He's Back!

Only a short while ago it would surely have been an oxymoron: business ethics.

Because the ruling wisdom for nearly a generation has been that when business people pursue their own self interest, the outcome works far better than when they try to make decisions that are good for others.

And while there is truth in that, it has become a lopsided ethic that - along with countless other pieces of the international business dynamic - has led us into our current disaster.

I was in seminary in the early 60s, a seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple of blocks our of Harvard Square, affiliated with but not a part of Harvard University. The civil rights movement was in its infancy, Viet Name had just appeared on the radar, and the conviction that people under 30 were the only ones not yet corrupted and trustworthy was in its formative stage.

A group of us from the seminary joined with people from a consortium of seminaries around the Boston area, and students at Harvard Business School, in a weekly meeting of what was known as the Musser Seminar on Business Ethics.

I have wondered in recent years whether the seminar survived the changes in thinking, from the very liberal - even radical -rejection of traditional values, through the years of the glorification of free markets.

In today's NY Times there is an article about 20% of those about to graduate from the Business School having written and signed a pledge that they would pursue the public interest ahead of their own interest in their business careers.

I doubt such a pledge will have much clout when they take their places in the junior positions answering to the lions of American commerce. But the fact that they have done such a thing at all is some sign of the anxiety the economic collapse has created among those who so recently eagerly headed for the canyons of Wall Street and the six figure starting salaries.

My favorite moment from those old days of the Musser Seminar came during a heated debate about whether American businessmen (comfortably referred to as men in those days) were leaders in forming the nation's ethics, or merely followers who waited to see what they could get away with before deciding right and wrong.

Professor James Luther Adams, venerable and long in the tooth professor in the Divinity School, made a passionate case for leaders of business being woefully lacking in ethics.

"When it comes to morality,": he said, his voice rising to a passionate pitch, "American businessmen are moral eunichs. When it comes to right and wrong, they always let someone else carry the ball for them."

There was some stifled laughter around the room, until, unable to contain it, the whole place exploded in laughter.

Professor Adams' expression suggested he was a combination of pleased to have triggered such a strong reaction, and totally puzzled about what it was.

He must be rolling over in his grave today.

The seemingly dicey nuclear news from N. Korea and Iran raises some discomforting issues for Americans.

Not because we might be on the edge of a nuclear moment - although that in itself is discomforting enough - but because, if we were to view all this without the self-blindness that hypocrisy causes, we would find ourselves looking uncomfortably at our own reflection.

As the first and only nation ever to actually use a nuclear weapon in war, and the nation with more nukes than all the rest of the world (likely not counting Russia), and having used our nuclear advantage to advance our political agenda over the past 50 years, how convincing doe we suppose it sounds for us to condemn other nations for seeking nuclear weapons?

Takes me back to the days of urban riots. Stokeley Carmichael, black militant, taunting President Johnson:

"President Johnson, he say don't do violence, violence don't solve nothin'. He say that while he's bombing the hell out of N. Viet Nam. Wh he think he's kiddin'?"

I hold no brief for the apparently off-the-wall Kim Il Johng in Korea, who is seeking international acknowledgement of his nation's place among the powerful even while his people starve.

Nor for the hard line religious president of Iran, who seems to be ignoring the wishes of his people to focus on the economy and education and leave aside power brokinng.

But we ceded our right to speak with a moral voice on the matter on August 6, 1945 when we exploded the first nuclear weapon in war over Hiroshima.

I am not wading into the controversy about whether Truman should have ordered the bomb dropped. I have read and read on both sides of that question, and I have no idea what I would have done had I been sitting in his seat. My guess is that I would have made the same decision he did, believing that the war might go on indefinitely, the Japanese never surrender, and maybe a million American soldiers die in an invasion of the Japanese islands, and even that might not finish the war. I know the argument that the bomb was intended more to intimidate Russia than to defeat Japan, and that may well be.

My point is a more practical one about what our having done that - and the nuclear arsenal we have built since - means for our ability to lead the conversation now about the nuclear ambitions of other nations.

It pulls its teeth.

The nasty reality is that - as Stokeley Carmichael rightly pointed out about violence - nuclear weapons have proven their worth in deterring others from attacking, and in being treated with respect in the international community.

And we - more than any other nation - have provided the proof of that.

