He's Back!

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?
- Satchel Paige

Who knows what Columbus would have discovered if America hadn't got in the way. -Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)

Two Arizona chemists published a paper expressing concern over the uncontrolled use of odor-fighting socks, which may, when washed, pollute aquatic ecosystems with nanoparticle silver. Researchers in Virginia found that due to pollution the scent of flowers, which could travel up to 4,000 feet during the nineteenth century, now travels not even a quarter of that distance. Harper’s Weekly

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw
themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don't
make it of wood, you must make it of words. -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,
poet, novelist, essayist, and physician (1809-1894)

C3, the firm that developed Disneyland, announced plans to build a $500
million amusement park in Baghdad. Harper’s Weekly

The Danish company Agroplast announced plans to market cheap plastic dinnerware made from pig urine. Harper’s Weekly.

*******

No – for those of you who asked – that wasn’t me the Great White dispatched. I never wear a wet suit, though not only to keep from being taken for a sea lion. Dick Martin, conditioning for a triathlon, had the bad luck. An experienced open ocean swimmer and a vet, I’d bet he understood what being in the milieu our kind left a few eons ago means. Perhaps he would have considered rejoining the ocean’s food chain an honor. I would.

Last week Lacey and I watched the movie about the guy who lived among the grizzlies in Alaska – for 13 years – until they ate him and his girlfriend. As you watch the footage he took over the years you see he forgot one of the key senses we dropped in favor of our prized mind/consciousness: animal instinct. He thought he had very nearly become a grizzly. They never saw him as anything other than a potential sandwich. Nothing personal.

I always read the wedding articles in the Sunday NY Times Style section, because they tell who officiated and I look for my few friends remaining in the business. Last week two men marking their union – in the photo a black man with dreads and a white man who could have been in a Brooks Brothers ad in 1954 – explaining why they waited this long before applying to be matched with an egg donor and a surrogate mother so they could become parents: “We wanted to first get ourselves well established because we have very traditional New York City values.”

I am drawn to the rich ambiguity of Barack Obama’s cry: We are whom we have been waiting for, because, perhaps without intending to be quite so challenging, he’s providing a Zen suggestion that what is, is, and what will be, will be. Willy-nilly.

Traditional values? Whose tradition. Whose values?

The controversial pastor - who seems to be the worst we can find to besmirch Obama - was also received in the Clinton White House. The photo of John McCain embracing that pastor who called the Roman Catholic Church ugly things. Puts me in mind of the respectable Republican businessmen who generously funded my churches and my life for 30 years, all the while deploring my unsavory political and cultural views.

Whether this tumultuous political campaign means we are about to make a great leap ahead in our willingness to acknowledge the rich, unclassifiable assortment that reality provides, leaving behind some of the pious chimera, or will yet again freak out, will be for those who come after us to decide.

In the meantime we might consider the great white and the hungry grizzly, religiously obeying their traditional values.

Every so often I have a dream that reminds me that, though I am by almost any measure, old, I hang onto an awful lot of what I once associated with adolescence.

Last night I dreamed that a woman who has always had a mysterious hold on me suggested we have an affair. To kick the thing off I turned to give her a full on mouth to mouth kiss.

And found myself nose to nose with her husband.

So far as I can pull back the rest of the dream (which I think faded into oblivion at that point) he and i never consummated that kiss.

As I search my unconscious (which I suppose is an oxymoron; how can one search a data bank to which he has no conscious access?) for what about this woman continues to attract me, I draw a blank. She is attractive enough, nice enough, but not the very sexy or very bright sort who would really turn on my afterburners.

Here's what I think:

When I retired we moved from a rather idyllic decade on the coast of southern California to our 1830 farmhouse in rural southern Vermont. Though I was eager to retire and write (I thought; but it wouldn't be the first, nor last time I persuaded myself of something that turned out to be chimera), I honestly feared that moving into that old house in the middle of nowhere, where winter lasted from November to May, would likely be the catalyst for my inheriting my mother's mantle of agoraphobia and alcoholism, the twin plagues that ushered her into her grave at just about the age I am now.

My much more resourceful and activist wife searched the valley for someone who might be our friends, and came up with the couple - refugees from Manhattan - who have been our friends ever since. The wife came to represent a savior to me. Her husband, whom I consider a good friend, is too much a man, distant, emotionally removed, for me to glom onto.

I hark back to a time many decades ago when friends from Boston were visiting in Vermont where, in those days, we went for whatever weekends we could get away. It was winter, the pond had good ice and we and our bevy of small children were skating. One little boy (who is right now a Major in the Marine Corps, in Iraq for his third tour) skated by me, slipped, and as he righted himself, jerked the hockey stick into the air and clipped me in my eye.

I was immediately blinded in that eye as the blood flowed into it, and I skated over to the bank where several adults were watching. A woman whom I knew, mother of one of the children, calmly took my head in her hands, and while I bled onto her jacket, carefully examined the cut to see whether it had damaged the eye.

She assured me it was a fleshy cut above the eye, not terribly deep or large, and I took off my skates, went up to the house, cleaned the wound, and covered it with a band aid.

That was pretty much the end of that story. Except for me.

For years afterward I had flashbacks to that moment. In those flashbacks that woman was my savior. I dreamed about her, she filled my fantasies and I imagined a life in which she and I were together. An Idyll.

Maybe 10 years later, when I was on sabbatical, my normal defenses lowered as I began letting go of my professional life and embracing life as a writer, experimenting with new ideas and forms, I emailed the woman and rehearsed the events of that day and told her of the place she had inhabited in me ever since.

A couple of months went by before she responded, politely, cautiously, telling me that she was glad I thought of her warmly and was grateful for her help that day. But that she remembered nothing of all that.

Having been released from the steely grip of testosterone overdosing the past decade or so, I can now look at these events (and write about them) without the anxiety they once roused in me. I never felt confident that - given a modicum of encouragement, I might act on one of those fantasies of being saved by a woman who would put aside her own life in behalf of mine, and wreck both of our lives in a storm of belated adolescence.

There is no accounting for the impulses and appetites that rise from the shadowy depths of our unconscious. One reason I love the late chapter of life in which I now find myself, is the ability to look, compassionately, dispassionately, at hungers born in us in our earliest days, if not in our DNA as that egg and sperm set off cell division that would take my shape.

We are a species - like all species - with drives and instincts that predate anything for which we have language or understanding. To be able to watch one's dreams and urges with an eye toward those mysteries is rich.

