarter of a cup of water in the cup from the sweating plastic beads. I could stretch, walk around but never to leave the area of the car. I could eat cactus, hang out in the car, which would now be cool and wait. Someone would find me and I would not be much worse for wear.

There were many lessons like this one. I know what to do if my car is tossed off a bridge in an earthquake into the bay, how to make a lifevest out of my trousers. It goes on. He sounds like a weird tyrant? Not a bit. His mother was English, born and grew up on the Isle of Wight. He would tell stories about her, how her mother made dresses for Queen Victoria, about his childhood in Michigan with Leigh and his dad who had wanted to be a Vaudville actor but since he had to take care of a family had become a dry goods salesman instead who hawked a cure-all elixir from his wagon drawn by a horse just to keep the old acting talent fresh. Dad's humor was dry like his mother's and he expressed it oddly and often. He would blatantly steal lines from a famous poet and then slightly change them. He would call me in and say he had written a poem and then stand, sober-faced and say it aloud, feigning pride. I remember one in particular. I believe it's mostly stolen from Byron. His version went like this: "Oft in the stilly night, hear the rabbit's lonely howl." That one was when I was six. I replied, sternly, "Daddy, rabbits don't howl." He looked pained and said, "Oh please don't criticize my great work!" He was so funny. But he only spoke when he was saying something funny or when he had something he thought was important to say but otherwise be completely silent. He could be silent for days, just standing staring out the window thinking or sitting in the rocker he inherited from his father, which I now have, smoking his pipe, reading books about survival, marking out the mistakes with a red pen. One day he told me that I was not required to love anyone in the family. He said that I was not just of our family but of a long thread of DNA going back as far as Mankind went back and as far forward as I or one of my cousins cared to send it. He said I might have naturally deeply loved my great-great-great grandmother or my descendant of six generations. He said people have to earn love, they don't just deserve it without deserving it because of how you happen to be related to them. Just because I was in our family didn't mean I had to love him or my mother. He said we earn love, we have to deserve it, never let an ingrate or someone mean try to make you feel guilty about love. Love is pure and has to appear naturally, of no coercion. He said never speak about one's own religious beliefs. One time he said one's personal religious beliefs are like a seed planted deep in the soil. You don't rip up the seed to see how it's doing, if it's grown roots, if it's growing. You tender it well and quietly. He said many things to me of this nature.

When a survey is being made, one drags a chain. A chain is a very long cloth tape measure wrapped up in a circle inside a solid case. At least it was then. I don't know about now. Now it's probably an electronic measurement. But then it had a round case with a handle to turn to wrap the tape back inside. I was assigned often as chain child, which meant that I pulled the tape as far as necessary to measure a survey line; it's called dragging the chain. Dad held the case and looked into his lovely complicated brass transit and told me to start walking. I pulled the chain on the invisible line that he was measuring. The only problem was in the mountains and desert it's not that easy to walk perfectly straight. There are bushes, trees, ditches, rivers, rocks. If I came to a big tree in the way he'd hand me an axe and say chop a V in the side until the chain goes straight. If we came to a cliff with a river below he'd say wrap a rope around a tree and shimmmy down, cross the river on stones or wade. There are many stories of those summer days. I figure in the eighteen years I lived with him we spent four and a half years camping out there somewhere in the wilderness.

Then Labor Day would come and we would drive back home. Mom would go back to the library and we would go back to school. Dad would spend our academic year teaching dancing in his dance studio that was attached to our house and draw the maps from the summer's survey in his back office that looked over the garden. When he retired he got a letter from the Bureau of Land Management saying that they wanted to tell him that he had never made one error, not in minute or degree, on any of his maps in his entire career. I have several of his maps, my favorite being pieces of heavy tan paper taped together in odd directions, the map hand-drawn in thin mechanical pencil in the field. He set the Bureau of Land Management letter up on his drawing table next to a photograph of his old friend, Claudette Jette, a ballerina in Montreal, who once gave me a beautiful soft, fluffy, stuffed white cat that my mother said was too nice for me to pet and put it way up on a high shelf. I stared at that cat for years but when I was old and brave enough to take it down, it had lost its shine and softness.

