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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Sunday, January 03, 2010
 
[note: not all facts are checked, not all images are formatted and uploaded, but the bones of the story are here... all images but Whitman portrait © 2009 Drew Kampion]
My good friend, Drew Kampion, has been sending out Walt Whitman poems every Tuesday for the last year, a practice instituted on the day of the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. His selections are pertinent to the times, and have prompted many on his extensive list to explore what the guy had to say, me among them.
I recall studying O Captain! My Captain! (Whitman on the death of Lincoln, which affected him profoundly) in school, but other than that, my exposure was pretty meager.
Along came Drew, though, lighting the Walt Whitman fire.
I don’t know what sort of reaction he was getting with his posts of Whitman’s poetry. I, for one, appreciated it – I have a number of correspondents who are poets, and many who send out poems, which I always enjoy, and sometimes to which I respond.
Also, it was interesting to see Drew’s selections of poems, and their relevance (or not) to our times; or, at least, Drew’s interpretation of it.
Drew has often been out in front in his time on Whidbey Island. He came here in the early nineties (as did I), and soon, established the Island Independent, an alternative newspaper, distributed around our archipelago fortnightly.
[open note to you compulsively-researching Wikipedia editors: why don’t you guys put together a page about Drew Kampion, and one about the Island Independent?]
It was really a great paper, featuring some excellent journalism, and interesting regular features (including, after a couple of years, my food column). A beloved newspaper, for which some still pine.
One of his correspondents, Kim Hoelting, is also a devotee of Walt Whitman. Kim lives out in the Maxwelton Valley, on the southern end of South Whidbey Island, next to a huge, old school, built just over a hundred years ago from native softwood (old-growth douglas fir), and standing strong. Kim uses the hall as his showroom for his imposing lumber selection, which includes book-matched douglas fir planks about three inches thick, three feet wide, and sixteen feet long, and some douglas fir two-by-twentyfours, about twenty feet long, and other large pieces of western red cedar, sitka spruce, Alaska yellow cedar, redwood, maple, you name it.
As I understand it, Kim became a salvage logger after having spent some years as a fisherman in Alaska (Bristol Bay Gillnetters, I think, or maybe a seiner or troller). On his way south, coming down the Inside Passage (relatively sheltered water among the northern end of the extensive archipelago, of which my island is the southernmost), he’d see huge logs on the beach, and began towing them home and milling them up and selling the boards. Often, driftwood, as his supply generally was, are old logs that are completely rot resistant – from natural attributes, and from being in salt water.
Kim began to deal in these specialty planks, and now, does that as his trade. He’s also a construction contractor, having participated in a renovation of the Paradise Inn at Tahoma (known as “Mount Rainier” to the yokels), installing huge Alaska cedar logs along the snow-shedding eaves, low to the ground below a high, steep roof.
Drew and Kim began to talk about working their way through Whitman’s work – which is entirely published in the perpetually-edited Leaves of Grass, deathbed edition, 1892. They had thought about meeting once a week, and continuing until they had exhausted the book, but then came the idea of reading the whole thing in one marathon go.
According to the statistic I saw recently published, the whole work would take about twenty-one hours to read; Drew and Kim made their own calculations (essentially 1.5 minutes per page, having timed various readings with a stopwatch), and determined that the whole thing would take twenty-four hours, one day between sunsets.
They selected a date (I hadn’t thought to ask if it were significant): 28-29 December 2009, beginning at 16:24, the time of local sunset (here in GMT-8 time).
Right on the heels of Christmas, which had me so engaged I hadn’t given his reading a thought, other than to check in when he was looking for recruits to read, and asked for a graveyard shift. I thought I would enjoy that most; I have abundant performing experience, particularly with spoken word, but the idea of not having an audience was appealing – as is my dream of hearing crickets when I get a curtain call, like Daffy Duck would).
Suddenly, it was the day before the event. I had just made arrangements to work in america at my Dad’s house, whipping his garden into shape, and would be leaving for the ferry soon after the reading ended, which felt to me like it was best that I was going to read late at night and early in the morning the night before. I intended to spend the night at my dad’s and commence the garden work the next day, so being short on sleep shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Not only that, but I am as stalwart a campaigner as they come, having slept folded up in the seat of a Fiat to be out of the rain at a trailhead in the Olympic Rainforest, and then hiked twenty miles the next day with a load. Come on, my motto – one of them – is podestis me impedere, sed non me sistere.
"You may be able to hinder me, but you are unable to stop me.”
I checked in with Drew’s email-published schedule (an ambitious piece of work – I have organized poetry festivals, and it’s hard to arrange the timetable), and sure enough, I wa on late.
When I got there, around 11:00 at night, it was well dark, the room dimly lit, and just a few were there. They were nearly two hundred pages into a 455 page book; some hours to go, yet. About a third of the way done.
I hung around until 3:00; I read a bit, I listened a lot.
The book was the culmination of Whitman’s work; originally published in 1855 with a mere twelve poems, it eventually, by the last edition in 1892, featured over four hundred poems, and included the entirety of his published poetry.
The Civil War had a great impact on the nation, and particularly on Walt Whitman. When I left the reading in the middle of the night, they were about to hit the patch of Civil War poems, but I had to go home and sleep, since I needed to get up in a few hours to go off and work.
As tired as I was, I got home just fine; the weather was around freezing, and the roads were a bit icy, but there hadn’t been any precipitation, so they weren’t so bad.
After a mere three hours of sleep, I was up and at it again; I did my morning routine and went off to work for a while.
Around noon, I decided I was too tired to keep working, so I headed back to the reading. They were around page 385; merely seventy pages to go.
Drew and Kim were bleary; Kim’s brother, Kurt, had slept in a sleeping bag laid on a huge plank and piece of foam, so he was fresher than Drew or Kim, but not by much.