Lots of speculation about why Obama has not been able to deliver the death blow to Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination.

In Salon today Walter Shapiro puts his finger right on it when he says Obama (nor Clinton) has said or done anything in recent months to make supporters of the other see clearly why they should switch.

The reasons for this - at least for Obama not doing this - explain the very basis for his candidacy and what will either get him elected or not.

Obama is the first person in my memory to run, not only without a clearly spelled out set of programs, but without believing new plans or programs are what the nation needs right now.

Well, not precisely that, because if he is elected new laws, policies and programs will surely flow from his leadership. But in his mind the leadership comes first.

Early in the campaign a reporter asked each of them for their understanding of the presidency, what it is for and how it is best used by the incumbent.

Senator Clinton said the job of president is managing the vast machinery of government. Unless the president has a firm grasp on the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy will quickly take the bit in its mouth and run with it, taking the president along for the ride.

Obama said he believes the job of president is to inspire a vision in the people that will cause them to rise up and demand of their government that it fulfill that vision. Obama's candidacy - an enigma to so many of those who have been around the game for a long time - is more vision and symbol than substance.

He is criticized for this by those who believe in programs.

I wonder what would happen if Senator Obama went into a period of near quiesence for the next month? If he were to say, "I have showed you who I am and told you why I think the moment is ripe for my presidency. Now I will give you the time to consider this and decide, letting the process run."

If ever there was a president who proved Obama's point, it is George W. Bush. He has become the living symbol of America as international bully and exporter of greed.

This election may well give us a measure of how much of the nation still holds to that picture of ourselves - the nation that came into unparalleled power with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that will use our financial and military might to muscle the rest of the world into adopting our ways - and how much of the nation has either given up hoping that we can bully the rest of the world into doing what we want, or never believed it was a good idea in the first place.

If Hilary Clinton gains the Democratic nomination, she and John McCain, both holding that view, the outcome will tell us only which of the two we think will carry it out better.

If Barack Obama is the nominee, the vote will be between two nearly opposite views of our nation and the world.

Everyone remembers Winston Churchill's saying that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.

But, when we get mired in the chaotic mud of democracy in action - as we have been for several months in the Democratic race for the nomination for president, we behave as if we are like Russians, eager to return to authoritarian rule so long as it keeps things running smoothly. For most of us.

Listening to the Democrats crying the blues over their primary race is sad.

Have we such short memories that I am the only one who remembers being glued to the TV in 1960, in 1968, 1972 as the Democrats went through their gyrations to decide their nominee?

In 1960 Kennedy and Johnson went to the convention, each within reach, but neither with enough delegates the seal the deal. Kennedy supporters were handing out tie clips fashioned in the shape of Johnson's latest EKG (Johnson had more than one heart attack and was known for his notorious eating and drinking habits), while Johnson supporters reminded delegates that Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, who had been FDR's ambassador to Britain at the start of WWII, had been a supporter of Chamberlain, who had defeated Churchill for Prime Minister by calling for appeasement of Hitler.

A favorite memory is of the camera picking up Bobby Kennedy who, having calculated that the Wyoming delegation could put his brother over the top for the nomination, did the high hurdles over the backs of scores of rows of chairs to tell the Wyoming delegates that they had a chance to make history. They quickly caucused and, while the TV camera stuck its nose into their huddle so all of us around the nation could see and hear, came to a unanimous vote and, a few minutes later, gave the nomination to the 41 year old junior Senator from Massachusetts.

In 1968, during a war equally unpopular as our Iraq adventure and with much greater upheaval in our streets - anti-war and racial - Hubert Humphrey and Gene McCarthy battled on the convention floor while protesters were beaten and arrested outside the convention hall in the streets of Chicago. Who can forget Mayor Daley giving the finger to Jesse Jackson as Jackson berated the convention over racism?

In 1972 McGovern gained the nomination even though he came to the convention with fewer delegates than the senator from Missouri who dared the press to catch him in sexual indiscretion. (They did.)

And we are all all strung out over the first woman and the first mixed-race man to have a shot at president still going toe to toe for the nomination a full six months before the election?

Makes one wonder how enthusiastic we really are about enduring the messiness democracy requires.

America Pie

One of those survey polls that are the staple of the internet diet breathlessly reports that contrary to expectations in our youth-worshiping culture, old people report being happier than any other age group.

Being of a certain age (b. 1940) I can confirm those findings. And I think I know why it is so.

We are the last generation – just before the Boomers – for whom the American dream of working hard and – if you’re lucky enough to outlive your work – having some years of your own, can come true.

Lest you think the New Deal was an extravagant giveaway, when the age at which an American could receive Social Security was set at 65, the life expectancy of an American male was – you guessed it – 65.

Herewith a summary of my road to the Finals – offered as exhibit A in the radical changes challenging us. Such an old-fashioned, red, white and blue American life, if the Democrats should go into their convention still without a candidate, I am considering throwing my hat in the ring.

My grandfather was Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Puerto Rico and the American Virgin Islands from 1915 – 1948. He traveled the vast region by boat reaching some more remote places only every 7 years where he married people and baptized their children in the same service. When he retired he was penniless and my father and uncle, neither one loaded, scrounged together enough to buy him a tiny cottage in Winter Park, Florida.

He had 7 children, 4 boys and 3 girls. The boys, thanks to church connections, all went to boarding school in Connecticut and on to Princeton, all on scholarship. The oldest boy became a doctor, the second a secondary school teacher and coach (he was an All-American wrestler and cox of an Olympic crew), and the youngest a research doctor at the University of Oklahoma. The girls went to boarding school and college and married. I would describe their lives as comfortably middle class.

My father, the third son and namesake, weary of poverty, made good use of a connection his father had with the Procter family and – in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression – took a job with Procter & Gamble. As a stock boy in a grocery store in the South Bronx, to learn the trade from the ground up. He went on to be District Manager of North and South Carolina in the 40s and 50s, and from there as Sales Manager for The Philippine Manufacturing Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of P&G.

I doubt he ever earned more than $20,000. But he was given stock options, all of which he exercised even when he had to scrimp to pay for them. He also bought shares in companies like GE that he thought were well managed, and paid a dividend. Which he always reinvested.

When he retired he still had every share of stock he had ever bought, except for a few shares which he had given to my two sisters and me. He lived comfortably for many years and became a pretty good water color artist, had several one man shows which paid for some nice trips.