During the school year my mother would often go shopping with her sister. She would go back into his office where he was working on a map and say, "Watch the baby, ok?" (the baby being my brother) He'd smile and say sure. For Dad watching the baby meant waiting until he heard the door click. Then he would roll the crib into the dance studio and call all his friends, mostly gypsies, to come over and dance. They did ballroom, all the Latin ballrooms, flamenco, tap. My brother's first memory is being in his crib, surrounded by faces looking down at him smiling, music blasting in the background. Perhaps that's why my brother became a musician. Nurture or nature? One can never say for sure.

The Gene Pool

2011-02-08T06:54:00.000-08:00

My mother learned ballroom from my dad but that was just part of a finely-tuned life. She had gone to private schools growing up and then Berkeley and from there the requisite chaperoned graduation trip to Europe where she bought silk slips in Paris and many pairs of thin, soft leather gloves in Venice. She came from a old American family, descended from both Thomas Prence and Edmund Freeman of Plymouth and before that a few centuries of ancestors from England and before that many centuries from France. Her family scroll was 83 generations tall with no unbroken lines. She felt the comfort keenly of such a thick foundation.

Her grandfather had been a scientist and among other things had invented something called the process for coal gasification. He held patents in many countries. I have a stack of them right here on the desk with me. From time to time I open the old yellowed folders and gingerly remove them. The one before me right now is dated 1928 and the country name is typed as "British India". The patent is on large, slightly rough paper. The type indents the page, that old typewriter etching. The details are written with a pen dipped in black ink. A thin green ribbon runs through two holes, attaching together the pages and a deep scarlet seal presses the ribbon safe. This particular patent is for "an improved method of and means for treating oil bearing shales and kindred oil bearing minerals" and it lists my great-grandfather's home in London where he spent much of his time. There are patents here lying with it from Sweden, Bulgaria, Great Britain, Roumania, Germany, Argentine, Belgium and other wonderful places and yes, that is the spelling on some you may have thought I spelled incorrectly. Their spelling is part of the languid, lovely paper and seals and flowing ink, an other world that no longer exists.

My mother married my father on a lark or was it to be rebellious towards her mother. One will never know for sure. My father wasn't exactly what they were expecting. Besides his being a dancer, he had known so much about minerals, having spent much of his time on Mary Blaine mountain with other codgers digging mines by hand, panning for gold that he took a correspondance course and got his license as a mineral surveyor. The license covered the western states. When he wasn't dancing he was out in a desert or up in a forest surveying. For him, my mother was a twenty-six year old unscratched gem. There was no uncertainty there. And that made her feel like the center of the world and that was how she wanted to feel and that was how he made her feel for the next thirty years until he died. They were happily married, against all odds. But who can say what works? Even the experts don't know. Some of the online dating services say it's chemistry, some say harmony, some say just go on a date and see. As odd a match as it was, it worked for them.

My mother took her degree from Berkeley and got a job as an English teacher at a high school near my father's dance studio. Then she became the head of the department and then the head librarian. During the school year my brother and I went to school, my mother ran the school library and my father taught dancing and drew maps of his surveys. Then every year on the first day of summer vacation, we were piled into the car in our jammies at 4 a.m. and took off towards the wilderness. The surveying work was seasonal and Dad had lined up one or two jobs. The jobs would be in the mountain forests of the Pacific Northwest or the deserts of California and Nevada. They were always on private land and usually belonged to some old miner who wanted to make a claim or somebody who had inherited the property from way back and had no idea where it was. Sometimes we would have to leave the car behind and hike the final miles to the place where we were to make camp. Dad didn't allow tents or camp stoves or any of the typical camping equipment. We were lucky he allowed sleeping bags as he didn't use one. It was a pile of leaves for him and an old Army blanket. One year up in Idaho at the snow line we found an ancient iron bed just sitting there in the forest. It even had its springs. Dad said I could have it and I happily laid my thin sleeping bag upon it. He said I needed to watch out for lightning, which happened a lot up there that summer. He said that lightning just loved metal beds and as long as not a single part of my body was touching the actual metal while I slept, I wouldn't fry. He thought that was hilarious. I slept like a hibernating hamster, curled tightly at the bottom of the bag.