Concerned Scientists and other groups have despaired of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The doomsday clock has been set forward until now it can only be moved in micro-seconds to keep from reaching midnight. Simple logic suggests that, with all these nukes around the inevitability of one being used - even if in an accidental incident (as we now know we came close to more than once during the Cold War) - rises to seemingly inevitable.

Even Ronald Reagan - professional anti-communist, trust and verify - sat down with Gorbachev and made a serious proposal to dismantle each of their nations' nuclear arsenal. His advisors thought he had gone mad - as, no doubt, did Gorbachev's - and they scuttled the deal.

If there is a looking back on this period, it surely will be seen as a time of a seismic shift in the world.

As the United States - grown used to calling the shots in the world with our nuclear superiority and unparalleled economic strength - were surprised and chagrined to discover that the world had caught up with us and no longer felt the need to bow their knee to us.

It'll take some getting used to.

I keep reading scientists' opinion that we likely are in the 6th great extinction.

And have been for several tens of thousands of years.

There is consensus around the fact that there have been 5 previous extinctions since life appeared on our planet. In each of them 99% of the life then present became extinct.

In fact, if one were to measure the species presently on earth against all those that have been here before and disappeared, today's number would hardly show up on the chart.

Only one possibility - a remote one - seems to me to perhaps counter the view that we, along with all but a few micro organisms, are soon (soon, in geologic time) to disappear.

That is that the vision of the French Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, of what he called the "homonization" of the earth. He envisioned a belt around the earth - akin to the atmosphere and the stratosphere - which he named the "noosphere. He imagined it to be made up of the collective mental energy since the beginning of mindfulness. And when it reaches a critical mass, you and I would no longer consider our significance to be located in our individual ego identity, but much as a single cell in a larger organism.

Teilhard was forbidden by the Holy See to publish his work in his lifetime. His thought was considered by the church to be both blasphemous, and in the conflict between communism and western individualism, too collectivist.

With my first encounter with the internet - maybe around 2000? - I was taken back to reading Teilhard back in the early 60s.

For some time I have wondered if our species' "evolutionary choice" for a big brain might - once the dazzle of our achievements began to fade, prove to be a fatal wrong turn. Our increasing narcissistic love of our intellect has seduced us into thinking we have become an exception to the way the world works. We suppose we can innovate our way through any challenge.

The reality, of course, is that we are an organism made of the same stuff- a collection of stuff, atoms, molecules, cells - stuff thrown onto our planet in collisions and explosions, as every other species and phenomenon that has ever been here.

And a collision with only a small comet will make all this moot. As it has before.

But I love thinking about this super organism - the multi-celled species, connected and guided by the noosphere.

Now let's consider that we may already have built a computer with a capacity that far outstrips our intellectual capacity, which will soon, if it hasn't already, begin creating new computers that will build new ones, and we will revert to our old status as drones, or workers, doing their bidding.

After receiving an email from a friend who was career CIA, and who disagrees with virtually every opinion I have about everything, I have sent the message below to President Obama.

You see, my retired CIA friend spent a major portion of his career in the Middle East. And while he thinks my liberal ideas about most things are not simply wrong, but disastrous, he says any attempt any western nation makes to subdue Afghanistan throuhg military force is not only doomed to failure, but certain to backfire in worse ways than Viet Nam.

His reasons for warning against military escalation in Afghanistan are quite different from mine. He hates the thought of young Americans dying in a futile war. But we agree it will doom Obama's presidency.

Mr. President:
With the possible exception of your wife and daughters, no one is a stronger supporter, nor thinks you are doing a finer job than I. I suspect the pressures on you to continue policies that have long been in place are immense. Nowhere more so than in Mideast policy.

I will be contacting my representative and senators to ask their support for a measured but certain withdrawal from Afghanistan before it becomes Obama's War. I believe you are walking the tightrope between the fear that still runs rampant when terrorism is the subject, and the reality about which you have spoken often, that trying to defeat terrorism with greater and greater military might dealt us a crippling blow in Viet Nam, and did the same to the British and the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Although most elected people will tremble at the idea, I have had conversations with military and CIA people that lead me to think they are decidedly unenthusiastic about a full war in Afghanistan. In that complex region - where we will have strategic interests for as long as we require imported oil - we have done much better over the years by arming and supporting surrogates, local people who make deals and switch sides in ways we cannot comprehend.