When I graduated from college I went straight to seminary for 3 years and was ordained before my 26th birthday. It was almost 20 years before I made $10,000. But we lived in comfortable, sometimes sumptuous church housing and our children were often given tuition breaks in school and college.

Sometime in the late 1930s the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church went to J.P. Morgan and told him the sad story of people like my grandfather who, if they outlived their days as active clergy were destitute when they retired. Morgan agreed to set up a pension fund which today is the envy of the financial world. Unconscious as most clergy about money, I didn’t know every church was required to put 18% of my salary into my pension.

I have a colleague friend who says in his nightly prayers he thanks God for adding a day to his span, and J.P. Morgan for making him able to afford it.

I decided to hang up my spikes after 30 years, only to discover that the pension fund, hoping to clear out some of the dead wood, was offering an early retirement for which I qualified by one month.

Thanks to that pension, Social Security, a modest portfolio inherited from my father, and a Boomer age wife with a prodigious work ethic, the past 11 years have been the happiest and most creative of my life.

Until a generation ago my story was standard American middle class fare. Today it borders on exotic. My children who are better educated with many more skills than I have, work longer and harder with little expectation of a last chapter like mine. They have risen higher, are paid way more than I ever was, know infinitely more about managing finances than I ever did. And can expect to live pretty close to a century. They are subsidizing my Social Security and, much more, my health care.

That’s about the only blemish on my idyllic old age, wondering how they’re going to be able to have one of their own.

After a friend took strenuous issue with a recent entry to this blog in which I trashed Vice President Cheney - saying it was beneath my intelligence to join the silly left-wing media creation of the straw man - i gave some thought to this business of opinions and attitudes.

He said Cheney was no more despicable a public figure than "that millionaire murderer Ted Kennedy."

At least my friend succeeded in raising my hackles as much as I must have raised his.

I have a vivid memory of the summer of 1956 when - as a 16 year old student at a summer boarding school - I watched the Democratic Convention in the rooms of a master who taught history and was in the process of becoming my mentor.

My father worked for Procter & Gamble and I suppose his politics were mainstream Republican for those days, which meant Eisenhower over Taft. Very different from today but pro-business and certainly lilly-white and middle class.

I listened - uncomfortably at first, then curiously, finally with admiration - to the conversation that went on in the room that week as my mentor and several other faculty who I admired, aired their views. They were Adlai Stevenson Democrats, liberals of that day. My first exposure to intellectual liberals made an impression on me that has been lifelong.

I felt both a little daring and a little uncomfortable. I had heard my grandfather call Franklin Roosevelt a traitor to his class. (He even collected dimes with Roosevelt's likeness on them and, on the ferry ride across the Great South Bay to his summer place on Fire Island, dropped them overboard, putting his money where his mouth was.) I think I knew my mother - and our minister whom she adored and whom my father liked but regarded as a dreamer ill-suited to living in the real world - secretly admired Stevenson. But she kept her counsel in our family conversation.

When we lived in Charlotte - the years I was 5 - 11 - we had black maids. I loved them. I thought they loved me. They lived in tiny rooms behind our house with minimal services. From as early as I can remember it made me uncomfortable that we lived virtually under the same roof but so differently. I still remember the first time I rode with my father when he took Gertrude back to her house for the weekend. I guess I knew she had 3 sons and that she would of course live in "colored town." But until that moment I hadn't thought about the details.

We turned onto a dirt road and pulled up in front of a run down shack and she got out. My heart stood still.

When I was 11 we moved to the Philippines and the discomfort grew worse. We lived in a house behind a high wall with broken glass on top to discourage thieves from scaling it. (At least once they did, stealing sheets hanging on the clothesline.) Our back wall separated us from a barrio made up of shelters made from packing boxes with pieces of corrugated tin for roofs.

One day, walking home from a friend's, a group of boys from that barrio came out into the street and blocked my way, challenging me to a fight. "Hey Joe, want to fight?" Several had lead pipes and one had a Balisong, the local equivalent of a switchblade. I took off on a dead run for home, fumbling with the closure on our gate when I made home, sure I would receive a fatal blow to the head before I could get it open. Turns out they had achieved their aim and hadn't chased me, only laughed derisively as I ran.

I never told my parents. Afraid they wouldn't let me walk to my friend's house again. But maybe even more because I had no trouble understanding what was behind their aggression.

I have never been able to sort out how much of my discomfort about all that was my innate sense of the unfairness, the injustice, and how much my relief that I hadn't been born into that.

The conversation in the master's apartment my 16th summer was the first time I heard smart people of my own class talking about their concerns for the world's injustice and suggesting one of the obligations of government was to do what it could to set it right. Before that I think I assumed blur collar workers, union workers, were Democrats, and all smart, educated white collar people were Republicans.

And that was just the way it was.

The exhilaration I felt at the possibility that one could be educated, middle class and still ally one's self with efforts to make the world more fair, has stayed with me.

I am not so naive as to think the Democratic Party has either succeeded in that huge complex effort. (In fact when Bill Clinton signed the so-called Welfare Reform Bill I wondered if there was any place on the political spectrum one might find such an effort, and understood why Ralph Nader - whom I hold responsible for giving us the Bush years - keeps running.) But the Democratic Party still has that in its history. Its embrace of its own plutocrats to finance the insane cost of political campaigns has badly watered down its commitment to people on the lower end of the economy.

But it still remains the Party that insists that creating an atmosphere in which big business can prosper is not enough. God knows Hilary Clinton, and her $100M recent income, is hardly the populist she likes to portray herself. (At least FDR never pretended to be anything other than the patrician he was). Obama has Harvard in his resume, and his agenda would shock Adlai Stevenson as being more Republican than Democratic, but in his personal history - and, I hope, in his heart - he holds the most promise I have seen in my adult life, of someone who might actually remain aware of the millions of Americans who struggle for the middle class existence we say is open to every hard-working American.

Thanks for listening. I had been wondering how I came to call myself a Democrat. And still do.

Oh, the ravages of time.

Last night I went to the local bookstore to hear Mary Roache speak about her latest book - Bonk; The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. (I think the title should be Boink, not Bonk, but never mind.)

I had read her previous book - Stiff - a study of cadavers, with the greatest fascination and appreciation for her courage and humor.