Compared to them, I was fresh as a daisy – but still not that fresh; I was quite tired.
I got inserted into the mix of readers – there were about twelve people there, and it was getting down to the end.
With thirty pages to go, Drew halted the proceedings to announce that, and to parcel out the remaining works, so that the ship came into port not by blowing there, but with intention.
I took on a few poems, and was flattered that Kim anointed me to read the last poem, Goodbye, My Fancy.
Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke around 1874; he spent the last eighteen years of his life expecting to die, so much of his poetry from then has an air of finality, and saying goodbye. But not as much as the last.
I read that last poem, and stepped away from the podium. I thought about closing the book, as an act of finality and completion, but left if open, as works of art such as that should remain available for deployment, like an alert fireman.
Silence, for a few minutes.
And then Kim spoke, talking about what a meaningful event it was.
The book from which we read had belonged to Kim’s father-in-law, who died during a marathon reading of it; do you suppose that might have contributed to the power of the event?
People began moving around, and leaving; the twenty-four hours had passed. There was mostly silence. Every word had been spoken aloud; the wooden building would remember it, always.
                            
  
GOOD-BYE my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!
I'm going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
So Good-bye my Fancy.
Now for my last - let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.
Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together;
Delightful! - now separation - Good-bye my Fancy.
Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended
into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who
knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning-so now
finally,
Good-bye-and hail! my Fancy.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Mortality's been the theme this last week.
On my island, one of my tree-work colleagues was just killed by an alder.
Bobby Stewart was one of those guys who do the work that's too big for me - I'm a horticulturist, a pruning specialist, I work in fruit trees of all sizes, among other things; there's nothing like the skill and finesse and vigilance it takes to be a tree man, and I don't have it. These guys are the top guys, the arborists, the loggers.
As I understand it, he was "wrecking it," which is a logging term for taking a tree down by cutting it from the top, little by little, in situations where there's no room to drop the whole tree. Part of the tree broke off, I am told, and landed on him.
They all call those falling branches widowmakers - my Finnish grandfather, Leo, was killed by one, logging near Coos Bay; I named my chainsaw after him to keep me mindful.
There's very little that's safe about an alder - the only tree I ever fell from, when the only branch that was supporting me gave way, as I climbed high to impress girls - who were not impressed, not even when I fell twenty feet and was arrested by forked branches -- and yet, those of us who really know alders love them all the same, even though they die young and throw branches along the way (I'll write about them next time) - only the idiots call them trash trees, and Bobby, although one landed on him, would tell you it was ready to go.
The next day, one of our sweet friends was experiencing some headache symptoms. I had heard she'd driven herself to the hospital here on the island (she went in an ambulance, I learned; a friend suggested the detail was critical, as perhaps there was an EMT who was heroic, and about whom we don't know, but who would obviously be an agent in the story).
They promptly airlifted her to Harborview, the regional trauma center down Puget Sound, in Seattle.
Turns out she had an aneurysm, and nearly didn't make it.
Later that day, the prognosis I heard was that they were hoping for signs of higher brain function - so it would seem we were about to lose her.
To deal with the pressure of the blood clot, they could either go into her brain via an artery in her leg, or enter her skull the conventional way - which they opted to do. The next day, they operated.
A portion of her skull was removed, and kept in the freezer for later re-attachment; the surgeon said the area "looked angry," and they want it to subside before they seal her all the way up.
She made it through the surgery like a champ, and was even demonstrating recognition of her situation the next day, a day before they intended to bring her out of her post-operative, induced comatose state.
The report I got that day was that she was going to be without this bit of skull for some time, and would be wearing a helmet.
"I think she's going to be just fine," I said.
I remember this from before.
When I was eleven years old, I lived in a little town on the saltwater, much like the town I live in now, but not as bohemian by a long shot.
There weren't that many employment prospects, as we were rather remote - you could either cut grass, or maybe babysit (tried that - the allegedly sleeping infant was actually a profoundly-sociopathic Houdini for two solid hours; I can still see that paltry 37¢ in the mother's fat palm -- "won't be long!") - but if you were lucky, you had one of the few, precious paper routes, delivering the Tacoma News Tribune, published in the city on the other side of the bay.
That was a good income for a kid in the early 70's - hard work, and getting up early on the weekends to deliver Sunday edition, which I would weigh when I finished my route - to determine that, yes indeed, that young guy was walking around with one of those classic, canvas newspaper-delivery bags, carrying upwards of a hundred pounds of newspapers at a time.
You loaded the papers in the bag for a long, looping first leg; the bag was so heavy you had to pull it over the edge of the box the truck dropped the bundles in - and in which you slept if you got there in the morning before the truck had arrived with your bundles. Then you kind of stood up into it and heaved away from the box like a tug from a pier.
You didn't bend over until you were down a dozen or more papers, as the weight of the papers would pull you down, and you wouldn't be able to get up - seriously - it happened more than once. It sounds funny to imagine a kid immobilized by a newspaper bag, legs feebly kicking like a capsized beetle, but it's not. That bag could strangle you, come to think of it.
I had no idea I barely escaped childhood with my life - no, actually, knew it all along, but this isn't that kind of story, so we won't go into it. The history of my scars and scrapes can wait.
I didn't have a paper route at the time, but was hoping to get one - there were only four, one of which was actually prestigious, having the most customers in the shortest distance, and good tippers, to boot (not as compact as a high school friend's route - he delivered papers in an apartment building, and would deposit the requisite amount of papers on every other floor going up in the elevator, then deliver them on the way down, using the stairs - over in half an hour).
My brother, Dan, had the prime route (my other brother had another). He was always an ass-buster, and had rapidly been switched to that one by the manager, and pulled in upwards of a hundred dollars a month, which was a lot for a kid in those days, for an hour's work a day (every day, no days off).