Tornado Season

2009-04-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

A long time ago I lived in Oklahoma. One night about 10pm, I was polishing my dining room floor when I saw on t.v. a storm warning, saying nothing about a tornado. I remembered that a window upstairs was open so I went up to close it. I was standing against the window trying to push it down (stuck double-hung). It was pitch dark. Suddenly I saw the sky turn a sickly green and heard what sounded exactly like a train coming right toward me, RIGHT toward me. Before I could even move, the house started shaking apart. The floor buckled, something crashed through the wall next to me, the ceiling cracked. I fell to the floor, knowing it was a tornado, though I'd never been in one before, and crawled down the stairs while the house shook like crazy. By the time I got to the front door it had stopped. I got the front door open. The front porch was totally demolished and a huge healthy maple tree (3 and 1/2 feet in diameter) that had been growing on my easement was torn out of the ground like a little weed and sent straight through the house like a javelin. The neighbors couldn't believe I was alive. They said I was blessed. I thought it was a warning.

I have come back to Kansas and last night I sat on the porch watching an enormous electrical and rain storm approach from the west, lightning charging over the whole sky. The news gave a tornado warning for the town over which it was. It told the people there to go to shelter. I stopped watching the news, since there is no cellar in this house, the friend I am staying with is gone for a few days and I know no one else in town nor where a shelter is. Besides, there might not be a warning once it hit here. And it hit here, at least the storm did, all night. It came over and then moved away and then came back. Directly overhead, I heard a lightning bolt hit the ground somewhere down the street. It was like the storm itself was circling this town. I heard a wild cat crying in the distance.

The Indus Valley Script

2009-03-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

I am a professional palaeographer. My specialty is undeciphered scripts of the Bronze Age from the Aegean to South Asia. I worked on the Linear A script from Crete with a world authority on the related script, Linear B, Professor J.T. Killen of the Classics Faculty of Cambridge University in England from 1996-2000. We created a methodology for representing language mathematically. The Finnish decipherer, Dr. Asko Parpola, told people in London and Helsinki about it and the British archaeologist Bridget Allchin told Dr. Greg Possehl at the University of Pennsylvania about it, who at the time was the head of the Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology. So, when I transferred to Penn, starting a M.A. in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, specializing in ancient scripts of South Asia, Dr. Possehl contacted me and happily convinced me to take all the Ph.D. core courses in Archaeology and several honors courses with him, where we started to work on the Indus Valley Script. The faculty in my own department also were interested in my applying the linguistic techniques they were teaching me as well as my own methods on the Indus Valley Script, so throughout my M.A. I worked on the Indus Valley Script, including the thesis for the M.A. After this, it was only natural to propose a Ph.D. dissertation on the Indus Valley Script, which I did and I was very happily accepted to a research institute that is housed in the Sorbonne in Paris, which is called l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section IV: historiques et philologique, under the supervision of the Tocharian specialist, Prof. Georges-Jean Pinault. I finished the dissertation and submitted it last November 2008. Prof. Pinault is picking the committee for the oral defense right now. The title of the dissertation is Une Description Morphologique de l'Ecriture Harappeen. As the title suggests, it is a comprehensive morphological description of the script, which means that I analyzed where and why each sign in the script appears in every word in which it appears, which is why it took me five years! It was 1900 pages long and Prof. Pinault wisely asked me to edit it down to 700 pages, which I did. Still, it's utterly unreadable though I hope it will soon earn me a Ph.D. The date for the oral defense is not yet set. I remember in what now seems like the distant past having feared the oral defense but now, after 46 terrifying days in jail, I very much look forward to discussing for three hours with four experts in my field my favorite subject! It now seems like the most wonderful thing to do in the world. It's like the punch line to that old joke, "it's too soon to tell" (if events are good or bad). Jail is horrible but man it makes you love life if you somehow are released.

Lecture on the Indus Valley Script

2009-03-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

Following a lecture I did on Problems in Decipherment for Doug's Forum in Benicia, California, Doug Snyder videotaped this section on the Indus Valley Script for You Tube.