I decided to go hear her speak about this one after reading an interview and seeing a You Tube video of her speaking about the book. And, among other intriguing revelations, she told us that, when a researcher said he could find not willing subjects to have sex in his lab while he waved his ultrasound wand over their coupling, she volunteered herself. And her husband. Who must be either a saint, the world's most self-confident man, or his wife's most valuable research assistant.

Yes, they did that. And, while she said it was not the best sex she had ever had (she took notes all the while), and it likely could not have been done before Viagra, it accomplished its purpose and she now has a three dimensional film showing the anatomical details of human coupling.

I suppose I went to be titillated and I wasn't disappointed. No doubt I also hoped for at least the old age version of arousal. If so, I was disappointed.

Not by Mary.

She was everything I could have hoped. Cute, irreverent, outrageous, hilarious, pretending to be coy about discussing such once forbidden things in such a public forum, she more than lived up to her billing. I would have enjoyed an evening of her telling us how to cook a steak.

I didn't buy the book, although I considered it just to have one signed by her.

But all the fun I could have expected was pretty much exhausted in the happy hour with 60 other voyeurs at Warwick's.

Now Stiff, her book about cadavers, held me in its thrall. I read it as slowly as I could, hoping it would go on forever. What she uncovered (I guess that's her vocation, uncovering what we keep under wraps) about what goes on with corpses, is mind- boggling. She is a fanatic researcher, running down leads that I might think futile and getting people to talk about things one would assume way too dicey.

I don't suppose you knew that the US Armed Forces has contracts with hospitals and morgues to buy unclaimed bodies which they use to test the effect of firing various different weapons at them.

I'm afraid my greater fascination for her book on cadavers than for her book on sex, says more about me and my age than about the relative merits either of the two subjects or of the literary merits of the two books.

Truthfully, I don't mind that it is so. There is a lot of relief in not being run around by one's testosterone levels. But there is also some sadness, a heavy dose of reality. To think one is now closer to becoming a cadaver than to becoming a parent.

I have just read a piece from Fox (unbalanced and unfair) about Tiger Woods' absence from the golf tour as he recovers from arthroscopic surgery that I regard as lacking in judgment and good sense as so much of that network's offerings.

In hyperbolic language it says that golf without Tiger Woods is dead.

No one cares about watching a tournament unless he is playing.

The star syndrome from which we suffer in this culture - and maybe the world's culture - is not only sad, it is self-hating and self-defeating.

Beginning with the Reagan years I was puzzled by the shift of middle and lower middle class voters from the Democratic rolls to the Republican rolls. Though I recognized that the Democrats had lost the edge they once gained from the New Deal, for watching out of the interests of Americans in the middle to the bottom of the economic ladder - climaxed perhaps when Clinton signed the so-called welfare reform bill - the Republicans continued their historic role of championing the access of the wealthy to even greater wealth without interference from government regulation.

Yes, there was the old trickle-down theory, a rising tide lifts all boats - so perhaps people bought the notion that if the super rich got even richer, the money they spent and the people they hired would make its way to those of us who lived at the foot of Mt. Olympus.

But all the numbers show that the opposite happened.

Not only did massive deregulation and tax cuts grease the skids for the top 10 % of Americans to get even richer, but the real income of those in the middle and below stagnated and dropped, resulting in ever greater gap between the few rich and the many who are not.

So why have they (until, perhaps, now) continued to vote for the likes of Reagan, the Bushes and Cheney, mega-rich who continue feathering the nests of their friends?

Sadly, it is a piece of the same phenomenon that Fox insists will cause us to turn aside from golf when the Great One is absent.

Having been demoralized for a generation by the reality of working harder and longer for less, no longer believing that honest, hard work will lift one into a decent middle class existence, we have become spectators at the circus. Entertained by freaks.

I hate to admit I have been infected.

I used to watch great tennis players - Jack Kramer, Poncho Gonzalez, Ken Rosewall - and couldn't wait to get out on the court myself. Because they inspired me to try new things and hope to get better. Now I watch Roger Federer and marvel at his extraordinary abilities, but, as the announcers keep reminding me, his play is unrelated to mine.

Last weekend, as Troy Immelmin, the 28 year old South African who had never won a major (He hadn't made the cut the week before in Houston) and the young American (Can't come up with his name) led the Masters from opening day, I began to actually hope some new unknown might win, finish ahead of Tiger.

On the last day, Immelmin was as much as 5 strokes ahead of the next closest player, and all the announcers wanted to talk about was Tiger Woods, who would have needed a miracle (he has never won a tournament in which he was not leading going into the final round) to catch him. Even though he wasn't having a particularly good round, the focus was on Tiger. As Immelimin came to the final holes all the announcers talked about was the likelihood of his choking under the pressure, and of the many hazards that yet stood between him and the green jacket.

Incredibly, Tiger Woods' super star status was confirmed in his losing. He played as badly as we have ever seen on the last day of a major tournament and still managed to finish second, albeit 3 strokes behind the young golfer from South Africa. And Tiger's second was bigger news than Immelmin's victory.

One theory about our attraction for stardom and wealth which we have little or no hope of sharing is what is sometimes called the lottery syndrome. When Dick Cheney struts across to his private jet, thumbing his nose at his detractors, he seems to be saying to the rest of us, "If you got lucky, if you hit the lottery, you, too, could thumb your nose at the world. Do you want to vote for those donkeys who want to take away your shot at this?"

Another theory is that, having been demoralized, we are now simply voyeurs, content to watch others on the big screen.

If there is any authenticity to the candidacy of Barack Obama, it may be to cut into this sad dynamic of living vicariously through the super rich, super stars because we no longer think ordinary people have a shot at a decent life, a chance to move up. He embodies what we used to refer to as the American Dream.

I can't wait for the next gold tournament, hoping some journeyman who has qualified for his first PGA event will make a run.

I still hope for the day when a poor boy from the streets of Chicago can, through discipline and hard work, hope to be president one day.

One of the new debates among economists is about the extent to which the decisions people make about their money are rational.

I have long been skeptical of any argument - about economics or just about any other piece of human endeavor - that holds to the view that we are a rational species. Not that we don't have the ability to reason and think rationally (which in the west since the Enlightenment, has meant thinking in a linear, 1,2,3 fashion), but that when it comes to matters of critical importance, other parts of the brain that the pre-frontal cortex (where it is rumored "highest" thinking takes place, a conclusion drawn largely from evidence that we humans have developed that most recently and other species have not) seem to play their roles.

Which may explain why I feel so double-minded about so much.