It would be a tragedy greater than that suffered by LBJ if this long overdue moment in which some of the structural problems we have ignored for a generation might actually be addressed by a bright, courageous, sensible president, if you were to lose your support - as you surely will - when American casualties again dominate the news.

This must be the trickiest issue you face. You have shown yourself to be up to complex, paradoxical problems. I beg you to put your smartest people back to refiguring this one.

Blayney Colmore

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

******

How’s the transition going
Pacific coast apartment to rural Vermont farmhouse
12 years by my count shifting November - May - Bush - Obama
separate universes

Single leg charley-horse to double leg charley-horse

walking mornings along the cliffs above the Pacific to my writing station
office in my backpack back again in the afternoon for a bracing ocean
swim (57º) or tennis with someone superior
evokes of an evening a mind-arresting charley horse, usually high on right calf beneath and behind the knee St. Vitus’ dance can often exorcise it

taking the truck up to Tracey’s field filling barrels of manure for
Lacey’s gardens
weeding & turning over the gardens mowing hauling limbs
from December’s ice storm to the burn pile
weed whacking futile fight against ornamental Asian
bamboo
some fancy lady brought to New England 100 years ago that has become
Yankee kudzu plague patiently waiting for me to become too feeble to
slow it swallowing our
place
followed by an afternoon bike ride with ageless
Conrad
gentle now - on the flat - maybe 20 miles Conrad patient as the
bamboo
setting me up for the killer Vermont hills to come

evokes of an evening a seriously diverting hard-as-rock muscle
gripping inner thigh vise crushing charley horse in
both legs that’ll drop you like Ali’s phantom punch

welcome to Vermont’s
double delight

In our dotage and in our induced
exhaustion
we’ve taken to nightly ear plugs to soften
snoring (only mine, of course, Lacey, being a lady, doesn’t snore)
which work with
oddly opposite unintended consequence sometimes making my skull a sound board - a woofer amplifying my every breath like some hood’s car radio - sometimes so dampening the vibrations I don’t wake in time to deny
I’m snoring

Yesterday three Canada Geese swam the pond accompanied by a
male Mallard
today two pair of Mergansers, two of geese, one goose scolding the
beaver
for swimming near her nest while the pair with 4 chicks made noisy splashing sorties
against any others who tried their end of the pond
and the Robins perched patiently waiting for the sun to melt the ice on the birdbath
Oriental bamboo silently grew three inches even while
frost finished off daffodils and tulips
mocking my conceit that
I own this place.

The buzz in our house is about the two worlds we inhabit.

May - November in rural southern Vermont.

November - May in coastal southern California.

I don't think we were as acutely aware of the differences when we were younger, because the work we do to get an old farmhouse and several vegetable and flower gardens up and running, seemed like recreation, a holiday from the urban life in California.

But now we feel the creaking bones and muscles.

We love it.

But we wonder how long...

But then, any sensible person wonders how long every morning when they wake, no matter where they are, their age or their circumstance.

I just spoke with a friend who has a lovely tennis court in the woods of Vermont. She said it may be ready within the next couple of weeks. And she wishes we would come every day to play, because, "We only have four months we can play here."

And to play four months means playing some chilly spring and fall tennis.

Our friends in California have plenty of other issues to keep them occupied, but braving nasty weather isn't one of them. (Today it's 50º, raining and blowing a gale)

Nothing about the photo would give a clue that life her is anything less than idyllic.

Which, properly considered, is the reality.

Embracing this moment, regaling you with news of another day, perks me up. A friend emailed me saying he thought I have had a more adventuresome life than most people. I explained that writers always sound that way, because our fun is to take the ordinary events everyone has and make them sound exotic.

Because the reality is that, when you look with eager eyes, every moment is exotic. Unlike any other. And added to our span for no good reason we can discern. A deal at any cost.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
******

Oh, so you bought Minnie Stetson’s place?

First I’d heard of Minnie Stetson. We bought the 1830 rural Vermont farmhouse from Forrest Murdock who used to be Principle of the K-12 school in town. They graduated 12 kids that year (1980). I wonder how many of them still live here? I thought Forrest had owned it a long time.

Bummy told me he used to stop by Minnie’s on his way home from school to see her button collection. She kept it on the porch where we now sit of an evening waiting for the beaver to swim to our end of the pond. Some of Minnie’s buttons are in the local historical society.