One day in June, I was with a friend, who had one of the subordinate routes. He was going on a trip with his family, so I was learning his route as a substitute, to fill in while he was away.
In the center of my town was a large park, with some great little woods, tennis courts, and a wide-open sports field with a baseball diamond on one side, and goal posts for soccer on the other.
A softball game was going on that day, but nothing organized; not a league, or anything. Just a bunch of grownups playing softball and drinking beer (which was easy to get away with - our town was unincorporated, so only the county sheriff had jurisdiction; we were way off near the county line, and you never saw those guys).
My pal's route went past the field, and then around the corner, looping past the fire station and the doctor's office.
As we approached the doctor's, a van squealed into the parking lot. A fellow got out of the van, ran into the office, came dashing back out, and sped off, around the corner.
"Shit," my pal said, "I'm going to see what's going on - you deliver those next few papers…?" as he ran off. I knew the route already, and was just affirming it for him that day.
He took off around the corner, and was back in a minute -
"Bart! It's your brother!"
I went around the corner to the next street, and could see a cluster of people gathered half a block down on the other side, standing looking at Dan on the ground.
I took the bag off, set it on the grass, and walked across the street to the group of people. I took my time; I was afraid.
I slowly walked up and looked down -
But that's the part I don't remember. I remember looking at him, but I don't remember what I saw.
I was the kid, shuffling that afternoon with his blood-flecked bag and papers, finishing his route.
Didn't know what else to do.
The fellow in the van, one of the drunk softball players, had hit him while he sped down the road - doing fifty in a twenty-five zone. His mirror, we learned later, had clipped my brother in the head, knocking him off his bike and to the ground (ironically, had he been wearing a helmet - they weren't around then - his head would have made it, but his neck would have been broken and he'd be dead).
He lay there, a bloody mess; his newspaper bag was next to him, his bicycle lay there, the front wheel bent. I walked away and sat on the grass.
An ambulance arrived soon after, and he was taken to the hospital in the city, where they hustled him into surgery.
He made it through surgery just fine, but - they took out part of his skull in the process - the part right above the hairline in front. Later, they would insert a plastic plate, but that had to wait until he recovered.
We were able to visit him in the hospital in a couple of days - I was a bit jealous by the attention he was getting, and of all the cool toys with which well-wishers were filling his room.
Dan was fine - I had feared I'd have a vegetable for a brother, but he was fine. Alert, coherent, just the same, but with a big hole in his head.
He came home from the hospital, and life went along just about the same - except that now my brother had this spot on his head with the skin just stretched across it, about as big as a dollar. Right there in front; you couldn't miss it.
He usually wore a stocking cap - a beanie, as the cool set has adopted them now - which made me just a bit less uncomfortable.
And he went about his normal business - he delivered his newspapers, and went to school, and continued his passionate basketball playing.
We had a hoop on the back patio, installed on a huge steel column made by one of the welders at the shipyard where my dad was a naval architect, and Dan would hang out back there, shooting baskets for hours.
He had an odd style of shooting, too - we were soccer players (Little League baseball, although present in our community, didn't have the appeal and cachet of soccer, which was the popular sport - many of my friends went on to have pro careers on the field), and Dan would shoot baskets as if throwing a soccer ball in from the sideline, in which the ball starts behind your head, and with both hands, you toss it as far and accurately as you can.
Dan would nail all the shots, too, uncannily - and had, as a result, an advantage over defenders taller than him, as shooting the ball that way gave him about a foot of extra height, compared to the conventional way of shooting a basketball.
He'd be out there for hours - and you wasted your time if you ever undertook a game of HORSE with him; he'd kick your ass every time.
Once, during Dan's convalescence, the ball rolled under the deck.
"I'll get it!" I said, wanting to protect my gentle, damaged brother. But he was closer, and got the ball, and banged his head when he came back out.
I nearly wet my pants, I nearly fainted, I certainly hyperventilated, afraid that he had damaged himself and was now about to die.
He was rather cavalier about it, though, to the point that he thought my concern and fuss were silly - and I think I'm still getting over that incident, as well.
Two months later, they operated on him again, and sewed this thick, plastic plate in his skull, in place of the missing bone. "Stronger than bone," the surgeon said.
Two operations in two months - a scar beginning above his eye and continuing over the top of his head to the back, from the first surgery, and another going from one ear to the other, the polar route, from the second.
When his hair grew back, rather than being light and rather wispy as mine was (and is still, although much grayer), it was dark and coarse. No one mistook us for twins after that.
And Dan went back to his normal activities, too, playing soccer that autumn, wearing a hockey helmet. I remember parents of the opponents making a stink about it, and my father bitching them out.
Just a few years ago, Dan had a series of small strokes in an afternoon - TIAs, they call them, or "Transitory Ischemic Attacks." He was incoherent, and a girl he was with called an ambulance. He was promptly airlifted across Puget Sound to Harborview, and took up residence for a few days in the same Neuro Intensive Care Unit where my friend is today.
It's a nice place - and a crack trauma center; the finest in the Pacific Northwest (including Alaska and Montana). Our friend will be in nice hands.
But when they told me that she was going to be missing part of her skull for a time, and wearing a helmet, it all came back. "No sweat," I said. She'll be fine - a tough road, but she's a tough dame, and medical technology has advanced in the last thirty years, right?
The medicine of my youth seems ancient and barbaric to me, now - although the administration of it to my numerous lacerations, contusions, sprains, strains and aches (no breaks, I don't think - and I'm knocking wood) is still fresh in my mind.
Perhaps you don't remember pain, but you remember everything else.
Almost.
Perhaps that's best.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
I live across the street from a fifty acre pasture, with a copse of douglas firs in the middle, and houses clustered at the northwest end. The land is contoured like the Palouse, to the degree that it would nearly be better for sheep, and is divided into a few fields with hotwire fences, cedar and barbed wire along our road.