One of the few pieces of my father's many pieces of advice that has stayed with me - stayed because every time I cam conscious of violating it, i feel uneasy - is not to make big decisions based on emotion. Buying a car, buying a house, getting married, conceiving children, taking a job, these are too important, too influential in shaping the rest of your life, to allow on-rational emotion to govern.

Every time I did one of those - and I have done each of them more than once - I knew there might be more rational reasons not to do them than in their favor. I did them because I wanted to. And why did I want to?

God knows.

Hormones, insecurity, irrational exuberance, chance, laziness, comfort, who can say which stimulus carried the most weight?

Wendell Berry, one of the giants of the alternative thinking of the 60s, who seems to have survived the debunking and still commands an audience, has an article in the May Harper's that powerfully persuades that the basic premise of American hegemony in our time (perhaps now over) - economic, cultural, political, military - has been built on a premise that is not only contrary to our most basic understanding of reality, but is ultimately fatal, self-defeating.

That is the assumption of unlimited resources.

We have long understood the earth and its minions (of which we are one) as finite. And while it has gone under various titles, the understanding that entropy - the running down of order toward disorder and dissolution - governs the life, and death, of the universe.

We have understood that, that is, for everything except ourselves.

Perhaps because of our narcissistic affection for what seems to be unique about us - consciousness, self-awareness - we translate that uniqueness (if it is indeed unique; what about dolphin, whales?) into a superiority that will surely be clever enough to innovate ourselves out of depleting the resources needed to sustain us.

Clearly Berry sees that cooperation rather than the economic and military competition we have relied on is the hope for our survival. And he is not quite ready to give up the possibility that we might see the end in time to make that shift.

To me it looks as if the very thing we most prize about ourselves - this consciousness - and believe means we are not subject to the finite conditions of a limited planet, is our fatal flaw. You can see how evolution would have taken this path, seeming to equip us for unparalleled life of achievement as we gained the mental acuity to discern the basic building blocks of matter itself. The stuff of which we, too, are made.

But the noble experiment went awry and the skill tempted us to try to separate us altogether from the rest of the finite earth, inventing schemes for by-passing the forces of life and death.

It has been a great ride until recently when we have begun to wreck the planet's self-cleansing mechanisms. The good news is that the planet will survive us, clean itself up over the eons, and provide for another try.

The most conflict i got into in the four churches where I was pastor was with vestries - the parish lay governing body - over the issue of church growth.

By the time I had been ordained a decade or son - around 1975 - the Episcopal Church, along with the Presbyterian. Methodist, Congregational, Lutheran and other s-called mainline Protestant churches - was in steady decline, while the confessional churches - the independent, more biblically literalist, moralist churches were growing.

It was the beginning of the Great Awakening we go through in this country every 50 years, which ends up in great revivals (in this era they took the form of mega-churches) and insistence that candidates for public office reassure us of their religious convictions.

Vestries of the parish where I was were made up mainly of businessmen. Their measure of everything was whether or not it was growing.

We spent hours in meetings designing schemes to attract people to our church.

I demurred. Seems to me what we are about is living our life as nearly as we can as we understand - based on our knowledge of scripture and tradition, filtered through our reason (the so-called three-legged stool on which Anglicanism stands). If we are living lives on behalf of others, not simply feathering our own nest, then no doubt some people will be attracted to us. But our basic mission is quite antithetical to the purpose of the commercial culture which surrounds us, which is to always grwo bigger.

They were shocked.

I have now come to believe that this urge to grow bigger, richer, to let the market place determine the shape of our life, is not only antithetical to the church's mission, but a danger to the future of our species on the planet.

In future offerings here I will say more about this, but for the moment let it stand that the ethic we have evolved in this country and exported with alarming success to the world - greed is good and getting rich the goal of every rational person - holds in it the seeds of our destruction.

To hint at what I will hope to tackle, we might begin with the simple reliance on non-renewable sources of energy to sustain a culture that is increasingly at odds with itself.

I was persuaded of the urgency of the civil rights movement when I heard Dr. King say he was working not only for the freedom of black Americans who had been denied their rights, but for white Americans who had been held captive by their prejudices.

By the lights of our nation and its understanding of itself, I have never been a minority.

As a white (Anglo-Saxon) American I may soon be if the predictions of the census bureau are right.

When women began to portray themselves as a minority I was skeptical. Because women are a majority. More boy babies are born each year than girl babies. Most believe that is because boy babies grow up to be soldiers and risk-takers and more of them die early. How nature knows this and how she adjusts for it is one of those (so far) unfathomable and fascinating pieces of reality. And whether having women in combat as we have now (although only a fraction the number of women have died in Iraq as have men) remains to be seen.

But by the time we are old enough to vote, there are more women.

Turns out the term minority has come to mean more about the place of people than their numbers. Hispanics may outnumber Anglos by the next census, but because the data all suggest the American dream is still more of a reach for them, we will continue to regard them as a minority.

Maybe Outsider would be a more helpful title. It is about those who must struggle harder for the same opportunities.

Last Sunday my wife and I went to church - which we seldom do - to see the first woman to be elected the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA. She is the titular head of the nation's Episcopalians who, though small in number (fewer than 3 million) continue to wield influence and gain attention beyond their numbers.

As she entered the room where 250 people had gathered for a breakfast with her before the service, everyone rose spontaneously to their feet and applauded her. It's been a long time since I have been present for such a moment.

I looked over at my wife and her eyes were filled with tears.

The Presiding Bishop proved to be impressive, moving, seemingly a wonderful choice for a time in which the church is embroiled in controversy over doctrine and sexuality. She embodies the answer to the second, carrying herself with the dignity and authority that gives the lie to concerns about a woman in a place historically reserved for men. Someone asked her how much of her busy life is taken up in addressing the controversies.

"About 5%," she responded with a warm smile. "There is so much else going on in the world and the church. We just are not spending our most precious energy debating doctrine while people are hungry and homeless and God is demanding that we feed and house them."

I understand my wife's tears. I wonder if the Presiding Bishop, elected a year ago, may be a foretaste of the coming election, either of a woman or of a man of mixed race?

The thought fills my eyes.

I think I remember a James Dean movie in which some teenagers played chicken in their hot rods.

You know how this works. They go out to some remote place - an abandoned road or airstrip - and two drivers a few hundred yards apart accelerate towards each other. The object of the "game" is to see who will chicken out, veer off, first. The one who doesn't wins.