Turns out Minnie has been dead well over a half century. I went across the road just now to check her dates on her gravestone, but the moles have undermined everything around here this spring and the pink granite rock that marks Minnie’s grave has sunk face-first so the markings are flat on the ground. In the attached photo you can see the peak of our (Minnie’s) house and barn above her stone.

Cosmos and I often walk through the graveyard after dark. On a clear night stars and planets – and an occasional man-made addition racing along the horizon – seem nearly as abundant as the dark you know is most of what’s out there. From the highest point you can even often get a cell signal.

Bummy was the first to tell us about our living in Minnie’s house. He is six years my senior, and several times my equal in strength, cleverness and grittiness. We met Bummy a week after we bought the house and came up from Boston to discover it had been broken into. Someone had come up through the cellar and knocked down the door from the cellar into the living room. Nothing was missing or disturbed, just a door lying flat on the floor.

We were the first flatlanders to own the house. When I asked someone what we should do, they mentioned Bummy. I went to his house up the road and told him what had happened. He looked concerned, but hardly distressed, which he sensed I was. Seemed like he probably knew what was up, and all these years later I suspect some kids were curious about what those city folks might have put in that old house.

Bummy has been our friend, our protector, disaster averter, guru and caretaker for nearly thirty years. He has aged just as we have, but instead of slowing down, necessity and inclination have added another dozen flatlanders like us to Bummy’s care.

January 5th Bummy and his wife Carolyn drove us to the Hartford airport and we flew back to sunny California. When they got home, Bummy climbed a ladder to clear an ice dam from his roof. The ladder slipped and Bummy fell face first into ice and deep snow. He was injured, but he’d been hurt before, and he hadn’t finished clearing the dam. And he was mad.

He set the ladder back and took care of it.

When he came in the house Carolyn looked at his blood encrusted face, and his weird sideways gait - his back bent even more than usual – and said she was going to call 911. (There’s another story; the year 911 came to the valley and everyone had to agree on the names of the roads. Longest, most contentious town meeting on record.)

Oh no you’re not. I’m just going to lie down on the couch and get some rest.

Bummy did that, spent a long, miserable night. In the morning he felt worse, so he drove himself the 45 minutes to Greenfield Hospital. (Carolyn has never driven). They X-rayed him, found that he had broken his neck, put him in an ambulance and took him to the emergency room at Bay State Hospital in Springfield. After emergency surgery, he spent the next three weeks in intensive care, immobilized and incoherent.

The doctors told Carolyn it was incredible he wasn’t paralyzed. They were guarded about his prospects, first for survival, then for recovery. She told us she knew they figured him for a 75 year old man who did well to be up and around, not the guy who rises at 4 or 5AM to plow a dozen driveways before he chops wood for his stove. They had to restrain and snow him with drugs to keep him from yanking out his IVs. Carolyn knew if they looked away for a second he would get up and leave.

A few weeks ago I called to check on him, knowing he was finally home. Here, Carolyn said, You can talk to him.

We pulled in last night about 9, and this morning, not long after we rose, Bummy stopped by. He said he’d left the grass for me to mow since he figured I’d be back soon, and he had several others to do. Cosmos was excited to see him, jumping up and whimpering, as if he knew he was greeting someone returned from the dead. Bummy reluctantly agreed to let me take his picture.

This morning as I was taking the photo of Minnie Stetson’s stone, with our house peeking over the top of the hill, I had this fantasy of Bummy – some years from now - greeting the new owners:

So you bought the old Colmore place.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
******

Oh, so you bought Minnie Stetson’s place?

First I’d heard of Minnie Stetson. We bought the 1830 rural Vermont farmhouse from Forrest Murdock who used to be Principle of the K-12 school in town. They graduated 12 kids that year (1980). I wonder how many of them still live here? I thought Forrest had owned it a long time.

Bummy told me he used to stop by Minnie’s on his way home from school to see her button collection. She kept it on the porch where we now sit of an evening waiting for the beaver to swim to our end of the pond. Some of Minnie’s buttons are in the local historical society.

Turns out Minnie has been dead well over a half century. I went across the road just now to check her dates on her gravestone, but the moles have undermined everything around here this spring and the pink granite rock that marks Minnie’s grave has sunk face-first so the markings are flat on the ground. In the attached photo you can see the peak of our (Minnie’s) house and barn above her stone.