I was out working today; a week or so ago, I took out two of three wild plum trees along the north fence. They were shading the neighbor’s garden, and the birds didn’t even eat the fruit!
They’ll be replaced by blue elderberries (we only have the red, poison kind in abundance around here), which, if I don’t manage to make jelly and wine out of them, will certainly be favored by waxwings and jays, and even those horrid, thrush-chasing robins. Now, there’s a pile of branches and brush in my yard. In a day or so, I’ll get to renting a chipper and turning the brush into mulch, but all the decent-sized wood I saved out – to deliver to, among others, a friend who put the word out a couple of months ago that he needed firewood – he got a supply, but needs it for next year. I was out there today, having cleaned out the back of the truck, cutting the long branches shorter so I could deliver them down the alley.
While I was standing there, having deposited a load of wood down at the mathematician's trailer, and at the editor's woodshed, and having put bar oil in the saw, an eagle came low over the neighbor’s house, and right past the truck and across the road, barely skimming above the barbed wire, and fifty feet later, a gentle lift above the perpendicular fence, with a twitch of the tail like a marsh hawk, across the pasture just a few feet off the ground.
For about four years, eagles have nested in the firs in the middle of the pasture, having certainly been enticed by the abundant rock doves who visit my birdfeeders. As the eagle skimmed across the road, I looked ahead to see what it might be preying upon, but there were no rabbits, just the cows, and he didn’t have his gear down, anyway. His flight was rather laconic and coasting, indeed, as a marsh hawk.
The cows have worried a section of the field at the crest of the slope into a bare basin two meters in diameter; the eagle was headed for this.
One of the cows along the fence over which the eagle had glided, and just up the hill a bit, saw the eagle moving over the grass, and as the eagle neared the basin, the cow had already begun to move, like a fat cop spilling his coffee and gathering headway.
The eagle landed, backfilling with its huge wings, and by now, the cow was nearly there, like a linebacker charging the quarterback, and two calves were even in pursuit.
The eagle looked up, and here was this cow bearing down on him, and I imagine it will always be fresh in the eagle’s mind, the memory of that treacherous sight, and the massive, glistening, foaming nostrils, and the brisket flapping from side to side, and into the air leaped our brave hero, the eagle, barely having avoided being trampled by a cow.
The calves arrived on the scene as the eagle flew south, and by now, the ten or so other cows were in on it and charging after the eagle as if it were several apples I had thrown, and then –
There was a cow, like there always is, the one far from the herd, nibbling grass that had some odd taste that only it favored, or just being a loner, or needing some quiet time, but you’ve seen them there, the cows, the lone ones away from the others, and this girl got in on the act, too.
She was far away from the eagle, and by the time she intersected the cows, the eagle would be in the forest, but our clever girl made a move in a flash, as if she were in the backfield covering a receiver, and made the move to intersect the eagle’s path, and she did, and the poor eagle, our national symbol, came this close to being mobbed and beset by misery and at the mercy of cows.
I never would have thought you could tell a story that had cows and eagles in it, a friend said later, when I told him the story.
It brought home to me, too, the importance of being outside. That’s where the miracles and ironies are happening, and you have to be out there to catch them in the act.
I'm glad I banded with the squirrels and the crows and their ilk, and join them when I can.
Later, it snowed.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
I was a cat guy, early on. I grew up with a cat, who came to us when I was a wee toddler, and died when I was nineteen and had left home long before. I never knew a day at home without that cat, Chessie (named after the mascot and logo of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, since she resembled it so much in demeanor and color - and her name was technically, "Chesapeake and Ohio," which you would deploy if you wanted to scold her - at least I did, since I was the youngest of four and had no authority over anyone but the cat - okay, I have since learned that the cat is at the top of the hierarchy).
Chessie was a great sport, and served, as many cats do around children, as the ambassador for all cats, so I became a cat guy.
After leaving home, I didn't live with a cat, but that changed.
Back in 1983, I had a friend who had a cat. He lived on Seattle's First Hill (known as "Pill Hill," since that's where all the hospitals were - I was born in one of them, so was my son…), and one stormy night, a little black-and-white kitten followed him out of the rain and into the lobby, into the elevator, and into the apartment.
The cat stayed.
A few months later, my friend moved into the University District, which was my neighborhood; he and the cat moved into a house just a few blocks south. Several of us young guys hung out there - we worked in a restaurant, so we kept odd, late hours, and drank a lot of beer. And played with the cat.
I was the only one who seemed to have much regard for the cat - all the other guys would tip him out of their laps if he made a move that way, but not me - the little cat and I were buddies.
So, not long after the cat arrived in my neighborhood, he had to move again - this time, into an apartment with a no-pets lease.
My friend called to give me this news, and to ask me if I could look after the cat; "Just for six months - I only ask you this since I know how close you and the cat are."
I knew it would be a responsibility, and, being young, knew that I wasn't sure I wanted to hinder my functional irresponsibility. But the cat needed me, I thought, so I relented.
We became rapidly close. During the six months, my friend never visited the cat, and when his lease was up, he called to say he was coming over to pick the cat up.
"What cat?" I asked.
He thought something had happened to it.
"What do you mean? Where is he?"
"Well, if you're talking about a black-and-white cat, yes, I have one. You don't, but I do."
I wasn't going to give the cat up, which was the right thing to do -- think of the welfare of the cat; should he live with someone who was devoted to him, or with an ignorant buffoon? As a result, the friendship was terminated, but I didn't care - I had gotten the better deal of the bargain.
He was quite something, that cat, and I soon named him, "Figaro." People thought it was cute, that I had named him after the charming kitten in Disney's Pinocchio, but that wasn't the case. I had named him after Figaro, the Barber of Seville, from Rossini's opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia.