Unless neither does, in which case both lose.

It's a game that transfers itself into adult life in countless ways.

The Bush administration - and in some ways American foreign policy over the past fifty years - has made it their cornerstone tactic.

In the past few days the massive disruption of air traffic across the country has resulted from such a game. The FAA has been accused - probably with some justification - of having become too cozy with the airlines they are supposed to be regulating, and allowing airlines to become lax in their attention to maintenance of their planes. Admissions of oversight in testimony before Congress has so embarrassed the FAA - and infuriated the Bush Administration (that is rigidly fundamentalist about its belief that all regulation of business is bad) - that it began harassing the airlines. And, in response, the airlines have simply removed from service huge numbers of planes (canceling 1000 flights yesterday and nearly that many today), snarling the nation's commercial and other life.

Who will turn aside from this madness first?

We are a stiff-necked species. We will foul our own nest, work in in every way against our own interests if it seems to vex those we think have wronged us. The desire for revenge trumps even a chance to resolve an issue. Most other species will gladly choose a course that clearly benefits them without regard for whether it pleases or displeases its opponents.

Mutual Assured Destruction, the policy that governed our relations with The Soviet Union (and likely is still in force), may have prevented a nuclear holocaust, or it may have shaped the unhappy world of today's nuclear proliferation, in which every country seeks the weapons we used to hold our opponents hostage. Whatever your opinion, it was undeniably a game of international chicken.

Maybe chicken is built into human DNA. Maybe it is a fool's errand to search for a candidate (Obama?) who might have evolved to a place of cooperation and mutual interest beyond chicken. As a human who hopes for a long tenure, I hope not.

Because, the longer one plays chicken, the shorter the odds of a deadly collision.

Every so often it comes time to take a personal inventory.

No, not a measure of personal wealth or health, but of one's sense of where life has brought you and how you're feeling about it.

And what, if anything, you plan to do differently.

Prompted by a friend who wrote me saying her therapist has invited her to step back from the endless round of daily problems to solve and take a look at the big picture. My friend said she realized she has really never done that. Just put one foot in front of the other, absorbing whatever today presented and dealing.

So, she says, sometimes she looks at her life - she is now 70 - and wonders, How did I get here?

I told her I have somehow - after spending most of my life as she describes spending hers, coping - I now find it possible to take a larger, longer view. It may have something to do with having left my day job more than a decade ago. Feeling the pressure of a rising tide of discontent from those with whom I worked and those to whom I felt responsible, I quit. Terrified though I was that I would go broke, or sink into depression and ennui without demands that defined my day, I was so eager to try a new life and to spend my best remaining energy and imagination writing (knowing I could never make a living at it) that I swallowed hard and took the plunge.

In a future entry I may get into the specifics of what has filled my days since. Here I only mean to document what a happy choice that has turned out to be. I did spend that first year in a lot of depression and turmoil. A friend said to me that every new job he took had been a washout for at least a year while he figured out what the job required and how he might do it. And he saw no reason to think retirement would be any different. That wise advice was a big help.

The reality is that, unless one is impoverished, deathly sick or mentally crippled, almost any new choice provides an initial challenge and then excitement and fun.

We fear change and we crave it.

Writing has turned out to be nourishment for my deepest longings. The chance to pursue my insatiable curiosity about virtually everything - just when the internet, email and blogging came into being - has been felicitous. And somehow the money has been adequate - so far - to keep the roof over our heads.

My friend is still working because she has no idea what she'd do with herself otherwise. I reassure her that she is one of the most creative and adventuresome people I know. Her days would be full from the outset.

My wife is also still working, because her work still calls on her most creative and satisfying efforts.

Taking stock.

Any who read my Zone Notes (My weekly writing; if you don't receive it, email me at blayneyc@earthlink.net and I will gladly send it to you) will have figured out how I think one of the most ancient religious issues plays out in the contemporary context.

When we speak of God we are giving expression to our awe at the ineffable. The ineffable is fundamentally what - because we are limited beings with limited perspective, creatures, a piece of this puzzle - we cannot fathom. Not because of our limited intelligence - though surely our intelligence is limited - but because our trying to gain a perspective on the entire picture (if we could even know what we mean by that) is logically and logistically impossible. It is like the old Zen Koan of trying to take out your eyeballs and stare at yourself.

So why do we continue using the divine name? (Hebrews, for some of the same reasons, do not use it) Both because it has an ancient significance which remains relevant to being human, and because it acknowledges that we are limited, creature, not in charge.

Why would we pray if there is not Great Being, no god in the sense of an all powerful One who both controls and cares?

Because prayer has always been about the one doing the praying, not about the wish for God to change something. When I pray - which, at least in the traditional sense, I don't - in the face of disease, tragedy, confusion, it is to bring me into an encounter with the reality of where I am and what is happening. To release my wish/hope that I might excite some magical power that would release me from the reality I dread.

When I pray I gain strength to accept reality, whether it is a defeat, death or simply a conundrum.

I suppose all religion has appealed to our dread of dying. Christianity - while it has its own version of how it overcomes this - is hardly unique in seeming to suggest the possibility of immortality.

In fact, whether it ever intended to, I don't believe the Christian idea of resurrection promises immortality. It is a trick question theologically sophisticated people like to pull on the less sophisticated. No, Christianity speaks not of immortality but of death and resurrection.

But in reality I think most church goers and believers think they are, if not equivalent, nearly so. Yes, immortality suggests one need never die, while resurrection insists one must first die and then be resurrected. But both seem to offer eternal life.

In fact I understand resurrection and eternal life to mean that we do die and we stay dead. Our bodies, the cells that make us up, molt in the ground and provide nutrients for more life to come after us.

Christianity, while it prizes individual identity, eschews what one might call Ego idolatry. In the west since the Enlightenment and Freud, we have emphasized individual identity and integrity as the center of meaning, perhaps the location of the central significance of the universe.

It is natural enough since our consciousness, self-awareness, seem to both make us unique and more intelligent than all other species. And because we do place such significance on that, it seems a gratuitous insult to have it simply dispersed into cellular compost when we die.

The genius of Jesus' teaching - at least as I understand it in the context of today - is his calm acceptance, not only of the political reality in which he finds himself, but his impending death.

"Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, no new growth can happen."