Cosmos and I often walk through the graveyard after dark. On a clear night stars and planets – and an occasional man-made addition racing along the horizon – seem nearly as abundant as the dark you know is most of what’s out there. From the highest point you can even often get a cell signal.

Bummy was the first to tell us about our living in Minnie’s house. He is six years my senior, and several times my equal in strength, cleverness and grittiness. We met Bummy a week after we bought the house and came up from Boston to discover it had been broken into. Someone had come up through the cellar and knocked down the door from the cellar into the living room. Nothing was missing or disturbed, just a door lying flat on the floor.

We were the first flatlanders to own the house. When I asked someone what we should do, they mentioned Bummy. I went to his house up the road and told him what had happened. He looked concerned, but hardly distressed, which he sensed I was. Seemed like he probably knew what was up, and all these years later I suspect some kids were curious about what those city folks might have put in that old house.

Bummy has been our friend, our protector, disaster averter, guru and caretaker for nearly thirty years. He has aged just as we have, but instead of slowing down, necessity and inclination have added another dozen flatlanders like us to Bummy’s care.

January 5th Bummy and his wife Carolyn drove us to the Hartford airport and we flew back to sunny California. When they got home, Bummy climbed a ladder to clear an ice dam from his roof. The ladder slipped and Bummy fell face first into ice and deep snow. He was injured, but he’d been hurt before, and he hadn’t finished clearing the dam. And he was mad.

He set the ladder back and took care of it.

When he came in the house Carolyn looked at his blood encrusted face, and his weird sideways gait - his back bent even more than usual – and said she was going to call 911. (There’s another story; the year 911 came to the valley and everyone had to agree on the names of the roads. Longest, most contentious town meeting on record.)

Oh no you’re not. I’m just going to lie down on the couch and get some rest.

Bummy did that, spent a long, miserable night. In the morning he felt worse, so he drove himself the 45 minutes to Greenfield Hospital. (Carolyn has never driven). They X-rayed him, found that he had broken his neck, put him in an ambulance and took him to the emergency room at Bay State Hospital in Springfield. After emergency surgery, he spent the next three weeks in intensive care, immobilized and incoherent.

The doctors told Carolyn it was incredible he wasn’t paralyzed. They were guarded about his prospects, first for survival, then for recovery. She told us she knew they figured him for a 75 year old man who did well to be up and around, not the guy who rises at 4 or 5AM to plow a dozen driveways before he chops wood for his stove. They had to restrain and snow him with drugs to keep him from yanking out his IVs. Carolyn knew if they looked away for a second he would get up and leave.

A few weeks ago I called to check on him, knowing he was finally home. Here, Carolyn said, You can talk to him.

We pulled in last night about 9, and this morning, not long after we rose, Bummy stopped by. He said he’d left the grass for me to mow since he figured I’d be back soon, and he had several others to do. Cosmos was excited to see him, jumping up and whimpering, as if he knew he was greeting someone returned from the dead. Bummy reluctantly agreed to let me take his picture.

This morning as I was taking the photo of Minnie Stetson’s stone, with our house peeking over the top of the hill, I had this fantasy of Bummy – some years from now - greeting the new owners:

So you bought the old Colmore place.

Some think we're buts to leave the southern California coast just as summer arrives.

And Vermont just as winter does.

California is beautiful in summer, and Vermont is a winter destination.

But we do, loving the seasons we are in both places.

Tomorrow - an an exercise that still seems like science fiction to me - we will take off over the Pacific and, a few hours later, land by the Atlantic. Change to a smaller plane and fly to Hartford where friends pick us up, we stop along the way for a nice dinner, and get home in rural Vermont in time to get into bed as darkness descends.

Though we have done this for many years, it still seems beyond comprehension.

The photo is of a jacaranda that has just come into bloom.

Maybe Monday I can send you one of the daffodils in Vermont.

Recently I have been confronted with a tendency I guess I've had most of my life.

To stonewall.

Pain, anger, fear, sadness, lack of confidence, any signs of feeling less than capable of managing whatever I may be facing, goes deep into hiding.

Hidden from myself.

And, I hope - unsuccessfully I have learned - from everyone else.

Why would I do this?

I think it may be what I have held as the most potent measure of manliness.