Figaro's great aria: Largo al factotum della citta… "Make way for the great factotum of the city!" That was the way my cat Figaro was, a factotum. Brilliant cat. He would climb up the cedar that grew outside my bedroom window to get in at night, and would even leap the twelve feet from the landing of the upstairs duplex next door to my windowsill. I saw him do it once, and was astonished.
Everything about him was astonishing - including how handsome he was.
The U-District is crawling with rats, more than a wharf, and Figaro would catch them. I saw him drop one at one end of a sheet of plywood leaning up against the house - the rat, spotting freedom at the other end, would make a break for it. When he arrived at the edge of safety - Bam, there was the cat! Back the rat would go, and Bam!
Or another time, I saw Figaro batting a rat, spinning around and around, like a hockey player on the icy street.
Figaro was a clever cat; you knew he was the boss, and he loved me. In fact, I maintain that he taught me to love myself (cats having such a capacity to be avatars), which enabled me to love others, which enabled me to fall in love with the woman who became my wife and mother of my kids. Their existence can be directly traced to a cat who walked in out of the rain.
Everyone knew I was devoted to this cat - beyond Damon and Pythias, even. We were close. So when my future wife fell for me, she knew that she had to get the cat's approval, first (authoritative cats are nothing new; see P.G. Wodehouse's short story, The Story of Webster). Sure enough, though, Figaro fell for her, too, so all was well.
In 1989, I lived in a house next to a woman I had gone to school with in another town; she played the clarinet in the Symphony (we had played together in the band at school - she kept playing hers, mine sits in the corner to this day), and traveled in the summer. She would let Figaro into her house, although her husband was allergic - he was some cat; he had that kind of appeal.
When they would go on trips, I'd look after their mail, and water their garden, and would always be paid with a bag of cookies on my porch the day they left.
One day, I came home, and there was a bag of cookies, and a note, and an art card, a painting of a cat. She had included the card since the depicted cat reminded her so much of Figaro.
We became quite fond of that card - ironically, it was from the Kirsten Gallery, just a couple of blocks away from the house I lived in when Figaro came to live with me in the U-District, but I rarely went there.
Once, though, my wife and I, when she was pregnant with our son, visited the gallery, and while looking around, came upon a framed print of the painting that was the image on the card, by Nicholas Kirsten-Honshin.
Zen Cat Meditates on Essence of Moon and Essence of Iris - All is One
My wife and I looked at each other, wondering: Should we buy it? Could we?
We thought about it. Kept walking around.
And then, just around a corner, there it was: The Original. Much more expensive than the print, but just above the painting was a sign on the wall: "All art may be purchased on time with no interest."
Wow. We had to live with it.
We went upstairs to the desk to make the arrangements; Nicholas was there, and came out to meet us.
"So many times, that painting has almost left, but then, the people changed their minds - and now I know why: it's supposed to be with you."
They took down all my information, but not even a credit card number, and we began contemplating making the payments until we could hang the painting in our home.
But they asked, "Is your car parked in back? We'll wrap up the painting and take it out there."
What? They were letting us take the painting without even a down payment? Yes, indeed they were. An odd transaction, but clearly, we were supposed to live with the painting.
You can still get prints, and art cards (contact the gallery), but you can't get the original. It lives with me.
It's one of Nicholas's well-known works, and one of a few that feature the handsome Zen Cat. We even got to know the actual cat, Crowley, who once favored me by sitting on my lap.
After having the painting for several years, it had acquired a bit of moisture-spotting on the inside of the glass, so we arranged to bring it to the gallery for re-framing. Nicholas's father, Richard Kirsten-Daiensai (much more on him another time), was having a festive art opening, and as my son carried the painting through the garden to the gallery, you could hear the guests fall silent. Someone whispered, "That's the original!" It really is a stunning asset, and, as Nicholas has pointed out, it's done better than the stock market!
Figaro died in 1996, which was a heartbreak. My son's first word, when pointing at the cat, was "Fo." He was enmeshed in our lives, and had changed everything. We still invoke his Number One Rule: "Walk in like you own the place."
I have lived with other cats in my time; Rosina, who was named after the femme fatale in Rossini's opera (she and Figaro were pretty tight), and then Gioacchino, named after Rossini himself, and who was superbly handsome and soft. There was Sophia, who was small, and fey, and had a short life, and then Akira, who was all black, clever, but didn't come home one moonless night.
We were without a cat for some months, and after a while, we noticed that we were tending to get on each other's nerves just a bit more often, and needed that tranquil lightning rod of a cat. It's unseemly for us to go out and try to acquire a cat, but we figure that if we just let the cosmos know that we're open to having one (derived from our standard philosophy; see my previous essay, good dog cosmos), then a cat will appear.
After a few months, we received a call. A woman had a cat who had come in out of the storm, and had been hiding out in her basement for a week, coming up at night to eat her cat's food. When she finally discovered this stowaway, she invited her to join the household, but her own cat wasn't having any part of it - you know how cats can be.
So she called us.
She didn't know that we were in the market for a cat; she worked at the Kirsten Gallery, had for years, and since the cat reminded her so much of the Zen Cat, and she knew we had the painting, she called.
Let me spell out the irony for you:
The painting came into my life since the featured cat resembled my cat, and now a cat was coming into my life since it resembled the cat in the painting.
We collected the cat, and soon named her Guinevere. How nice it was to have a cat again.
The problem was that she had obviously been abused by a man; any time my son or I would go into the room where she was, she'd dash into hiding. She was close and cuddly with my wife, but wasn't going to tolerate me or my son.
This was frustrating. "The hell with it," we would say, "let's just get a kitten so we can have a cat."