Once the certainty of one's own death is accepted, and the ego's panic that infects our psyche is faced down, we are free to embrace with awe and thanksgiving the astonishing odds-against fact that we are here. That we were "invited" through no virtue of our own, to spend a season here, exercise mindful being, join with the rest of this miraculous creation in growing, maturing, aging and dying. And when that season comes to its close, to be embraced by the process that brought us here and become manure for what is to come.

Halleluia!

Fodder
April 8, 2008

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else
they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be
possible. -George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

Man who left and let door slam is wedded to his cell phone – poor wife.
- Note scribbled on back of pew card found in hymn rack in church

*******

Frank, our Vermont neighbor, retired after 30 years working for the state, ubiquitous in town, doing every sort of odd job, was killed last week when a tree he was felling in the woods by his mother’s house fell on him.

He is the third person in the valley we have known who was killed like that in the past couple of years. All around this time of year.

Spring – well, not quite spring in Vermont – sap running, ground thawing, woods full of trees half brought down by the winter ice and wind. Widow-makers they call those limbs balanced precariously.

Frank’s funeral was Friday. His relatives – who have been in the town for several generations - must have overflowed the church. Burial will have to wait for the thaw.

They tell me the sap is running copiously this year and the syrup quality will be better than it has been for a long time.

Sometimes someone or something shows you - it’s usually unexpected, almost always unwelcome – how things really are with you.

Two tennis matches. And a golf tournament. The first in the heat of the California desert, an American and a Serb, aging journeymen, wounded warriors battling, not for the $ million purse but for a spot in the main draw as a sacrifice to one of the superstars. Foils for a morality drama. Tall, wiry, acerbic Serb, pony tail, acrobatic, charismatic, unorthodox. American, lightly complected black, Hollywood handsome, buzz cut, muscular, compact, businesslike, within himself.

Serb – 143mph serve –dominates, wins opening set easily. American works out serve return, wins second set. Third set see-saws until American breaks serve, looks to close out, until Serb suddenly collapses, a huge cramp in his quad. Limps to his chair in front of where we sit, I can see an fist-size knot popped out on his leg. Trainer works on him feverishly.

They resume but Serb can neither serve hard nor cover the court as before. Now he is wily, dangerous as a wounded leopard, hitting improbable winners off impossible shots. Tie break. Serb really lame, in pain, American going nuts. You know the rest. Serb serves half speed, American hits returns out. Double faults. Nets match point. Serb falls to court. Gallery erupts.

It takes me the 2 1/2 hour drive home to unknot my stomach.

Serena Williams in the TV finals of a tournament she has won four times before, facing Jelena Jankovic, yet another player from tiny Serbia, a nation with no tennis tradition, recently at war She beat Serena in Australia. Serena comes out smoking, seeking revenge, destroys Jelena 6-1 in 20 minutes. Announcer says this will be over soon.

Leading 3-0 in the second set I see Serena muff a backhand, bottom of the net. Not a difficult shot. My stomach twists, I need to visit the loo. Takes the announcer two more games to see Serena’s confidence has drained out of her ear. She can no longer stay in a point. Double faults to lose the second set. Third set she gets it all back, runs up a 5-0 lead. Match over.

Not quite. Leading 40-0 in each of the next three games, Serena dumps easy shots in the net, suddenly it’s 5-3. She serves, makes a mighty collection of her nerves, serves an ace and two winners. 40-0, three match points. Nets the first on an easy forehand. Then a backhand miss. I may vomit on the living room rug. Long since have left my chair, pacing the floor, shouting, armpits awash. Somehow Serena hangs on for that last point. She drops to the court in exhaustion and relief. I may take to my bed.

Sunday afternoon Johnson Wagner – who has made the cut in only 3 of the10 golf tournaments he has played this year, making $40K, not enough to pay his expenses, never won a PGA event - comes to the 15th hole on the final day with a three stroke lead. Why do I watch these freaking things? The announcers remind us – reliving their own agonies – what it’s like that first time you come to the final holes leading. Johnson – he’s 28, his parents are traveling with him – keeps drying his hands, announcers make not-funny jokes about sweaty palms. He drives into the rough. I feel nauseated. The lead drops to 2, then 1. The other guy bogeys, lead 2 again. Johnson hangs on. $1M purse. Johnson can barely keep from crying in the interview. I’m not on TV, don’t have to.

Monday night the valiant Memphis Tigers come from behind the Kansas Jay Hawks to build a strong 9 point lead, 2 minutes to go in the finals of the National Basketball Championship, March Madness. I could give a damn about either school, don’t follow basketball. Memphis misses the foul shots that would ensure victory, Kansas makes miraculous 3 pointer with 2 seconds remaining in regulation. My paroxysms proliferate. Kansas runs away with overtime. I want to go into Memphis’ dressing room and collapse.

Though tough way to win it, Frank gets a rest. Come spring he’ll be given a place to begin composting. Providing fodder from his finish.

I've wondered the past few days whether I might be having a spell of high blood pressure, or just the pressure of events?

I have been having trouble shutting down my mind so I can read or relax or sleep.

It began, I think, when a young woman I know and care about told me she is going to get divorced. Having lived through that wretched process myself 30 years ago, it triggered my anxiety. Both for myself and for her. In fact I know her to be a very smart, tough and resourceful woman, so I have no doubt she will navigate her way through this. Knowing her integrity, she explored I am certain every possible way of avoiding this. And, having made the decision, she is going forward. She told me there are days when she thinks maybe she could just go dead inside, ignore what she knows about herself and her marriage, and figure out a way to just put one foot in front of the other.

But she's not doing that.

Saturday I watched Serena Williams play in the finals of a tournament in Florida, a tournament she has won four times before. She was playing a Serb who had soundly beaten her when they played in the quarter finals of the Australian Open. Serena is by now one of the acknowledged giants of the game. She and her sister, Venus, dominated women's tennis for several years. Whether they got bored with crushing everyone else, or whether it was their family tragedy - their sister was shot to death in Los Angeles - they didn't play much for a couple of years, then came back and have been less dominant.

But when they are on top of their game, they can still beat anyone.

And Saturday Serena was at the tip top of her game. She came out smoking, hitting 120 mph serves, leaning into every shot, hitting lines, missing nothing.

Until she was up 6-1 (the first set took less than a half hour), 3-0. When I saw her hit a backhand into the middle of the net and somehow sensed that - in the moment between that point and the previous one - all that confidence had drained out of her as if someone had pulled the plug.