The result?

Stomach tightening inner stress.

I doubt it's a habit I can break this late in life.

But I can at least stop lying to myself about it.

And maybe write about it, my preferred prescription for purging unwelcome behavior.

So it goes

Like many birds, we have migrated seasonally for the past 12 years, flying east to west in November and west to east in May.

It embarrassed me at first. We referred to people like us as "snow birds," and it always had at least a slightly derisive tone. The rest of us were serious residents with jobs, while these people let weather determine where they would spend their leisure lives.

Some years ago my embarrassment gave way to gratitude.

Today was my last day of going to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, where I was conferred with the honorific, "Writer-in-Residence title by the kind director of the museum, hugh Davies, who waved off my questions about what a contemporary art museum would need or do with such a thing.

The reality is that I have done nothing to enhance the museum, while the corner carrel they have provided for me has provided me with the most welcoming writing space, and the most august title I have ever known.

Before dawn next Monday we will fly to Vermont where I - thanks to my talented designer wife - have a beautiful writing studio over the barn, with a drop dead view looking across our 20 acre pond to the hills beyond.

Lacey has a work ethic of such size and strength to more than compensate for my having none at all.

So, while she works long days at her design firm while we're in San Diego, in Vermont our 1830 farmhouse and her 8 flower and vegetable gardens claim as much time and energy as she can muster. The photo is of Lacey's dahlias that bloom in late summer and fall.

I am her gopher. So I get less writing done. And the much neglected part of me - my body, digging in dirt and hauling manure - has its chance to try to rebalance me.

Life provides everything we need, don't you think?

To all appearances - at least from the San Diego shore - the Pacific is well named.

I grew up on the Atlantic, where the water is always seriously roiled up. The waves crash rather than roll. And there's virtually never a way - even beyond the breakers - to swim without swallowing a lot of ocean.

The Pacific - where I have spent the past twenty years - rolls in and a more orderly fashion. And once you get beyond the break you can often swim on top, not smooth exactly, but calm enough to be able to turn your head and breathe without taking on sea water.

Yesterday I went for a swim late afternoon.

Although it was nothing like an Atlantic swim - banging me around like a piece of flotsam - I hadn't calculated accurately the size and frequency of the waves.

So I found myself with just barely enough time to take in a big breath before having to dive under the next wave, as I made my way out to where I could swim. Luckily the water has warmed up enough (62º) so I could expand my chest to take in air. But I was aware that my lungs don't expand as quickly nor as much as they did many years ago when I used to routinely swim in 55º water before dawn in La Jolla Cove.

I wasn't concerned, breast stroke is always a means of making progress without exerting as much energy. But I was chastened.

I think that's what I have always loved about ocean swimming. The chastening.

Any illusion you may harbor about playing a major role in the physics that govern the planet disappear as you plunge beneath that second wave. And third, fourth, fifth, eighth.

I suppose some primordial residue in our marrow recognizes our old home.

My recurring fantasy centers around an alternate version of the elephants -recognizing their end is near - go off into the deep bush to die. My version is about diving under wave upon wave, and once beyond the break, continuing swimming west until my arms and legs lose all their strength, and I no longer can roll to the side and breathe air. Then I do what our ancestors did, swallow water.

Yesterday I rolled onto my back and looked up to the cloudless sky. My air-filled body floated like a cork.

Cinco de Mayo May 5, 2009

The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.
- Jay McInerney in The Last of the Savages

I have always been curious about how these recipes are passed from my mother, the best cook I know, my sisters, and my dear friends from all over the world. Now with the printing of this cookbook, I pass these recipes to the second best cook I know, my daughter, who leaves for college next fall…Christmas 1990. – From a cookbook by Lacey.

The soft susurration of satisfaction in our post-prandial dip - a family feast topped off with Lacey’s chocolate cake - ramped up to a quarrel when she threatened to expunge the cake from the second edition of her cookbook.

The cake – as politically incorrect as a fox hunt – is a potent icon of our family history. You can read (and prepare, at your own risk) the recipe below. Boxed cake mix. Sour cream. Wesson oil. Eggs. Instant pudding. Chocolate chips. Everything a man could hope for. And a woman defend against.

Everything Lacey has labored over the past decade and more to keep me from, ever since I let my life insurance policy expire.