 Months of this tragic behavior went by, but I kept trying - I'm the one who feeds the cat, and always endeavor to be close to animals - it's my notorious nature - and eventually, my attentions paid off, and we're now not only close, but closer than she is with anyone else. She's like my girlfriend - she likes me to leave a sweater on the bed sometimes, so she can lay on it, and when she sees me in the garden, she comes running; we always spend some time when we're out there together, her rolling around in a patch of grass under the apple tree, and me rubbing her belly and running my hand from the top of her head all the way down her tail.
She's another clever one, too, and lately, we've said to each other, "Are you getting a 'Figaro' hit from Guinevere like I am?"
They are much alike, with one prominent difference - I heard Figaro meow maybe fifty times in the thirteen years I lived with him, but compared to that, Guinevere is a regular chatterbox, meowing maybe a dozen times a day (not like the famous Gioacchino, though - he meowed all the time, with a marvelous voice; once, I thought I would count how many times he meowed in a day, and after an hour, he was up over seventy, so I gave up and called it five hundred for the day).
The best way to get out of this essay? Wrap it up and go to bed - Guinevere's waiting…
Sunday, January 18, 2009
The other day, I wrote about dogs, and how capable they are when given a clear job description (see The Good Dogs).
I promised to make an ironic leap with the topic, so here's my stab at that:
I have a good friend, a Zen priest in fact, which I suppose makes him more the master and me the disciple, but neither of us looks at it that way - he's a fellow crow devotee, which fostered our relationship - at any rate -
He travels with his sons to Las Vegas when they attend conventions (they're in the art publishing and gallery business), and unbeknownst to the casino managers, who see this frail old man and give him a complimentary room, he rakes it in on the slots.
How does he do this?
He whips out his jizo statue and sets it on the machine, and then, if you were watching, you'd see him lean in and caress the slot machine, the way someone does with a favored horse, and whisper; he's making a connection with the machine.
"What people don't realize is that even though a man made it, the machine has a soul," which he treats with respect, and is rewarded with consistent winnings.
Really, he's just tapping into the cosmos's willingness to accommodate our needs.
I've spent a lot of time around theaters, have appeared in a lot of plays, have learned tons of lines. Fortunately, I'm good at the memorization, but for others, it's tough; I do all I can to help my fellow actors out, running lines with each other, until we're all comfortable that we know them.
I was running some scenes with a friend who was in a challenging play; most of her lines were long, non sequiturs (Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)- tricky to learn, as you can imagine: having a thread in the dialogue gives the actor some handholds, but working with random monologues is tough - you have to memorize it until your body knows it, and then deal with the chaos of the scene.
Needless to say, my friend was having trouble, which was why she called me - so I could help her run the lines, over and over.
Still, she was having trouble, which was really frustrating for her.
{note - this is funny - I know what my point is supposed to be, but I look at what I have and wonder if I'm getting close to making it, which shines a light on what would seem to be one of my approaches as a writer - if a topic is difficult to pin down, throw enough words at it to smother it).
"I'll never get this line!" she said.
No.
She won't; she can't, with that attitude.
You see, I regard everything that we say to be a prayer. Any statement can be easily recast to highlight this; in the case of my friend, the frustrated actress, her statement translates, with hyperbole intact, as:
"Please, O provident Cosmos - don't let me learn this line, please…"
I prefer to approach that situation with this prayer:
"Man, this line is a bitch - but I'll nail it down; I'll keep working on it."
Really, it works that way.
Around here, we really try to avoid negative statements, as a corollary of this approach, urging one to remember something rather than admonishing them not to forget.
It works in all kinds of ways, too, such as finding one's car keys - say it out loud - "I really need to find my car keys in the next five minutes, since I don't want to be late…:
And it helps, as in that case, to be specific. I was talking with a friend who runs a non-profit, who said the institution depended on a miracle.
My notion is that they'll get their miracle, but not until she states clearly just exactly what kind of miracle it is.
Of course, it helps to be vague at times, too - since, if there's any order or structure to the cosmos, one might assume that the providence can be obscure but authentic.
Still, if one is willing to be clear with the cosmos, it will endeavor to provide.
Just like a dog; it only wants a good, clear job description.
And that's as easy as talking to a dog.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Once upon a time, we had two ways to be found: our telephone number, and our address. If you wanted, you could have an unlisted number and a PO box; you could keep a pretty low profile.
Now we have email addresses, too, and often, more than one.
And a business line, and maybe also a fax, and of course, a cell phone number - I think about Tony Robert's character in Woody Allen's film, Play it Again, Sam - constantly leaving numbers with his secretary so she'd know how to reach him - but now, we have many addresses that hook us into the web.
Many now have a presence on the web - a MySpace page, or the Book of Faces, or a blog, or maybe they're real mavericks and have their own website.
Here I am, for example, writing in this blog - which I'd rather not think of as a blog, but as a venue for essays - since that's what I like - and intend - to write. I mean no disservice to the devoted "bloggers" out there, but I just don't want to think of myself as one. An essayist, but not a blogger -
I have other sites, too:
A personal favorite is geniusweirdo.org - I've realized that many of the items which might appear here would also be good to have on that site (visit it and you'll see what I mean), and no doubt, some of the stuff on there might show up, in some form, here.
Another web concept I'm working with is Argyle9. Check it out. I wouldn't know how to begin describing it, anyway.
Sue Frause, a friend of mine, writes a blog; mostly about her travels, she also writes about life here on our island. Once upon a time, Sue, who has been around in the publication business for some time, wrote for the local paper. Each week, she'd have a little sidebar featuring her Best Bets. I was headlining a poetry reading, and Sue wrote it up (the favorable attention definitely contributed to the size of the crowd - thanks, Sue). However, my name was spelled "Baron," without the "t" that makes it "barton."
I wrote a reply:
"While I am flattered to have been mentioned in your "Best Bets," Mrs. Frause, I must point out a slight error: You refer to me as a Baron, but I am actually a Viscount (a mere notch above a baron in the peerage), a title conferred upon me by Rex Incognito,the Very King of Langley Himself.