The announcers didn't notice for two more games. Serena tanked. Her footwork - that had been perfect - suddenly turned to mush, so she was hitting off her back foot, off-balance and awkward. She hit easy shots into the net and beyond the baseline. Down set point against her on her own serve, she double-faulted to give her opponent the set. She crushed her racket on the ground and threw it across the court, getting a warning from the umpire for racket abuse. (Bad sportsmanship)

I felt my stomach knot and my blood pressure rise. Oh, I have been there. What is that fear that rises up when one is riding the crest of a wave? What the fear of success? I walked the living room floor, unable to stay seated. Moaning as if Serena were my own daughter.

As if to torture me further, she regained her confidence as the third set got underway, hitting as she had in the first set, winners off both sides, serving aces, building up a 3-0 lead. The announcers lauded her for paying attention to technique, disciplining herself not to panic, back to basics, and regaining her stride.

Until she tanked again. As before, way ahead (she blew 40-0 leads in three separate games) and in control, something in her whispered a curse into her ear and down she went.

All this repeated a couple more times until Serena finally seemed to have hung on for an insurmountable 40-0 lead, 5-3 on her serve. Either an error from her opponent or one strong winner from Serena and the match was hers.

Two easy unforced errors and she was at 40-30, her third match point in this game and maybe her fifth of the match. A good serve, decent return and Serena hit a strong backhand beyond her opponent's reach.

I felt as if I had given birth.

And - along with several other events that will remain for a future entry - Serena's roller coaster set in motion my fear of flying.

While the suits in Washington debate whether we're in recession or headed for one (I know, you need two successive quarters with negative growth to officially be in recession), the unemployment rate reached 5.1% and consumer confidence plummeted.

What seems certain is that we are headed into a new day.

New mostly in our perception.

When Alan Greenspan told Congress an eon ago in 1999 that we are in a new economy to which the old rules no longer apply, he was not totally wrong. He is being scorned today because of the huge dot-com collapse and now the collapse of the housing market. Maybe he could have dome something to at least make the crash gentler, if not hold it off, but maybe not.

He was right because the tech revolution has so markedly increased worker productivity that a lot more work could be done with fewer people on the payroll.

What he - and everyone else - either missed or hoped might be avoided, was that we had no idea how to re-gear an economy that no longer required a major workforce doing heavy lifting, and a global economy in which those skilled tech jobs would be taken by people in countries other than ours.

In the meantime those factors provided and juicy investment climate - for a while - for people shifting from American stocks to international stocks.

It looks to me as if no one yet has figured out how to factor in all the new pieces of the equation.

The hopeful possibility is that, if the past provides any clues, it is when a consensus grows around a particular scenario that one can bet things are about to go the other way. That is true during a boom, like the dot-com boom and the housing boom, and during a slide, like ours.

The fear this time is akin to the optimism Greenspan had last time: that this is truly such a new situation that we can't predict what is going to happen.

But - new though the moment surely is - we are still human and some things recur.

One is that - as the man said - it is always darkest just before the dawn.

April 1, 2008

I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is
us. - Konrad Lorenz, ethnologist, Nobel laureate (1903-1989)

Anyone who thinks they can be the keeper of the litter box and hang on to an inflated view of themselves has never had a cat.

*******

Jasmine, 16 year old Siamese, is supposed to be underground by now. Renal failure at 6, years of harassment by Cosmos the terrier, tumor, unknown type, on her lung (yes, we sprang for an ultrasound). A bald spot on her side where they shaved her for the ultrasound it isn’t growing back. Hair cells and cancer cells are the fastest growing, so I take heart about that lung thing.

Despite her rather elegant swoons – seizures, I suppose – her eyes glass over, rear paw quivering, she sinks ever so slowly, like a ballet dancer, until she lies still, usually at night on our bed as we read, Jasmine has yielded nothing to these warnings.

Her bushy white tail, normally in constant motion, goes deathly still. We hover, looking for some sign either that she has died or will return. First swish of that tail we greet as we would the second coming.

Our fright – that one of these seizures might mark her end – is only our fright. Her routine – following the sun from the cedar chest to the bed to the armchair – is as it has been. She uses the litter box, jumps onto the kitchen counter to eat, startles us, leaping silently, stealthily onto our laps when we’re reading. She still stares down the terrier when she’s had enough.

But there’s no mistaking her failing health, her advancing age, the pull of gravity, entropy.

It’s an awesome affair.

On this morning’s Cosmos walk Inside-Wave Dave, Morning Mayor, pointed to a pair of good-sized turtles on the beach. A woman was between them and, with the dangerous little knowledge I picked up from our daughter’s being a turtle researcher, I expressed concern that the woman might be disturbing their coming onto the beach to lay their eggs.

No, Dave explained, They’re her’s. Tortoises – land turtles.

Sure enough. The weathered woman said these tortoises - 100 year old female, 130 year old male, - have been with her for 50 years. Lacey kept Cosmos – the terrible territorial terrier – at a safe distance.

Not to worry, Turtle Woman reassured, They live with pit bulls. They love dogs. But, we insisted, This terrier…He won’t bother her, said Turtle Woman, She’s handled many a dog.

Cosmos is 6, maybe halfway, maybe a little less if he stays healthy. He and I sometimes meet a cockatoo riding on a neighbor’s shoulder. Our neighbor tells us the colorful bird will likely outlive her.

He – and we – couldn’t quite fathom a century old turtle. And her 130 old mate. She’s going to lay eggs in 8 days, Turtle Woman told us. 30 of them. The old girl waddled over toward us. How many of the eggs will hatch? I wondered. She seemed to think my question silly. All of them. All of them? What will you do with 30 baby tortoises? All my friends have them. In fact that’s what we’re doing down here this morning. Getting ready for a play date with some of her children in front of the Beach & Tennis Club.

30 tortoises a year for maybe 70 years? I couldn’t do the math.

How long do they live? 300 she said. (Wikepedia says the longest known living tortoise, cared for by the Tonga royal family, lived to be 177)
Anticipating my next question: My grandchildren will take them and pass them on to their grandchildren.

Though she put her hand directly in from of the tortoise’s impressive jaw, meaning to reassure me that I was in no danger from her interest in my foot, I backed away. I remembered a huge snapper that once climbed from our pond in Vermont onto the road. We used a long thick downed limb to try to nudge her back onto the road. In one sudden motion she snapped that sturdy limb like a twig. Last summer we watched , maybe her again, lay her eggs in the mud beneath the bridge.

She may have been doing that the spring our house was built in 1830.