The aside at the bottom of page 37 - the page number we have all memorized in the torn, rat nibbled cookbook – betrays the extent of this treasure’s staying power: This cake freezes well and sells for big bucks at church sales.

I’m pretty sure I had hoped to persuade Lacey to marry me before tasting a piece of her chocolate chip cake. But had I not, I would have set aside any thoughts of life with anyone else.

The artery challenge is of concern to no one else in the family besides Lacey. Her embarrassment at having such a blatant blast of sugar in her second edition was finally overwhelmed by the family’s threat of boycott.

If ever any one of the five of them is finding getting home for a birthday problematic, the promise of the cake usually overcomes obstacles.

Beloved morphed into legend the summer Louise was running a turtle research program in Baja California on a remote spit of beach. Oakley had gone along. Lacey, bereft of two kids so distant, living under such primitive conditions, decided to bake them a cake and send it to Baja.

What? Send a cake to Baja? Where, if it gets there at all, will be delivered by donkey. In withering, melting heat.

Averting eyes, Lacey assured me the ingredients are so packed with preservative it might make it intact. Maybe even still edible.

When the kids opened it, they were at first incredulous that it looked fine. Then they went through a soul-searching dilemma about whether they could hide it and eat it all themselves, or had to share. Likely only because living in tents on the beach provided no suitable hiding place, the whole group enjoyed it. And became Lacey’s cake aficionados.

Oakley and his wife now live in Singapore. Singapore is in a tropical weather belt that produces rolling thunder storms with sudden changes in atmospheric pressure. Oakley’s occasional headaches have become more frequent and severe. His birthday comes next week. Knowing chocolate can be a headache trigger, Lacey determined not to send a cake. We had a soul searching conversation in which I lobbied for a few things being worth risking one’s life. The cake is right up there.

Agonizing through each culinary step, she baked one, packed it up, and I dropped it off at the Post Office. (Could have bought him a new tennis racket for what the postage cost.) Lacey second-guessed her offering, almost hoping it wouldn’t make it this record-setting distance.

Oakley sent an ecstatic email the other day, attaching the photo that I have attached to this Zone Note. He said he could smell the cake before he opened the box. We’re not sure whether he ate a piece. But as you can see, the local god did.

Lacey’s Chocolate Chip Cake
1 Box Duncan Hines Yellow Cake Mix
½ pint sour cream
½ cup Wesson Oil
4 eggs (!)
1 package vanilla pudding (instant)
I package 6 oz chocolate chips

Mix all ingredients (1/2 chocolate chips at this point)
Place in greased Angel Food pan & bake at 350º
After 15 minutes add remaining chips
Bake 30 minutes more or until done


In the new edition of Vision Magazine – www.visionmagazine.com - I have an article: Revolution, Revelation, Reconciliation

If you haven't seen the long interview with President Obama that is the cover piece of yesterday's magazine section, may I suggest you take a look.

The interviewer wanted to talk with him about how he sees the economy shaping up after the present crisis has let up. They sat in the Oval Office for 50 minutes and, while the writer (name?) said the setting was more formal - thanks to the setting - than the interviews he had done with Candidate Obama, the conversation was just as relaxed and open.

What strikes me every time I hear or read an interview with the president is his seemingly thoughtful and unhurried way he answers very searching questions. Though of course he has a point of view and a political agenda (which, seems it jibes so comfortably with my own, makes it easier for me to listen), he does not speak in hyperbole or make grandiose claims for his attempts to design policies to achieve his objectives.

Which are so sensible that they are sometimes hard to believe. And most of what he sees ahead he sees not so much as a result of his brilliant engineering, but as the inevitable ebb and flow of events, which he would like to do what he can to shape in favor of outcomes he hopes for.

The shrinking back of the percentage of GDP that the financial sector has claimed in recent years. He says we need a healthy and strong financial sector, making loans, funding entrepreneurs. But when they become the tail that wags the dog, things are seriously out of balance. So he wants people to get an education - whether four years of college, two of community college, or a year of technical training beyond high school - that arms them for making a living doing something useful and productive.

I'm not going to try to reproduce the interview here - the details are well worth your taking a look - but want to record my gratefulness to have a president who not only can speak clearly and eloquently, but who looks at the world as a smart and responsible adult who regards himself as having been hired to do a job.

And what a job! And what a job he is doing!