Protocol dictates that use of my title is optional at all times."
Often, if a local is engaged in something she finds noteworthy, she'll interview them and feature them on her blog.
Apparently, I'm the noteworthy one this time around.
The local arts center is having a fundraiser show called "Something to Crow About," and I learned, via the invitation in the mail, that I was to be the entertainment. That's appropriate, I suppose, and appropriate, considering that it's a show invoking Crow Energy, that I found out in a weird way -
Sue had mentioned something about it some months ago, last year, but then it was rescheduled, and I hadn't heard much about it.
"This show has had more glitches," Sue said when I brought the curious disposition of my recruitment to her attention. "You know? I think it's the Crow Thing."
"Gee, Sue - do you think?"
So she interviewed me for her blog today; we met at the Useless Bay Coffeehouse, here in Langley, on Whidbey Island, off the northwest coast of America. As befits an interview, I was actually interviewing her for my blog -
 I did learn much about Sue during our hour-and-a-half together, but it's personal stuff, so I'll leave it for now.
One thing that was a bit comical - she wanted to take my picture, as she does, but pointed out that Gary, who owns Mukilteo Coffee Company, out in the woods, chided Sue for conducting her meetings and interviews at Useless Bay Coffee Company here in Langley. "I don't even want to mention where I met them any more," she said, "but people will be able to tell from the picture," sweeping in the surroundings as if washing them off glass.
"I know - "I told her, "I have a picture of myself in just about the position you find me here, but at a table outside a coffee bar on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris in the summer."
I went on to suggest that we met there, so she could use the photo and claim it as her own.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Let's represent a sugar molecule like this:
X
Although there are many different kinds of sugar (glucose, sucrose, fructose…), we'll keep it simple.
Take a little leap, though, and think of the molecule as C6H12O6 (six carbon molecules, twelve hydrogens, six oxygens - put together like building blocks).
String a bunch of sugars together, and you have a starch (just a long chain of sugar molecules):
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A much longer chain of them gets you cellulose, which is wood fiber:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Starch is an excellent way to store sugars for energy, which is why grains are starchy - they need that sugar to get the sprout up and out of the ground; the plant needs an energy supply until it can get some leaves photosynthesizing and making its own energy.
To break the starch down into sugars, you need enzymes - they take the chain apart.
The enzymes that take sugars apart are called amylases; enzymes that deconstruct proteins are called proteases, and fat-breaking enzymes are lipases…
There are two principle amylase enzymes: the alpha and the beta. The alpha assesses the starch molecule, finds the middle, and cuts it there, like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX becomes
XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
It keeps doing it, too - it will take those two halves and halve them again.
The beta enzyme works from the end of the starch molecule, taking off two glucose molecules at a time, like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
becomes
XXXXXXXXXX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX
Barley is loaded with these enzymes, much more so than any other grain, an attribute we can exploit, as we'll see.
But it doesn't serve barley for the enzymes to convert its own starches to sugars until it needs them, so it has a meager supply, basically, until the seed gets "switched on," and its time to utilize that efficiently-stored energy (the starch molecule takes up far less room than the sugar molecules it's composed of, since it's kind of like a neat coil inside the grain, a tightly-packed chain).
How do you switch the seed on?
You sprout it.
In the case of barley, you soak it in water until it germinates, and the little, ambitious "acrospire" (the sprout) emerges.
When the acrospire is about ¾ as long as the grain, the enzyme count increases dramatically, much longer, and the enzymes will begin digesting the starches in earnest, but you want to hold off a bit…
So you switch the seed off. How?
You dry it out, so the acrospire withers, and that's that.
The barley you began with has now been "malted," and you now have "malted barley." That's all there is to it.
Beer is made from malted barley. How do you do that?
Beer is a fermented beverage, which means that the sugars have been converted to alcohol by yeast, which are simple organisms. Yeast digests sugar (just like we all do, fundamentally), excreting alcohol (C2H5OH) and carbon dioxide (CO2).
If you're into it, do the balance sheet -
Sugar: 6 C 12 H 6 O
Alcohol: 2C 6H 1O
Carbon dioxide: 1C 2O
If you balance it out, you see that one sugar molecule generates two alcohol molecules, and two carbon dioxide molecules, nothing left over.
(For extra credit, ponder how plants use CO2 and water [H2O] to make sugars, including chains of starches, and obviously, cellulose [plant fiber, remember?]).
Looks like making alcohol is going to be pretty easy - start with malted barley, get some yeast…
You've got to make conditions favorable for the enzymes in the barley to convert the starches to sugars; turns out that the ideal conditions are wet heat - around 150°.
First, though, you have to render the grains into a form that makes it as easy as possible for the enzymes to get at the starches, so it gets crushed by passing it between rollers.
If you add water that's hotter than 150°, and plan it out ahead of time so you start with water of the right temperature, once you add it to the crushed, malted barley, the temperature settles into the favorable range. Of course, it's also possible to apply heat to the wet, crushed grains to get the temperature into the zone.
This is called a "mash."
I always wanted to know what one was; see rapid research.
And the enzymes get busy - soon, they have converted all the starches into sugars, which is easy to verify: pull out a spoonful of the grains and drop some iodine into them - from chemistry class years ago, you may recall that iodine, which is red, turns black when it contacts starch - one simply tests for the presence of starch until it isn't present any more, maintaining the temperature of the mash in the favorable range.
Now, you have a mass of wet, crushed, malted barley that is now sweet - all the starches have been converted. Bootleggers go this far and add yeast, fermenting it until the yeast activity ceases, once the yeasts have converted all the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Then they distill it (a topic for another day, but a dear one, to me).
Brewers, though, start the same way, but have to get the sugars out of the grains - who wants porridge in their beer?
Usually, they'll put the mash in a pot that has a screen bottom, and wash the sugars out of the grains with hot water, collecting the water and putting it in a pot.
This is called "wort," and once it's boiled with hops (a perennial vine with bitter flowers growing in clusters like grapes), it can be fermented and will have become beer (sake, generally called "rice wine," having been made from grain is actually "rice beer").
Pretty straightforward stuff, really. Beer has been around for over four thousand years, having been invented in Mesopotamia.
How would someone know what to do to the grain to make beer out of it, though?
It was either advice from the alien overlords who seeded the earth with people and ideas, or it happened accidentally, which is easy to imagine:
Let's say you have a sack of grain, and it rains. The grain sprouts.
But you want to eat it, not plant it, so you try to rescue it by drying it out.
Darn it, though! It gets wet again, but this time, you don't catch it until it's been there for a couple of weeks, the grains floating around, and now yeast has gotten at it - which is common, there being so many yeasts drifting around.
It's really ruined now, but not wanting to throw it out, you eat some of the grains, and discover alcohol in the process.
For extreme extra credit, consider this:
Agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent, around the Middle East. Grains were grown, stored, and marauded by rats.
Cats to the rescue!
This is when cats became our companions - by protecting the grains by hunting the rodents who were eating and spoiling it.
What if cats hadn't come on the scene?
Rats would have had their way with the silos of grain, and people would likely have given up growing grains.
"Forget this agriculture thing," the early, pissed-off people might have said.
"Let's go back to hunting/gathering."
Without cats, we might have abandoned agriculture, and that would certainly have meant no beer!
So we have cats to thank for beer getting off the ground in the first place.
The next time you have a beer, raise your glass to the cat and shout its name.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
I read an article in a recent New Yorker about a fellow who is ferreting out the dimensions of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end the Pacific theater of WWII. An interesting point jumped off the page: a day on which the crews were training to drop the bombs was the fortieth anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright having demonstrated that powered flight was possible.
Merely forty years, and a plane was able to fly high and drop an instant sun.
That seems like pretty extreme technological compression - forty years? From limping along the sand in North Carolina and packing the bits of airplane in barrels afterward, to flying high over the ocean and destroying cities.
Add another twenty-five years or so, and Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon.
Other technological marvels include the news I just received yesterday: my brother, the Luddite, not only has a computer, but is online. He called me with the news, and left a message saying he wanted me to give him some links of my web design work; since I had missed the call, he thought he might just get the information from my sister.
Well, jeez, pal, why didn't you just tell me your email address?
I frequently tell my son how things we take for granted didn't even exist when I was his age. There weren't calculators (unless you count an abacus), I seldom saw a color television, personal computers were relatively far off, and there certainly wasn't an internet.
I had an IBM pc back in the 1980's - I bought it used from a friend for $700 (which seemed like a pretty good deal).
The hard drive was massive, for those days - 256 kilobytes. That was the hard drive. The machine I'm working with at the moment has a 320 gigabyte hard drive, which is over 1.3 million times the capacity.
A mere eight years ago, I upgraded from a machine with a 1 gigabyte hard drive to one with an 8 gigabyte drive, and I thought I was really stepping up.
Over the recent holidays, one of my nephews was excited that he had just acquired a 500 gigabyte external hard drive.
"Is that all?" I said, "I recently picked one up that's 1.5 terabytes." -- (that's about 6.3 million times as large as the drive in that old PC, and the unit is about half the size of a box of facial tissue).
Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't even conceive of a gigabyte. I might as well get used to petabytes [about a million gigabytes, which is a bit over 8.5 billion bits - a bit being the binary unit, a zero or a one - on, or off]). And exabytes: a bit over a billion gigabytes - and zettabytes - over a trillion gigabytes. Yottabytes? That's more than a billion terabytes, which is more than a million megabytes, which is more than a million bytes, which is eight bits. That is a huge heap of zeros and ones, and they all will have something to do, one day.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
A good friend tells me of “morphic resonance” – I won’t explain it as he does (he’s an intellectual), but you’ll get the idea.
For instance, he says, let’s say you’re walking along, and spot a rubber band on the ground. You pick it up, but not after making a conscious decision – not, “Hey, I might need that.” No, you just pick it up and put it in your pocket.
And sure enough, he explains, in a short time, you encounter a situation that requires a rubber band. And you have one.
Morphic resonance.
He told me of this little concept a month or so ago, and I’ve been eager to investigate the phenomenon… which might be a bit tricky, since it seems key to not engage with the object you find, you just pick it up with no agenda or expectation.
Today, just as I was leaving to go work on an outdoor project for a client in my neighborhood, I went into my office and fetched a piece of paper. I thought it was an obsolete printed document from a stash of scrap paper, but it was a virgin sheet of 8 ½ x 11. I folded it in quarters and put it in my pocket.
Not long after, I was working away, and hear, down the hill, my friend – who happens to live next door to the client for whom I was working – calls out and asks if I can help him pick up some furniture from a friend here in town.
I walked down the hill and into his house.
He needed to write a note, but couldn’t find a piece of scratch paper. I had one in my pocket, so I gave it to him. He tore off a quarter of it and handed me the rest.
We got the furniture; a bit later, I headed down at his house for hot tea, but wrote a note for my client, telling her I would be back in half an hour to discuss the project, and tucked it in the window of my truck. Then I headed down the hill.
During our brief visit, my friend was telling me about a Bob Dylan tune he thought I should know, and wanted to write the title down. He remembered that I had the paper.
Now I had a quarter of it left.
When I left my friend’s house, his wife offered me a cookie, a gluten-free Pfeffernuss (don’t laugh, it was a killer cookie). She wanted to roll it in the confectioner’s sugar, and after doing so, said, “Oh, now I need a napkin to put it on for you, so you can take it away.”
“No problem,” I said, and whipped out the last of the paper.
I had used it all, and without planning it.
Morphic resonance.
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